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Catalonia election: Puigdemont calls for talks with Spain Published duration 22 December 2017 Related Topics Catalonia independence protests
image copyright Reuters image caption "Now is the time for dialogue," said Carles Puigdemont
Catalonia's ousted leader, Carles Puigdemont, has called for new talks with Spain after separatist parties won a slim majority in a regional election.
He said he wanted the negotiations in Brussels, where he is living in self-imposed exile, or another EU country.
Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy later appeared to reject the idea.
He said he would hold talks with the head of the new Catalan government but that leader would have to take up their post in Catalonia itself.
He avoided naming Mr Puigdemont, adding that the winner of Thursday's election was Inés Arrimadas, the leader of the Citizens party, which wants Catalonia to remain a semi-autonomous part of Spain.
The Citizens party is now the region's biggest party. although pro-independence parties are best placed to form a government.
"Catalonia wants to be an independent state," said Mr Puigdemont, speaking in Belgium on Friday. "This is the wish of the Catalan people. I think the plan of [Spanish Prime Minister] Mariano Rajoy is not working, so we have to find new ways to tackle this crisis."
Mr Rajoy's conservative Popular Party (PP) recorded its worst ever result in Thursday's vote.
He had hoped that the poll would restore stability and said the Spanish government was "willing to talk in a realistic way and inside the law" with a future Catalan government.
"I offer Catalonia this because we care about the people" he said.
The Spanish government imposed direct rule on Catalonia and called the election after declaring an October independence referendum illegal.
Mr Puigdemont has also called on the prime minister to repatriate all the police sent to Catalonia before the referendum.
What were the results?
With nearly all votes counted, the pro-independence parties Together for Catalonia (JxCat), Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) and Popular Unity (CUP) were on course to win a total of 70 seats in total, giving them a majority in the new parliament.
Citizens (Cs) had 25.3% of the vote, winning 37 seats in the 135-seat chamber.
Its leader told the BBC her party had been "victorious". Ms Inés Arrimadas said forming a coalition would be "difficult - but we will try".
The PP, meanwhile, won only three seats, down from 11 in the previous assembly.
Turnout was more than 80%, a record for a Catalan regional election.
Analysis: What the papers say
By BBC Monitoring
Leading Spanish newspapers say that the result has strengthened the government's position.
"Nationalism can no longer claim that it exclusively represents Catalonia," says Madrid-based La Razón. ABC newspaper thinks Madrid should now settle the Catalan crisis. "If Spain wants to win this fight in the long term and prevent Catalonia from leaving one day, it should draft a serious plan for strengthening the state."
The result seems to have split Catalan papers between those who want the independence project to continue, and those who accept the realpolitik of the election result.
"The independence movement has humiliated the Spanish prime minister," El Nacional says. "The decisions that affect Catalonia are not made in Madrid."
But Barcelona's El Periódico says the result means a "divided Catalonia". "The election that Mariano Rajoy called has shown that Catalonia is firmly divided in two blocs and there is hardly any space for intermediaries."
La Vanguardia writes: "Major forces supporting independence should look back, confess to mistakes and avoid making them again,"
Why did the election take place?
Separatists who dominated the previous Catalan parliament declared independence on 27 October after a referendum that was declared illegal by Spain.
In an attempt to stop that referendum, Spanish police stormed some polling stations. However many voters defied the Spanish courts and riot police to cast their ballots.
The move led to violent clashes with hundreds of people reported injured.
According to referendum organisers, 90% of voters were in favour of independence, but fewer than half the region's electorate took part.
image copyright Getty Images image caption Inés Arrimadas said she would try to form a coalition
However, Mr Puigdemont decided it was enough to declare independence from Spain.
Mr Rajoy then sacked the Catalan government, imposed direct rule and called the 21 December election.
Prosecutors accused 13 Catalan separatist politicians of rebellion and sedition, including Mr Puigdemont and four others who fled to Belgium.
Among the accused, two pro-independence politicians are in Spanish prisons, and six are being monitored while on bail.
What has been the reaction?
The European Commission said that its stance towards Catalonia remained the same, despite Thursday's election result.
The executive arm of the EU has previously stated that events in Catalonia are an internal issue for Spain.
"Our position on the question of Catalonia is well known and has been regularly restated, at all levels. It will not change," commission spokesman Alexander Winterstein told AFP news agency.
"In relation to a regional election, we have no comment to make," he added.
The Spanish government has not yet commented on the results.
What happens now?
Analysts say the success of separatist parties means that the ball is now back in the Spanish government's court.
Antonio Barroso, of the London-based research firm Teneo Intelligence, says the problem for Madrid remains "and the secession movement is not going to go away".
Correspondents say it is not yet clear whether Mr Puigdemont will be renamed president, and if so, if he will return from Belgium. As things stand, he faces arrest, should he enter Spain.
image copyright Getty Images image caption Independence supporters celebrated in Barcelona
Why do many Catalans want independence?
Catalonia is one of Spain's wealthiest and most productive regions and has a distinct history dating back almost 1,000 years.
Before the Spanish Civil War it enjoyed broad autonomy but that was suppressed under General Francisco Franco's dictatorship from 1939-75.
When Franco died, the region was granted autonomy again under the 1978 constitution, and the region prospered along with the rest of the new, democratic Spain.
A 2006 statute granted even greater powers, boosting Catalonia's financial clout and describing it as a "nation", but Spain's Constitutional Court reversed much of this in 2010.
Recession and cuts in public spending fuelled local resentment, which coalesced in a powerful secessionist movement. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Wirex, a prominent UK’s FCA supported cryptocurrency remittance provider, has partnered with Stellar, bringing in its over 2 million users and more than 5000 business clients into the cryptocurrency project’s ecosystem.
The surprising collaboration will see Wirex launch “26 fiat-backed stablecoins” on Stellar network, a crypto platform that also partnered with tech giant IBM.
Stellar network is receiving different supports from big firms across the globe. The launch of Wirex Stablecoins on Stellar Network infers that the crypto platform is uniquely designed to also accommodate Stablecoins.
While some analysts opined that Stablecoins are created to bring growth into the crypto space, they are becoming a solid way to reduce crypto volatility due to the fact that their value are pegged to fiat currency.
For Low Cost and Almost Instant Across Border Remittance
When Stellar-based Wirex stablecoins finally launches, they are going to be used to perfect low-cost and all most immediately cross-border remittance, just like the IBM Stablecoin which has received support from six respected international banks.
First of its Kind in the Crypto Space
This Wirex Stablecoins is going to be the first of its kind for many reasons. They are the maiden stablecoins to be spend easily in day to day dealings using Wirex Visa card. It is the first stablecoins to be pegged to different fiat currencies like USD, EUR, GBP, HKD and SGD with exchange at interbank rates. Similarly, it is the foremost stablecoins that can be easily exchanged with other virtual currencies at OTC rates.
Importantly, it is the first stablecoins to be released by an FCA supported crypto and fiat payment firm. All these will propel the stablecoins when it is finally unveiled.
Wirex’ Over 2 million Users and 5K business clients Added to Stellar (XLM) Ecosystem
The advent of Wirex Stablecoins on Stellar network means the FCA-regulated company’s over 2 million Users and 5K business clients are to be added to the Stellar ecosystem. This is definitely going to propel the cryptocurrency project.
Wirex has an outstanding user base. The number of people using the Wirex platform are enough to bring revolution to the Stellar (XLM) network.
More Use Cases Than Expected.
The stellar-based stablecoins have diverse use cases than one can imagine at the moment. Its functions in the business and retail arena indicate the partnership is the beginning of development for Stellar (XLM).
The stellar-backed Wirex Stablecoins is unique for international remittance, and offers faster and cheaper alternatives to Mastercard and Visa. It offers immediate token issues and redemption, stands as the beginning of crypto adoption with its instant merchant settlement among other use cases. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Effect of sleep quality on memory, executive function, and language performance in patients with refractory focal epilepsy and controlled epilepsy versus healthy controls - A prospective study.
We aimed to evaluate the effect of sleep quality on memory, executive function, and language performance in patients with refractory focal epilepsy and controlled epilepsy and compare these with healthy individuals. We prospectively enrolled 37 adolescent and adult patients with refractory focal epilepsy (Group 1) and controlled epilepsy (Group 2) in each group. History pertaining to epilepsy and sleep were recorded, and all patients underwent overnight polysomnography. Language, memory, and executive function assessments were done using Western Aphasia Battery, Post Graduate Institute (PGI) memory scale, and battery of four executive function tests (Trail Making Test A & B, Digit symbol test, Stroop Task, and Verbal Fluency Test), respectively. Forty age- and sex-matched controls were also included in the study. Significant differences were noted in both objective and subjective sleep parameters among all the groups. On polysomnography, parameters like total sleep time, sleep efficiency, sleep latency, and rapid eye movement (REM) latency were found to be significantly worse in Group 1 as compared with Group 2. Cognitive and executive parameters were significantly impaired in Group 1. Shorter total sleep time, poorer sleep efficiency, and prolonged sleep latencies were observed to be associated with poor memory and executive function in patients with refractory epilepsy. Our study strongly suggests that sleep disturbances, mainly shorter total sleep time, poor sleep efficiency, and prolonged sleep latencies, are associated with impaired memory and executive function in patients with refractory focal epilepsy and to a lesser extent, among those with medically controlled epilepsy. | {
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Abstracts"
} |
### Solution for "Download of Code Without Integrity Check" challenge
This challenge showcases a situation common to software deployments where an update server is being used but integrity checks are no in place in order to validate the software has not been tampered with.
Only thing required to do in order to pass is changing the update server to `evil.bad`. | {
"pile_set_name": "Github"
} |
Fluorescent labeling of both GABAergic and glycinergic neurons in vesicular GABA transporter (VGAT)-venus transgenic mouse.
Inhibitory neurons play important roles in a number of brain functions. They are composed of GABAergic neurons and glycinergic neurons, and vesicular GABA transporter (VGAT) is specifically expressed in these neurons. Since the inhibitory neurons are scattered around in the CNS, it is difficult to identify these cells in living brain preparations. The glutamate decarboxylase (GAD) 67-GFP knock-in mouse has been widely used for the identification of GABAergic neurons, but their GAD67 expression was decreased compared to the wild-type mice. To overcome such a problem and to highlight the function and morphology of inhibitory neurons, we generated four lines of VGAT-Venus transgenic mice (lines #04, #29, #39 and #49) expressing Venus fluorescent protein under the control of mouse VGAT promoter. We found higher expression level of Venus transcripts and proteins as well as brighter fluorescent signal in line #39 mouse brains, compared to brains of other lines examined. By Western blots and spectrofluorometric measurements of forebrain, the line #39 mouse showed stronger GFP immunoreactivity and brighter fluorescent intensity than the GAD67-GFP knock-in mouse. In addition, Venus was present not only in somata, but also in neurites in the line #39 mouse by histological studies. In situ hybridization analysis showed that the expression pattern of Venus in the line #39 mouse was similar to that of endogenous VGAT. Double immunostaining analysis in line #39 mouse showed that Venus-expressing cells are primarily immunoreactive for GABA in cerebral cortex, hippocampus and cerebellar cortex and for GABA or glycine in dorsal cochlear nucleus. These results demonstrate that the VGAT-Venus line #39 mouse should be useful for studies on function and morphology of inhibitory neurons in the CNS. | {
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Abstracts"
} |
Q:
How to avoid anti-clockwise rotation animation when reseting rotation from 360deg to 0 deg?
I am creating an animation that looks like a fancy wheel, When resetting rotation from 360deg to 0 deg, It animating the wheel in anti-clockwise direction, How to Avoid this???
HTML
<ul class="cm">
<li><span>01</span></li>
<li><span>02</span></li>
<li><span>03</span></li>
<li><span>04</span></li>
<li><span>05</span></li>
<li><span>06</span></li>
<li><span>07</span></li>
<li><span>08</span></li>
</ul>
SCSS
$Brdr: #7d868c;
*{
-webkit-box-sizing: border-box;
-moz-box-sizing: border-box;
box-sizing: border-box;
&:before,&:after{
-webkit-box-sizing: border-box;
-moz-box-sizing: border-box;
box-sizing: border-box;
}
}
%notaList{
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
list-style: none;
}
$node: 8;
$s: 80px;
$rotation: 0;
.cm{
top: 50%;
left: 0;
right: 0;
width: $s;
height: $s;
margin: auto;
display: block;
position: absolute;
transition: transform 0.8s ease-out;
transform:rotate(#{$rotation}deg);
@extend %notaList;
background: rgba(#000, 0.5);
border-radius: 50%;
li{
left: 0;
top:-($s*2 - ($s/2));
color:#333;
width:90%;
height: 90%;
display: block;
position: absolute;
margin-bottom: ($s*2 - ($s/2));
& > span{
display: block;
padding: 36%;
text-align: center;
overflow: hidden;
background: #CCC;
border-radius: 5px 5px 50% 50%;
transition: transform 0.8s ease-out;
}
@for $i from 1 through $node{
&:nth-child(#{$i}n) {
transform-origin: 50% ($s*2);
transform: rotate(($i - 1) * 360deg/$node);
& > span {
transform:rotate(($rotation * -1) - (($i - 1) * 360deg/$node));
}
}
}
}
}
JQuery
var i = 1,
nodes = 8;
setInterval(function(){
var rotation = i * 360 / nodes;
i = i + 1;
$('.cm').css({
'transform': 'rotate(' + rotation + 'deg)'
}).attr('data-rotation', rotation);
$('.cm li').each(function (node){
r = (node) * 360/nodes;
$($('.cm li')[node]).find('span').css({
'transform': 'rotate(' + ((rotation*-1) - r) + 'deg)'
});
});
if(i >= nodes){
i = 0;
}
}, 1000);
JsFiddle link:
https://jsfiddle.net/aspjsplayground/hqczLby7/
A:
I've edited your jsfiddle so that it does not animate the rotation when reseting to 0.
When doing this it's helpful to use window.requestAnimationFrame since modifying transition isn't instant.
https://jsfiddle.net/hqczLby7/8/
| {
"pile_set_name": "StackExchange"
} |
Carotid endarterectomy: operative risks, recurrent stenosis, and long-term stroke rates in a modern series.
To determine whether carotid endarterectomy (CEA) safely and effectively maintained a durable reduction in stroke complications over an extended period, we reviewed our data on 478 consecutive patients who underwent 544 CEA's since 1976. Follow-up was complete in 83% of patients (mean 44 months). There were 7 early deaths (1.3%), only 1 stroke related (0.2%). Perioperative stroke rates (overall 2.9%) varied according to operative indications: asymptomatic, 1.4%; transient ischemic attacks (TIA)/amaurosis fugax (AF), 1.3%; nonhemispheric symptoms (NH), 4.9%; and prior stroke (CVA), 7.1%. Five and 10-year stroke-free rates were 96% and 92% in the asymptomatic group, 93% and 87% in the TIA/AF group, 92% and 92% in the NH group, and 80% and 73% in the CVA group. Late ipsilateral strokes occurred infrequently (8 patients, 1.7%). Late deaths were primarily cardiac related (51.3%). Stroke-free rates were significantly (p less than 0.0001) greater than stroke-free survival rates, confirming a non-stroke related cause for late death. Restenoses greater than 50% according to duplex scanning developed in 13%, most (67%) within 2 years after CEA. Most of these (77%) were asymptomatic, and only 0.3% (1 patient) presented with a permanent neurologic deficit. The results of carotid endarterectomy are superior to those of optimal medical management in symptomatic and asymptomatic patients in terms of long-term stroke prevention. When low perioperative stroke mortality/morbidity rates are achieved, carotid endarterectomy is justified for treatment of patients with carotid bifurcation disease. | {
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Abstracts"
} |
Regulation of the anaerobic metabolism in Bacillus subtilis.
The Gram-positive soil bacterium Bacillus subtilis encounters changing environmental conditions in its habitat. The access to oxygen determines the mode of energy generation. A complex regulatory network is employed to switch from oxygen respiration to nitrate respiration and various fermentative processes. During adaptation, oxygen depletion is sensed by the [4Fe-4S](2+) cluster containing Fnr and the two-component regulatory system ResDE consisting of the membrane-bound histidine kinase ResE and the cytoplasmic ResD regulator. Nitric oxide is the signal recognized by NsrR. Acetate formation and decreasing pH are measured via AlsR. Finally, Rex is responding to changes in the cellular NAD(+)/NADH ration. The fine-tuned interplay of these regulators at approximately 400 target gene promoters ensures efficient adaptation of the B. subtilis physiology. | {
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Abstracts"
} |
Q:
ReCAPTCHA v3 is not working in a Shopify Contact form, how can I solve it?
Yesterday I added Google ReCAPTCHA v3 in one of my client's Shopify website, but I don't think that it is working because he is still reporting to receive several spam e-mails.
I've followed Google's guide, but I don't know what to do for "Verifying user response" part of the guide. I'm not an expert in coding.
Basically I've added this code to the theme.liquid file
<script src="https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api.js?render=*site key provided by google*"></script>
And then I've added this part in the page.contact.liquid file:
<script> grecaptcha.ready(function() {
grecaptcha.execute('*site key provided by google*', {action: 'contact'}).then(function(token) {
...
}); }); </script>
Have I missed out something? Can someone help me to fix this issue please?
A:
Unfortunately, any attempt to implement reCaptcha on a native Shopify contact form will not work. It may appear to work, as in the form submits and you see the stats in the reCaptcha admin, but it won't actually be blocking any spam. The reason is that you can only implement the client-side piece in your theme, and in order to work, you must have both the client and server-side pieces in place and working. The server-side piece is what detects a failed captcha (i.e., a spam bot) and prevents the form from being submitted.
Implementing just the client-side piece might block some of the most unsophisticated spam bots that just see the captcha and stop, but it's trivial to design a bot to bypass the client-side piece: that's why the server-side piece is essential.
Also posted this answer on the Shopify forum thread linked by Chami, as people there are going in circles thinking it's possible or thinking it's working when it's not.
| {
"pile_set_name": "StackExchange"
} |
Early and long-term outcomes after manual and remote magnetic navigation-guided catheter ablation for ventricular tachycardia.
Remote magnetic navigation (RMN) is a safe and effective means of performing ventricular tachycardia (VT) ablation. It may have advantages over manual catheter ablation due to ease of manoeuvrability and catheter stability. We sought to compare the safety and efficacy of RMN vs. manual VT ablation. Retrospective study of procedural outcomes of 139 consecutive VT ablation procedures (69 RMN, 70 manual ablation) in 113 patients between 2009 and 2015 was performed. Remote magnetic navigation was associated with overall higher acute procedural success (80% vs. 60%, P = 0.01), with a trend to fewer major complications (3% vs. 9% P = 0.09). Seventy-nine patients were followed up for a median of 17.0 [interquartile range (IQR) 3.0-41.0] months for the RMN group and 15.5 (IQR 6.5-30.0) months for manual ablation group. In the ischaemic cardiomyopathy subgroup, RMN was associated with longer survival from the composite endpoint of VT recurrence leading to defibrillator shock, re-hospitalization or repeat catheter ablation and all-cause mortality; single-procedure adjusted hazard ratio (HR) 0.240 (95% CI 0.070-0.821) P = 0.023, multi-procedure HR 0.170 (95% CI 0.046-0.632) P = 0.002. In patients with implanted defibrillators, multi-procedure VT-free survival was superior with RMN, HR 0.199 (95% CI 0.060-0.657) P = 0.003. Remote magnetic navigation may improve clinical outcomes after catheter ablation of VT in patients with ischaemic cardiomyopathy. Further prospective clinical studies are required to confirm these findings. | {
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Abstracts"
} |
Suzanne:
Thanks. I just want to make sure that my vacation time gets paid at 100%
before I go down to the 90% level. Thanks for taking care of this. As you
can see, I now have access to my e-mail so when I'm not pumping, feeding,
changing diapers, etc... I acn be checking up on things!!!
Carol St. Clair
EB 3892
713-853-3989 (Phone)
713-646-3393 (Fax)
[email protected]
Suzanne Adams
07/18/00 05:22 PM
To: Carol St Clair/HOU/ECT@ECT
cc: Taffy Milligan/HOU/ECT@ECT
Subject: Re: Carol St. Clair
Carol, I turn it in as sick and Taffy will code it how I turn it in. I've
got it all on the calendar, so it's taken care of. | {
"pile_set_name": "Enron Emails"
} |
Effect of Cardiac Rehabilitation on Sexual Satisfaction Among Patients After Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Surgery.
After coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery, many patients experience diminished sexual function and satisfaction. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of outpatient cardiac rehabilitation (OCR) on the level of sexual satisfaction among post-CABG patients. A clinical trial was performed at the Al-Zahra Hospital, Shiraz, Iran, from July 2017 to January 2018. Based on the inclusion criteria, 104 post-CABG patients were recruited into the study. The participants were randomly assigned to the intervention (OCR) group (n = 52) or the usual care group (n = 52). The intervention group received 20 sessions of OCR, whereas the usual care group received the routine hospital care and education. Data were collected using the Index of Sexual Satisfaction and a demographic data sheet. The data were analyzed using the SPSS software, v23.0 (IBM) and the independent sample t test, paired-samples t test, and χ test. There was no statistically significant difference in the mean pre-intervention score for sexual satisfaction between the groups. However, a statistically significant difference in the mean post-intervention score for sexual satisfaction was observed between the groups (P < .001). The difference in the mean pre- and post-intervention scores for sexual satisfaction in the intervention group was statistically significant (P < .001), whereas there was no significant difference in the usual care group. Post-CABG patients who completed the OCR program experienced an increased level of sexual satisfaction. It is, therefore, recommended to include an OCR program as part of the patient treatment and aftercare following CABG surgery. | {
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Abstracts"
} |
Theresa May is expected to appoint an EU ambassador who “believes in Brexit” in the wake of the current Brussels representative's decision to quit after being cut adrift by Downing Street.
Sir Ivan Rogers on Tuesday announced his resignation as Britain’s ambassador in Brussels after it was made clear Mrs May and her senior team had “lost confidence” in him over his “pessimistic” view of Brexit.
Government sources made clear that Sir Ivan had “jumped before he was pushed” and that Number 10 believed his negative view of Brexit meant that he could not lead the negotiations after the Prime Minister triggers Article 50.
In a 1,400-word resignation letter to his staff leaked on Tuesday night, Sir Ivan launched a thinly-veiled attack on the "muddled thinking" in Mrs May's Government. | {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
/*
Copyright (C) 2014-2016 Leosac
This file is part of Leosac.
Leosac is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
Leosac is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
GNU Affero General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
*/
#include "modules/smtp/SMTPServerInfoSerializer.hpp"
#include "modules/smtp/SMTPConfig.hpp"
#include "tools/JSONUtils.hpp"
using namespace Leosac;
using namespace Leosac::Module;
using namespace Leosac::Module::SMTP;
json SMTPServerInfoJSONSerializer::serialize(const SMTPServerInfo &in,
const SecurityContext &)
{
json server_desc;
server_desc["url"] = in.url;
server_desc["from"] = in.from;
server_desc["username"] = in.username;
server_desc["password"] = in.password;
server_desc["timeout"] = in.ms_timeout;
server_desc["verify_host"] = in.verify_host;
server_desc["verify_peer"] = in.verify_peer;
server_desc["enabled"] = in.enabled;
return server_desc;
}
void SMTPServerInfoJSONSerializer::unserialize(SMTPServerInfo &out, const json &in,
const SecurityContext &)
{
using namespace JSONUtil;
out.url = extract_with_default(in, "url", out.url);
out.from = extract_with_default(in, "from", out.from);
out.username = extract_with_default(in, "username", out.username);
out.password = extract_with_default(in, "password", out.password);
out.ms_timeout = extract_with_default(in, "timeout", out.ms_timeout);
out.verify_peer = extract_with_default(in, "verify_peer", out.verify_peer);
out.verify_host = extract_with_default(in, "verify_host", out.verify_host);
out.enabled = extract_with_default(in, "enabled", out.enabled);
}
std::string SMTPServerInfoJSONStringSerializer::serialize(const SMTPServerInfo &in,
const SecurityContext &sc)
{
return SMTPServerInfoJSONSerializer::serialize(in, sc).dump(4);
}
void SMTPServerInfoJSONStringSerializer::unserialize(SMTPServerInfo &out,
const std::string &in,
const SecurityContext &sc)
{
return SMTPServerInfoJSONSerializer::unserialize(out, json::parse(in), sc);
}
| {
"pile_set_name": "Github"
} |
Now that we’ve failed to use Russia’s corrupt and degenerating economy, subservience to the international banking system, and vulnerability to falling energy prices to pop Vladimir Putin like a zit, we’re going to have sit on our NATO, E.U., and OSCE duffs and take the long view of Russian imperialism.
Fortunately the long view, while a desolate prospect, is also comforting in its way, if you aren’t a Russian.
In the sixth century A.D. Russia was the middle of nowhere in the great Eurasian flat spot bounded by fuck-all on the north and east, barbarian hordes and the remains of the Byzantine Empire on the south, and the Dark Ages on the west.
Wandering around in here, up and down the watershed of the Dnieper River from Novgorod (which hadn’t been built yet) to Kiev (ditto) were disorganized tribes of Slavic pastoral herdsmen herding whatever was available, pastorally. They were harried by Goths, Huns, Khazars, and other people who had the name and nature of outlaw motorcycle gangs long before the motorcycle was invented.
The original Russian state, “Old Russia,” was established at Novgorod in A.D. 862 by marauding Vikings. They’d set off to discover Iceland, Greenland, and America, took a wrong turn, and wound up with their dragon boat stuck on a mud bar in the Dnieper. (Historians have their own theories, involving trade and colonization, but this sounds more likely.)
The first ruler of Old Russia was the Viking Prince Ryurik. Imagine being so disorganized that you need marauding Vikings to found your nation—them with their battle axes, crazed pillaging, riotous Meade Hall feasts, and horns on their helmets. (Actually, Vikings didn’t wear horns on their helmets—but they would have if they’d thought of it, just like they would have worn meade helmets if they’d thought of it.) Some government it must have been.
Viking Prince Ryurik: “Yah, let’s build Novgorod!”
Viking Chieftain Sven: “Yah, so we can burn it down and loot!”
The Russians weren’t converted to Christianity until A.D. 988—a thousand years late to “Peace be unto you” party, the basic principles of which still haven’t sunk in. (And maybe never had a chance to. Russia’s conversion came at the hands of St. Vladimir, Grand Prince of Kiev, who was reputed to maintain a harem of 800 concubines.)
The death of St. Vladimir, and every other ruler of Old Russia, was followed by assassinations, mayhem, civil strife, and the other hallmarks of change in Russian leadership evident to the present day. Oxford historian Ronald Hingley notes that “the first and only Russian ruler to fashion an effective law of succession” was Tsar Paul I (1796-1801). Tsar Paul was assassinated.
Anyway, things went along pretty well for almost 400 years. (Pretty well by Russian standards—a free peasant was known as a smerd, meaning “stinker.”) Then, in 1237, when the rest of the West was having a High Middle Ages and getting fecund for cultural rebirth, a Tatar horde invaded Russia.
The Tatars were part of the Mongol Empire founded by Genghis Khan. They had a two-pronged invasion strategy: Kill everybody and steal everything.
Kiev, Moscow, and most of Russia’s towns were obliterated. Tatar control—part occupation and part suzerainty over impotent, tribute-paying Russian principalities—lasted more than 200 years.
The Russians have heroic stories about fighting off the Tatars, but in fact it seems like the Tatars gradually lost interest in the place and went off in a horde back to where they came from.
Professor Hingley says the “Tatar Yoke” left Russia with “a model of extreme authoritarian rule combined with control through terror.” It also left Russia with a model of leadership best summarized by a passage from John Keegan’s A History of Warfare:
“Genghis Khan, questioning his Mongol comrades-in-arms about life’s sweetest pleasure and being told it lay in falconry, replied, ‘You are mistaken. Man’s greatest good fortune is to chase and defeat his enemy, seize his total possessions, leave his married women weeping and wailing, ride his gelding [and] use the bodies of his women as a nightshirt and support.’”
Why Putin wants Angela Merkel for a nightshirt is beyond me. But that’s a Russian dictator for you.
Around the time Europe was getting a New World, Russia was getting tsars. Several were named Ivan, one more terrible than the next until we arrive at Ivan the Terrible in 1533.
Ivan created a private force of five or six thousand thugs, the oprichnina, who wore black, rode black horses, and carried, as emblems of authority, a dog’s head and a broom. (The hammer and sickle of the day, presumably.)
Oprichniks were entitled to rob and kill anyone, and did so with a will. Ivan suspected Novgorod of disloyalty, and the oprichnina spent five weeks in the city slaughtering thousands and driving thousands more into exile.
Ivan presided over and sometimes personally performed the roasting, dismembering, and boiling alive of enemies and people who, left unboiled, might possibly become enemies.
He killed his own son and heir by whacking him over the head with the monarchal staff in a tsar-ish fit of temper.
He conducted a 24-year-long war against Sweden, Poland, Lithuania, and the Teutonic Knights, and lost.
Russia’s economy was destroyed. Drought, famine, and plague beset the country.
But Ivan put Russia on the map as an international player. He defeated what was left of the Tatars, mostly by conniving with leaders of what was left of the Tatars. He expanded Russian rule into Siberia, his success due to almost nobody being there. And, draw what parallels you will, Ivan the Terrible’s popularity rating was very high among the smerds.
After his reign, Russia, if you can believe it, got worse. “The Time of Troubles” featured more drought, more famine, more plague, foreign invasions, massacres, the occupation and sacking of Moscow, and tsars with names like False Dmitry I and False Dmitry II. The population of Russia may have been reduced by as much as one-third.
The remaining two-thirds reacted to increasing anarchy in traditional Russian fashion, by increasing autocracy. The Russians aren’t stupid. We’re talking about a country where chess is a spectator sport. Autocracy is just a Russian bad habit, like smoking three packs of cigarettes a day and drinking a liter of vodka.
In 1613 the Romanov dynasty was installed, providing Russia with a range of talents from “Great” (Peter I, Catherine II) to “Late” (Ivan VI, Peter III, and Paul I killed in palace intrigues; Alexander II blown to bits by a terrorist bomb, and Nicholas II murdered with his family by the Bolsheviks).
The Romanovs adhered to what Harvard historian Richard Pipes calls a “patrimonial” doctrine, meaning they owned Russia the way we own our house (except to hell with the mortgage). They owned everything. And everybody. The Romanov tsars imposed rigid serfdom just as that woeful institution was fading almost everywhere else.
Russia never had a Renaissance, a Protestant Reformation, an Enlightenment, or much of an Industrial Revolution until the Soviet Union. Soviet industrialization produced such benefits to humanity as concrete worker housing built without level or plumb bob, the AK-47, MiG fighter jets, and proliferating nukes. (Although the only people the Soviets ever killed with a nuclear device was themselves at Chernobyl, located, perhaps not coincidentally, in what’s now Ukraine, for the time being at least.)
Russia was out in the sticks of civilization, in a trailer park without knowledge of how to build a trailer. But Russia kept getting bigger, mostly by killing, oppressing, and annoying Russians.
Peter the Great (1682-1725) led a military expedition against the Turkish fort of Azov that was a disaster. But Peter came right back and, getting more Russians killed, overwhelmed the Turks. The same thing happened in the Northern War against Sweden. Although it took 21 years after Peter ran away at the battle of Narva, Russia finally got a Baltic coastline. Which Peter didn’t know what to do with, so he built St. Petersburg in a swamp with conscripted serf labor. The number of Russian serfs who died building things in the swamp equaled the number Russian soldiers who died in the Northern War.
Peter the Great raised taxes, made the Russian nobles shave their beards, and caused the death of his recalcitrant son and heir, like Ivan the Terrible did, but on purpose.
Catherine the Great (1762-1796) doubled taxes on the Jews and declared they weren’t Russians, as if anyone would want to be. She was the first but not last leader of Russia to annex Crimea. NATO member alert, code red—she won two wars against Turkey and partitioned Poland. (Like Peter the Great on the Baltic, she got the swampy part.)
Under Catherine, Russian settlements pushed all the way east into Alaska, the most valuable land Russia has occupied. (Annual GDP per capita, Alaska: $61,156. Annual GDP per capita, Russia: $14,037.) But—E.U. shame alert—when Russia was facing financial difficulties and geopolitical conflict, Tsar Alexander II was forced to sell Alaska to the United States in 1867 for 2 cents an acre. Later, as mentioned, Alexander got blown to bits.
And that’s pretty much it for Russia’s Golden Age. After the 18th century, Russia devoted itself mostly to being big fat loserland, losing pace with the modern world, wars, Alaska, a communist utopia, a million victims of Stalin’s purges, 6 million victims of the famine of 1921, 8 million victims of the famine of 1932-33, a “Kitchen Debate” between Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon, ICBMs in Cuba, the space race, the arms race, the Cold War, and finally, 14 independent countries that were once in the USSR.
Napoleon actually won the war part of his war with Russia. If “General Winter” and the general tendency of Moscow to be periodically destroyed hadn’t, for once, sided with the Russian people, you’d be able to get a good bottle of Côte de Volga and a baguette in Smolensk today.
Russia began a series of wars in the Caucasus that it has yet to win.
In 1825, the Decembrists, a reform-minded group of military officers, staged a demonstration in favor of constitutional monarchy and were hanged for taking the trouble.
Political oppression, censorship, spying, and secret police activity reached such a level of crime and punishment that Dostoyevsky himself was sentenced to death for belonging to a discussion group. He was standing in front of the firing squad when his sentence was commuted to exile in Siberia. (Whether to thank Tsar Nicolas I depends upon how weighty a summer reading list you’ve been given.)
“Exiled to Siberia” says everything about Russian economic and social development in that land of mountains, lakes, and forests with a climate, in its lower latitudes, no worse than the rest of Russia’s. I’ve been across it on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. If this were America, the route from Irkutsk to Vladivostok would be lined with vacation homes and trendy shops, and “exiled to Siberia” would be translated as “exiled to Aspen.”
Russia lost the 1853-56 Crimean War. NATO member alert, code green—Russia lost to Britain, France, and Turkey.
In 1861 Tsar Alexander II freed 50 million serfs. If “freed” is the word that’s wanted. The serfs had no place to go except the land they were already farming, and if they wanted any of that, they had to buy it with the nothing they made as serfs. Later, as mentioned twice already, Alexander got blown to bits.
Russia lost the Jews. Being robbed, beaten, and killed in pogroms was not a sufficient incentive to stay. More than a million Jews emigrated, taking what common sense the country had with them.
Russia lost the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War in the best Russian loser fashion at the naval battle of Tsushima.
Japanese Admiral Togo Heihachiro “crossed the T” of the Russian fleet, a rare execution of a tactic where you get your ships in a horizontal line so that your guns can be aimed at the enemy, whose ships are in a vertical line so that their guns can’t be aimed at you.
The Russian fleet was demolished. Eight battleships and most of the smaller ships were sunk. More than 5,000 Russian sailors died. Just three of 38 Russian vessels escaped to Vladivostok.
Russia lost World War I, not an easy thing to do when you’re on the winning side. After the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Russia was too much of a mess to keep fighting Germany. The Soviet government signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk surrendering Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Russian Poland, and Ukraine—containing in total a quarter of the population of Imperial Russia—to the Central Powers just eight months before the Central Powers had to surrender to everybody.
Russia lost both sides of the 1917-22 Russian Civil War. The White Russians were losers. The Reds were total losers. We know how their revolution turned out.
Russia might as well have lost World War II. Between 18 million and 24 million Russians died. That’s three times as many military and civilian casualties as Germany suffered. There must have been a better way to kill a bunch of Nazis running low on food and ammunition and stuck in frozen mud.
Now, because of what he’s doing in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has a higher smerd popularity rating than Ivan the Terrible or even Stalin. We certainly should have screwed him over. But Russian history is on our side. He’ll certainly screw himself. | {
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[Chronic intestinal pseudo-obstruction. Clinical symptomatology and course].
Chronic intestinal pseudoobstruction (CIP) is a motility disorder clinically characterized by recurrent symptoms of small intestinal or large bowel obstruction without organic stenosis. The aim of the present study was to assess the clinical presentation and course of the disease. During a four year period all available data including the symptoms as assessed by the bowel disease questionnaire (BDQ) of all patients with newly established diagnosis of CIP were analyzed including duration of symptoms and previous surgical interventions due to the abdominal symptoms. Data of nine patients (five females, four males, age 20 - 64 years) with newly diagnosed CIP were available for analysis. Median age at initial onset of symptoms were 24 years. The final diagnosis of CIP was established after a median of 7 years (range 1 - 20). Initially, the majority of patients suffered from uncharacteristic symptoms such as abdominal fullness and abdominal pain. All patients had undergone repeated abdominal surgical interventions for suspected mechanical bowel obstruction. On average, the first surgical intervention was performed 5 years after the onset of symptoms and there was a median number of 10 treatments as in-patients. Suspected acute bowel obstruction occurred between 1 and 14 times and laparotomies were performed in 50 % of these events. The diagnosis of CIP is usually preceded by several years with uncharacteristic abdominal symptoms. During this time, most patients undergo multiple surgical interventions. Thus, in patients with repeated suspected acute bowel obstruction without definite proof of mechanical obstruction, CIP has to be taken into consideration as differential diagnosis. In this context, small bowel manometry is an important diagnostic tool. | {
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315 A.2d 483 (1974)
SEAWAY SHOPPING CENTER CORPORATION
v.
The GRAND UNION STORES, INC., OF VERMONT, and the Grand Union Company.
No. 3-73.
Supreme Court of Vermont, Chittenden.
February 5, 1974.
*484 James D. Foley, of Yandell, Page & Archer, Burlington, for plaintiff.
Wilson, Curtis, Bryan, Quinn & Jenkins, Burlington, for defendants.
Before SHANGRAW, C. J., and BARNEY, SMITH, KEYSER and DALEY, JJ.
SHANGRAW, Chief Justice.
This is an appeal from a judgment entered in a civil action tried by the Chittenden County Court on December 6, 1972. Jury trial was waived and following a hearing by the court plaintiff was awarded damages in the amount of $14,839.05 and its costs. A judgment for this amount followed, and the defendants have appealed therefrom.
Plaintiff, a Vermont corporation, owns and operates the Seaway Shopping Center in South Burlington, Vermont. Its principal stockholder and officer is Thomas Farrell, who developed the shopping center.
The Grand Union Stores, Inc., of Vermont, is also a Vermont corporation, and a wholly owned subsidiary of The Grand Union Company. The Grand Union company is a Delaware corporation with its principal office in East Paterson, New Jersey. The Grand Union Company is a guarantor of the performance of its subsidiary company under the lease here in question.
For the purposes of this opinion, Seaway Shopping Center is hereinafter referred to as "Seaway", The Grand Union Stores, Inc., of Vermont, as "Tenant", and The Grand Union Company as "Parent Company."
The original lease, here in question, was between Thomas Farrell and the above Tenant. The Parent Company was guarantor of the Tenant. The lease was subsequently assigned by Farrell to Seaway. Its terms are not in dispute.
Without reciting verbatim all of the pertinent provisions of the lease, the court determined under finding No. 5 that it provided, in substance, as follows:
(a) That the Landlord would maintain the surface of the parking area, rights of way, curb-cuts, approaches and sidewalks in good condition.
(b) That if the Landlord failed to carry out any of its obligations, the Tenant might, after reasonable notice or without notice if in the Tenant's judgment an emergency should exist, perform the obligation at the expense of the Landlord.
(c) That if Tenant did so, it would be entitled to reimbursement from the Landlord, and could apply the claim against subsequent rent installments.
(d) That the Landlord should also mark and reline the parking areas as often as necessary.
(e) That notices or demands under the lease should be given by each party to the other by mail, to the addresses therein set forth.
The trial court continued with the following findings.
6. It is undisputed, and we find, that the Tenant in July 1971, caused a substantial part of the parking area adjacent to its store premises to be repaired and repaved, and subsequently remarked. The cost of the paving was $14,050.00, and of the remarking $903.15, both costs being reasonable.
*485 7. It is also conceded, and found, that Tenant made withholdings from its rent as follows:
January 1, 1972 $2,500.00
February 1, 1972 2,500.00
March 1, 1972 2,500.00
April 1, 1972 2,500.00
May 1, 1972 2,500.00
June 1, 1972 2,453.15
8. It is virtually, if not actually, conceded, and we find, that the remarking in question was required and necessary, whether or not the repaving was, and we find that the deduction of $903.15 by Tenant was justified and is an allowable reduction of plaintiff's claim.
9. Since the rental obligation itself is not in question, the central issue here involved is the condition of the parking lot before the repaving was done, i. e. whether it was in "good condition" as required by the lease. We find that it was, and that the repaving by the Tenant was not justified. Additionally, no notice of the repaving was given to the Landlord, the notice which was given referring only to "repair." (Def.Ex. T)
10. Over the course of six years prior to the repaving, Tenant had from time to time notified Seaway of the recurrent need for repairs to the lot, and Seaway had made them, presumably to the satisfaction of Tenant, since the non-performance clause had not previously been invoked.
11. When repairs were needed, Seaway had an arrangement with one Armand Pare and one Rene Barsalou to make them, using their equipment and hot mix (or cold patch in winter) purchased from local suppliers.
12. The cost of these repairs to Seaway were as follows: 1966, $760.65; 1967, $20.15; 1968, $670.09; 1969, $232.01; 1970, $469.91; and 1971, $1,835.91. The total is $3,968.72, almost half of which was just before the repaving in question.
13. Mr. Farrell testified that the repaving was done by Tenant, not because of necessity, but because it desired to give the premises a "new look" and to upgrade the store to meet growing competition. We so find, for the following reasons:
(a) By letter of May 5, 1970, the parent company advised Seaway (Def.Ex.L) that the parking area was badly in need of repair, "creating a very shabby appearance in comparison to the other Shopping Centers in the area."
(b) It then, in August, 1970, proceeded to get an estimate of the cost of repaving from L. M. Pike & Son, Inc., (Pl.Ex. 2, p. 4) even though it did not proceed with the work.
(c) On June 25, 1971, in a telephone conversation with Farrell, Mr. Hayes, Vice-president for the real estate of the parent company (which handled all these matters completely without reference to its subsidiary), asked Seaway to pay half of the cost of repaving, to upgrade the store to meet competition. Mr. Farrell refused, advising Hayes that substantial repairs had already been made and more were in process.
(d) At that time, a second quotation for repaving had already been obtained by defendants, and another was in the process.
(e) We are unable to find, and defendants' evidence could not make clear, who made the decision to repave. Notice was mailed July 1, 1971, although it did not specify that repaving was to be done, referring only to repairs. This notice came from Mr. Charles Bailey, assistant maintenance supervisor for the parent company. The following day he accepted the low quote for the work, and it proceeded.
(f) When Mr. Bailey gave this notice and accepted the quote, he did *486 not know repairs had been made, was unaware of the then condition of the lot and had had no communication from local officials of the Tenant about the repairs.
(g) Mr. Bailey testified he did not know who in the chain of command made the decision to repave. He thought it might have been the "legal department." A representative of the legal department was present through the trial, but did not testify. The vagueness of this whole line of testimony as to individual decisionmaking within the corporate structure tends to reinforce the conclusion that the reasons for repaving were other than as stated in the formal notice.
14. The defendants, although entitled to deduct the sum of $903.15 from the rent, were not entitled to deduct the further sum of $14,050.00. Plaintiff is entitled to recover from defendants that sum, with interest to date in the amount of $789.05, for a total of $14,839.05, plus its taxable costs.
In its conclusions the court, in part, stated:
No substantial legal questions are here presented. As agreed, by the parties, the main issue involved is one of fact, whether the parking lot in question was in good condition under the terms of the lease when the repaving was done, or in such bad condition, unremedied by the landlord after tenant's request, that repaving was necessary. Strengthened by the information that tenant's responsible officials did not know of, or take into consideration, the substantial repairs which landlord had made, we have concluded that the repaving was not necessary, but was done for purposes of "upgrading" to meet competition, a worthy motive but not the landlord's responsibility under the lease.
The issues raised by the defendants on appeal are primarily challenges to the findings of fact made by the trial court which they claim are clearly erroneous. The standard by which such a challenge is tested is stated in V.R.C.P. 52(a) thus:
Findings of fact shall not be set aside unless clearly erroneous, and due regard shall be given to the opportunity of the trial court to judge of the credibility of the witnesses and the weight of the evidence.
The above Vermont rule is similar to Rule 52(a) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Defendants argue that this Court should not follow the long history of Vermont case law, but should adopt a new standard now used by the Federal Courts. It is claimed that under the Federal test, this Court should consider all of the evidence when reviewing findings of fact and not only that evidence which would be most favorable to the prevailing party in order to determine whether or not the findings are "clearly erroneous". The defendants contend that the crucial findings are clearly erroneous.
This Court has interpreted the clearly erroneous test to require it to "take the evidence in the light most favorable to the prevailing party, . . . excluding the effect of modifying evidence." Green Mountain Marble Co. v. Highway Board, 130 Vt. 455, 457, 296 A.2d 198, 200 (1972). Our test, as stated in Armstrong v. Hanover Ins. Co., 130 Vt. 182, 185, 289 A.2d 669, 671 (1972), appears as follows:
The prescribed law of this state is that findings must stand if there is any credible evidence which fairly and reasonably supports them, and this Court must construe them so as to support the judgment, if possible, and further, that the weight of the evidence, the credibility of the witnesses and the persuasive effect of the testimony is for the sole determination of the trier of fact.
This Court thus uses the same interpretation of V.R.C.P. 52(a) as it did *487 under the previous statutory requirement found in 12 V.S.A. § 2385.
In essense, the defendants urge that this Court should reconsider the case of Green Mountain Marble Co. v. Highway Board, supra, and follow the Federal practice of looking to the evidence in its entirety on appeal. They cite United States v. United States Gypsum Co., 333 U.S. 364, 394, 395, 68 S.Ct. 525, 541, 92 L.Ed. 746 (1948), as a definitive Federal case on the "clearly erroneous" test. That opinion, in part, states:
[F]indings of fact in actions tried without a jury "shall not be set aside unless clearly erroneous, and due regard shall be given to the opportunity of the trial court to judge the credibility of the witnesses.". . . A finding is "clearly erroneous" when although there is evidence to support it, the reviewing court on the entire evidence is left with the definite and firm conviction that a mistake has been committed.
When findings are challenged on appeal, it is the recognized duty of this Court to search such portions of the record as are called to our attention, in order to determine whether or not there is substantial evidence to support them. We must read the evidence in support of the findings if reasonably possible, "when considered as a whole." Little v. Little, 124 Vt. 178, 182, 200 A.2d 276 (1964).
In construing Federal Rule 52(a), the Gypsum case, supra, in effect held that a reviewing court should consider the "entire evidence". Under our Vermont Rule 52(a), it was held in the Little case, supra, that the evidence should be "considered as a whole." This leaves very little difference in result between the Federal rule and our case law as applied to our Vermont rule, which we now reaffirm. We are not inclined to give a different meaning to V.R.C.P. 52(a) than has been previously enunciated by this Court in our case law.
The central issue is whether the parking lot in question was in "good condition" after it had been repaired by Seaway in June, 1971. It is the contention of the Tenant that the court's finding that the lot was in "good condition" prior to repaving is clearly erroneous and that Seaway's evidence as to the good condition of the parking lot after repairs had been made by Seaway was inclusive and equivocal.
A number of witnesses were called by the Tenant who testified that prior to the repairs there were depressions, ruts, cracks, holes and soft spots in the parking lot and that the repairs made by Seaway in 1971 at a cost of $1,835.51 were faulty. Also, notwithstanding the repairs, there were six or seven clay spots which, at time of repaving, had to be dug out at a maximum cost of $700. The tenant introduced other evidence that following the repairs made by Seaway the general condition of the lot was poor and needed resurfacing.
To the contrary, Seaway's evidence in the transcript reveals that the repairs made in June, 1971, were done in a good and workmanlike manner, that resurfacing was not necessary, and that following such repairs the parking lot was in good condition.
Thus, the controversial issue relating to the condition of the parking lot at the time of repaving was left to the court for resolution. Finding No. 9 that the parking lot was in good condition prior to repaving and that the repaving by the Tenant was not justified is amply supported by the evidence.
The Tenant next claims that the trial court's findings of fact that the repaving was done by tenant, not because of necessity, but because it desired to give the premises a "new look" and to upgrade the store to meet growing competition is clearly erroneous. On the contrary, Seaway urges that the trial court's finding of fact, No. 13, determining that the repaving was done *488 by the Tenant in its desire to give the premises a "new look" is substantially supported by the record.
The question as to whether or not the Tenant was interested in obtaining a "new look" is not pertinent to the issue as to whether or not the parking lot was in "good condition" at the time of the repaving job done by the Tenant.
By finding No. 13 the court determined that ". . . the repaving was done by Tenant, not because of necessity, but because it desired to give the premises a `new look' and to upgrade the store to meet growing competition. . . ." This finding is reinforced by subparagraphs thereof. In addition to the foregoing finding, and in support thereof, we note the following testimony of the witness, Charles J. Bailey, an employee of the Tenant.
Q. It's not necessary to have an even blacktop surface, is it?
A. It would be nicer than holes, sir. Having a good parking lot is good advertising.
We find no basis in the record for disturbing finding No. 13. We are bound to confirm this result unless, as a matter of law, it is unsupportable. Villeneuve v. Commissioner of Taxes, 128 Vt. 356, 357, 264 A.2d 774 (1970) citing Forslund v. Cookman, 125 Vt. 112, 114, 211 A.2d 190 (1965). The prescribed law of this jurisdiction is that findings must stand if there is any credible evidence which fairly and reasonably supports them. Largess v. Tatem, 130 Vt. 271, 280, 291 A.2d 398 (1972).
The issue was raised below as to whether, under the terms of the lease, the Tenant gave "reasonable notice" in writing to Seaway that the parking lot needed repaving before the Tenant proceeded to do so. This became a controverted issue. The trial court found that the notice given referred only to "repair."
As stated in the findings and conclusions, the court below determined that the parking lot was in good condition by reason of the repairs made by Seaway and that the repaving done shortly thereafter by the Tenant was not necessary. This is the critical and controlling issue upon which the judgment is predicated. Therefor, the above referred to notice, or lack thereof, becomes immaterial in disposing of this appeal, and requires no consideration by this Court.
Judgment affirmed.
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1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of semiconductor fabrication and, more particularly, to the field of fabricating p-channel and n-channel transistors with different characteristics on a common substrate.
2. Description of Related Art
In complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) fabrication, p-channel and n-channel transistors are fabricated on the same semiconductor substrate. To achieve transistors of both polarities (conductivity types), it is necessary that at least some process is steps differentiate between p-type and n-type transistors. Separate implant steps, for example, are needed to define n-well and p-well structures and to dope the source/drain regions of n-channel and p-channel transistors. Whenever possible, however, it is generally desirable to use a single process step to define transistor features regardless of the transistor type. Single process steps imply a single mask step, which is always desirable to reduce load on the photolithography processing. Moreover, a single step generally minimizes undesirable variations between the p-channel and n-channel transistors. Imagine, for example, that a particular design has been optimized under the assumption that the thickness of the gate oxide (or other dielectric) is the same on n-channel and p-channel transistors. The best way to ensure that the assumption is correct is to form the relevant feature for p-channel and n-channel transistors simultaneously.
In some cases, however, it may be desirable to process n-channel and p-channel transistors separately to account for differences in the characteristics of the respective transistor types. As an example, there is an asymmetry in the sub-micron behavior of p-channel and n-channel transistors. For sub-micron p-channel transistors, the high diffusivity of its boron carriers causes sub-threshold leakage current to be of paramount concern. For n-channel transistors, the drive current or saturated drain current (IDS), which is an important performance parameter, is strongly influenced by the effective length of the source/drain extension region due to the parasitic resistance that it creates. Whereas it would be desirable to have shorter extensions to increase the n-channel drive current, it would be desirable to have longer extensions to reduce the p-channel sub-threshold leakage current. It would therefore be desirable to implement a process that simultaneously addressed these concerns without substantially increasing the cost or complexity of the process. | {
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A Podcast About Things
PodTea’d 010: The Varying Levels Of Audio Quality
RIP Headphone Users. Recording from a phone or tablet mic is a very bad idea, and thus my audio quality is super duper loud at times. My apologies! Anyway, we discussed things that happened. I honestly don’t remember what we talked about. Just go listen already, would you? | {
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Q:
Get URL segment in Laravel 5
For accessing previous URL in laravel. I am using this code in my controller.
$current_url = Request::url();
$back_url = redirect()->back()->getTargetUrl();
if ($current_url != $back_url) {
Session::put('previous_url', redirect()->back()->getTargetUrl());
}
This method helps maintainging previous url even when server side validation fails.
In my blade I access previous url like this {{ Session::get('previous_url') }}.
I need to find the second segment of my previous url.
Thanks
A:
You can do it this way:
request()->segment(2);
request() is a helper function that returns Illuminate\Http\Request, but you can also use the facade Request or inject the class as a dependency in your method.
EDIT
with the redirect back: redirect()->back()->getRequest()->segment(2);
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Loftus Henry Bland
Loftus Henry Bland (August 1805 – 21 January 1872) was an Irish Liberal, Whig and Independent Irish Party politician.
Born in Blandsfort House, Queen's County, Ireland, and the third son of John Bland and Elizabeth née Birch, daughter of Robert Birch, Bland was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated as a Bachelor of Arts in 1825, and a Master of Arts in 1829. He was called to the Irish Bar in 1829, becoming a member of the Queen's Counsel in 1854.
In 1840, he married Charlotte Elizabeth Grove Annesley, daughter of Arthur Grove Annesley and Elizabeth née Mahon, and they had at least one child: John Loftus Bland (1841–1908). After Charlotte's death in 1842, he remarried to Annie Jane Hackett, daughter of John Prendergast Hackett, in 1843, and they had at least three children: Thomas Dalrymple Bland (1846–1869); Elizabeth Emily Bland (died 1901); and Annie Sophia Alicia Bland.
He became an Independent Irish Party Member of Parliament (MP) for King's County at the 1852 general election and, becoming a Whig in 1857, held the seat until 1859, when he unsuccessfully stood as a Liberal.
In 1862, Bland became chairman of the County Cavan Quarter Sessions. He died in Dublin in 1872.
References
External links
Category:UK MPs 1852–1857
Category:Irish Nationalist politicians
Category:Whig (British political party) MPs for Irish constituencies
Category:1805 births
Category:1872 deaths
Category:Queen's Counsel 1801–1900
Category:Irish barristers
Category:Irish Queen's Counsel
Category:Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge
Category:Politicians from County Laois
Category:UK MPs 1857–1859
Category:Members of the Parliament of the United Kingdom for King's County constituencies (1801–1922) | {
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One major contribution by the FANY to the work of the SOE was in Communications, in both Signals and Cipher departments, where they received intensive training on Morse code.
Another major contribution was the FANY agents in the field: they worked mainly in France.
Thirty-nine of the 50 women sent into France were FANYs, of whom 13 were captured and murdered by the Gestapo.
Emma Mackey, dressed in 1940s French civilian costume, reads an extract from an interview with Agent Yvonne Cormeau.
"After my husband was killed in November 1940 I joined up the WAAF and I put my little girl in a school in the country.
"I had declared to them that I spoke German, Spanish and that I was fluent in French. This filtered through the Ministry and suddenly I was being interrogated to see if I was suitable for the SOE, I joined them in 1943.
"After extensive radio operator training I was parachuted into France on the 22nd August, north-east of Bordeaux.
"The reception committee consisted of five men from the resistance. Over the next year I hid in villages with no water, and was shot at by the gestapo, then one day myself and my group leader, codenamed Hilaire had our closest run in.
"We were told that Germans were getting closer to where we were based, that they were coming from the two roads from the east and the west, so we took one due south hoping to escape them; we hadn’t gone 15 Kilometres when we came face to face with one personnel carrier.
"They stopped us and told to get out of the car, then they put us in the ditch, with two soldiers in between us, both had a pistol, one in my back, one in Llias back.
"The soldier in charge was telling somebody on the radio that he had stopped a tobacco inspector and a woman, the woman had a district nurse card on her and what was he to do with them. We waited and waited, my perspiration was coming down, the flies were sticking to it.
"I couldn’t move because if we moved they would’ve shot immediately, therefore we waited. Then the crackle came up again on his radio.
"He told the two soldiers to go away and he told us “get in the car” which we did at once. Then he suddenly asked me what was in the case that had been thrown on the backseat, which of course was my radio set.
"I knelt on the seat and opened it for him, he asked me what it was and I said a German word that meant radio as well as X-ray and due to the fact that I had a district nurse card, he assumed it meant X-ray and let us get out. So we got out very fast, the engine was already running." | {
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Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature
**Plateaus – New Directions in Deleuze Studies**
'It's not a matter of bringing all sorts of things together under a single concept but rather of relating each concept to variables that explain its mutations.'
Gilles Deleuze, _Negotiations_
**Series Editors**
Ian Buchanan, University of Wollongong
Claire Colebrook, Penn State University
**Editorial Advisory Board**
Keith Ansell Pearson
Ronald Bogue
Constantin V. Boundas
Rosi Braidotti
Eugene Holland
Gregg Lambert
Dorothea Olkowski
Paul Patton
Daniel Smith
James Williams
**Titles available in the series**
Dorothea Olkowski, _The Universal (In the Realm of the Sensible): Beyond Continental Philosophy_
Christian Kerslake, _Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy: From Kant to Deleuze_
Jean-Clet Martin, _Variations: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze_ , translated by Constantin V. Boundas and Susan Dyrkton
Simone Bignall, _Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism_
Miguel de Beistegui, _Immanence – Deleuze and Philosophy_
Jean-Jacques Lecercle, _Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature_
Ronald Bogue, _Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History_
Sean Bowden, _The Priority of Events: Deleuze's_ Logic of Sense
Craig Lundy, _History and Becoming: Deleuze's Philosophy of Creativity_
Aidan Tynan, _Deleuze's Literary Clinic: Criticism and the Politics of Symptoms_
Visit the Plateaus website at www.euppublishing.com/series/plat
BADIOU AND DELEUZE
READ LITERATURE
_Jean-Jacques Lecercle_
EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS
© Jean-Jacques Lecercle, 2010, 2012
First published in hardback by Edinburgh University Press 2010
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF
www.euppublishing.com
Typeset in Sabon
by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and
printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7486 3800 0 (hardback)
ISBN 978 0 7486 4905 1 (paperback)
The right of Jean-Jacques Lecercle
to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Contents
Introduction
---
Chapter 1 | Disjunctive Synthesis
Chapter 2 | A Question of Style
Chapter 3 | Deleuze Reads Proust
Chapter 4 | Badiou Reads Mallarmé
Chapter 5 | A Modernist Canon? Badiou and Deleuze Read Beckett
Chapter 6 | Reading the Fantastic after Badiou and Deleuze
Conclusion: Aesthetics or Inaesthetics?
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
Tell me which literary texts you read and how you read them and I shall tell you what kind of philosopher you are and how important your philosophical contribution is.
Alain Badiou begins the introduction to his magnum opus _Being and Event_ by positing three numbered theses, or 'assumptions', about the 'current general state of philosophy'.1 In a pastiche of the philosopher's practice, I shall start by stating my own three assumptions, or theses.
_Thesis one_. Badiou and Deleuze are two of the most important contemporary philosophers. This is the weak version of the thesis, which, I am afraid, is trivially true. All you have to do in order to ascertain this is to browse among the philosophy section of any Waterstone's bookshop. A few years ago, the shelves were filled with books of philosophy of an impeccably analytic cast, where applied ethics vied with the philosophy of mind. Today, Wittgenstein and Cavell (who is not even an analytic philosopher) are lone survivors in a sea of translations from the French or German: Adorno, Barthes, Baudrillard, Blanchot and so on to the end of the alphabet. Badiou and Deleuze figure prominently in that glorious list. There is hardly a text by Deleuze that has not been translated into English and translations of Badiou are coming thick and fast (the massive second part of his magnum opus, _Logic of Worlds_ , published in 2006, has already been translated).2 The time of the research monograph devoted to a little known philosopher is already past – the time of readers, primers and assorted cribs is increasingly near. So the weak version of my first thesis is trivially true indeed. But I decided to write this book because I believe in a _strong_ version of the thesis: Badiou and Deleuze are _the_ two major contemporary philosophers. I am entirely aware of the highly contentious nature of this strong version, perhaps even of its outright falsity. How dare I ignore Derrida or Foucault, or even Lyotard? And what about, if we extend the field, Adorno and Heidegger? At this stage, the strong version can only be supported by a philosophical decision (a move that should please Badiou). Whether this will induce effects of truth remains to be seen. But the fidelity, to use Badiou's term, is already there: I believe that the work of Badiou and Deleuze is there to stay, _aere perennius_. And this Pascalian wager on the future of philosophy is supported by an analysis of what Badiou himself calls the 'moment of French philosophy': an 'adventure' that for him begins with Sartre's _Being and Nothingness_ and ends with Deleuze and Guattari's _What Is Philosophy?_ , but also, Badiou claims with characteristic but understandable immodesty, with his own work: 'Time will tell; though if there has been such a French philosophical moment, my position would be as its last representative.'3 A strange statement for a philosopher who claims that what he has in common with Deleuze is the rejection of all thought of the end (as in the phrases 'the end of philosophy' or 'the end of history') and of finitude, but a statement that must be understood in the light of his conception of history as a dotted line of 'historical sequences' that produce eternal truths but that are themselves deciduous. I happen to believe that Badiou's claim, large as it may seem, is justified – that there is such a thing as a moment in French philosophy and that Deleuze and Badiou are its major representatives. In saying this, I have already moved towards my second thesis.
_Thesis two_. Badiou and Deleuze form a pair, which is a form of unity, the unity of a set, and a pair of opposites, which is a form of distance or separation. We could describe this in the language of Deleuze: they share a plane of immanence, where their individual lines cross (in agonistic strife), then converge and are entangled (in a philosophical correspondence), while remaining entirely distinct and ultimately separate. We shall need a concept to describe this form of relation which is a non-relation (and certainly a non-relationship) – the Deleuzian concept of 'disjunctive synthesis' will do the philosophical work that is needed. But we can also, more traditionally but perhaps more perspicuously, describe this situation in the language of Bourdieu (which in this case is not incompatible with the language of Deleuze): contemporary French philosophy is a field of forces, in which Badiou and Deleuze occupy two opposite places that function as poles and, by acting as attractors, structure the field. As we can see, my second thesis is as strong, and potentially as unpalatable, as the first. But there is a third thesis, which is perhaps even worse but which actually impelled me to write this book.
_Thesis three_. The best way to enter the (non-) relation between Badiou and Deleuze is through the way they read literature. Again, a weak version of the thesis is trivially true. Their interventions in the field of literature are as numerous as they are notorious. Badiou is a novelist and playwright, a complete philosopher like Sartre his mentor, and he is the author of theses on drama and a 'handbook' of what he calls 'inaesthetics', in reality a collection of essays mostly on literary texts.4 His philosophical works, from _Théorie du sujet_ to _Logic of Worlds_ , abound in 'readings' of poems and other texts. Deleuze, at a time when he was still a historian of philosophy in the French tradition, devoted a volume to a reading of Proust, and the last collection of essays published in his lifetime is largely devoted to literature – obviously a lifelong passion.5 The weak version of the thesis is even more trivial than this: in showing an interest in art (Deleuze wrote extensively on painting and the cinema, Badiou has an essay on dance in his 'handbook') as well as literature, Deleuze and Badiou play the usual role of continental philosophers who, unlike their analytical counterparts, never hesitate to wander beyond the narrow limits of their favourite subjects: Heidegger and Adorno, Foucault and Derrida, as the French language has it, _ne sont pas en reste_ (they, too, wrote extensively on literature).
But there is a strong version of the thesis. It can take two forms. The first states that literature plays a crucial role in the contents of our philosophers' respective positions. For Badiou, literature is a condition of philosophy. Sometimes it is included in the field of art, one of the four fields (science, politics, art and love) in which events occur and procedures of truth are conducted – literature is a source of truth, unlike philosophy, whose more modest task is to 'compossibilise', to think together the truths produced in other fields. Sometimes, the conditions are, through synecdoche, reduced to two: the matheme and the poem, mathematics and literature. In both cases thinking the poem is, for the philosopher, of the essence. For Deleuze, literature is a constant source of thought experiments, it is one of the fields in which thought is at work, perhaps even in an exemplary fashion, as the literary text is a locus where the shift between interpretation ('What does it mean?') and experiment ('How does it work? Let's put it to work!') is least expected and most fruitful. This is why Proust, Lewis Carroll and a host of American writers are as important to philosophy as Hume and Spinoza. The second form of the strong version of the thesis goes one step further. In a pastiche of Deleuze's attitude, it is not interested in the contents of the philosophical positions of the two philosophers, even where they directly concern literature: it seeks to ask their texts the wrong question, not 'What does it say?' but 'How is it written?', a type of question usually reserved for literary texts, in which we perceive the local version of Deleuze's question, 'How does it work?' So the second form of the strong version demands that we attempt to describe the authors' style, their use of rhetoric, their taste for metaphor and/or narrative (a kind of philosophical analysis which is also characteristic of deconstruction). In other words, the second form suggests that the task of our critical account of that (non-)relation is to treat the two philosophers as poets (which in a sense they are): not only to read them, or to read them reading, but to read them writing.6
In doing all this, I am not particularly original, at least as far as the first form of the strong version of my third thesis is concerned. Badiou, in his essay on the moment of French philosophy, has already trodden that path. In that essay, he describes what he calls 'the alliance between philosophy and literature' as 'one of the characteristics of contemporary French philosophy'.7 He enthuses over the quality of writing to be found in those texts ('they wanted to be _writers_ ').8 He identifies the 'one essential desire' of the French philosophical moment as 'turning philosophy into an active form of writing that would be a medium for the new subject'.9 By which, of course, he means the subject of the historical sequence of French philosophy, whose concept it is the task of that philosophy to construct. That the construction of a new concept of the subject is an essential concern of contemporary French philosophy is a highly contentious thesis – not least for Deleuze, who deemed the concept exhausted and created a host of substitutes (haecceities, assemblages, etc.) among which the philosophical work of the concept was distributed. Nevertheless, Badiou's analysis comforts me in my attachment to the strong versions of my first and my second thesis. Badiou and Deleuze, those conceptual characters, embody the two aspects of the French philosophical moment. They are separated by their individual philosophical positions and conjoined by their belonging to the same field of forces, to the same moment of the conjuncture. They are conjoined by their common appraisal of literature as a source of thought and by their fascination for the act of writing, as they are separated by their singular ways of reading literature as well as by their idiosyncratic philosophical styles, which are also styles of writing.
I would like to end this introduction on a personal note. I do not claim to belong to the 'French philosophical moment'. But I was a student in its heyday, and one can never forget the sheer exhilaration of reading philosophy in France in the late 1960s and early 1970s, of discovering the philosophies of Badiou and Deleuze. Glory was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be a student was very heaven.
And I don't believe for a moment it was a sunset.
**_Notes_**
1. | A. Badiou, _Being and Event_ , London: Continuum, 2005, p. 1.
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2. | A. Badiou, _Logic of Worlds_ , London: Continuum, 2009.
3. | A. Badiou, 'The Adventure of French Philosophy', _New Left Review_ , 35, 2005, p. 68.
4. | A. Badiou, _Handbook of Inaesthetics_ , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005 (French edition: _Petit manuel d'inesthétique_ , Paris: Seuil, 1998).
5. | G. Deleuze, _Proust and Signs_ , London: Continuum, 2008 (first English translation: New York: George Braziller, 1972; first French edition: _Proust et les signes_ , Paris: PUF, 1964; definitive edition, 1972); _Essays Critical and Clinical_ , London: Verso, 1998 (1993).
6. | Badiou, 'The Adventure of French Philosophy', op. cit., p. 72.
7. | Ibid., p. 73.
8. | Ibid.
9. | Ibid., p. 76.
1
Disjunctive Synthesis
**_Confrontation_**
In 1976, one called the other a fascist. The other replied by talking of intellectual suicide. Those were the heady days of the aftermath of May '68 at the University of Vincennes in Paris, when even the slightest political difference became a pretext for the exchange of what the French language poetically calls _noms d'oiseaux_ , in other words insults. So in an article published in the theoretical journal of an obscure Maoist sect,1 of which he was 'a leading member', Badiou called Deleuze a fascist, as he recalls, with a hint of nostalgic mischievousness, in the opening pages of his book on Deleuze.2 In those days, Badiou was a young lecturer in the philosophy department, with no philosophical _oeuvre_ to speak of behind him: two novels, one slim volume published in the celebrated _Théorie_ series directed by Althusser, and two essays, which he himself classifies as 'political', not philosophical texts, in a short-lived series directed by Sylvain Lazarus and himself with the same left-wing publisher, François Maspéro.3 But he had years of political militancy behind him, first in a small left-wing socialist party, the _Parti Socialiste Unifié_ ( _PSU_ ), then in a small Maoist group called UCF (m-l), where 'C' stands for 'Communist', of course, and 'm-l' for 'Marxist-Leninist'. Deleuze, on the other hand, was already a full professor in the same department. He had already published a considerable body of work, from _Empiricism and Subjectivity_ (1953) to _Kafka_ (with Félix Guattari, 1975), including two massive volumes (on difference and repetition, on Spinoza and the concept of expression) which constituted his _thèse d'Etat_ , the double monstrosity then required from the prospective occupant of a chair. More importantly perhaps, he was, with Guattari, the best-selling author of _Anti-Oedipus_ , and his classes were attended by a motley crowd of students and assorted eccentrics, in lecture rooms thick with the smoke of countless cigarettes, as the film of one of his lectures shows.
Badiou's article, with its provocative turn of phrase ('they can't be supposed to be illiterate, so it must be supposed they are crooks'4 – he is talking about Deleuze and Guattari), was provoked by the success of _Anti-Oedipus_ and the recent publication of _Rhizome_ , which was later included as the introduction to _A Thousand Plateaus_. We can, I think, understand the rage (which is not the same think as condoning it): between the anarchic political philosophy of flows and desire and the strict Marxism-Leninism of the militant Maoist, no compromise was possible, and Badiou was putting into practice the Maoist injunction to 'shoot the leaders' ( _feu sur les étatsmajors_ ) – he even went as far as organising and at least once leading expeditions of Maoist students into his colleague's classes, for an exercise of public criticism and self-criticism, in imitation of the Great Cultural Proletarian Revolution in China. Deleuze, it seems, was mildly annoyed by such aggressions – he was of a milder and less militant temper.5 Badiou, in his book, recalls that Deleuze called him a 'bolshevik'. But that was hardly an insult, either for Badiou who _was_ a bolshevik or for Deleuze who was a firm critic of Stalinism but an admirer of Lenin (a chapter of _A Thousand Plateaus_ is devoted to his pamphlet on slogans). Badiou also recalls that Deleuze talked of 'intellectual suicide': a more serious form of dismissal, in which the established mandarin deplores the political activism of his promising young colleague, who is not only wasting his time and talent but is caught in a form of quasi-religious persuasion that makes individual thought impossible. Both insults, of course, turned out to be misguided: it is in the nature of insults to be blatantly false. Deleuze, unlike most of his contemporaries, never ceased to stand on the left of the left, and Badiou, while still a political militant, has become the major philosopher that we know.
The university of Vincennes (or Paris VIII) was a strange institution. It was erected in the summer of 1968, in three months, in the woods of Vincennes, immediately east of Paris. It was housed in prefabs, and was expropriated towards the end of the 1970s and relocated in Saint-Denis, a working-class suburb in the north of Paris, where it now stands. It was created by a politically astute Secretary for Education, who sought to provide a playground for leftist students and academics at a safe distance from the centre of Paris. But the academic founders of the institution were given complete freedom as to the appointment of their colleagues, the organisation of the curriculum and the type of students they wanted to teach (in an attempt to reach the common people, _le peuple_ , the university took in students who did not have a _baccalauréat_ , the usual requisite for university entrance). The result of such academic freedom was remarkable: Foucault was in charge of appointments, and he became the first head of the philosophy department. Among its members were Deleuze, Badiou, Rancière, Lyotard, Balibar and François Châtelet. The head of the English department was Hélène Cixous, who recruited Christine Brooke-Rose, and there was a department of psychoanalysis founded under the aegis of Lacan, where Jacques-Alain Miller, Lacan's son-in-law and editor of the seminars, reigned. Never was such academic brilliance so concentrated in a French university. The only competitor in the field was the Ecole Normale Supérieure, with Althusser and Derrida on the staff and Lacan giving his seminars for a few years.
Amid such intellectual ferment (the attempted normalisation of the institution co-occurrent with its transfer to Saint Denis did not quite work), Deleuze and Badiou spent most of their teaching careers (Badiou transferred to the Ecole Normale Supérieure at a late stage). But they hardly spoke to each other.
In the first chapter of Badiou's book on Deleuze, there is a nostalgic and sometimes touching account of this non-relationship. Although they taught in the same department in the same building, they hardly ever met (no dinner parties, Badiou regrets, no post-prandial walks, no lengthy conversations on the telephone). And yet, more than a decade later, from 1992 to 1994, they entered into philosophical correspondence, on Badiou's insistence, Deleuze's persistent diffidence being shown by the fact that he forbade the publication of the letters and apparently destroyed them. But it seems that Badiou has kept them: in a corner of his study, there must lie some of the most important letters in contemporary philosophy . . .
By the early 1990s, the conjuncture had changed. Neither Badiou nor Deleuze renounced political commitment and intervention: Deleuze's texts on Palestine and various political subjects are collected in the last volume of his essays;6 Badiou is still involved in a group called _L'Organisation politique_ , and his first best-seller came late in 2007 with a book analysing the electoral success of Nicolas Sarkozy,7 in which 'one of the points to be held', as he calls them, is 'the communist hypothesis'.8 In a context of political and intellectual reaction, political abysses were bridged and differences gave way to proximity if not alliance. Badiou and Deleuze shared the same detestation of the _nouveaux philosophes_ , those darlings of the media whose philosophical work was nil. And since Badiou had emerged as a considerable philosopher in his own right, the conditions for a real philosophical confrontation, perhaps even a dialogue, were ripe. It is doubtful whether this would ever have come to pass, Deleuze's hostility to dialogue being as notorious as his talent in practising it with Félix Guattari or Claire Parnet. But in 1996 he committed suicide, leaving Badiou alone in the field.
**_Conjunctures_**
Confrontation means divergence and, as we shall see, philosophical differences, both in concept and style, between Badiou and Deleuze are unbridgeable. But such differences, significant as they are, emerge on a background of convergence. For Badiou and Deleuze were not only members of the same academic institution, but also the products of the same historical conjuncture and the same philosophical tradition.
The historical conjuncture, that of postwar France, has its climax in the May events of 1968, a philosophical and political turning point for both of them. The May events may even be considered as an _event_ in the technical sense of the concept in Badiou's system, the beginning of a historical sequence, albeit short, engaging the construction of a political truth and processes of fidelity and subjectivation. Both philosophers have remained faithful to that event – certainly a minority option. In one of his electoral speeches of 2007, the president-to-be, Nicolas Sarkozy, called for the eradication of the spirit of '68, while one of the leaders of the movement, André Glucksmann (who has become the most explicitly reactionary of the new philosophers), sat in the first row of the audience. For Badiou and Deleuze, fidelity to the revolutionary impetus of the May events, to what Deleuze used to call his 'common-or-garden leftism', was not a vain concept.
The philosophical tradition that they share goes back much further, even further than what Badiou calls the 'moment of French philosophy', which, as we saw, begins for him with Sartre's _Being and Nothingness_ and the ideal of the philosopher as writer and political militant. Badiou and Deleuze had the same training in philosophy, they were both subjected to the same institutional hurdles, the competitive entrance exam to the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Badiou passed, Deleuze narrowly failed), the equally competitive _agrégation_ in philosophy (in which both excelled). That training, which was not without a form of stifling scholasticism, was based on a thorough knowledge of canonical philosophy (Plato and Kant, but neither Nietzsche nor Marx), envisaged from the point of view of the history of philosophy (Deleuze's first books, on Hume, Bergson and Kant, bear witness to this), and on the two technical exercises of _dissertation_ (in length, but not in spirit, comparable to the essay: strong rhetorical architecture and a gift for elegant expression were indispensable requirements, as anyone who has read Bergson will realise) and _explication de textes_ , a form of close commentary which, again, required powers of synthesis and rhetorical skill. And it is interesting to note that both academic exercises were, and still are, common to the training of students of literature and of philosophy: the proximity of philosophy to literature is already inscribed in French institutions.
Such historical and institutional background explains one of the philosophical tenets Badiou and Deleuze have in common: their hostility to the analytic tradition in philosophy (which never really caught in France, Jacques Bouveresse being a lone exception).9 Deleuze called Wittgenstein an 'assassin of philosophy' (this was in _Abécédaire_ , that series of television programmes which he insisted was to be broadcast only after his death, in which, therefore, he dispensed with the usual precautions of politeness) and, as Badiou forcefully puts it, he hated logic10 – at least the form of logic prevalent in Anglo-Saxon philosophy (we recall he wrote on the 'logic' of sense and of sensation). Badiou's affect is apparently milder: he indulges in deliberate misprisions of Wittgenstein (not least his concept of language-game), but he is strongly critical of philosophers that restrict their interest to logical or grammatical questions, and his recent book on Wittgenstein, the title of which sums up his position, is extremely critical.11 In short, both philosophers strongly resist the 'linguistic turn' in philosophy, a position which happily coexists with their interest in literature and their attitude towards language.
**_Continental and analytic_**
A short excursus, to be taken tongue-in-cheek, will show what their styles in philosophy have in common, in contrast with the analytic way of doing things. I would like to suggest that the opposition between what is broadly (very broadly) known as 'continental' and 'analytic' philosophy develops along the following six contrasts.
1. | Where analytic philosophy is dry, continental philosophy is copious. Paul Grice gained a worldwide reputation on the strength of two essays.12 Collections of essays by various hands on a given subject are, for analytic philosophers, a standard way of publishing their works. Continental philosophers, on the other hand, favour the thick treatise, like Sartre's _Being and Nothingness_ , or at least the two hundred page volume. In France, this tendency was accentuated by the institution of _thèse d'Etat_ , that academic pachyderm which ran to several hundred pages and took ten years to write: _Difference and repetition_ and Foucault's _Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique_ belong to that category, as does Gilbert Simondon's _L'Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique_ ,13 which exerted considerable influence on Deleuze. And even if Badiou's two _summae_ (that is how he himself, quite rightly, calls them) came too late to gain that sort of academic recognition, as the _thèse d'Etat_ was abolished in 1984 and replaced by the equivalent of a PhD, they are typical of the genre, at least in length and scope.
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2. | Where analytic philosophy is argumentative, continental philosophy is thetic. There is nothing Anglo-Saxon philosophers like better than a good debate, and that Oxford Union type of philosophical practice influences their mode of writing. Austin's first article on performatives is characteristic: he starts by positing and defending the 'constative v. performative' contrast and ends up dissolving it.14 Deleuze, on the other hand, openly despised discussion and preferred writing _à quatre mains_ : for him, a debate was merely an opportunity to exhibit one's intellectual brilliance at a small cost and at the expense of serious thought – this is why he refused, with very few exceptions, to take part in colloquia, those forums for academic vanity. And if Badiou's texts are usually the site of an unremitting demonstration (in which he is close to the early Wittgenstein and the logical trend in analytic philosophy), he always starts, like Althusser, who was one of his masters, from a set of carefully numbered theses, which he uses as axioms (in the case of _Being and Event_ , they are indeed axioms, the axioms of set theory): for him, there is always a moment of _decision_ , which is the crucial moment.
3. | Analytic philosophy is logicist, continental philosophy is literary. The ideal figure for the analytic philosopher is the logician, and the rationale for such degrees as PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) in Oxford is the belief that the contribution of philosophy to the study of politics and economics is teaching the students to think and argue logically. This attitude towards logic often influences the shape of philosophical research in the analytic tradition. We need only think of the relationship between Davidson and Tarski. Continental philosophers, in spite of what their opponents would like to think (remember the polemic between Derrida and Searle, and the infamous episode of the petition, signed by Quine and other distinguished philosophers, against Derrida being granted an honorary degree by Cambridge university), also practise the art of philosophical argument. In the case of Badiou, as we have seen, this takes the form of a quasi-mathematical demonstration. Readers of _Logic of Worlds_ ,15 his second _summa_ , can turn to the end of the volume and find a numbered list of the sixty-six propositions demonstrated in the book. But their relation to logic is entirely different: they do not treat it as the transcendent method that rules all forms of philosophy. In other words, they do not make a fetish of it, preferring to concentrate on the construction of concepts. And such construction does not avoid questions of form – what is now called 'philosophy as a kind of writing', the philosopher as stylist, is a characteristic of French as of all continental philosophy. This entails a different relationship to literature – this is what this book is about: where analytic philosophers hardly write on literature or the arts, practically all continental philosophers have devoted an important part of their work to literature, with the possible exception of Althusser (who, in a sense, delegated the task to Macherey). Deleuze and Badiou are not the least literary of such philosophers.
4. | Where analytic philosophers believe that there is progress in philosophy as in science, continental philosophers enjoy revisiting their predecessors – this means not only that philosophers of old are like the old masters in the history of art, that their achievements must be revisited, their positions constantly rehearsed, but more importantly that their problems are still as vitally significant now as they were centuries ago. When Strawson writes about Kant or Ryle about Descartes,16 it is to correct their mistakes and point out their limitations. And let us not even mention Hegel, who is beyond the pale. Continental philosophers, on the other hand, show considerable piety towards their forebears – that is why the history of philosophy is an integral part not only of their training but of their practice. So Althusser re-reads not only Marx but Montesquieu and Machiavelli; Derrida re-reads Rousseau and Hegel, Deleuze Hume, Nietzsche, Spinoza and Bergson and Badiou claims to be a Platonist philosopher and 'meditates' on a host of his predecessors. For analytic philosophers, the tradition is as passé as Newtonian physics: something to be respected, even foraged for anticipations, but something largely alien to current problems. For continental philosophers, the urgent task is that of a return: to Freud, Marx or Plato.
5. | Where analytic philosophy is technical, continental philosophy is of a generalist cast. A highly specialised subject, analytic philosophy makes no effort, when it defines the relevant questions and constructs the requisite concepts, to allow the non-specialist to take part in the holy mysteries. Continental philosophy, on the other hand, likes to address sixth-form students, and this difference is even institutionalised: whereas the A level in philosophy is a relatively recent invention and is taken by a tiny minority of students, all candidates for the French _baccalauréat_ have to take a paper in philosophy – for a significant minority, it is even the most important paper. And continental philosophy likes to address the concerns of the general public: where the analytic philosopher is a shy and retiring creature, the continental philosopher is a man, or woman, of the world – his or her voice is heard on the _agora_ , in the media, thus gaining a form of recognition. Thus, when Jacques Derrida died, president Chirac indulged in a few words of public condolence and a brief eulogy of the great man. Thus Deleuze, who writes in a highly specialised philosophical idiom (no one will claim that _Difference and Repetition_ is as easy to read as a Jane Austen novel), gave public lectures on Spinoza that were followed by hundreds of people, most of whom were not philosophers in the strict sense. (Deleuze was duly proud of this and rejoiced in the fact that _The Fold_ had been appreciated by Japanese paper folders and Australian surfers.) And at one time, in the carriages of the Paris metro, one could see impeccably dressed yuppies hurrying towards the business centre of La Défense while flicking through the pages of _What Is Philosophy?_ (the title of the book is the very inscription of the desire to go beyond the boundaries of the specialised subject). Thus Badiou, whose philosophical work, although written with the utmost clarity, is of a highly technical nature (situation, count-for-one, state of the situation, edge of the void, evental site, presentation and representation, etc.: one has to enter the closed world of the system to make sense of these concepts), is also capable of writing for sixth-formers, and on exactly the same subject as he does in his _Ethics_ , which indeed originally appeared in a series intended for that audience,17 not to mention, of course, his many interventions in current affairs, of which his best-seller on Sarkozy is the best example.18
6. | Where analytic philosophy – this point is a consequence of the preceding one – is closed, continental philosophy is open. For analytic philosophers, philosophy is a subject unto itself: with the exception of 'applied ethics', it does not mix with other subjects, whereas nothing human is alien to the continental philosopher, especially the human sciences. Again, there is an institutional reason for this in the French context. For a long time, any student wishing to do research in psychology, sociology, anthropology or linguistics had to pass the _agrégation_ in philosophy, as there was no equivalent exam in those subjects. Thus both Lévi-Strauss and Bourdieu were _agrégés de philosophie_ , which means they underwent a thorough training in that subject before devoting their energies to their preferred field of research, a situation which naturally influenced their scientific practice. This openness of philosophy, or opening up towards other subjects, often to the point of invasion, but not without the inverse counter-movement, explains why French philosophers so confidently write about literature and art when they do not practise it themselves, like Sartre or Badiou, and why 'French Theory' met with such success in departments of comparative literature in the United States. And we understand why Badiou defines the task of philosophy (a modest but nevertheless an essential one) as the 'compossibilisation' of procedures of truth in the four fields (science, art, politics and love) where truths, in the emphatic plural, emerge, why philosophy is practised only 'under the conditions' of truths produced in other fields, the fields in which, unlike in philosophy, events occur.
If we restrict the field of continental philosophy to Deleuze and Badiou, the contrast takes another, massive, form: the focus on first philosophy, otherwise known as ontology, versus the dismissal of such interests as sheer metaphysics and the concentration on logical and grammatical problems. For Badiou and Deleuze, philosophical problems can never be merely grammatical: they have to be substantial. Hence their energetic rejection of the 'linguistic turn': in his first philosophical opus, _Théorie du sujet_ , Badiou called this exclusive preoccupation with language, 'idéalinguisterie',19 a coinage based on Lacan's coinage of 'linguisterie', which describes his idiosyncratic approach to language. The addition of 'idéal' insists on the gross idealism of all philosophies centred on language.
**_Metaphor or concept_**
I have, of course, caricatured the undeniable differences between two traditions, and I am aware that their very names, 'continental' and 'analytic', are gross oversimplifications. But Deleuze's and Badiou's common hostility to the analytic tradition is equally undeniable and goes some way towards explaining the convergence of their philosophical practices. For there are material conditions for philosophy, conditions of institution, of conjuncture and moment, of tradition, which explain why the differences between our two philosophers appear to have turned into similarities. They share the same historical conjuncture and they share a fidelity to its revolutionary component, the events of May 1968. They are products of the same institutional training, and their academic career took place in the same exceptional institution. They emerged from the same intellectual background, where the discipline of philosophy occupies a central place, and they share the same conception of the discipline: they are philosophers _in the same sense_ (for both, ontology, not logic, is the core of the subject, and philosophical problems can never be mere grammatical problems – for them, too, art and literature are an integral part of philosophy's concerns). So the similarities are considerable and obvious. But equally considerable are the differences: it is clear that, as philosophers, they are poles apart, and their former political hostility turns out to have been the least of their differences.
To capture such conjunction of convergence and divergence, we need a metaphor, perhaps even, if we manage to reach that giddy height, a concept. The French language offers the hackneyed biblical metaphor of _frères ennemis_ , but that would oblige us to decide which is Abel and which Cain. We might suggest, trusting the implicit wisdom of the English language, that their respective philosophies are at cross purposes, a potentially Deleuzian image of series diverging and lines crossing: but that would not be equal to the seriousness, and the quality, of their differend. And perhaps the last word is the name we are looking for. We remember that, in Lyotard,20 it denotes a difference which cannot be resolved for lack of a language common to both parties. But even if Deleuze's and Badiou's philosophical positions are incompatible, even if their styles of doing philosophy, in spite of their shared background, diverge sharply, it cannot be said that they do not share a language, for reasons we have just described, least of all the French language in which they write (and writing is for them of no mean philosophical importance).
In an essay devoted to Badiou's place in French philosophy and centred round the question of a 'history of truth', Etienne Balibar suggests that the phrase in question 'circulates in the writings of a constellation of authors' and 'at the same time signals the differences between them'.21 To name such mixture of similarity and difference, he uses three phrases in the same sentence: 'It constitutes, in other words, the index of a point of heresy that both unites and divides them, or brings them together in a "disjunctive synthesis" around their differend.'22 'Point of heresy', 'disjunctive synthesis' between inverted comas, 'differend': the choice is wide. The inverted commas around the second term inscribe a double allusion: to a Deleuzian concept of prime importance, and to the use Badiou makes of it in his reading of Deleuze. I think we have found the requisite metaphor, and it turns out to be a concept.
**_Disjunctive synthesis_**
The phrase is used as the title of the first essay Deleuze wrote with Félix Guattari.23 It has been used by one critic to describe the type of writing, _écriture à quatre mains_ , practised by Deleuze and Guattari. Here is Anne Sauvagnargues describing that text, devoted to the novelist and philosopher Pierre Klossowski, which found its way, in a modified version, into _Anti-Oedipus_ :
The text re-uses the notion of disjunctive synthesis that Deleuze introduced in _The Logic of Sense_ – an important notion which here finds its point of application. Synthesis, for Deleuze, does not mean a return to the one, but a disjunctive differentiation that works through bifurcations and transformations, rather than through fusion and the identity of the same. Such differentiating synthesis, a synthesis without conjunction, is applied to the singular practice of writing with four hands, and changes not only the status of the text, but its construction.24
The concept of synthesis, it appears, plays a role both in _The Logic of Sense_ and _Anti-Oedipus_. Its origin is to be found in Kant, where it plays an essential role, as it names the operations through which we make sense of the chaotic multiplicity of phenomena. There are three syntheses: of apprehension in intuition, of reproduction in imagination, of recognition in the concept. Kant is working his way from sense to intellect or understanding, and in each case the object of the exercise is to grasp together a multiplicity under a form of unity, be it an object of the senses, an image or a concept. In Deleuze, where the phenomena are given in the form of series (in _The Logic of Sense_ – series of things, of words, of thoughts, etc.) or flows of energy (in _Anti-Oedipus_ ), the function of synthesis is to capture and regulate the connection or intersection of such series or flows: to segment, to connect, to fuse, so that again the world of phenomena should acquire form. There are three syntheses in Deleuze as in Kant: of connection, of conjunction, of disjunction. The first two are easy to grasp: two series or lines connect together in a single sequence; two separate lines or series are conjoined in fusion, like rivers. The disjunctive synthesis, however, has a strong paradoxical flavour, as it seeks to connect and separate at the same time, to keep together what must ultimately remain apart. The phrase is, indeed, somewhat of an oxymoron, as the Latin prefix 'dis' contradicts the Greek prefix 'syn': you should not be able to separate and conjoin at the same time. A disjunctive synthesis, for traditional logic, is an impossibility. But it is precisely on this new concept, on this new 'logical' operation, which belongs to the logic of paradox, that Deleuze constructs his distinctive ontology of absolute difference, against the Aristotelian logic of subject and predicate and the Hegelian logic of contradiction.25
The concept first appears in the seventh series of _The Logic of Sense_ , where Deleuze, reading Lewis Carroll, develops his theory of portmanteau words (the term is Carroll's own: Deleuze calls them 'esoteric words').26 Portmanteau words, we remember, are the result of the contraction of two distinct words into one, as when a Victorian portmanteau, a kind of suitcase, was folded. Thus the word 'Snark', as in _The Hunting of the Snark_ , is said to be a contraction of 'snail' and 'shark', and the creature it denotes is duly monstrous. Deleuze distinguishes between three types of portmanteau words. _Contracting_ portmanteau words concern a single series (here a series of words); they coalesce successive elements, as we all do when we speak too fast, and all the words of a sentence may be contracted into one unintelligible word. Carroll's example comes from _Sylvie and Bruno_ , where 'y'reince' represents the phrase 'your Royal Highness' reduced to a single syllable. _Circulating_ portmanteau words concern two heterogeneous series which are made to coexist in them: this is the canonical case of the Snark, where two series of phonemes, but also of bodily parts, are made to converge in a linguistic monster and a monstrous creature. Lastly, _disjunctive_ portmanteau words operate the ramification of two coexisting series, which they keep both at once together and apart. Deleuze's example comes from Carroll's preface to _The Hunting of the Snark_ , where he quotes Pistol's injunction to Justice Shallow, in Shakespeare's _Henry the Fourth, Part Two_ , 'Under which King, Besonian? Speak or die!' He comments on the scene in the following fashion:
Supposing that [. . .] Justice Shallow had felt certain that it was either William or Richard, but had not been able to settle which, so that he could not possibly say either name before the other, can it be doubted that, rather than die, he would have gasped out 'Rilchiam!'27
This is no chimera, unlike the Snark or the Gryphon (both an eagle and a lion): the two elements are incompatible, as they belong to the same paradigm and cannot occupy a single syntagmatic position. And yet they must, as the choice of one rather than the other is too dangerous – a question of life and death. The disjunctive synthesis which produces the portmanteau word, the true esoteric word, allows Justice Shallow to do just that.
The three syntheses are more extensively described in the twenty-fourth series, 'Of the Communication of Events'.28 The _connective synthesis_ operates on one series only, and its linguistic marker is 'if . . . then': the connection is one of consecution and consequence. The _conjunctive synthesis_ constructs two series in their convergence, and its linguistic marker, predictably, is 'and' (they are literally taken together). The _disjunctive synthesis_ distributes two series through their divergence, and its linguistic marker is 'or', a connector that, in natural languages, has the useful property of being ambiguous between an inclusive interpretation ('p or q' is true if one of the propositions is true, which means that both may be true) and an exclusive one ('p or q' is true if one proposition is true and the other false). Perhaps this ambiguity of a linguistic marker which corresponds to two logical connectors is the best image we may hope to have of a disjunctive synthesis. The paradoxical nature of this synthesis is of course fully acknowledged by Deleuze: indeed that is its main interest for him (we remember that _The Logic of Sense_ is not divided into chapters but into 'series of paradoxes'). His question is: under which conditions is that disjunction a true synthesis? His answer is that the disjunctive synthesis does not exclude any predicates (a simple ascription of identity, combined with the law of non-contradiction, means that certain predicates will be validated for the subject, and others excluded) but rather organises the circulation of events along the two series thus conjoined in their difference. Such disjunction does not deny or exclude, it is strongly affirmative (it is prepared to conjoin incompatible predicates): it affirms difference, makes distance a positive characteristic, thus allowing the conjoining of two series that remain apart by the circulating event. The disjunctive synthesis is the logical operation that is needed by a philosophy of absolute or 'asymmetrical' difference, not the traditional philosophy of identity and representation.
The paradox of the disjunctive series is further developed in the thirty-second series, 'On the Different Kinds of Series'.29 This chapter is devoted to a theory of the genesis of language through the stages of noise, voice, speech and language proper. This genesis is sexual and the solution to the paradox of the disjunctive synthesis is to be found in psychoanalytic theory (we must not forget that _The Logic of Sense_ precedes _Anti-Oedipus_ by several years, and that in the preface Deleuze describes his project as 'an attempt to develop a logical and psychoanalytic novel').30 So, in the beginning, when the child is still in the womb or just born, there is only noise, what Deleuze calls 'the family rumour', which already speaks about the child, to the child, but which she does not yet perceive as speech addressed to her. In the second stage, the stage of the voice, the child realises that the flow of sounds in which she is immersed is made up of voices: she learns to do what we adults constantly do without any longer thinking about it, she cuts up the flow of sound into a series of discrete segments, phonemes, characterised by their differential values. Here, Deleuze follows Serge Leclaire, the psychoanalyst who theorised erogenous zones and their differential intensities.31 When the child moves to the next stage, from voice to speech, a sexual position is reached: not only is the flow of sound turned into a series of linguistic signs, ready for communication and meaning (the last stage of this genesis of language), but the originary body-without-organs is now a sexual body, an articulation of erogenous zones. The famous portmanteau word of Leclaire's patient, 'pordjeli', inscribes the parallel genesis, through the three types of synthesis, of language and the sexual body. Thus the erogenous zones are brought together into a sexual body through a connective synthesis, they are articulated into _this_ sexual body through the operation of conjunctive synthesis (Deleuze calls it 'the phallic coordination of zones' – _raccordement phallique_ )32 and the body of erogenous zones becomes the sexual body of the individual subject through the disjunctive synthesis that operates via the Oedipus complex. In other words, the role of disjunctive synthesis is to complete the genesis of the subject's sexual body and of her language at the same time: the three syntheses are linked to the three formative elements of language – phonemes (connective synthesis of sounds into distinctive elements), morphemes (articulation of such elements into a syntax, through conjunctive synthesis) and 'semantemes' or elements of meaning (the syntax now carries meaning, the two diverging series of words and things are held together and yet kept separate by the operation of disjunctive synthesis). The fourth stage, language proper, the stage of reference, enunciation and communication, is the surface consequence of the emergence of articulated meaning from the depths of the sexual body: only with designation, manifestation and signification will the business of meaning, common sense, good sense and sense proper be finally transacted.
The concept of disjunctive synthesis, therefore, is developed on two levels, the level of language, which provides the main illustration of the concept in the shape of its linguistic marker, and the level of the sexual body. In _The Logic of Sense_ , where the two levels are articulated, the portmanteau or esoteric word, as operator of disjunctive synthesis, plays the same role as the empty square in Deleuze's structuralist theory of sense and meaning33 – an element that glides along the two series of signifier and signified, itself devoid of meaning but achieving meaning in the synthesis it operates. Meaning is the result of the circulation of this floating signifier, the point of convergence of diverging series. In _Anti-Oedipus_ , where neither language nor the sexual body of psychoanalysis any longer play a major role, the disjunctive synthesis, like the other two syntheses, is a productive operation of desire, reality and the unconscious. The various syntheses cut the flow of libidinal energy, they connect it (synthesis of connection), they register it into series and semiotic codes (disjunctive synthesis), they contract into a form of subject (synthesis of contraction) – as we can see, the order of syntheses has changed, and the disjunctive synthesis now occupies the middle place. The linguistic markers of the respective syntheses have also changed: to the synthesis of connection corresponds the 'and then . . . and then' of the connection of part objects; to the synthesis of disjunction corresponds the 'either . . . or' of the schizophrenic patient, whose disjunction distributes heterogeneous series and flows and achieves the unity of experience; to the synthesis of conjunction corresponds the 'so that was it!' of recognition and _prise de conscience_.34 The disjunctive synthesis, Deleuze and Guattari add, is not a synthesis of contradictory terms as in Hegelian sublation ( _Aufhebung_ ), it reaffirms the individual separate existence of the terms it conjoins, it remains open and not closed in the circularity of the dialectic.
I think we understand the importance of the concept for Deleuze. It haunted him all through his work, and it survived the stage of _The Logic of Sense_ , the positions of which were largely abandoned when Deleuze met Guattari. It is connected with the main concepts of his ontology (series and empty square; flows and cuts; events) and of his philosophy of language (esoteric words and the stuttering of language, floating signifier and the distinction between meaning and sense). It provides a rationale for the practice of _écriture à deux_ with Guattari. Above all, it is the very embodiment of Deleuze's notorious hostility to the Hegelian system: the three syntheses are Deleuze's answer to the Hegelian dialectic, and the function of the disjunctive synthesis, which is affirmative and resists closure, is to replace and deny the third moment of the dialectic, the moment of unity of the contradictory terms through sublation.
**_Badiou reads Deleuze_**
The concept of disjunctive synthesis, therefore, is not a mere metaphor, a short circuit to describe the philosophical relation between Deleuze and Badiou. It is a fully-fledged concept. There are two reasons for attempting to capture this (non-)relation under precisely this concept. First, the concept, if it is Deleuze's answer to the dialectic, is a major point of divergence. Badiou in his Marxist-Leninist phase was a strict Hegelian (in _Théorie du sujet_ he uses a logic of contradiction, with due reference to Mao's disquisitions on the subject, not a logic of difference).35 And if the dialectic seems to have disappeared from _Being and Event_ (it is not strictly compatible with an ontology based on set theory), it makes an explicit reappearance in _Logic of Worlds_ , where Badiou states that his position is not that of dialectical materialism (the infamous _diamat_ of Stalinist fame) but of a materialist dialectic.36 So, unlike Deleuze, Badiou consistently thinks of himself as a dialectician, even if it can be argued that the 'and' of _Being and Event_ is not the 'and' of conjunctive synthesis but a marker of disjunctive synthesis: the event, being supplementary to the situation in which the multiple is presented, is outside being (the event is nothing, a nothing, a flash in the pan, captured only in retrospective truth procedures) and yet, it must have some sort of link with the situation in which it occurs at the point of an evental site – this is a notorious difficulty in Badiou's system, the crux, for instance, of his divergence with the theory of hegemony in Laclau.37
The second reason, which is of more direct interest to us, is that the concept of disjunctive synthesis is the guiding thread of Badiou's reading of Deleuze, in the book he devoted to him. The relation between Deleuze and Badiou is not evenly balanced. Their discussion on equal terms, as we saw, cannot be published. And after Deleuze's death, Badiou's interventions on the work of his colleague were numerous to the point of obsession: there is a chapter on Deleuze's ontology in _Briefings on Existence. A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology_ ,38 a section on the event according to Deleuze in _Logic of Worlds_39 and a short obituary in _Pocket Pantheon_.40 His review of _The Fold_ , which must be added to this list, pre-dates Deleuze's death by a few years.41 But the main text is the book on Deleuze, _Deleuze: The Clamor of Being_ ,42 published in a series of introductory texts, to which Badiou also contributed a volume on Beckett and Rancière a volume on Mallarmé.43 Except, of course, that the book is hardly an introduction to Deleuze and can only be described as a strong and idiosyncratic reading, which duly incensed Deleuze's followers.44 There is nothing particularly surprising in this: the books of Slavoj Žižek and Peter Hallward on Deleuze45 fall within that category, for it would seem that Deleuze's thought, unlike Badiou's, is sufficiently fluid and open-ended to invite creative misprision, to speak like Harold Bloom. In strong contrast with Badiou's obsessive interest in Deleuze's work, the latter never seems to have been greatly interested in Badiou's work. This is partly due to the respective dates of publications of their books: _Being and Event_ was published in 1988, by which time Deleuze had already published most of his work. _What Is Philosophy?_ , published in 1991, is the only book by Deleuze in which Badiou is mentioned, on two pages only.46 Badiou is 'example no. XII' in a chapter dealing with prospects and concepts. He is accused of reintroducing transcendence through the separation of the event from the ordinary multiple of the situation. He is also accused of entertaining an old-fashioned concept of philosophy as superior, as 'floating in empty transcendence', and his concept of multiplicity is called 'monist' ('any multiplicity' means _one_ multiplicity) whereas Deleuze's theory of multiplicities in the plural demands that there should be at least two. This curt reading of Badiou, the force of conviction of which is limited, is not so much a mark of interest as an outright dismissal, and Deleuze has been accused of interpreting Badiou in a way that makes his work unrecognisable.
The same accusation has been levelled, more than once, at Badiou's reading of Deleuze.47 But it can in no way be taken as a dismissal. In his recently published obituary of Deleuze in _Pocket Pantheon_ , Badiou draws up the five main 'motifs' of Deleuze's philosophy.
1. | In Deleuze, we recognise the centrality of an affirmative posture, against any 'thought of the end', whether it be human finitude or the end of philosophy.
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2. | Deleuze's only real concept of a synthesis is the synthesis that separates (we recognise our disjunctive synthesis): this is linked to Deleuze's conception of thought as a form of violence imposed on the thinker – we are 'forced to think', or forced into thinking.
3. | Deleuze's concept of time centres on eternity, not the usual temporal sequence: Badiou calls this the 'temporal intemporality' of Deleuze's event – this is an anti-phenomenological motif: we must abandon the 'consciousness of time' for good.
4. | Deleuze does not share the general obsession with language, a sad characteristic of poststructuralism and postmodernism, and he does not consider that the judgement is the main form of thought – in so doing, he takes an anti-Kantian posture, in which he is close to Badiou.
5. | Deleuze is hostile to the dialectic, which for him is 'exhausted', and he refuses to celebrate the power of the negative – this is coherent with the first motif of affirmation.
Points (1) and (4) in this list show the convergence between Badiou and Deleuze, points (3) and (5) their divergence. And point (2), the disjunctive synthesis, has been taken by Badiou as a point of entry into Deleuze's philosophy.
That the disjunctive synthesis is an essential concept for Deleuze is made explicit by Badiou in his book. In the chapter devoted to the univocity of being and the multiplicity of names, in a section dealing with 'Heidegger's limits', Badiou links the disjunctive synthesis to the conception of the One he ascribes to Deleuze:
Being 'occurs' in the same way in all its modalities – in the visible and language, for example (one could cite others). Thus, in assuming that there is an intentional relation between nomination and the thing, or between consciousness and the object, one necessarily breaks with the expressive sovereignty of the One. Were the objection to be made that these modalities are at least minimally 'related' to each other in so far as they are all modalities of the One, one need but reply that the essence of this relation is nonrelation, for its only content is the neutral equality of the One. And it is, doubtlessly, in the exercise of this nonrelation that thought 'relates' most faithfully to the Being that constitutes it. This is what Deleuze calls a 'disjunctive synthesis': one has to think of the nonrelation according to the One, which founds it by radically separating the terms involved. One has to steadfastly rest within the activity of separation, understood as a power of Being. One has to explain that 'the nonrelation is still a relation, and even a relation of a deeper sort' ([ _Foucault_ ], p. 63; translation modified), insofar as it is thought in accordance with the divergent or disjoining movement that, incessantly separating, testifies to the infinite and egalitarian fecundity of the One. But this disjunctive synthesis is the ruin of intentionality.48
It is well-known that Badiou's reading of Deleuze, contrary to an established critical tradition, makes him a philosopher of the One (thus imposing on him a form of Platonism), rather than the thinker of anarchic multiplicities, processes of becoming, complex assemblages of machines or enunciations, lines of flight and all-pervading difference. That there is a case for such a reading, the above quotation makes clear: Deleuze appears to be a consistently Spinozist philosopher, the disjunctive synthesis being the name of the (non-) relation between the various modes of the one substance, a relation deeper than the intentional relation between name and thing, sign and referent. Such (non-)relation is best described through the Spinozist concept of expression, to which Deleuze devoted a volume of his thesis.49 This, according to Badiou, is Deleuze's solution to the traditional problem of the mind–body relation: not through the intentional relation of phenomenology (one of Deleuze's ambitions is to discard phenomenology) but through the working of absolute difference – the operation which the disjunctive synthesis also names – except that – this is where Badiou's reading sharply differs from the critical _doxa_ about Deleuze – such differences are always related to the One, to whose 'infinite fecundity' they testify. It is at this point, of course, that the reader of Deleuze tends not to recognise her favourite philosopher in Badiou's version.
Badiou links the concept of disjunctive synthesis to another Deleuzian concept, the concept of 'life', another name for the One Being. Disjunctive synthesis, in this context, is the centre of what Badiou calls 'Deleuze's other logic', not the Aristotelian logic of categories, the logic of exclusion and inclusion ('and', 'or', 'neither . . . not'), but a paradoxical logic where all such relations are 'superimposed' in one relation of 'and-or-neither-nor': a logic where any conjunction is also a form of disjunction. Only such a logic can be faithful to the univocity and neutrality of being, and the disjunctive synthesis is the name for this superimposed nexus of relation: 'Deleuze called this neutrality "and-or-nor" connector, the _disjunctive synthesis_. It must be said that Being as a neutral power deserves the name "life" because it is, in terms of a relation, the "or-and-nor," or the disjunctive synthesis itself.'50 So disjunctive synthesis is now the name of one of the modalities of Being, Being as relation.
We understand why Badiou chose the concept as his guiding thread through Deleuze's ontology. For him, it is the very embodiment of Deleuze's superficial because mistaken anti-Platonism ('Deleuzianism is fundamentally a Platonism with a different accentuation').51 The disjunctive synthesis is what Deleuze opposes to Plato: 'beings are merely disjointed, divergent simulacra, that lack any internal relation between themselves or with any transcendent Idea whatsoever.'52 The discussion turns around the Platonist concept of 'simulacrum' (the idea is the model; the actual realisation of the idea, the icon – the real bed made by the carpenter in accordance with the idea of the bed – is a good copy; the simulacrum or idol, the bed painted by the artist in imitation of the real, or rather phenomenal, bed is a second-order, bad copy). Deleuze's strategy is to free the simulacrum from its relation of subservience to both the icon and the idea:53 the simulacrum is a positive power that dissolves the system of model and copy, original and representation. The simulacrum is the power that denies all foundation or grounding ( _fondement_ ), in the joyous chaotic operation Deleuze calls _effondement_ ('ungrounding'), and which he assimilates to the phantasm at work in the work of art. Badiou's strategy in discussing this passage is to fold Deleuze back on to Plato by claiming that the Platonist concept of the simulacrum, far from being purely derivative, a second-order copy, is a positive one: 'I am not sure that Plato is so far from this view of beings, even sensible beings, as immanent differentiation of the intelligible and as positivities of the simulacrum.'54 In other words, the Deleuzian theory of the independence of the simulacrum is neutralised by being assimilated to another version of the ontological difference, between Being and being, the One and the simulacra in which it expresses itself.
As Badiou's interpretation of Deleuze unfolds, it becomes clear that the disjunctive synthesis is the master concept that unites all Deleuze's main concepts into a system. At the cost of reducing Deleuze's three syntheses to the one disjunctive synthesis (the 'and-or-neither-nor), Badiou accounts for Deleuze's vitalism, which, like all vitalisms, 'including Spinoza's version [. . .] (the philosophy of the power of being) requires the absolute unity of a relation'55 – even if this relation is defined as a non-relation. When he analyses the virtual as 'the principal name of Being in Deleuze's work',56 and in this concept identifies the grounding of his philosophical system so that Deleuze's philosophy may be called a 'Platonism of the virtual',57 Badiou distances Deleuze from the traditional concept of ground as mimetic (the model is the ground for its copies or imitations). In Deleuze, singular beings, produced by the dynamic power of Being as its expression, have no need to resemble anything: 'they are fortuitous modalities of the univocal and, being as far removed as possible from any mimetic hierarchy, can only be thought in their anarchic coexistence through disjunctive synthesis.'58 But that relation between being and Being, in the paradoxical mode of disjunction, is, according to Badiou, Deleuze's version of grounding. And that Deleuzian ground is the virtual. The One, 'the virtual reservoir of dissimilar production' is 'the virtual totality'.59 And this is where transcendence returns within Deleuzian immanence: the position of the virtual totality of the One is transcendent in relation to the multiplicity of beings that express it, whose chaotic proliferation is held together by disjunctive synthesis. It is no wonder, therefore, that we discover that the concept of the fold is Deleuze's solution to the paradoxes created by the relation which is no relation, disjunctive synthesis. The question that Deleuze's ontology asks is the following: 'Given that thought is set in motion by disjunctive syntheses, and that it is solicited by beings which are in nonrelation, how can it be in accordance with Being, which is essentially relation?'60 The concept of fold is Deleuze's answer to this paradox. Badiou's deduction, which owes much to a reading of Deleuze's _Foucault_ ,61 envisages a dual topology of exteriority and limit, and the folding of the limit into an inside. This process of the outside folding itself into an inside is the very process of subjectivation. The subject – the inside – is the result of the invagination of the outside – the world. Badiou concludes: 'We might as well say that we finally reach the point where the disjunction is intuited as a simple modality of the One: the common limit of the heterogeneous forces that absolutely externalize the objects, or forms, is the very action of the One as self-folding.'62
**_Capture_**
Badiou's reading has one considerable advantage. It is a strong reading (I shall return to this notion in the next chapter) in that it turns Deleuze's philosophy into a coherent system, an ontology of the One, a Platonism of the virtual. It has one considerable disadvantage – apart from the possibility that it might be a misreading: it turns Deleuze's philosophy into a mirror image of Badiou's, with the expected inversions produced by the need for symmetry. In other words, that strong reading, like many or most of its kin, is an attempt at capture.
The object of the strong reading of a philosopher is double. The first object is to establish or renew the critical position, to situate the philosopher by making his problem explicit and systematising it. This is how Deleuze read his predecessors; this is also how Hallward and Žižek read him. The second object, when the critic is also a philosopher in his own right, is an assessment of convergence and divergence. The strong reader places the work he reads in proximity to his own, which requires a minimal amount of empathy, but also at a distance, in order to remain within the ambit of his own problem. Where the strong reading is also an attempt at capture, a third object will appear: to place the philosopher thus read and criticised in a position of subservience.
Badiou's reading fulfils all three objects. As we have seen, the problem he identifies in Deleuze is ontological, and centres around the operation of the disjunctive synthesis. The second and third objects are reached in four different ways.
1. | Badiou places Deleuze where he himself will not be placed, even if Deleuze has no taste for such placement. Badious's ontology is an ontology of the multiple, based on the mathematics of set theory (there is no One, there is no Whole). Therefore Deleuze's ontology must be an ontology of the One-Whole (call it Life, call it the Event, call it the one throw of the dice): 'Deleuze's fundamental problem is most certainly not to liberate the multiple but to submit thinking to a renewed concept of the One.'63 So the critical _doxa_ that interprets Deleuze as a thinker of multiplicity is wrong. And because Badiou's is a strong reading, it is clear that he has a point there, even if we decide, following Todd May, to describe Deleuze as a thinker of both the One and multiplicities.64 His argument is that Deleuze's reference to the One is meant to bolster up the thought of immanence: the Deleuzian 'One' (call it Being as difference, Spinoza's substance, desire in _Anti-Oedipus_ , memory in Bergson – the list is Todd May's) is whatever comforts immanence. One consequence of such placement in Badiou's reading – and one that goes against the grain of all previous interpretations – is that Deleuze's philosophy of life turns out to be a philosophy of death ('The result is that this philosophy of life is essentially, just like Stoicism [. . .] a philosophy of death').65 Such a paradoxical conclusion is understandable if the object of the reading is the placement of an opponent: Badiou wishes to occupy the pole of life (he likes to quote Lin Piao, 'The essence of revisionism is the fear of death'),66 so Deleuze has to occupy the pole of death. There is, of course, a thought of death in Deleuze, but it does not contradict in any way his strong affirmation of life, it is in no way a melancholy or dolorous resignation to finitude.
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2. | Badiou's reading – this is a direct consequence of the previous placement – excludes Deleuze from the field he himself wishes to occupy. This is the case with claims of the reintroduction of transcendence within immanence. Badiou is of course entirely aware of the move he is making, as he is, as the French language picturesquely phrases it, merely 'returning the politeness' ( _retourner la politesse_ ). As we saw, the accusation of a return to transcendence is exactly what Deleuze, in his only reference to his colleague's work, aims at Badiou. This is how Badiou puts it, with uncharacteristic precaution: 'The result is that Deleuze's virtual ground remains for me a transcendence, whereas for Deleuze it is my logic of the multiple that, in not being originally referred to the act of the One, fails to hold thought firmly within immanence'.67 You will have noticed that he manages not to formulate Deleuze's accusation of transcendence explicitly. And the idea that the virtual is a 'ground' in Deleuze's philosophy is, of course, highly contentious, the usual image of the philosopher being one that privileges _effondement_ over grounding. The same goes for Badiou's overturning of Deleuze's overturning of Platonism: for him, as we have seen, Deleuze's philosophy is a form of differently accented Platonism and it is 'organized around a metaphysics of the One'.68 Deleuze finds himself excluded from the fields of immanence and of multiplicity, which Badiou emphatically wishes to occupy. There is an element of dramatic irony in this: in his first philosophical opus, _Théorie du sujet_ , Badiou, who then based his philosophy on the Maoist axiom 'One divides into Two', accused Deleuze of practising an ultra-leftism of the multiple and stated that any thought of the multiple 'presupposes the One as substance and excludes the Two'.69 But there is also an element of insight, of a correct reading, in this 'differently accented Platonism' that Badiou attributes to Deleuze: for the dialectic of the One and the Multiple can undoubtedly be said to be the core of the philosophical tradition we still call Platonism.70
3. | When Badiou includes Deleuze in fields which he himself occupies, it is in a subordinate position, which turns Deleuze's philosophy into a weak version of Badiou's. And such inclusion is often a forcible one. Deleuze's lack of interest in, or even dislike of, the notion of truth is notorious (in _What Is Philosophy?_ he states that philosophy does not consist in knowledge, nor is it inspired by truth, but by categories such as 'interesting' or 'remarkable').71 But for Badiou this smacks of Freudian denial, so the concept is reintroduced within Deleuze's philosophy, under the paradoxical name of 'the power of the false': 'All in all, "power of the false" is exactly the Deleuzian name, borrowed from Nietzsche, for truth.'72 The same could be said, as the third movement of Badiou's reading is inseparable from the second movement, of the ascription of Platonism. Badiou has always been explicit, forcefully so, about his Platonism. By contrast, Deleuze's unacknowledged Platonism of the virtual is a _platonisme honteux_ : the overthrow of Platonism ultimately fails, Deleuze's anti-Platonism is just an instance of the modern _doxa_ (another instance is Heidegger) and – Badiou's _Deleuze_ ends on this – Deleuze is the last of the pre-Socratic philosophers, a great philosophical physicist, one of those 'thinkers of the All',73 a position which Plato's critique made it impossible to hold. So Deleuze manages to be both an unwitting Platonist and a pre-Platonist philosopher.
4. | Lastly, Badiou's reading proceeds by excision: he excludes from Deleuze a significant part of himself by avoiding any mention of a large proportion of his work – that part the name of which is 'Deleuze and Guattari'. That his reading operates a selection among Deleuze's works clearly appears in the extracts that are appended to the body of his text (this apparently bizarre practice is due to the series in which the book was published, a series of short introductions followed by even shorter extracts): _The Logic of Sense_ , _Difference and Repetition_ , _Cinema 1_ and _2_ , _Foucault_. Between the first two of these books and the last three, there is a gap of sixteen years, the years of Deleuze's collaboration with Guattari, of _Anti-Oedipus_ and _A Thousand Plateaus_ – hardly minor works. It would be a strange reading of Wittgenstein that ignored the _Philosophical Investigations_ and concentrated on the _Tractatus_ on the one hand and on _On Certainty_ on the other. But such iconoclasm is entirely explicit: Badiou's aim is to overturn what he perceives as a critical _doxa_ , what he calls 'the superficial _doxa_ of an anarcho-desiring Deleuzianism',74 which turns Deleuze into 'the joyous thinker of the world's _confusion_ '.75 Badiou no longer calls Deleuze a fascist (as we have just seen, by _Théorie du sujet_ , published in 1982, Deleuze is rather a left-deviationist),76 but his judgement on _Anti-Oedipus_ has not changed: it was not a matter of the politics being misguided as the philosophy was hardly any better. I am afraid, however, that, in doing this, Badiou is caught in another form of _doxa_ , which deplores the association of Deleuze, a respectable philosopher, with Guattari, a mere charlatan, whose independent work is feeble, hardly worthy of critical notice. The revelation, in the recent biography, that _What Is Philosophy?_ was written by Deleuze alone and that Guattari merely appended his signature to the finished manuscript has not helped.77 The _doxa_ is of course as unfair as it is prevalent – Anne Sauvagnargues's book on the aesthetics of Deleuze and Manola Antonioli's book on his 'geophilosophy' are welcome exceptions:78 most of the concepts that have been put to work in the wake of Deleuze's work (concepts of nomadism, lines of flight, deterritorialisation, the critique of linguistics, etc.) belong to that period and that collaboration, which Badiou superbly ignores.
But I am being unjust to Badiou. I am turning a strong reading into a mere demolition, the annihilation of a philosophical opponent, whereas a strong reading is a construction whereby a philosopher constructs himself by constructing his Other. But there are two types of Other: the excluded Other, the philosopher whose positions are utterly incompatible with the strong reader's, and the included Other, whose positions the strong reader might have adopted, except that he decided to reject or deny them, which means he constructs himself in contradistinction with his included Other. This second Other is linked to the strong reader in a relation of disjunctive synthesis. If the conceptual character who for Badiou embodies the right path in philosophy is Plato, the excluded Other is, naturally, the Sophist, Badiou's or philosophy's eternal opponent. This is how Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano, in their postface to a collection of essays by Badiou, describe 'modern sophistry', in contrast with the 'aleatory rationalism' which is their name for Badiou's philosophical stance:
But to respond to the challenge of modern sophistry by expropriating philosophical intuition permits the truly contemporary philosopher to recognize that the sophistical schema only seems to be in favour of dissemination and multiplicity. From the standpoint of an aleatory realism, it is essential to perceive how the sophist, while seeming to sing the praises of universal difference and exception and the inapplicability of any rational categorial schema, is still committed to the notion that the multiple can itself be characterised, that it can be given the quasi-transcendental lineaments of discourses, language-games, embodiments, strategies, and so on. Though sophistry abandons the immanence of thought to philosophical intuitions of the kind endorsed by critique and dialectics, it simply shifts the locus of unified transcendental legislation, to language in particular, thereby generating, beneath the gaudy appeal of discursive multiplicity, a new figure of the Whole and the One.79
It is tempting to read the name of Deleuze under that characterisation of the modern Sophist, or at least Badiou's Deleuze, the apparent philosopher of difference and multiplicity, two terms that barely conceal his commitment to the Whole and the One. But this might be a misreading, as the 'gaudy' multiplicities in question are primarily discursive ones, the multiplicities of language-games and strategies. So that even if the language used points at Deleuze ('intuition', 'universal difference', etc.) as much as at Derrida, the real Sophist is the philosopher who has taken the 'linguistic turn', from Wittgenstein to the poststructuralists, as exemplified by Lyotard, whereas Deleuze emphatically refused to take that turn (even if that refusal conceals a problem, as I have tried to argue elsewhere).80 And here we must pay renewed attention to the last page of Badiou's _Deleuze_ , where another figure of the philosophical Other appears, the included Other, not the Sophist but the pre-Socratic philosopher, not the philosopher the Platonist must struggle against in ever-renewed antagonism, but the philosopher he succeeds and supersedes. And such is the aim of the construction of Deleuze in Badiou's strong reading: a polarity in a field of forces where Badiou occupies the opposite pole – a conjunction (they share the same field, the same conception of philosophy, their respective planes of immanence have an intersection) which is also a disjunction, as they occupy opposite poles of attraction. Deleuze and Badiou AND Deleuze or Badiou AND neither Deleuze nor Badiou. No wonder the title of the introduction to Badiou's _Deleuze_ is 'So Near! So Far!'
**_So near! So far!_**
The time has come to try and take a more distant view of that philosophical relation. We might do this by using the typical Deleuzian tool of a correlation, where Badiou is the first term, Deleuze the second:
1. | a mathematical versus a vitalist ontology;
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2. | the focus on the real, in a sense similar to that of Lacan as well as in the traditional sense versus the couple of virtual and actual (both of which are, in Deleuze, equally real);
3. | a mathematical, set-theory concept of the multiple versus a dual view of multiplicities as intensive or extensive, qualitative or quantitative;
4. | two opposite concepts of the event: events as the rare and instantaneous supplements to the situation, introducing the radically new and originating procedures of truth versus events as actualisations of the one virtual Event, as the eternal non-occurring part of all that occurs;
5. | truth in the plural, but not in philosophy (the four fields in which truth emerges and which condition philosophy are politics, science, art and love), versus a marked disinterest for the notion of truth (the 'remarkable' or the 'interesting' is what really matters, the true is only of secondary interest – the obsession with the question of truth is a characteristic of the image of thought Deleuze wishes to overturn);
6. | a concept of the subject that is central to the system, the result of the advent of the event and the aleatory supplementation of the situation versus an explicit dismissal of the concept, whose philosophical work is distributed among a-subjective or pre-subjective concepts: haecceities, assemblages, singularities, etc.
Badiou is entirely clear as to the nature of this contrast. This is how, at the end of his essay on Deleuze's vitalist ontology, he formulates it:
This is how, by seeking out to learn from this genius, I reached the conviction that the pure multiple, the generic form of Being, never itself greets the event as a virtual component. On the contrary, the event befalls unto it through a rare and incalculable supplementation.
To achieve this, I had to sacrifice the Whole, sacrifice life and sacrifice the great cosmic animal; whose surface was enchanted by Deleuze. Thought's general topology is no longer 'carnal and vital,' as he used to declare. It is caught in the crossed grid of strict mathematics, as Lautréamont used to say, and the stellar poem, as Mallarmé would have said.81
I shall have more to say about the word 'genius', a form of praise that smacks of extravagance, and of course about that 'stellar poem' as one of the conditions of thought, for they indicate the boundaries of the common philosophical field where Deleuze and Badiou are poles apart, the field of the affirmative infinity of thought. As they went through the 1980s, that 'nightmare decade of reaction', in the words of its chronicler François Cusset,82 the lineaments of that field became clearer to them, as they are to us now. According to Cusset, the decade was characterised by the general abandonment of any thought of emancipation (in Badiou's terms this marks the end of a historical sequence, the sequence opened by the events of May 1968), but equally by the end of any critical thought (of which the movement away from Marxism is a symptom). On this historical background we might describe the convergence of the thoughts of Deleuze and Badiou as situated, if not on a common plane of immanence, at least on two strata in sufficient proximity to have a strong intersection and form a _voisinage_ (a neighbourhood – a concept which, incidentally, does not only belong to Deleuze, where it is used to describe the position of singularities, but also to _Théorie du sujet_ , where it supports the analogy between the parallel themes of materialism and mathematics).83 Such a _voisinage_ involves a form of political philosophy, centring on a critique of representative democracy, a position they share with Rancière's extreme egalitarianism (Badiou has always rejected any participation in the electoral process, while Deleuze supported the comedian Coluche when he declared himself a candidate for the post of President of the Republic). And this anti-representative political philosophy is in turn dependent on an anti-representative conception of philosophy at large (for Deleuze, the corset of representation is characteristic of the dogmatic image of thought).84 The _voisinage_ also involves a common conception of philosophical practice, centred on the construction of an _oeuvre_ , against the rising stars of French philosophy, the _nouveaux philosophes_ , whose philosophical work was as negligible as their media impact was considerable. In the introduction to his book, Badiou nostalgically approves of Deleuze's pamphlet, that notorious denunciation of the new philosophers' non-works. It involves a common mistrust of the ideology of human rights, and of the replacement of political thinking by a return to morality and religion (Badiou's _Ethics_ has nothing to do with this return to moral philosophy). And it also involves a common rejection of the poststructuralist cum analytic 'linguistic turn' in philosophy. Deleuze on this point is faithful to Bergson, whose mistrust for the traps language sets to thought is well-known and Badiou, as we have seen, inveighs against the linguistic sophists. Last but not least the intersection or _voisinage_ involves not merely a common passion for literature, but the conviction that literature is a condition for philosophy, that the proposition 'literature thinks' is an object of crucial philosophical elucidation. On the disjunctive synthesis of Badiou and Deleuze, I shall leave the last word to Badiou, at the very end of his philosophical obituary of Deleuze:
Yes, the front line [. . .], where he stands with us, and thus proves to be a considerable contemporary philosopher, is this: thought must be faithful to the infinite on which it depends. It must not make any concession to the detestable spirit of finitude.85
**_Notes_**
1. | A. Badiou, 'Le flux et le parti', in 'La situation actuelle sur le front de la philosophie', _Cahiers Yenan_ , 4, Paris: Maspéro, 1977. The same publication has a review of Deleuze and Guattari's _Rhizome_ , entitled 'Le fascisme de la pomme de terre', signed by one Georges Peyrol, which Deleuze and Guattari's biographer, François Dosse, claims is a pseudonym for Badiou. The title of that piece needs no comment. It is in that piece that Deleuze and Guattari are called 'pre-fascist ideologists'. See F. Dosse, _Gilles Deleuze Félix Guattari_ , Paris: La Découverte, 2007, p. 432.
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2. | A. Badiou, _Deleuze: The Clamor of Being_ , trans. Louise Burchill, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, p. 2 (9). Whenever possible, I quote the English edition of the French text: the page of the French text is given in parentheses.
3. | A. Badiou, _Almagestes_ , Paris: Seuil, 1964; _Portulans_ , Paris: Seuil, 1967; _Le concept de modèle_ , Paris: Maspéro, 1969 (second edition, Paris: Fayard, 2007); _Théorie de la contradiction_ , Paris: Maspéro, 1975; A. Badiou and F. Balmes, _De l'idéologie_ , Paris: Maspéro, 1976.
4. | Dosse, op. cit., p. 432.
5. | He once said to one of his students, before going to take his class: 'I must go. Badiou's gang are coming today.' Dosse, op. cit., p. 432.
6. | G.. Deleuze, _Two Regimes of Madness_ , New York: Semiotext(e), 2007 (2001).
7. | A. Badiou, _The Meaning of Sarkozy_ , London: Verso, 2008 (2007).
8. | Badiou has since devoted a book to such a 'hypothesis': A. Badiou, _L'Hypothèse communiste_ , Paris: Lignes, 2009.
9. | See, for instance, his recent book, _La connaissance de l'écrivain_ , Paris: Agone, 2008, an exercise in the analytic philosophy of literature.
10. | A. Badiou, 'Deleuze's Vitalist Ontology', in _Briefings on Existence. A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology_ , New York: State University of New York, 2006, p. 66 (65).
11. | A. Badiou, _L'antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein_ , Caen: Nous, 2009.
12. | H. P. Grice, 'Meaning' and 'Logic and Conversation', in _Studies in the Way of Words_ , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 213–23 and 22–40.
13. | G. Simondon, _L'Individu et sa genèse physico-biologique_ , Paris: PUF, 1964.
14. | J. L. Austin, _Philosophical Papers_ , Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970, pp. 233–52.
15. | A. Badiou, _Logic of Worlds_ , London: Continuum, 2009 (2006).
16. | P. F. Strawson, _The Bounds of Sense_ , London: Methuen, 1966; G. Ryle, _The Concept of Mind_ , Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963 (1949).
17. | A. Badiou, _Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil_ , trans. P. Hallward, London: Verso, 2001 (1993).
18. | See the collection of essays: A. Badiou, _Polemics_ , London: Verso, 2006.
19. | A. Badiou, _Théorie du sujet_ , Paris: Seuil, 1982, p. 204.
20. | J.-F. Lyotard, _The Differend_ , trans. G. Van den Abbeele, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988 (1983).
21. | E. Balibar, 'Alain Badiou and French Philosophy', in P. Hallward (ed.), _Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy_ , London: Continuum, 2004, p. 23.
22. | Ibid.
23. | G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, 'La synthèse disjonctive', in _L'Arc_ , 43, 1970, pp. 54–62.
24. | A. Sauvagnargues, _Deleuze et l'art_ , Paris: PUF, 2005, p. 17 (my translation).
25. | On paradox as a path into Deleuze's philosophy, see P. Montebello, _Deleuze_ , Paris: Vrin, 2008, where each of the seven chapters is devoted to a Deleuzian paradox.
26. | G. Deleuze, _The Logic of Sense_ , trans. M. Lester and C. Stivale, London: Athlone Press, 1990 (1969), pp. 42–7 (57–62).
27. | L. Carroll, _The Annotated Snark_ , ed. M. Gardner, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967, p. 42.
28. | Deleuze, _The Logic of Sense_ , op. cit., p. 174 (203–4).
29. | Ibid., pp. 224–33 (261–7).
30. | Ibid., p. xiv (translation modified) (7).
31. | S. Leclaire, _Psychanalyser_ , Paris: Seuil, 1968.
32. | Deleuze, _The Logic of Sense_ , op. cit., p. 232 (271).
33. | G. Deleuze, 'How Do We Recognize Structuralism?', in _Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974_ , New York: Semiotext(e), 2004, pp. 170–2. See also J.-J. Lecercle, _Deleuze and Language_ , Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002, ch. 3.
34. | G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, _Anti-Oedipus_ , London: Athlone Press, 1984, pp. 41 (49) and 76 (90). See also V. Bergen, _L'Ontologie de Gilles Deleuze_ , Paris: L'Harmattan, 2001, pp. 352–4.
35. | Badiou, _Théorie du sujet_ , op. cit., pp. 43–4.
36. | A. Badiou, _Logique des mondes_ , Paris: Seuil, 2006, p. 12.
37. | E. Laclau, 'An Ethics of Militant Engagement', in P. Hallward, _Think Again_ , op. cit., pp. 120–37.
38. | Badiou, _Briefings on Existence_ , op. cit.
39. | Badiou, _Logique des mondes_ , op. cit., pp. 403–10.
40. | A. Badiou, _Pocket Pantheon_ , London: Verso, 2009 ( _Petit Panthéon portatif_ , Paris: La Fabrique, 2008, pp. 106–11).
41. | A. Badiou, 'Gilles Deleuze, _The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque_ ', in C. Boundas and D. Olkowski (eds), _Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy_ , London: Routledge, 1994, pp. 51–69.
42. | Badiou, _Deleuze: The Clamor of Being_ , op. cit.
43. | A. Badiou, _Beckett, l'increvable désir_ , Paris: Hachette, 1995; J. Rancière, _Mallarmé, la politique de la sirène_ , Paris: Hachette, 1996.
44. | For an account and endorsement of those outraged reactions, see Dosse, op. cit., pp. 43–57.
45. | S. Žižek, _Organs Without Bodies_ , London: Routledge, 2004; P. Hallward, _Out of This World. Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation_ , London: Verso, 2006.
46. | G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, _What Is Philosophy?_ , London: Verso, 1994 (1991), pp. 151–3 (143–4).
47. | See 'Badiou/Deleuze', in the journal, _Futur Antérieur_ , 43, 1997, pp. 49–84.
48. | Badiou, _Deleuze_ , op. cit., p. 22 (15).
49. | G. Deleuze, _Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza_ , New York: Zone Books, 1990 (1968).
50. | Badiou, 'Deleuze's vitalist ontology', op. cit., p. 66 (65).
51. | Badiou, _Deleuze_ , op. cit., p. 26 (42).
52. | Ibid., pp. 26–7 (43).
53. | G. Deleuze, 'Plato and the simulacrum', in _The Logic of Sense_ , op. cit., pp. 253–65 (292–306).
54. | Badiou, _Deleuze_ , op. cit., p. 27 (43).
55. | A. Badiou, 'Afterword', in Hallward (ed.), _Think Again_ , op. cit., p. 235.
56. | Badiou, _Deleuze_ , op. cit., p. 43 (65).
57. | Ibid., p. 46 (69).
58. | Ibid., p. 49 (67).
59. | Ibid., p. 46 (69).
60. | Ibid., pp. 82–3 (132).
61. | G. Deleuze, _Foucault_ , London: Athlone Press, 1999 (1986).
62. | Ibid., p. 89 (133).
63. | Badiou, _Deleuze_ , op. cit., p. 11 (20).
64. | T. May, 'Badiou and Deleuze on the One and the Many', in Hallward (ed.), _Think Again_ , op. cit., pp. 67–76.
65. | Badiou, _Deleuze_ , op. cit., p. 13 (23–4).
66. | Badiou, 'Afterword', in Hallward (ed.), _Think Again_ , op. cit., p. 237.
67. | Badiou, _Deleuze_ , op. cit., p. 46 (69).
68. | Ibid., p. 17 (30).
69. | Badiou, _Théorie du sujet_ , op. cit., p. 40.
70. | See V. Descombes, _Le platonisme_ , Paris: PUF, 2007 (1971), pp. 89 ff.
71. | Deleuze and Guattari, _What Is Philosophy?_ , op. cit., p. 82 (80).
72. | Badiou, _Deleuze_ , op. cit., p. 59 (89).
73. | Ibid., p. 102 (150).
74. | Quoted in Louise Burchill's introduction to Badiou's _Deleuze_ , op. cit., p. xii.
75. | Ibid., p. 10 (21).
76. | Badiou, _Théorie du sujet_ , op. cit., p. 223.
77. | Dosse, op. cit., p. 539.
78. | Sauvagnargues, _Deleuze et l'art_ , op. cit.; M. Antonioli, _Géophilosophie de Deleuze et Guattari_ , Paris: L'Harmattan, 2003.
79. | R. Brassier and A. Toscano, 'Postface', in A. Badiou, _Theoretical Writings_ , London: Continuum, 2006, p. 278.
80. | J.-J. Lecercle, _Deleuze and Language_ , Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002.
81. | A. Badiou, 'Deleuze's vitalist ontology', op. cit., pp. 70–1 (71–2).
82. | F. Cusset, _La décennie. Le grand cauchemar des années 1980_ , Paris: La Découverte, 2006.
83. | Badiou, _Théorie du sujet_ , op. cit., pp. 237–9.
84. | On this, see D. Olkowski, _Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation_ , Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998.
85. | Badiou, _Pocket Pantheon_ , op. cit. ( _Petit Panthéon portatif_ , op. cit., p. 110 (my translation)).
2
A Question of Style
**_A passion for literature_**
My first chapter was concerned with the first two theses stated in the introduction (Badiou and Deleuze are major contemporary philosophers and they form a strange pair). Three areas of interest have emerged:
1. | Deleuze and Badiou are united by a paradoxical relation of disjunctive synthesis (this concept names not only Badiou's guiding thread through the philosophy of Deleuze but a description of the field of philosophy on which each of them draws his plane of immanence: an ontological stance, the affirmation of the infinity of thought, a close relationship between philosophy and other fields, mathematics and art).
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2. | The notion of a strong reading, as practised by Badiou on Deleuze, at Deleuze's expense, but not as unfairly as has been claimed, since, as we shall see, Badiou's reading is faithful to Deleuze's own description of his practice as reader of other philosophers.
3. | A common passion for literature (which takes a more prevalent form in Badiou than in Deleuze, who is equally interested in other arts, like painting and the cinema).
The last term, 'a passion for literature', requires glossing, in order to avoid the triviality of its common-or-garden meaning. It is true that Badiou and Deleuze share a passionate, all-pervasive and persistent interest in literary texts, but that is not particularly original among continental philosophers and not necessarily relevant to a confrontation of their philosophical styles. So we must attempt to give a more precise content to that 'passion', in other words we must construct a concept of 'passion for literature'. Help may come from Badiou's _The Century_ , where the century's main characteristic is defined as 'a passion for the real'.1
The phrase 'a passion for the real', which in English is innocuously unambiguous, in its original French, _la passion du réel_ , is ambiguous between an objective and a subjective genitive: it captures both the twentieth-century's passionate attraction for the real, and the passion that a century of wars and massacres has inflicted on the real. Badiou's argument goes through a number of moves, which can be expressed in a number of propositions. The first proposition is that the _devoir de mémoire_ , the moral duty not to forget the horrors the century has inflicted on various communities, does not dispense us from the more important duty to understand and explain what has happened: whatever the importance we ascribe to memory, thought is even more important. To state that certain events (for instance the Shoah) simply cannot be thought is to deprive ourselves of the capacity to prevent similar occurrences in the future. For even the policies of the Nazis must be analysed and explained. The second proposition is a critique of individualism. The only subject the century's passion for the real allows is a collective subject: every 'I' is intelligible as part of a 'we', the 'we' of collective action; for the century, the only reality is the reality of collective projects (there has always been a voluntarist aspect in Badiou's philosophy, not least in his political philosophy: this is the specific difference of Maoism from other brands of Marxism). The third proposition states the necessity of a shift from ethics to politics. Badiou belongs to a generation that suffered from a surfeit of politics and neglected ethics. But he has never given up the centrality of politics and his ethics, as in the eponymous book, is a political ethics of fidelity and betrayal, not a glorified form of common morality. Hence his description, which stops short of celebration, of the cruelty of the century, his opposition to the ideology of victimisation (he advocates a 'formalised anti-humanism' against the bad humanism of the victimised body).2 In a conjuncture that suffers from a surfeit of ethics and a lack of politics, such a position is a breath of fresh air. The fourth proposition enables us to understand what he means by the 'cruelty' of the century (beyond the obvious fact that massacres occurred on a hitherto unheard of scale: the turning point, the moment of brutalisation of society being not the Shoah but the First World War). The concept of real evoked by the characterisation of the century is inspired by the Lacanian concept of the Real, but also by the Hegelian concept of the real of the Idea. As such, the real is that which escapes our grasp, that against which we clash, but also what we must extract from the surrounding reality, that which must be purified from the reality that occults it, even if our relation to it is never harmonious but a site of contradiction and violent break. We come to the fifth proposition: the Maoist philosopher of _Théorie du sujet_ is still a philosophical Maoist in so far as the century is not characterised by the figure of the One (the harmonious whole to which we aspire, be it the classless society of achieved communism or the Reich of a thousand years), but the Two of division and antagonism (the division of the class struggle, but also of war). The last proposition rehearses the central concept of Badiou's philosophy, the event as encounter with the real. We understand what the thesis of the passion for/of the real as characteristic of the century means: the twentieth century was a century of unequalled violence and cruelty, but also a century of collective hope and commitment; it was a century of murder and systematic suspicion (the Stalinist trials were a good example of that), but also a century of hope in a better future and the construction of a new figure of humankind. A passion for collective endeavour and engagement with the future, which contrasts sadly with the soulless individualism of the present conjuncture, which is preoccupied only with money, sex and social success; and a passion inflicted on the world in an endless sequence of wars and massacres.
The most interesting aspect of that picture and the aspect which is most relevant to our concern is the role ascribed to art. For Badiou, thinking the century is first and foremost thinking its art: hence the fact that the book is constructed around the reading of poetic or literary texts (by Mandelstam, Pessoa or Brecht), for a poem says more about the real of the century than a speech, famous and influential as it may be, by Martin Luther King. The reason is given in the development of a Hegelian contrast between manifestation (in which the subject is impelled to open up to the exteriority of the real) and representation (which acts as a means of legitimation): in a proposition that is inextricably philosophical and aesthetic, Badiou states that the real cannot be represented, but only presented.3 And the real, being as fragile as it is cruel, can only be presented in its violent contradictions: it is the historical function of avant-gardes, with their artistic cum political manifestoes, with their insistence on the radical novelty of the event, with their conception of art as struggle, to achieve such presentation which is no representation.4
I believe we can derive a non-trivial concept of the passion for/of literature from this. We understand why, for both Deleuze and Badiou, there is no philosophy which is not intimately linked to art in general and the art of language in particular. For Deleuze, literature is one of the practices that forces us to think; for Badiou, it is one of the conditions for philosophy, one of the sites in which the event is captured and procedures of truth may be conducted. Inversely, there is no literature without an intimate connection with philosophy: its internal philosophy, not always an explicit one, is what moves the artist into thinking, hence the necessity of a strong reading of literary, as of philosophical, texts, a reading which matches the violence of the thinking that occurs in both fields.
The phrase 'the passion for literature' carries two affects. It carries an affect of violence, a passion in the sense of Spinoza, that is a passive affect which reflects the violence that turns out to have been an unavoidable component of the century's worldview, and as such threatens to find its way into literary texts which it will fill with the melancholy of oppressive finitude, lack of freedom and historical despair. Such affect is more characteristic of postmodernism than of modernism, the literary conjuncture in which both Badiou and Deleuze select their canon. But the main affect carried by the century and expressed in its literature is a positive affect, an affect of desire and joy, one that increases the subject's power, expressing as it does the hope for a better future, the decision to militate for the emancipation of humankind, the desire to break out of the limits of language. Literature, for both our philosophers, is a vector of joyful affect, its 'passion' one that increases our power instead of decreasing it like the melancholy passions. Neither Deleuze nor Badiou have that dolorist, melancholy, post-Romantic attitude to literature which thrives on finitude and the absurd. Their passion for literature takes the shape of a philosophical style that is as passionate and joyful as its object. Hence the at first sight surprising subtitle to Badiou's book on Beckett, _L'increvable désir_ ( _Desire Unstoppable_ ): his reading is aimed at reclaiming Beckett from the mire of absurdist literature.
This passion for literature, in a more precise sense than the common-or-garden one, which is both the passionate affect of joy that literature carries and the passionate affect of joy both philosophers bring to thinking literature, enables us to move towards our third thesis. Analysing the passion for literature as an affect of joy allows us to invert the usual critical stance. It allows us to go beyond the reconstruction of two systems (Badiou is explicitly systematic; Deleuze's philosophy is entirely coherent, but better represented as a plane of consistency and a multiplicity of lines of flight). It allows us not to be content with extracting the relevant theses (as we saw, the formulation of relevant theses is at the heart of Badiou's practice of philosophy) or with formulating the relevant problem (which varies with each of Deleuze's philosophical projects), but to ask the apparently irrelevant question of the materiality of their philosophical practice, the question of the expression of that joyful affect in the practice of _writing_ philosophy rather than simply formulating theses or constructing concepts. Only by asking what is philosophically speaking the _wrong_ question will the necessary distance or displacement be achieved – the distance necessary to assess not what our philosophers want to do or claim to do, but simply what they do when they talk about literature: the continental philosopher is not merely a reader of texts (all philosophers are) but a _writer_ , with a taste for literature both in the active and in the passive sense, a tradition that goes back to Parmenides, whose philosophy took the form of a poem, and to Plato, whose Platonism is concealed beneath a veil of irony and the labyrinth of dialogues that are also literary games. The wrong question, of course, turns out to be the right question, in so far as it places literature at the heart of Badiou's and Deleuze's philosophical undertaking. The price to pay for this shift of value can best be expressed in the fortunate paradox of philosophers who resist the linguistic turn but turn out to be not only lovers of literature but writers in their own right. The following is an outline of our answer to the now relevant question of their style of philosophy:
1. | We find in both Deleuze and Badiou a militant conception of philosophy (philosophy not as interpretation of the world and of texts, but as experiment or intervention in the world and therefore in texts) which involves an interventionist form of writing. Writing philosophy is an aesthetic act (I borrow this concept from the work of the French philosopher of the sublime, Baldine Saint-Girons),5 it involves an image of thought in which art and philosophy interfere with each other. It is not merely a form of aesthetics (Rancière discusses Deleuze's complex relationship to aesthetics,6 and Badiou calls his essays on various arts 'essays in inaesthetics'), in other words there is no distinct philosophy of art but rather a disjunctive synthesis of art and philosophy, involving the capture and expression of strong affects. To say it in Deleuzian terms, the planes of consistency of Deleuze's and Badiou's philosophies is stratified with the plane of composition of art.
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2. | Writing philosophy involves the strong reading of other philosophers, a reading which is already a form of intervention and implies another, concomitant practice, that of strong writing. Or again, to put it briefly, our question is the question of the style (of philosophy, of writing) of Badiou and Deleuze.
**_A bearded Hegel, a clean-shaven Marx_**
In the history of philosophy, a commentary should act as a veritable double and bear the maximal modification appropriate to the double. (One imagines a _philosophically_ bearded Hegel, a _philosophically_ clean-shaven Marx, in the same way as a moustached Mona Lisa.).7
What Deleuze is describing here is his own method of reading texts, with a mixture of flippancy (a clean-shaven Marx), travesty (he alludes to the celebrated version of the Mona Lisa by Marcel Duchamp) and violence (the hapless philosophers are _philosophically_ deprived of one of their striking characteristics). This is what I have called, in a phrase that needs explanation, a 'strong reading'.
Perhaps we should begin by wondering what a 'weak reading' of a text might be. Is it a reading that fails to convince its readers? Is it a reading that is too traditional to establish its right to exist, as we expect of a reading, as indeed of any research project, a modicum of originality? There are so-called Marxist readings that can be described as Marx and water. By way of contrast, a strong reading will thrive on the connotations of the adjective: it will involve force rather than form (if there is such a thing as a Deleuzian aesthetics, this will be its first proposition), it will involve a violence imposed on the text – forcing thought, as we have seen, is a Deleuzian theme, one with which Badiou would not disagree (the Lacanian concept of _forçage_ plays a part in his theory of the subject).8 As a matter of fact, the theory of strong readings was provided by Deleuze himself, at an early stage, in the first text of his _Negotiations_. The theory is encapsulated in a now famous phrase, when Deleuze describes his method of reading his philosophical predecessors: 'I saw myself as taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous.'9 That reading is a form of sexual violence, even of rape, is made entirely explicit in the text: 'I suppose the main way I coped with it at the time was to see the history of philosophy as a form of buggery or (it comes to the same thing) immaculate conception',10 where it appears that this form of sexual violence is also an impossible one, short of a miracle. And here we may remember that Badiou justifies his own reading of Deleuze, in the face of the outrage it caused among Deleuze's followers, by suggesting he had been faithful to the theory of reading outlined in this passage.
The letter to a harsh critic was addressed to Michel Cressole, a student of Deleuze who had written the first book ever devoted to his work.11 The book, the first but not the best in what is now a crowded field, was written in the flippant style of post-68 Paris, when the admiration one felt for one's masters was best expressed through insults.12 Much is made in the book of the length of Deleuze's nails and similar irrelevancies. Deleuze's answer barely conceals his irritation, and it is written, tit for tat, in the same vein, with the same mixture of aggressiveness and vulgarity, which accounts for the sexual metaphors. So, the famous phrase does not do justice to the theory of reading thus adumbrated. The offspring, the strong reading, is not only monstrous, it is necessary, and the rape turns out to be an expression of love ('This intensive way of reading [. . .] is reading with love').13 Otherwise, of course, we would be faced with the paradox that, with the exception of the book on Kant, Deleuze has always read philosophers whom he loved and defended against the mainstream tradition in the history of philosophy: he never wrote at length, if at all, on Plato, Aristotle or Hegel, so that the exclusive victims of his affectionate rapes were also the victims of the dominant image of thought in the history of philosophy. I am of course aware that claiming to have acted out of love would be a weak defence for a rapist, and that the metaphor goes against the grain of current political correctness: but those were the heady 1970s, when strong language was compulsory.
The time has come to move away from what now appears to us as an unfortunate metaphor – but we must keep the connotations of violence, intensity of affect and the paradox of the necessary impossibility or miracle. In fact the text provides a further description of the method of reading I have called 'strong', inspired by Deleuze's reading of Nietzsche. It may be usefully contrasted with Badiou's own reading method, which is also based on a form of violence, the violence of engagement and antagonism, for the one of unity must always give way to the two of separation and contradiction. On the same page, Deleuze opposes two ways of reading a text:
There are, you see, two ways of reading a book: you either see it as a box with something inside and start looking for what it signifies, and then if you're even more perverse or depraved you set off after signifiers. And you treat the next book like a box contained in the box or containing it. And you annotate and interpret and question and write a book about the book, and so on and on. Or there's the other way: you see the book as a little non-signifying machine, and the only question is 'Does it work, and how does it work?' How does it work for you? If it doesn't work, if nothing comes through, you try another book. This second way of reading's intensive: something comes through or it doesn't. There is nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret. It's like plugging in to an electric circuit.14
So either one unpacks the contents of a text, one reorganises and clarifies (which suggests the author was not clear-headed enough to do it himself), or one treats it as a machine, both small and a-signifying (we recognise in that term the language of _Capitalism and Schizophrenia_ , with its non-signifying semiotics, and the distinction between the machinic and the merely mechanical: the text is a machine, the body is a machine, but they do not require the services of a skilled mechanic to be serviced). What we have here is a materialist conception of reading as production of meaning, as intervention, not interpretation of an already fixed meaning. The main question is indeed 'What can I do with this text?', hence the recourse to a-signifying semiotics. The text is full of signs, but not Saussurian signs, inducing signification through the cohesion of structured semantic fields and the coherence of syntactic organisation, designation through accurate reference, and manifestation as the presence of a subject of enunciation is felt through the requisite markers. We remember that in _Logic of Sense_ , Deleuze defines doxic meaning, as opposed to sense, as the composition of signification, designation and manifestation.15 Asking the 'wrong' question, 'How does it work?' takes us away from _doxa_ into the realm of the machinic: pottering with those little machines, experimenting with them means reading for intensity rather than meaning (At what speed does the text move? Which bifurcations does it take in its rhizomatic proliferation? Which affects are involved? Are they melancholy or joyful?). We understand the paradoxical conclusion of the passage: there is nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret; the text is not a box, a receptacle of meaning, but an installation, if we use the artistic metaphor, or an electrical circuit, as the circulation of intensities and affects is what the text is about. Such is the passionate form of violent reading that Deleuze advocates, and it has nothing to do with a 'truth' of the text ('I believe in secrecy, that is, the power of falsity, rather than representing things in a way that manifests a lamentable faith in accuracy and truth').16 With this phrase, 'the power of falsity', we are back to Badiou's reading of Deleuze, since we remember that such is, according to Badiou, the version of the unavoidable concept of truth that is to be found in Deleuze's philosophy – an excellent example of a strong reading, since it unblushingly inverts what Deleuze's text, with its emphatic rejection of accuracy and truth, seems to be saying.
**_Style_**
Let us take this last episode as an incentive to read both philosophers as they read each other, as well as other philosophers: asking the wrong questions, extracting the wrong problems, which will of course turn out to be the right ones. Not: how are the concepts articulated into a system? (the local equivalent of 'what does it mean?') but rather: how does it work? In other words, what is the philosopher's style?
Let us start not with the philosopher's writing style, his _écriture_ , for we know that philosophy is a form of writing, but with his philosophical style. We are justified in doing this by Deleuze's extended concept of style, which does not cover just language but also life. (Henry James has his inimitable style, but Mods and Rockers had style too.) In Deleuze the concept of style covers not only the writers' practice of writing but her existential experience: '[Style] is a modality of becoming that forbids any form of separation between living and speaking, thought and the literary quest'.17 But this absence of separation, which is a form of synthesis, is disjunctive; the work of art is autonomous with regard to its author, and 'style is never a matter of the man':18 style is not a function of the author but of the text as part of a collective assemblage of enunciation.
So there is a Badiou assemblage of enunciation, which is not to be ascribed to the author's likes and dislikes or to his political positions (which are etymologically eccentric), but is a function of the texts which are remarkably coherent and yet entirely different as the system changes and develops all the time. Between _Théorie du sujet_ and _Being and Event_ there is a gap, which may be interpreted as a change of mind: the extreme Marxism-Leninism, of a Maoist and Lacanian cast (which remains perhaps the most important attempt to elaborate a Marxist philosophy for the late twentieth century), has given way to an ascetic ontology. And the relationship between _Being and Event_ and _Logic of Worlds_ , which ought to be of division of labour (the latter is supposed to be to the former what the _Phenomenology of Mind_ was to the great _Logic_ ) can also be described as a movement away from strict ontology (which may account for the limited impact the second opus has had so far). But the three texts are united by a similar philosophical style. The apparatus of _Théorie du sujet_ , an array of theses, always carefully numbered, principles and diagrams (the seminars are punctuated by 'at the blackboard' sequences, where diagrams, often of Byzantine complexity, out-Lacaning Lacan, are carefully drawn) has left traces in the later works. For the later work is equally systematic, and such systematicity brings with it a form of explicitness and perspicuity. Badiou is consistently a complex philosopher, but he is also entirely clear: there is a Badiou matheme, which calls for pedagogic exposition. Thus the three-page preface Badiou wrote for the English collection of his theoretical writings spells out the string of concepts that make up the skeleton of _Being and Event_.19 You can 'do' Badiou in one paragraph, a paragraph repeatedly rehearsed in commentaries. Here is Bruno Bosteels, quoted by Žižek:
Setting out from the void which prior to the event remains indiscernible in the language of established knowledge, a subjective intervention names the event which disappears no sooner than it appears; it faithfully connects as many elements of the situation as possible to this name which is the only trace of the vanished event, and subsequently forces the extended situation from the bias of the new truth as if the latter were indeed already generally applicable.20
I do not want to deny the talent of the commentator, who is a specialist of Badiou's political thought: I just want to note that the explicitness of the system makes such summary possible, without gross betrayal. And it would be impossible to do the same thing for Deleuze, for more than one reason. The first reason is that the historical determination of his concepts is greater. Some of the main concepts of his early work (the concept of essence in _Proust and Signs_ , the concept of sense in _Logic of Sense_ ) have been abandoned or replaced in later works. One has the impression, explicitly acknowledged by Deleuze, that each new book is a new beginning. It can be argued that with _Being and Event_ , Badiou's system has reached a stable state: with Deleuze, although some concepts are present throughout the _oeuvre_ (the concepts of virtuality or of event), there is no stable state, only lines of flight, some of which are long and uninterrupted. The second reason is that, within a single work or period (for instance, the Deleuze and Guattari period), Deleuze's philosophical style is hardly systematic. A philosophical system can be described as a form of arborescence. Drawing on the preface to _Theoretical Writings_ or on Bosteel's paragraph, one can represent the logical framework of _Being and Event_ , if not as a tree, at least as a chain of logically articulated concepts: inconsistent multiplicity (without either a One or a Whole) → count for one → presentation (of the elements counted for one) → situation → structure of the situation (its subsets) → representation (where the subsets are counted for one) → state of the situation (language, knowledge) → void of the situation (the null set) → edge of the void → evental site → event → generic procedure (generic set) → enquiry → truth through forcing → fidelity → subject. A list of similar concepts in Deleuze could be produced, but it would not have the structure of a chain, where each concept is linked to the preceding one by a logical or quasi-logical relation. In order to describe the plane of consistency on which Deleuze's concepts are deployed, one would have to use the Deleuzian concepts of rhizome, lines of flight, infinite speed, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. There is a sense in which the best metaphor to describe Deleuze's style of philosophy is the metaphor of the fold. As Tom Conley puts it:
The passage of the fold from one work to the other attests to a style of writing that in itself is always folding, unfolding and refolding. Some concepts and figures shift emphasis or are metamorphosed when they migrate from one work to another. They show that in Deleuze's world everything is folded and folds, in and out of everything else.21
The very number of metaphors available in Deleuze's books for the description of his philosophical style is a good index of the proliferating aspect of that style. Indeed, one of the most convincing critiques of Badiou's reading of Deleuze is that he forces back the rhizome into a tree, that he systematises the unsystematic. For instance, the concept of simulacrum, which is at the heart of Deleuze's anti-Platonist stance in _Logic of Sense_ , belongs to the pre-Guattari period and afterwards disappears. But Badiou's reading projects it, for the needs of overturning Deleuze's overturning of Platonism, on to the whole of his work. And by systematising Deleuze's philosophy, he dehistoricises it: there is a constant becoming in Deleuze's work – witness the three stages of the work on Proust, the last of which, belonging as it does to a much later period, is not entirely compatible with the first.
**_Theses and correlation_**
It is only too easy to express the different styles of the two philosophers in Deleuzian terms: by contrasting Badiou's striated with Deleuze's smooth style; or by opposing a plane of reference in Badiou to Deleuze's plane of immanence or of consistency; or again, by opposing Badiou's fixed concepts to the Deleuzian lines of flight, as concepts diverge and merge. That would be unfair to Badiou, so I shall attempt to express the difference by contrasting Badiou's taste for the positing of theses and Deleuze's chronic use of the device of a correlation.
Badiou, as we have seen, is a thetic philosopher: the matheme is a conceptual architecture and consists of a number of carefully articulated theses (each of the concepts in the chain of concepts quoted above is the core of a number of propositions or theses). The origin of this practice is probably to be found in Marx's theses on Feuerbach, although the result is entirely dissimilar, as Marx's theses were jotted down on a piece of paper without thought of publication or construction of a systematic argument.22 The second origin, itself determined by the first, is Althusser's celebrated essay on Ideological State Apparatuses, where the argument proceeds through a number of carefully articulated theses.23 In Badiou, however, the model is not only philosophical but also mathematical: we have not only propositions (as in _Logic of Worlds_ ) and theses, but axioms, theorems and lemmas. The thetic method has obvious advantages, which we have already glimpsed: the text enjoys all the advantages of clarity and explicitness, which means the system can be expounded, discussed and refuted. What we have is a philosophy under the condition of (mathematical) science. But since that philosophy also operates under the condition of poetry, the thetic philosopher meditates in an assertive mode, often against the grain of common sense, hence the strong feelings Badiou sometimes provokes. The subtitles of Badiou's texts ( _Desire Unstoppable_ ,24 _The Clamor of Being_ ) often illustrate that strongly assertive position: there is little place for uncertainty and doubt in this style of philosophy, a characteristic that becomes particularly obvious when Badiou talks about literary texts, where interpretation is usually more open and less affirmative. Thus, in _Pocket Pantheon_ , Deleuze's philosophy is summarised around five 'motifs', a fine instance of pedagogic simplification, and in his _Beckett_ , we find three types of subject in the text (the subjects of enunciation, of passivity and of the question),25 as well as four 'functions' isolated by the text (movement and rest, being, language and the Other).26 Somehow, the assertiveness of strict numbering is less congenial to the literary critic, used to the openness and multiplicity of interpretations (a possibility Badiou strongly denies in his readings of Mallarmé) than it is to the philosopher.
Deleuze, on the other hand, is, if I may say so, a correlative philosopher. Even if he rarely uses diagrams and never tables, he constantly uses the stylistic expository device whereby two objects are contrasted, along a line of flight, by two series of determinations which might be tabulated into a correlation. Thus, at the end of his introduction to the work of Sacher Masoch, sadism and masochism are jointly characterised along the following lines, where they are correlated in that order through a number of contrasts: (1) a speculative and demonstrative mode of thought versus a dialectical and imaginative mode; (2) a negative attitude based on direct negation versus a suspensive one based on denial; (3) a sadistic form of masochism versus a masochistic form of sadism; (4) a negation of the character of the mother and an exaggerated importance ascribed to the character of the father versus the denial of the mother and the annihilation of the father; (5) different roles and meanings ascribed to both phantasy and fetish; (6) a rejection of aestheticism versus a revelling in it; (7) an overall meaning provided by institutions versus an overall meaning provided by contract. I pass over one or two further contrasts and come to the last, which is presented as the summing up and totalisation of the preceding ones: (11) apathy versus coldness. Those contrasts are supposed to operate between the two forms of sexual perversion but also between the literary techniques and styles of Sade and Sacher Masoch.
This expository stylistic device is coherent with Deleuze's ontology: it involves the development of two series joined by a form of disjunctive synthesis. The series, organised as a sequence of juxtaposed elements, is a much more plastic form of ordering than the articulated tree, like the tree of Porphyry, based as it is on the twin principles of linearity and progression.27 Indeed the correlation as used by Deleuze is incompatible with the dogmatic image of thought he wishes to overturn: what we have is not two lines, one representing the other (as in the classic case of the systematic parallelism between signifiers and signified in the linguistic chain of utterance), but a series of contrasts along a line of flight. The main aspect of the correlation, which is also its main philosophical interest, is that _there is always another column_ : its principle of organisation is indeed a line of flight, there is no teleology in the correlation, as the passage from one column to the next does not mean one step further towards the exhaustion of a fixed number of possibilities within a system.
There are two possible sources for the device, the first of which is fully acknowledged by Deleuze, in his essay on structuralism:28 the linguistic chain is organised in two parallel series (of words and things, of signifier and signified), along which the empty square circulates, producing meaning. The two series are endless, and endlessly diverging, only joined at irregular intervals by the _point de capiton_ , the upholstery button or quilting point of Lacanian fame. From such series, which provide the structure of language, it is a short step to the correlation proper, the best instance of which is to be found in Jakobson's celebrated correlation of two types of aphasia, two types of organisation of language, two figures of speech and two literary genres:
The conceptual jump that allows the eminent linguist to go from figures of speech (their relation to linguistic operations and units, and therefore with types of aphasia is fairly straightforward) to literary genres and styles of art is staggering: this is following a line of flight with a vengeance.
The second source for the device of the correlation is – if it is indeed a source – unacknowledged: the reader of Wittgenstein (which Deleuze claimed he wasn't, going as far as calling Wittgenstein, in _Abécédaire_ , an assassin of philosophy) cannot help being reminded of the famous family resemblance sequence, where A resembles B, which resembles C, and so on to N, which has no resemblance to A, the resemblance having drifted, as it does from sibling to sibling or from generation to generation.
We can now give a more precise description of the correlation, using Deleuze's own concepts (to the best of my knowledge he does not use the term itself):
1. | A correlation is a rhizome – it can be entered at any point, so why not in the middle? (There is no beginning nor end, only a middle: the correlation, like a rhizome, grows at both ends.)
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2. | A correlation is a line of flight. It has no _telos_ because it has no _arche_ – again, there is always another column.
3. | The correlation is organised by two forms of AND of addition, one vertical and one horizontal. (Jakobson's correlation has seven columns and two lines, but a correlation with more than two lines is entirely possible: there is always another line.)
4. | The correlation always tends towards a diagram that complexifies it. (The famous spiral diagram in _A Thousand Plateaus_ immediately comes to mind: its centre is the Signifier, and the spiral escapes, along its line of flight, with the figure of the Scapegoat – the potential signifier versus signified correlation has acquired spatial and conceptual dynamism.)29
We can summarise this description by providing the correlation of the correlation, contrasting the device with its Deleuzian antonym, the Hegelian dialectic:
The correlation diagram reads thus: where a correlation involves a proliferation of concepts, the dialectic involves a single one; where a correlation is anarchic in the etymological sense, the dialectic involves a fixed origin or principle; the correlation is open-ended, which means that it always begins in the middle, whereas the dialectic is teleological; the correlation is relational (everything lies in the relation of disjunctive synthesis that (dis)unites the lines, whereas the dialectic develops an essence); the correlation can be mapped as a line, not a spiral like the dialectic, or a rhizome, not a tree: there is no triangulation, no determination of coordinates in the correlation, only open-ended mapping, which contrasts the rhythm of the correlation with the closure of the dialectic. This is of course unfair to the Hegelian dialectic, to which Badiou has remained, with due qualifications, faithful (it is, as we saw, central in _Théorie du sujet_ , absent but not denied in _Being and Event_ , and it makes a comeback in _Logic of Worlds_ ) but it reflects Deleuze's deep-seated hostility to it.
**_Two modes of reading_**
We have described two styles of philosophy. Their difference implies a different mode of reading texts, beyond the Deleuzian 'taking the author from behind' approach. The Badiou mode of reading texts is assertive and critical: the object of the reading is a mixture of celebration (especially of poetic texts) and placement. Badiou's typical operation is separation through the recognition of antagonism (one is divided into two), which explains his frequent indulgence in sharp polemics ('I have never tempered my polemics; _consensus_ is not my strong point').30 The style has mellowed with age: we might compare _Pocket Pantheon_ , where praise for his predecessors, including Deleuze, is lavish, with _Théorie du sujet_ , where Deleuze is presented as a left-wing deviationist and the limitations of both Mallarmé and Lacan are made explicit. Deleuze's mode of reading is more difficult to pin down: he doesn't place the authors he reads, he tends to ignore his opponents and he rarely indulges in polemics (with the large exception of psychoanalysis, but even then the criticism is generic): there is, for instance, hardly a word on Hegel in all his works. Nor is his style appreciative and empathetic, it is rather an opening up of the text he reads, the identification and following of lines of flight. The best way of characterising such a mode of reading is to call it problematic: he forces out a problem, but he is little interested in solutions, unlike Badiou, whose system is a set of solutions. Hence, when they mourn a predecessor, two different forms of a grief may be observed. This is how Louise Burchill, in the introduction to her translation of Badiou's _Deleuze_ , describes the difference between their two modes of reading:
At no moment does Deleuze, in his text [on Foucault], play his philosophy off against the philosophy he assigns to Foucault; nor does he ever adopt the point of view of his system to isolate the failures of the other. On the other hand Badiou engages from the outset in a polemical dialogue with Deleuze's conceptualization, in which, if he elaborates – much as Deleuze does in _Foucault_ – what he views as the underlying logic and movement of Deleuze's metaphysics, the aim is nevertheless to counter the conceptual coordinates so delineated with arguments that draw on a philosophical tendency opposed to Deleuze's own.31
The contrast appears to be between a mode of reading based on a principle of charity and one based on the operation of placement of the opponent. We can find an example of this in Juliette Simont's essay on Deleuze's and Badiou's critiques of representation, where she analyses Badiou's rhetoric in his Deleuze book, especially his use of adjectives. Badiou's reading, she claims, is 'strongly rhetorical', especially in his use of patronising laudatory adjectives and insinuating pejorative adjectives.32 Badiou wishes to free philosophy from grammatical and linguistic constraints (so he claims in his _Briefings on Existence_ : _l'emprise grammaticale et linguistique_ , 'the dominion of grammar and linguistics'),33 but the question of the type of language he writes must be nevertheless asked. Thus we noticed Badiou's use of the word 'genius' with reference to Deleuze in his essay 'Deleuze's Vitalist Ontology':34 since the essay is devoted to a systematic account of Deleuze's mistakes in the field of ontology, mistakes that Badiou himself skilfully avoided, the term is either an example of irony, or a form of praise, extravagant if indirect, of Badiou himself.
**_Two styles of writing and yet another correlation_**
We have moved from a style of philosophy to a style of writing: the question of the philosopher's language is unavoidable, and we have entered the realm of stylistics. The object of stylistics, at least since the work of the founding father of the discipline, Leo Spitzer, is the description of the 'X-sentence', where X is the name of the author. Thus there will be a recognisable Proust sentence or a Hemingway sentence as worthy of parody as a picture by Cézanne is prone to be faked, for style is indeed what allows parody, pastiche and fakes. So we shall postulate that there is a Badiou sentence and a Deleuze sentence.
There are two types of Badiou sentences (at least). In _Théorie du sujet_ , which collects seminars given from 1975 to 1979, the stylistic model is still Lacan and sometimes even Mallarmé: neither is known for the perspicuity of their style, so that this attempt at a Marxist-Leninist philosophy is still often couched in the syntactically complex idiom of _préciosité_. In the later works, however, and most notably in the major opus, the style has become as perspicuous as it is explicit. Badiou, who has a sense of humour, even gives a fictional account of this in the introduction to his latest novel, _Calme bloc ici-bas_. The novel, set in the fictional country of Prémontré (a child's dream: a whole new country, complete with imaginary geography and even a map, and an imaginary history of war and revolution – but a country which, of course, is startlingly reminiscent of modern France), describes the three styles of that nation's literature, all exemplified in the novel and distinguished by three different typographic characters: the classical style is clear and simple; the romantic style is metaphorical and syntactically complex; the modernist or sarcastic style is a-grammatical and laconic.35 This could be a description of the evolution of Badiou's philosophical style, from the Romanticism of _Théorie du sujet_ to the classicism of the later work. It remains to be seen whether we shall ever have a work of philosophy written in the sarcastic and ungrammatical style of modernism. For an instance of the Badiou sentence, we may quote the incipit to the first 'meditation' in _Being and Event_ : 'Since its Parmenidean organization, ontology has built the portico of its ruined temple out of the following experience: what _presents_ itself is essentially multiple; _what_ presents itself is essentially one.'36 Admire the rhetorical balance between the last two clauses; admire the classical simplicity of the syntax; admire the rhythm the skilful use of punctuation gives the sentence. Note also the remains of the Romantic style, in the metaphor of the ruined temple and its portico, with reminiscences of Claude and Hubert Robert rather than Poussin.
The Deleuze sentence is a different matter: it does not have the classical grandeur of the Badiou sentence. It is more sinuous, less skilfully balanced, it meanders, it follows the intensive line of syntax, it runs along its line of flight, it indulges in endless correlations. Not to choose the incipit to _Anti-Oedipus_ once again, a fine instance of provocation, moved by the obvious pleasure there is in _épater le bourgeois_ (shocking respectable readers),37 I shall quote the opening words of _The Fold_ :
The Baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative function, to a trait. It endlessly produces folds. It does not invent things: there are all kinds of folds coming from the East, Greek, Roman, Romanesque, Gothic, Classical folds . . . Yet the Baroque trait twists and turns its folds, pushing them to infinity, fold over fold, one upon the other. The Baroque fold unfurls all the way to infinity.38
The Deleuze sentence is syntactically simple (it is an excellent example of what is known as hypotactic style), but it has rhythm, a different rhythm from the Badiou sentence: it moves by twists and turns, along a line, or rather two lines in contrast (what the baroque is not, what it is), it proceeds by potentially endless accumulation, the line of flight running towards infinity (note the three dots at the end of the second sentence) and by syntagmatic accretion (note the number of appositions at the end of the third sentence). In other word, the Deleuze sentence is a fold and a fold upon a fold – here it is iconic of its referent. Nor is it simply a matter of the adequacy of the style to the subject matter: an analysis of the opening to the first chapter of _Difference and Repetition_ , 'Difference in Itself', will yield the same stylistic results. I shall merely quote it here, as the reader will be immediately aware of the similarity of stylistic quality:
Difference has two aspects: the undifferentiated abyss, the black nothingness, the indeterminate animal in which everything is dissolved – but also the white nothingness, the once more calm surface upon which float with unconnected determinations like scattered members: a head without a neck, an arm without a shoulder, eyes without brows.39
Deleuze's style is not metaphorical (the fold is not a metaphor), but it eschews the classicism of the Badiou sentence (without falling into the rhetorical weight of the Romantic style or the ungrammaticality of the sarcastic style): it is a baroque literary style, in his acceptation of the term. It has a poetic quality that Badiou refuses to allow himself (but in which he too indulges in his novels).
The comparison between Badiou's and Deleuze's styles of philosophy and writing styles can be summarised in yet another correlation:
The system gives its author a vantage point on the world. Even if there is neither One nor Whole and the philosopher is not in the position of Jupiter above, the system allows the stability and exhaustiveness of its articulated concepts: it is the rock on which the philosopher, like the King of the castle, firmly stands. The artisan, on the other hand, bent on the creation of his concepts, is not in this stable position: the concepts shift from work to work, they seem to acquire a life of their own, like characters in a novel, and the pottering goes on indefinitely, for the plane of immanence is only a fragile protection from the original chaos. Hence a mode of reading which is less assertive but in a way more violent: not so much the violence of decision (there is a strong form of decisionism in Badiou, and not only in his political philosophy) as of deliberate misprision, the price to pay for genuine creation (that there is a form of creationism – but not in the usual meaning among biologists – is at the centre of Peter Hallward's reading of Deleuze).40 From those philosophical contrasts we can derive the opposition between thesis and correlation (one is certainly more systematic and assertive than the other), the Badiou sentence and the Deleuze sentence and the classical versus the Baroque style.
But perhaps the correlation could take one more column (there is always another column): | 7
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Badiou | Literature as condition for philosophy
Deleuze | Literature as machine
**_Reading literature_**
That literature is a condition for philosophy, like art in general, is an essential tenet of Badiou's system. This explains why the elaboration of a Marxist-Leninist philosophy in _Théorie du sujet_ takes the paradoxical detour of a reading of a Mallarmé sonnet, or why the analysis of 'the century' is conducted mostly through the reading of literary texts, from Mandelstam to Saint-John Perse. And nobody will accuse Badiou of neglecting the importance of literature. For him, it is a practice before it is an object of analysis. His first published books were two novels, _Almagestes_ and _Portulans_.41 _Calme bloc ici-bas_ , his third novel, was published eleven years after _Being and Event_ , and there is a sense in which it is informed by the system: it reads like a yarn, complete with disappearances, pursuits and _coups de théâtre_ , but the 'events' narrated are, more often than not, events in the sense of Badiou, radically new occurrences in the fields of politics, science and love (for instance, we meet a mathematician who is trying to improve on Cantor). And several of his plays were staged in France in the late 1990s: they come complete with a theory of drama, in which, unexpectedly, the essence of drama is comedy. (Have I said that Badiou has a sense of humour?) And when Badiou appeals to literature as a condition for his philosophy, it is to defend a canon which is limited (his favourite, should I say his only, authors are Beckett, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Pessoa and Mandelstam – Deleuze's taste is much more catholic), limited to poetry, as we have just noted (Beckett, for instance, is treated more as a poet than a playwright) and typically high modernist: you don't catch Badiou mentioning Gaston Leroux, that ancestor of the closed-room whodunit, as Deleuze does in his essay of 1966, 'Philosophie de la série noire'.42
With Deleuze, on the other hand, we find no explicitly literary writing – philosophy is an obsession, and there is no leaving it, even for art – but a proliferation of literary references, as well as a more general interest in other arts. There is a sense in which the development of his interest in art goes from literature to a more general form of artistic semiosis: such is Anne Sauvagnargues's thesis in her _Deleuze et l'art_.43 But she immediately concedes that the interest in literature was a lifelong passion in Deleuze (the last book he published in his lifetime, _Essays Critical and Clinical_ ,44 is largely devoted to literature). Thus, in contrast with Badiou's, Deleuze's canon is (1) without bounds (someone has produced a concordance of literary allusions in Deleuze's works: there are 279 entries);45 (2) without generic bounds, as Deleuze can philosophise about any type of literature, from the detective story, as we have seen, to avant-garde poets like Gherasim Luca, taking in the classical novel of the nineteenth century (Dickens, Zola) as well as contemporary drama from Beckett to Carmelo Bene; (3) with a national slant, as Deleuze is particularly keen on Anglo-American literature, having devoted most of his _Logic of Sense_ to Lewis Carroll, and entitled a section of his _Dialogues_ with Claire Parnet 'On the superiority of Anglo-American literature' – Crane, Lawrence, Melville, Kerouac, Fitzgerald are among his favourite authors; (4) with the same high modernist slant as Badiou: the entries on Artaud and Lawrence are among the longest in the index, and the longer books are devoted to Proust, Kafka and Beckett.
Now that we know which literary texts Badiou and Deleuze read, the time has come to watch them reading.
**_Badiou reads Mandelstam, Deleuze reads Kafka_**
The second chapter of _The Century_ is entitled 'The Beast'. It is devoted to a poem by Mandelstam, of which this is the title, and which Badiou uses as a point of entry into the thought of the century: access to the century does not occur by way of history or sociology, and only by way of philosophy in so far as it is conditioned by poetry. As we remember, the central thesis of the book is that the century is characterised by 'the passion for the real'. Mandelstam is treated as one of the century's heroes as he experienced that passion not only in his flesh (he fell victim to Stalinist terror) but in his poetry (and here the term 'passion' recovers its ambiguity, as Mandelstam's passion must be understood in both senses of the term). Badiou reads the text, a poem of thirty-two lines which he begins by quoting in full, by extracting from it five fragments, in which he identifies five figures of the century: the Beast, the face-to-face-stare, the beast's 'vertebration' (its skeleton), the 'blood glued together' (a phrase borrowed from the poem) and finally the poem itself. These five figures are immediately translated into five philosophical questions that the century asks: the questions of vitalism, of voluntarism, of consistency, of the relation to the past, and of art as 'installed in the wait' ( _dans l'attente_ )46 – art is the expectation of the unpredictable event. This reading, or translation, is preceded by a page on the historical context of Mandelstam's poem (the celebrated poem on Stalin, which cost him so much, is duly mentioned) and followed by three other poetic 'punctuations' of the century, by Breton, Heidegger and Yves Bonnefoy. From this brief summary it appears that the poem is a source for the thinking of the century by the philosopher: it allows the translation that makes the truth of the century explicit, a truth which the poem itself cannot formulate clearly either because it is written in Aesopic language (this may well have been the case with Mandelstam), or because its own path to truth is not propositional (and Badiou has a taste for hermetic poetry, as appears in _Calme bloc ici-bas_ , where one of the characters is writing an interminable poem of resolute, but somewhat tongue-in-cheek, hermeticism, and the hero is a disciple of Mallarmé). The outcome of the reading is the formulation of a number of philosophical theses on the century, the last and perhaps the most important of which is that the century was a century of the poetics of the wait and of the threshold: what the poem does achieve is that it enables us to think the century anew, by being a source of further theses.
I shall not here rehearse Deleuze and Guattari's reading of Kafka. I shall only evoke that famous reading as an instance of creative misprision, a strong reading that 'forces' the text, in other words that forces a number of concepts or theses out of the text. And indeed, the importance of this reading for Deleuze's aesthetics cannot be undervalued: there is a sense in which such aesthetics is based on the concept of minority, which lies at the heart of the book on Kafka. In his essay, 'De la littérature en général, et de Beckett en particulier, selon Deleuze', Jean-François Louette formulates Deleuze's aesthetics in four theses.47 The first thesis is that for Deleuze the task of literature is not the creation of forms: rather, literature is the unceasing genesis of a flow of life, an expression of desire. The second thesis is that literature has an impersonal quality: it is a site for welcoming pre-individual haecceities rather than the expression of a self, the self of the author or of the character. The third thesis is that literature is the expression of 'great health', a phrase Deleuze has borrowed from Nietzsche: that literature has to do with the clinical as well as the critical is inscribed in the very title of Deleuze's last book – what literature is about is, again, the power of life. The reason for this insistence on the link between literature and 'life' (a danger word for literary critics) will, I hope, appear in the next section. The last thesis is that literature implies a minorisation of the major use of language. And here, the reference is, of course, Kafka, a Jewish author writing in German in the Czech environment of the city of Prague – the concept of minority is attributed to him, as it is said to come from a passage of his diaries. From this passage Deleuze and Guattari have evolved a whole theory of literature around the three characteristics of a minor literature: a minor literature is not written in a minor language, it deterritorialises a major language; in a minor literature everything is immediately political: it is the very embodiment of the 1968 slogan 'the personal is also political'; a minor literature is not an individual affair, it is always produced by a collective assemblage of enunciation.48 The importance of such a view of literature is not in doubt. The problem is that Kafka specialists strongly deny it originates in Kafka. In her essay, 'Deleuze et Kafka: l'invention de la littérature mineure',49 Marie-Odile Thirouin points out that the text on which such analysis is based is not Kafka's own, but a collage of fragments from the diaries by Max Brod; that the concept of _littérature mineure_ comes from a translation of the phrase _kleine Literatur_ by Marthe Robert, which introduces a pejorative connotation absent in the original German (and duly inverted by Deleuze and Guattari); and that the position Kafka takes on the subject is not what Deleuze and Guattari claim: he is not dealing with the situation of a Jewish writer in Prague, but of authors writing in Yiddish, not German, in Warsaw, not Prague, or of Czech authors writing in Czech, and for him Jewish literature in Prague, being written in German, belongs to the great German literature, not to a minorisation of it. Hence we find the twin illusions that Kafka is the author of a text on minor literature and that his is a deterritorialising text. Yet the efficacy and creativity of what appears to be a gross misreading is not in doubt: for this is what a strong reading is, not so much an interpretation (interpretation there is in their reading, but it is incorrect) as a form of interference, an intervention, a forcing of the text. Violence is needed, Deleuze keeps saying, in order for us to think. The question remains, of course, of the limits of such violence, of whether anything goes in the matter of intervention as of interpretation. In the case of Deleuze and Guattari's strong misreading of Kafka, the answer to the questions 'Does it work? Does it produce interesting results?' is firmly positive.
**_Deleuze reads Dickens_**
The last words of a great philosopher have a duly touching quality. No doubt the brevity of Deleuze's last text and the enigmatic quality of its title, 'Immanence: A Life . . .' have helped to increase such emotional weight and to make it a cult text. In that title we note the colon of equivalence (how can immanence, an abstract concept, be equivalent not even to life but to _a_ life?) and the three dots that seem to announce the end of a life (the essay was published only weeks before Deleuze committed suicide). And we note the interplay between the zero article, which refers to a notion or concept, and the indefinite article, which refers to a singularity. The essay reads like a summary of Deleuze's first philosophy as it once again stages the typical Deleuzian chain of concepts: the _ET_ (AND) of the series versus the _EST_ (IS) of identity; the transcendental field versus the empirical representation; an a-subjective, pre-reflexive, impersonal form of consciousness, a consciousness without subject or object (Deleuze obsessively comes back to Sartre's essay on the transcendence of ego); a plane of immanence. At this point in the essay, before the chain goes on to the event, to becoming, to singularities to the virtual (the essay is a fragment of a projected longer text on the concept of the virtual), a literary illustration is introduced, and Deleuze reads Dickens.
Chapter 3 of the third book of _Our Mutual Friend_ is a strange chapter, as it seems to be a moment of stasis in the plot (its only relation to the main thread of the narrative is that it anticipates the death by drowning of the main villain who, in this chapter, almost drowns but is saved, which causes him to entertain the illusion, based on proverbial stupidity, that he can never drown). So Riderhood, the scoundrel, almost drowns when his small boat is sunk by a steamer on the Thames: he is brought ashore and, with difficulty, revived. This is how Dickens accounts for the scene: Riderhood, between life and death, is no longer a character, only a life, and the other characters, who despise Riderhood, treat this life with the tenderness and care it deserves, which has nothing to do with the 'person' that bears it. For this is indeed an in-between moment: before, Riderhood was a villain, considered as such by the community (he had been forbidden to enter the pub where he is now lying in the hands of the doctor); after, when he has been revived, he is again a villain and behaves as such: he insults the people who have just saved his life and goes on with his life of nefarious deeds. In this in-between moment, we are no longer in space and time, even fictional ones: we are in a transcendental field, marked by the indefinite pronoun – not _the_ life (of Riderhood), but _a_ life: an indeterminate person but a determinate singularity. (This apparent paradox of indeterminate determinacy is carried by the two grammatical values of the indefinite article in English: generic extraction – 'a cat is an independent beast' – and singular extraction – 'there's a cat on the window sill'). Suddenly, in this in-between moment, a life has emerged, and that is what is worth struggling for, that is why the people in the pub fight to save someone who does not deserve to live. Such a life has the following characteristics: it is impersonal, singular, freed from the accidents of internal and external life (it knows neither subject nor object), it is a haecceity, singular but not individual (the bearer of a life has temporarily lost his name and all his personal characteristics), it is neutral, beyond good and evil, no longer the life of an individual, but 'the singular immanent life of a man who no longer has a name'.50
We could treat this reading as a forcing of the text, imposing on it a host of abstruse concepts (haecceity, plane of immanence, transcendental field, etc.) that stifle it: we could decide that Dickens is merely preparing the end of his plot (in which Riderhood will drown, in the embrace of the criminal schoolmaster), or that he is making his usual moral point, to show that Riderhood, who is not in the least grateful for having been saved, is beyond redemption. But that would be a mistake, as the philosopher who ignores such trivial reading is aware of aspects of the text no one has noticed before (and which, once noticed, become as obvious as a finally understood joke, when the quilting point of achieved meaning has been reached) – aspects of the text that account for the apparent irrelevance of the chapter with regard to the narrative as a whole (for my trivial reading is not merely trivial, it is also rather unconvincing). This is how Dickens describes the scene:
The doctor-seeking messenger meets the doctor halfway, coming under a convoy of police. Doctor examines the dank carcase, and pronounces, not hopefully, that it is worth while trying to reanimate the same. All the best means are at once in action, and everybody present lends a hand, and heart and soul. No one has the least regard for the man; with them all, he has been an object of avoidance, suspicion, and aversion; but the spark of life within him is curiously separable from himself now, and they have a deep interest in it, probably because it _is_ life, and they are living and must die.51
There is a contrast between the usual sarcastic tone of the beginning of the passage and the last sentence, where the text acquires a form of ethical seriousness. It is on this last sentence that Deleuze's reading is based: you have noted the appearance of 'a life . . .' in the italicised 'is' in the last sentence, as you have also noted the Frankensteinian 'spark of life', the naked life that is 'separable' from the person who bears it (a 'spark of life' is what Victor Frankenstein instils in the yet lifeless form of his creature).
I believe that this type of reading, although it is more of a translation and an intervention than an interpretation, is deeply faithful to the text. All we have to do to understand this is to compare it with another famous reading of _Our Mutual Friend_ , by Henry James, a famous assassination of Dickens in general and this novel in particular, in the shape of a review of the novel. Here are the famous first words of that text: ' _Our Mutual Friend_ is, to our perception, the poorest of Mr Dickens's works. And it is poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion.'52 The criticisms addressed to the novel are systematic and far-reaching: there is no feeling in the writing (p. 32), no principle of nature, but only 'mere bundles of eccentricities' (p. 32), no humanity, as no single character can be said to refer to an existing type (p. 32): 'the people [. . .] have nothing in common with each other, except the fact that they have nothing in common with mankind at large' (p. 33). As a result of this, Dickens appears as a superficial writer (p. 34) and, a point that we read with special interest, he is not a philosopher: 'Mr Dickens is a great observer and a great humorist, but he is nothing of a philosopher' (p. 35). The task of the true novelist, who is also a philosopher, is to 'know _man_ , as well as men' (p. 35): the greatness of a work of art lies in such a capacity to generalise.
In contradistinction to this analysis, Deleuze's reading makes it obvious that Dickens in this chapter is more of a philosopher than Henry James, in so far precisely as he escapes from the dogmatic image of thought to which James's account of the philosopher (and of the novelist) belongs. Against the novel as a canonical form of representation (of Nature, of Man), with its consequent generalisations (the italicised _man_ ), Dickens appears to be a philosopher of singularities, one who captures haecceities and events, an explorer of surfaces, not of the depths of human nature. In Deleuze's own terms, we might oppose Dickens's humour, a matter of surfaces, to the irony of Henry James, who considers mankind from the height of moral and philosophical abstractions (the choice of the indefinite article in ' _a_ life' does not only refer to the concept of singularity, but also to Deleuze's adherence to a form of empiricism), and reading the novel from such abstract heights, from that high moral ground, can only lead to the pointless assassination we find in his review.
And the objection that Deleuze is reading a short passage, not even a whole chapter, whereas James is reading the whole novel is not valid, as the page chosen by Deleuze is an excellent point of entry to the novel, and it enables us to perceive the grandeur of the text which Henry James has missed: the novel is not a matter of grotesque caricature and satire as James claims (p. 33), but of humour, the literary mode that captures the circulation of the event, the impersonal force of virtuality that produces actualisations in the shape of characters and accidents. Only from this point of view can we understand the grandeur of the celebrated opening of the novel, where the river, the Thames, that impersonal flow of life, is more important than the human characters that are caught in its current.
_Conclusion_
Reading those three readings may have given the impression that the contrast expressed in my last correlation is somewhat blurred. For there are similarities in the ways Badiou and Deleuze read literature. In both cases, they read for the content of the text, and show no interest in the signifiers: what we have in both cases is a philosophical, not a literary, reading. But there are differences as well in which the contrast is maintained. Contrary to expectations, treating literature as a condition for philosophy rather than a machine (how does it work?) means a closer attention to the text under analysis: Badiou quotes the entire poem and his commentary follows the flow of the text, providing as it goes philosophical translations of the truths the text produces. On the one hand we are closer to traditional literary analysis, and Badiou believes in syntax as the guarantee of the meaning of the text (in his essay on Mallarmé's 'method', in _Conditions_ , he claims that the 'guiding thread for clarification' of the poem is syntactic;53 in _Calme bloc ici-bas_ , he has one of the characters, a faintly ridiculous grammarian, exclaim: 'syntax is the only protection _garde-fou_ ] when we are seized with poetic fury').54 We have a mixture of fidelity and exploitation, which Badiou describes in the following terms: the poem thinks, but it does not know – it requires philosophy to reach the knowledge the poem provokes but does not master; on the other hand, of course, it is such thinking, and such thinking only, that produces truths. There is something of a paradox here, which will be developed in [Chapter 4.
Deleuze's account, on the other hand, is further from the literal aspect of the text, which he never even quotes. And yet in an important sense, it is much closer to its workings, as he sees aspects of the text which the professional critic, Henry James, utterly ignores, so that the inevitable translation of the thought of the text into philosophical concepts actually remains closer to the text than Badiou's analysis does: with Deleuze, at least in the case we analysed, one does not get the impression the text is a mere pretext or illustration, even if it is presented as such. The life in question is not only the life that Riderhood bears, it is also the life of the text, which Deleuze's commentary respects and makes present to us. But perhaps the time has come to watch the reading practices of our two philosophers in much more detail.
**_Notes_**
1. | A. Badiou, _The Century_ , London: Polity, 2007 (2005).
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2. | Ibid., p. 178 (251).
3. | Ibid., p. 107 (153–4).
4. | On this, see S. Rinzler's book on the discourse of twentieth-century manifestos, _La Passion du discours_ (forthcoming).
5. | B. Saint-Girons, _L'Acte esthétique_ , Paris: Klincksieck, 2007.
6. | J. Rancière, 'Existe-t-il une esthétique deleuzienne?', in E. Alliez (ed.), _Gilles Deleuze, une vie philosophique_ , Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 1998, pp. 525–36.
7. | G. Deleuze, _Difference and Repetition_ , London: Continuum, 2004 (1968), p. xx (4).
8. | A. Badiou, _Conditions_ , Paris: Seuil, 1992, p. 193.
9. | G. Deleuze, _Negotiations_ , New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 6 (15).
10. | Ibid.
11. | M. Cressole, _Deleuze_ , Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1973.
12. | For a brief portrait of Michel Cressole, see F. Dosse, _Gilles Deleuze Félix Guattari_ , Paris: La Découverte, 2007, pp. 260–1.
13. | Deleuze, _Negotiations_ , op. cit., pp. 8–9 (18).
14. | Ibid., pp. 7–8 (18).
15. | G. Deleuze, _Logic of Sense_ , London: Athlone Press, 1990, ch. 34. See also J.-J. Lecercle, _Deleuze and Language_ , Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002, ch. 3.
16. | Deleuze, _Negotiations_ , op. cit., p. 11 (21).
17. | D. Carlat, 'Portrait de l'écrivain selon Gilles Deleuze', in B. Gelas and H. Micolet (eds), _Deleuze et les écrivains_ , Nantes: Cécile Defaut, 2007, p. 183.
18. | G. Deleuze, _Proust and Signs_ , London: Continuum, 2008, p. 108 (201).
19. | A. Badiou, _Theoretical Writings_ , London: Continuum, 2006, pp. xiv–xvii.
20. | B. Bosteels, quoted in S. Žižek, 'From Purification to Subtraction', in P. Hallward (ed.), _Think Again_ , London: Continuum, 2004, p. 173.
21. | T. Conley, 'Folds and Folding', in C. Stivale (ed.), _Gilles Deleuze. Key Concepts_ , Stocksfield: Acumen, 2005, p. 180.
22. | See P. Macherey, _Marx 1845_ , Paris: Amsterdam, 2008.
23. | L. Althusser, 'Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d'Etat', in _Positions_ , Paris: Editions Sociales, 1976, pp. 67–126.
24. | The French for this is 'l'increvable désir'. The English translation, in A. Badiou, _On Beckett_ , eds N. Power and A. Toscano, Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003, has 'tireless desire': although more accurate, that translation does not do justice to the register of the phrase (it belongs to popular language) and to its energy or even violence.
25. | A. Badiou, _Beckett_ , Paris: Hachette, 1995, pp. 35–6; _On Beckett_ , op. cit., pp. 53–4.
26. | Badiou, _Beckett_ , op. cit., pp. 19–20 and 22–3; _On Beckett_ , op. cit., pp., 45–7.
27. | On the series in Deleuze, see M. Buydens, _Sahara. L'esthétique de Gilles Deleuze_. Paris: Vrin, 1990, pp. 24–5.
28. | G. Deleuze, 'How do we recognize structuralism?', in _Desert Islands and Other Texts_ , New York: Semiotext(e), 2003, pp. (238–69).
29. | G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, _A Thousand Plateaus_ , London: Athlone Press, 1988, p. 135 (169).
30. | A. Badiou, _Deleuze_ , Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p. 2 (8).
31. | L. Burchill, 'Translator's Preface', in Badiou, _Deleuze_ , op. cit., p. xii.
32. | J. Simont, 'Critique de la représentation et ontologie chez Deleuze et Badiou', in C. Ramond (ed.), _Alain Badiou. Penser le multiple_ , Paris: L'Harmattan, 2002, pp. 457–76.
33. | Badiou, _Briefings on Existence_ , op. cit., p. 110 (124).
34. | Ibid., p. 70 (71).
35. | A. Badiou, _Calme bloc ici-bas_ , Paris: POL, 1997, pp. 11–12.
36. | A. Badiou, _Being and Event_ , trans. Oliver Feltham, London: Continuum, 2006, p. 23 (31).
37. | I indulged in a close analysis of this incipit in J.-J. Lecercle, _Deleuze and Language_ , Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002, pp. 8–12.
38. | G. Deleuze, _The Fold_ , trans. Tom Conley, London: Continuum, 2001, p. 3 (5).
39. | G. Deleuze, _Difference and Repetition_ , trans. Paul Patton, London: Continuum, 1994, p. 36 (43).
40. | P. Hallward, _Out of This World_ , London: Verso, 2006.
41. | A. Badiou, _Almagestes_ , Paris: Seuil, 1964; _Portulans_ , Paris: Seuil, 1967.
42. | G. Deleuze, 'Philosophie de la série noire', in _L'Ile déserte et autres textes_ , Paris: Minuit, 2002, pp. 114–19.
43. | A. Sauvagnargues, _Deleuze et l'art_ , Paris: PUF, 2005.
44. | G. Deleuze, _Essays Critical and Clinical_ , London: Verso, 1998 (1993).
45. | D. Drouet, 'Index des références littéraires dans l'œuvre de Gilles Deleuze', in Gelas and Micolet, op. cit., pp. 547–81.
46. | A. Badiou, _The Century_ , London: Polity, 2007, p. 21 (39).
47. | J. F. Louette, 'De la littérature en général, et de Beckett en particulier, selon Deleuze', in Gelas and Micolet, op. cit., pp. 73–84.
48. | G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, _Kafka_ , Paris: Minuit, 1975, pp. 28–31.
49. | M.-O. Thirouin, 'Deleuze et Kafka: l'invention de la littérature mineure', in Gelas and Micolet, op. cit., pp. 293–305. See also, for a similar argument, S. Korngold, 'Kafka and the dialect of minor literature', in C. Prendergast (ed.), _Debating World Literature_ , London: Verso, 2004, pp. 272–90.
50. | G. Deleuze, 'Immanence: A Life', in _Two Regimes of Madness_ , New York: Semiotext(e), 2007 (2001), p. 391 (361–2).
51. | C. Dickens, _Our Mutual Friend_ , London: Penguin, 1971 (1864–5), p. 503.
52. | H. James, ' _Our Mutual Friend_ ', in _Selected Literary Criticism_ , London: Penguin, 1968, pp. 31–5.
53. | A. Badiou, _Conditions_ , London: Continuum, 2008, p. 49 (109).
54. | Badiou, _Calme bloc ici-bas_ , op. cit., pp. 389–90.
3
Deleuze Reads Proust
**_What's in a strong reading_**
The importance of Proust for Deleuze, throughout his work, cannot be overestimated. In the concordance of literary allusions in his works, the Proust entry is the longest, and allusions are present in practically all his books, from _Proust and Signs_ to _Essays Critical and Clinical_.1 To the end, Deleuze kept quoting the celebrated Proustian description of the writer writing as if his maternal language were a foreign tongue – for him, this was the best description of style as the stuttering of language.2 What better entry, therefore, into the world of Deleuze as a reader of literary texts than a close study of his Proust book?
But we do not come to this reading of Deleuze reading Proust empty-handed. The preceding chapter has described both Badiou and Deleuze as strong readers and sought to construct a concept of _strong reading_. The time has come to summarise this process of construction by stating the determinations of the concept. I suggest there are six such determinations – the determinations of the _philosophical_ concept of strong reading, or perhaps of the concept of the strong philosophical reading, for this is how philosophers read literature.
The first characteristic of a strong reading is that it goes against the grain of received _doxa_. Its aim is to force the reader into thinking. The insistence here is on the violence of the practice. This is not merely the rather trivial practice of reading the object of the strong reading anew, with different eyes, from another point of view, for that is true of any interpretation worthy of the name: this involves a form of violence done to the text as to the reader, and the practice has been called 'an active dismantling of the text'.3 Thus we shall learn that Proust's novel is about neither memory nor the past, but about learning and the future.
The second characteristic inscribes this forcing of thought in the shape of the extraction of a problem. Traditionally, the definition of philosophy is centred on the capacity of the philosopher for _étonnement_ , for being astonished at what common opinion takes for granted. Such _étonnement_ is expressed by formulating a problem in the very site where solutions have long been accepted. Although the Deleuzian definition of a problem is somewhat more complex, it is faithful to this traditional intuition. Reading Proust's _Recherche_ , therefore, will centre on the extraction of a problem which pervades the text but is not explicitly formulated, the problem of learning.
The third characteristic goes from the extraction of a problem to the construction of the concept that grasps it. The creation of concepts is notoriously the task ascribed to the philosopher by Deleuze. In _What Is Philosophy?_ such construction goes through the drawing of a plane of consistency, the description of a conceptual character and the formulation of a number of determinations of the concept. That such a construction is central to Deleuze's reading of Proust is made apparent in the very title of the book, where the concept – the concept of sign – is named. That such a concept has to be constructed and cannot be merely borrowed ready-made from the philosopher's predecessors will appear in the fact that Deleuze's concept of sign in this book has nothing to do with what we usually mean by sign, namely Saussurian sign.
The fourth characteristic of a strong reading is its persistence. The right problem, and the correct concept that grasps it, do not vanish once they have been respectively extracted and constructed: they persist (witness the fact that this early book was added to on two occasions, at a time when Deleuze's philosophical position had shifted considerably, so that the book in its final version contains two different layers of thought, if not three); but they also insist, as the problematic of the sign is taken up again, twenty years after the first publication of the Proust book and considerably expanded in the _Cinema_ books, where the semiotics of Peirce is exploited through the usual form of Deleuzian _bricolage_ and where the Saussurian concept of sign, based on the dichotomy of signifier and signified, is the object of an explicit critique.
The fifth characteristic is that the consequence of such extraction, construction, persistence and insistence is an intervention rather than an interpretation. Here we encounter a slight difficulty, as the rejection of interpretation (the question, as we saw, is not 'what is the meaning of the text? but 'how does it work?') is a central tenet of Deleuze's later philosophy, but in _Proust and Signs_ , signs are meant to be interpreted and we find a positive theory of interpretation. But apart from the deciduous character of such a theory, we already find in the book all the aspects of reading as an intervention, most explicitly of course in the second and later section, 'The Literary Machine'. The best test of the intervention that the reading enacts is its capacity to shock the critical tradition of readings of Proust, although I am afraid we are not in the same situation as with the reading of Kafka evoked in the last chapter, as Deleuze's reading of Proust seems to have acquired canonical status.
There is a sixth characteristic of a strong reading: its very strength is a provocation for readers, in other words it calls for a _counter-reading_. We saw that such was the effect Badiou's reading of Deleuze had on its readers. The remainder of the chapter will move from the reading of Deleuze's reading of Proust towards a form of counter-reading, where it will be suggested that Deleuze _reads for style_.
**Enonçable et énoncé: _pre-linguistic matters_**
To illustrate the notion of a counter-reading, I shall do a modicum of violence to Deleuze's text and start reading it anachronically, against the current, starting with a passage in _Cinéma 2_ ,4 a text written twenty years after the first publication of the Proust book. The passage can be found in the first section of the second chapter, a chapter devoted to the relationship between the cine-image and language (the title of the chapter is: 'Recapitulation of images and signs'). The section is devoted to a strongly polemical attack against the moment of structuralism in film studies, incarnated in the early work of Christian Metz, who defended the idea that there was a language of film, that images were utterances, to be analysed in terms of double articulation, of paradigm and syntagm. This, of course, tends to treat a film as a narrative, with a story line analogous to a linguistic chain.
But Deleuze will have none of this. For him, narration is never a _datum_ , it is an effect of the organic composition of movement-images, hence his strong statement: 'the cine-image is not an utterance.'5 He develops this by quoting Pasolini, on whose theoretical texts he often relies: the cine-image partakes of an idiom of reality ( _langue de la réalité_ ) which is not a language. In that idiom, rather than the two axes (paradigm and syntagm) that define the structure of language, together with the discrete units that are selected or combined in them, we find processes of differentiation and specification, continuous variations and intensities (a description strongly reminiscent of Deleuze's own account of language as a system of continuous variations and intensities, an account totally opposed to that of mainstream linguistics). So what we have with the cine-image is what he calls a _matière signalétique_ , sign-matter or sign-material, with 'modulation features' that are sensory, kinesic, intensive, affective, rhythmic, tonal and even (why not?) verbal (that long list is, of course, a quotation). If we look at this list of the modulation features that make up the cine-image, we note (1) that linguistic features come last, as an afterthought; (2) that the general tonality of the list is organic – it concerns the affects of the body, not the abstract ideality of the linguistic system: the cine-image has more to do with what Deleuze, in his Bacon book, calls 'the logic of sensation' (this phrase is used as the subtitle of the book) than with a logic of representation – the cine-image is sensory and organic, it does not represent or narrate; (3) if another art form is evoked in the list, as a point of comparison with the visual art form of the cinema, it is music rather than poetry: those modulation features are rhythmic and tonal, not articulated; (4) the most important term in the list is 'intensive', and intensities are what the structure of language, which is concerned with positions and differential values, cannot capture; (5) lastly, we finally understand what Deleuze means by 'modulation': the world itself is a dynamic entity, in a state of constant and continuous variation – the cine-image captures such variations directly without having to go through the screen of language and representation. Hence the apparent paradox of Deleuze's conception of the cinema: the cine-image, apparently a kind of photograph endowed with movement, is not a representation, and the cinema is not a representational art, and only contingently a narrative art. Exit Hollywood, pursued by a Deleuzian bear.
Deleuze has recourse to another authority on film theory, and Pasolini is supplemented by Eisenstein (this is not surprising if we remember the impact Eisenstein's texts, which were widely available in paperback, had on the French _intelligentsia_ in the late 1960s and early 1970s). Thus Pasolini's 'idiom of reality', that which the cine-image spells out, works on materials which Deleuze describes in the terms of Eisenstein's theory of 'interior monologue'. For Eisenstein, the cinema, not the novel, is the site where we get a glimpse of an externalisation of our inner speech, the old _logos endiathetos_ , the nature of which preoccupied the Greek and medieval philosophers, from Aristotle onwards.6 Except that, for Eisenstein, and for Deleuze after him, _logos endiathetos_ is not a form of mentalese or language of thought (the prevalent solution to the problem of inner speech in the philosophical tradition), nor is it internalised natural language (the minority solution), but an accretion of non-linguistic matter or material: a _masse plastique_ , a shapeless but informable and deformable mass of a-signifying and a-syntactic material, not yet linguistically formed (although already formed semiotically, aesthetically and pragmatically). In other words, Eisenstein's interior monologue, as practised in the cinema, is a mass of material that emits signs (but not _linguistic_ signs: we remember the Peircean efflorescence and multiplication of types of signs that is at the heart of _Cinema 1_ : in the first chapter of _Cinema 2_ , five more types have already been introduced). Those multiple and various signs produce aesthetic affects and induce action (hence the idea that the material is already 'semiotically, aesthetically and pragmatically' formed). The general lesson of this (a recurrent theme in Deleuze's work) is that _there is more to signs than merely linguistic or Saussurian signs_ : Saussurian semiology, or the semiotics of languages, is not the model or base of all semiotics, nor is it the climax of their progression; it is only one among many, and does not enjoy any privileged position. More on this anon.
Deleuze sums up his analysis of what cine-images are made of by stating that their a-linguistic matter is a _pre_ -linguistic matter: _pas une énonciation, pas des énoncés, un énonçable_ ('It is not an enunciation, and these are not utterances. It is an _utterable_ ').7 Such matters are liable to be uttered in a process of enunciation, they may give rise to utterances. It is only when language appropriates them, when narrative, for instance, is introduced, that utterances come to replace images and non-linguistic or pre-linguistic signs. The relationship between Saussurian semiology and more general semiotics is not only diluted but inverted: semiology is merely a secondary or belated form of semiotics. 'The language system, Deleuze claims, only exists in its reaction to a non-language material that it transforms'.8 Hence the deliberate ambiguity of the title of this section: there are 'pre-linguistic matters', a rich source of all types of signs, and the material which the cine-image is made of; and such 'pre-linguistic matters' actually matter – the 'utterable' is not yet an utterance, and it does not necessarily have to become one. A whole theory of signs, and a strong reading of Proust, derive from this.
**_A problem_**
There is, however, a problem. Deleuze's formulation, which the title of the last section quotes, is bizarre. Far from offering a _solution_ to the question of the relationship between cine-image and language, as he claims (an anti-structuralist solution, one that contradicts Metz), he makes such a relationship highly problematic because of the terms he selects to formulate it. If the matter, or material, that cine-images are made of is _pre-linguistic_ , this means that it is waiting for language to shape or inform it. If such material is called 'utterable' ( _énonçable_ ), such utterability sounds like Aristotelian _potentia_ expecting to be actualised in utterances, in a process of enunciation. Even if it is claimed to be a-signifying, a-syntaxic and generally a-linguistic, the material is still, at least virtually, determined by language. There appears to be no independent way of talking about images (even if in his Bacon book Deleuze attempts to construct a series of concepts to do just that). So language in Deleuze is a _problem_. Let us spell it out.
Were Deleuze a Hegelian philosopher (which he emphatically is not), there would be a natural progression hailed as progress. From mute and inglorious pre-linguistic matters he would proceed to their appropriation by language and their metamorphosis into glorious utterances. We would thus move from etymological infancy to fluency. But it is a short way from fluency to empty garrulousness, and Deleuze, not being a Hegelian, rejects this narrative as too pat. His object is not to make language the apex or climax of an inevitable progression, but to put it in its place, a humble and dependent one. His object is to treat language as a sequel or epiphenomenon to images.
This, however, is not an easy task. (The paradox of the language hater who can only vent his hostility to language and distrust of eloquence through the eloquence of his words immediately crops up.) Hence the semantic tension that is felt in the word _énonçable_ : a movement towards actualisation in _énoncé_ or _énonciation_ , and its immediate freezing or even retreat. Except that Deleuze, who is not a Hegelian, is hardly an Aristotelian philosopher either: he follows Bergson in ascribing a central place to _virtuality_. This _énonçable_ is not merely possible: it is virtual, which makes it as real as an actual _énoncé_. We have indeed moved into a realm other than the realm of language: the realm of the virtual.
This move has drastic consequences for a philosophy of language always in part inherited from structuralism. The inversion of the customary relationship between semiology and semiotics is merely the symptom of a sea change. What we have is in fact a _dissolution_ of the Saussurian sign on which the science of linguistics was founded: both a _dilution_ , as semiotics multiply because types of signs proliferate, and a _destruction_ , as double articulation, the arbitrary character of the sign and the principle of immanence (which states that the science of language is constructed out of linguistic phenomena alone, carefully separated from the rest of reality) go by the board. Thus is the tyranny or imperialism of the signifier (a central theme in _A Thousand Plateaus_ ) finally overcome. Thus also is another philosophy of language, duly called pragmatics, born, one which at a fell swoop discards both Chomsky and Saussure and the heavy metaphysical weight their conceptions of language involve. (This is particularly obvious in the case of Chomsky, with his innate ideas and physical reductionism –in an important sense, Deleuze's new philosophy of language is anti-Chomskyan.) Lastly, thus is the logic of representation, the dominant image of thought in modern Western philosophy, also overcome. And this is no mean feat.
As an example of this achievement, I shall briefly consider what Deleuze and Guattari call 'non-signifying semiotics'. At first sight, the phrase appears to be an oxymoron: semiotics is the science of signs, and it is of the essence of signs that they should signify. But here is the definition I borrow from the Glossary, written by Guattari as an appendix to the English edition of his book _Molecular Revolution_ :
We distinguish signifying semiologies – those which articulate signifying chains and signifying contents – from non-signifying semiotics, which work from syntagmatic chains which do not produce effects of meaning and which are capable of entering into direct contact with their referents. Examples of non-signifying semiotics would be musical notation, the mathematical corpus, information or robotic syntaxes, etc.9
The central phrase of this definition is probably 'capable of entering into direct contact with their referents'. By this phrase, Guattari is leaving the position of structuralism, which rejects designation (or the relation between word and thing) and devalues denotation (or the relation between signified and referent), in favour of signification (or the relation between signifier and signified). The definition operates a return to designation, a relation of ontological mixture where words cohabit with things and utterances intervene in the midst of the world, _à même les choses_. In the moment of structuralism we have two series, of signifier and signified, separated but parallel, and sparks of meaning emitted at their infrequent conjunction by quilting points ( _points de capiton_ ): this is the structure described in Deleuze's most structuralist text _How Do We Recognize Structuralism?_ and put to work in _The Logic of Sense_ , where it yields a theory of sense in contrast with meaning, that is with good sense and common sense. After the moment of structuralism, that is from _Anti-Oedipus_ onwards, syntagmatic chains are not only in direct contact with their referents, but they interact with them, 'in diagrammatic interaction', as the French version of the Glossary says (so we have not only a mixture of bodies but a form of abstraction). The passage from one moment to the other, from one position to the other involves a denial of the ideality of meaning and an affirmation of the materiality of language. (Deleuze has always strongly admired the pan-somatism of the Stoics and is fond of quoting the pseudo-paradox, or sophism, attributed to Chrysippus, which goes: 'If you speak of a chariot, a chariot goes through your mouth' – not so much a blatant piece of sophistry as an evocation of the Stoic theory of causation, according to which physical bodies are causes of incorporeal effects.) And if we want to find an example illustrating that otherwise obscure statement, words are in direct contact and interaction with their referents, we only have to think of the semiotics of faces: faces signify (they emit signs of affect, etc.) but not through discrete units and double articulation. We are simply moving back from a digital to an analogic concept of sign: hence the development of a semiotics of 'facialities' ( _visagéités_ – as horrible a word in French as it is in English), to be found in the work of Guattari and in _A Thousand Plateaus_.
Let us take our bearings and consider our progress so far. It is a paradoxical, if not chaotic, sort of progress. We understand that language has been demoted from the central position it enjoyed in the moment of structuralism. ( _The Logic of Sense_ , the most structuralist of Deleuze's books, is where he comes nearest to offering a fully-fledged theory of language.) But the concept of sign escapes this general demotion: the Saussurian sign, that is the linguistic sign, is dissolved, but other signs increase and multiply. There are as many signs, and more, as there are regimes of signs, or semiotics. Yet the whole process of demotion and dilution is affected by ambiguity. The semantic tension in the term _énonçable_ is not a chance occurrence. It is also present in _A Thousand Plateaus_ , where those non-signifying semiotics are evoked. They belong to various types, which Deleuze and Guattari call 'pre-signifying', 'signifying', 'counter-signifying' and 'post-signifying'. The compulsive recourse to prefixes cannot but appear as an instance of Freudian denial: the centrality of language returns, like Banquo's ghost, in the inevitability of the term 'signifying', at the very moment when it is denied. It appears, therefore, that for Deleuze language is, paradoxically, something to be firmly put in its place and a constant source of fascination. This dialectics of repulsion and desire works through Deleuze's _oeuvre_ and explains why at the same time he aims to subvert mainstream linguistics ( _la linguistique a fait beaucoup de mal_ , 'linguistics has done a lot of harm', he exclaims in _L'Abécédaire_ ) and he constructs, book after book, more than a sketch of a new philosophy of language. Language is indeed a _problem_ for Deleuze: it is denounced, yet the question of the sign remains central.
The position Deleuze adopts towards the question of the sign can be summarised in the following diagram:
My contention is that this diagram is at work in Deleuze's reading of Proust's _Recherche_ and that it will enable us to understand why and how, when Deleuze reads a literary text, he reads for style.
**_Signs and Proust_**
A brief word about _Proust and Signs_ :10 a very early book, his fourth (1964), but one he never quite abandoned, as its history shows. A second part, 'The literary machine', was added for the second edition in 1970, and a conclusion, 'Presence and function of madness: the spider', for the third edition in 1977. The fact that he added new material to the book, without rewriting it, is significant. The first part, written before he met Guattari, that is before he became interested in linguistics, belongs to a different problematic from the second, written shortly after _Anti-Oedipus_ and bearing marks of this (the very title, 'The Literary Machine', seems to belong to the world of _Capitalism and Schizophrenia_ ). In spite of this complete change of problematic, there is a common thread that gives the book its unity: the centrality of the concept of sign and its relation to style.
The book starts, in typical Deleuzian fashion, with the violent extraction of a problem which carefully avoids traditional or commonsensical interpretations and provokes a shock in the reader. (It is not, therefore, exactly an interpretation: the description just given also applies to the cine-image and its affects in _Cinema 2_.) The object of the extraction and of the shock is the identification of a problem and the beginning of the construction of its concept. Now, a trivial reading of _In Search of Lost Time_ ( _La Recherche_ ) will, unavoidably so, tell us that the novel is about memory. Not so, of course, Deleuze. Here are the first lines of the book:
What constitutes the unity of _In Search of Lost Time_? We know, at least, what it does not. It is not recollection, memory, even involuntary memory. What is essential to the Search is not the madeleine or the cobblestones.11
We may, I think, admire the bluntness of that incipit. In one brisk sentence or two, Deleuze dismisses the commonsensical view of _La Recherche_ we have inherited from the critical _doxa_. Having thus duly shocked us, jogged us into thinking anew, he can formulate his problem, which he does on the second page:
But however important its role, memory intervenes only as the means of an apprenticeship that transcends recollection both by its goals and by its principles. The Search is oriented to the future, not the past.
Learning is essentially learning _signs_. Signs are the object of a temporal apprenticeship, not of an abstract knowledge.12
So it appears that Deleuze's reading, an intervention rather than an interpretation, consists of a shift of focus: we move from memory to apprenticeship, that is to learning (as the real object of _La Recherche_ ) and from learning to signs (as the objects of the process of learning). 'Learning' is in fact here a better translation of the French word _apprentissage_ than the literal 'apprenticeship', as the French word evokes not only the figure of one who is apprenticed to an artisan, but also the concepts of _Bildungsroman_ (or _roman d'apprentissage_ in French). This shift in focus entails consequences about the conception of time: learning takes time, and it is not exclusively concerned with the past, far from it – the focus shifts from the past to the present and the future. _La Recherche_ is not only about time vanished or lost, but also about time wasted (another meaning of the French phrase, _le temps perdu_ ). So, by stating that _La Recherche_ does not so much look towards the past as towards the future, Deleuze practises his usual game of reading the text against the grain. The problem _La Recherche_ evokes is not the problem of the passing of time, but of the time necessary for learning. And the concept that corresponds to this problem, that names it, is not memory but sign.
This of course implies the construction of a concept of sign. The beginnings will not be all that different from Saussure's construction: a sign is the sign of something. Apparently, we are still in the realm of representation. And what are the signs in Proust signs of? Deleuze eventually answers this question, but only after a while, as for him it is a secondary question. The essential question is different. What defines signs in Proust is not their referents, but the site of their emission: not what they are signs of, but who or what emits them, and in which context. The important thing about a Proustian sign is not what it denotes, but what it evokes.
Even as in Badiou's system there are events and truths in four fields (the fields of politics, of love, of science and of art), in Deleuze's Proust there are signs in four worlds: the world of _mondanité_ , of worldliness, of aristocratic snobbery; the world of love, of falling in love and the pangs of jealousy; the world of sensible qualities, of perceptions and their affects, evoked for instance by a _madeleine_ or a paving stone in Venice; and the world of art, Vinteuil's 'little phrase', _le petit pan de mur jaune_ in a picture by Vermeer, and, _en abyme_ , the novel itself.13 We may note, incidentally, the proximity between this quadripartition and Badiou's four types of events, with the revolutions they foster.
In Deleuze's Proust, the encounter with the sign occurs in a context from which signs derive their significance and where learning is practised, as the aim of learning is the capacity to interpret signs. In this early book, which is totally indifferent to psychoanalysis and to Deleuze's emphatic rejection of it, he is not shy of talking in terms of interpretation. So our conceptual drift can be captured in the following diagram:
memory (less important than) learning (about) signs (in need of) interpretation
Memory is less important than the process of learning, learning is about signs, and signs are constitutively in need of interpretation.
So interpretation is not only a possibility, but a necessity. In Deleuze's Proust, the world in which we live is full of mystery, a site for encounters, where the subject becomes who she is by learning her way through a maze of signs, which are not merely to be taken for wonders but must be interpreted. _La Recherche_ is not content with exploring one human faculty, memory: it explores the essential activity of all human faculties, how the human being becomes a subject by learning signs, by constructing herself in the four regions that form the human world (or at least the world of Proust). So the _Recherche_ is not only a search but a quest, but not simply a quest for self: it is the noblest of quests, a quest for truth. Here is Deleuze:
The worlds are unified by their formation of sign systems emitted by persons, objects, substances; we discover no truth, we learn nothing, except by deciphering and interpreting.14
The interest of this is that it sets up another chain of concepts, which can be represented in a diagram:
signs encounter deciphering truth
The encounter with signs jogs us into thinking, engages a process of deciphering, that is a process of thought (deciphering signs is what thought is about, it is the highest exertion of human intelligence) and the deciphering quest enables the subject to construct a truth. For Proust's position towards truth (or rather Deleuze's Proust) is neither relativist (there is no truth, only a multiplication of interpretations) nor naturalistic (there is something out there, namely objective truth). Truth has to be invented in both senses of the term: it has to be creatively imagined, and it has to be found where it always was, as an archaeological site is invented. This is why Deleuze calls every apprentice, every decipherer of signs, an Egyptologist.
So we have four worlds of signs, and consequently four types of signs, with specific characteristics. The _first world_ , the world of _mondanité_ , is a natural world of signs. For what is worldliness, if not an exchange, an emission and reception, of signs? But those signs are neither discrete nor articulated. Their characteristics are vastly different. For they are (1) _caught up in rituals_ (the rituals of _etiquette_ , of snobbery); (2) _ontologically heterogeneous_ (signs of worldliness are indifferently elements of dress, gestures, utterances, even external implements: there are all sorts of ways of making what is known as a 'statement' of fashion); (3) _local_ (they depend on a small group, a _milieu_ or a _coterie_ , outside of which they are meaningless: so that the same objects or features may be entirely different signs in different _milieus_ ); (4) _unstable_ (in that they are subject to the accelerated time of fashion – one day they are in, the next they are passé); (5) (this is their main characteristic) they are _not_ representations. A sign of worldliness does not represent its referent in its absence, it does not refer, it directly expresses. Why does it not refer? Because, Deleuze says, such signs are vacuous and stupid – signs of fatuousness, not of emotional depth or intellectual content. In the terms of Barthes, such signs have no denotation but only connotation: they directly connote, without denoting, a situation that Hjelmslev's semiotics (which Deleuze mentions in _A Thousand Plateaus_ ) cannot contemplate.
The _second world_ of signs is the world of love. In the universe of Proust's novel, the loved one 'implicates' a world that must be 'explicated', that is deciphered by the lover. To love is to interpret the world folded in one's beloved. Hence another set of characteristics, again vastly different from those of the linguistic sign. Signs of love are: (1) _elusive_ (how can I be sure that my interpretation is correct, that she reciprocates my love?); (2) _mysterious_ (an aura of mystery surrounds the loved one: the very elusiveness of the signs she emits creates an atmosphere of anxiety bordering on awe: I am fully engaged in the process of loving, that is of deciphering, and I am under the impression, or illusion, that my life is at stake); (3) (this is the main characteristic) they are _mendacious_. For I, the lover, can never reach the truth: there is every possibility that the beloved is lying to me, for it is easier to lie than to utter the blunt truth; and there is every possibility that I am lying to myself, indulging in wishful thinking. As you can see, Deleuze's Proust is a pessimist: love is not described in terms of the communion of souls and the fusion of two bodies into one but in terms of solipsism and agonistic encounter. Take the first moments of falling in love, moments of maximal uncertainty (she loves me, she loves me not, or the petty bourgeois version: if the light goes green before I reach the kerb, he will leave his wife for me). The difference with Badiou's treatment of love, centred on the _coup de foudre_ and its consequences, is obvious: in Deleuze's Proust, the main affect of love is not a passionate yearning for the other, but jealousy. The 'first law of love' in Proust is that jealousy is stronger than love. When signs have been explicated they prove to be mendacious, so that the lover, far from being welcomed into the fold, is excluded. So the signs of love, like the signs of worldliness, are not Saussurian signs, not representational signs, because they are pragmatic: each sign is a call for the calculus of implicit meaning, what Grice calls implicatures (she says this, but she cannot mean it literally, so she must mean that).15 And this call for the calculus of meaning is a call for action: there is no interpretation without an intervention. The sign itself is not content with marking a situation: it intervenes in it.
The _third world_ of signs concerns the signs of sensible qualities (the impression created by the _madeleine_ , etc.). We are closer to the philosophical tradition. It has always been the case that the passage from sense impressions to perceptions involves construction, that is a synthesis of sense impressions (there are various versions of this, from Kant to phenomenology), and it also involves interpretation. And there is a moment of decision, the moment of recognition, when I decide that the mark on the wall is a snail, not a nail, as in Virginia Woolf's story, 'The mark on the wall',16 or that what I see is a light effect rather than the ghost of my grandfather. This world, of course, is not merely the third world of signs, it is everywhere around us, it is _our_ world, the _whole_ of our world, so that Marcel moves in a world of signs, a receptacle for potential epiphanies.
Those signs also have characteristics that are not Saussurian. (1) They are _assertive_ : they undoubtedly are, they are not projections, like the signs of love, not figments of our imagination. (2) They are _truthful_ : they are not mendacious, like the signs of love, since perception, to speak like Wittgenstein, is a language-game where a notion of truth is necessary: the signs of sensible qualities must be carefully distinguished from dream and hallucination. (3) They are _material_ , since they begin with the impression, a word to be taken literally, that they make on our senses. This materiality, however, is a limitation: as we shall soon see, a sign is nothing if it does not embody an immaterial essence. Hence the ambivalence of those signs: they are everywhere, they constitute our lived world, but they are disappointing. Although he is moving away from the logic of representation, Deleuze, at this stage, has not yet reached the logic of sensation that he constructs in the Bacon book. And is he not perhaps, in expressing disappointment in sensible signs and yearning for essence, abandoning the professed empiricism of his first book, the book on Hume?17 The answer to this is that he is describing the world of Proust, whose instinctive Platonism will have to be overcome.
The _fourth world_ is the world of the signs of art, with their specific list of characteristics. (1) They are _dematerialised_. This is an old preoccupation of aesthetic theory, one which Anglo-Saxon aesthetics has thoroughly explored: the sonata is distinguished from its various materialisations, either in its interpretation or in the manuscripts that transcribe it. (2) They are _all-embracing_ : they have the capacity to launder, if you pardon me the bathetic metaphor, all other types of signs, to metamorphose them into signs of art. _La Recherche_ , where the other types of signs are staged, turns them, _en abyme_ , into signs of art: thus with the baron de Charlus, that paragon of worldliness, thus with Swann in love, thus with the cobblestones of Venice. (3) They are _climactic_ : the sequence of the four worlds of signs involves a progression, as all signs converge towards the signs of art, which incarnate the perfection of signs. This is due to the fact that (4) they are _essential_ , that they express essences, and this is their essential characteristic, what all signs strive for.
From such an array of diverse characteristics, we may nevertheless derive a general theory of signs: this is what Deleuze duly does. In the world of Saussure, signs are dual. So they are, too, in the world of Deleuze's Proust, but the duality is situated elsewhere. A sign _designates_ an object (remember that designation involves direct contact with the object: the sign is an object, the object is directly a sign – we live in a world of sensible qualities), but it also _signifies_ something else (what I have called a connotation: this is why the best signs, the signs of art, are immaterial – they do not let themselves be enmeshed in the carnality of designation, but go straight for essences). We can therefore formulate the conception of the sign in Deleuze's Proust in the following diagram, which takes the usual Deleuzian form of a correlation:
This correlation occurs in a chapter entitled 'Apprenticeship': it describes the effect of signs, what they achieve. At one level, signs, or certain types of signs, involve friendly conversation, appealing to the human faculty of intelligence, which the Greeks called philosophy (a similar account of philosophy is to be found in _What Is Philosophy?_ ). On the other hand, they also, when they are true signs, the signs of art, engage thought, the passion of love and a process of interpretation or deciphering. And we note that truth is on the bottom line of the correlation, which seems to make recognition, or _doxa_ , the realm of philosophy – an unkind thought, but one that is typical of the artist that Proust is. For, of course, there is a hierarchy in the correlation (the bottom line is more valuable than the top line), or at least a dynamism, whereby the top part of the correlation is always striving towards the bottom, where it finds its achievement. This might be a description of the very process of learning, of the passage from the objectivism that characterises the top row of the correlation (pleasure, not truth, recognition, not cognition, intelligence, not thought: this may make for a type of philosophy of a slightly dubious kind; this certainly makes for bad literature). The central point of the contrast is that, for Deleuze's Proust, philosophy is based on communication (conversation as the exchange of information) and art is based on interpretation.
But perhaps the most important column in the correlation is column 2, which contrasts subject and object. It is this contrast that constitutes the sign even as, conversely, the sign institutes the opposition between subject and object. In a world of signs, the object emits a sign, and the subject is subjectified in the process of recognising the sign as sign of the object and of interpreting it. So that the sign is deeper than the object to which it is still attached (it is a sign of the object) and than the subject that interprets it. The diagram below encapsulates this state of affairs:
The _madeleine,_ qua sign, is a triple or three-tiered entity. It is a bundle of sensible qualities, still attached to the object by their materiality; it is the site of an encounter, of an epiphany, a sign that must be interpreted, for signs must indeed be taken for wonders: it is, at this stage, already immaterial, but still attached to the subject that interprets it and which it makes a subject; and it is the expression of an immaterial essence, a sign of art, not _a madeleine_ , but _the madeleine_ , _Proust's madeleine_.
This account of the sign has, for anyone who has read the rest of Deleuze's work, two puzzling consequences. The first has already been evoked: in _Proust and Signs_ , interpretation plays a central role. A sign is in need of interpretation, a sign inhabits an object in that the object needs a subject to interpret the sign it virtually emits. The interesting point, however, is that Deleuze describes interpretation as a subjectifying, but not a subjective process: it is always a 'we', never an 'I', even Marcel, that interprets. Or, rather, there is a pure impersonal interpreting that selects both object and subject. This is not quite the interpretation as representation that Deleuze will strongly reject later.
The second consequence is the centrality of essence. For our last diagram must be improved, and give way to this diagram:
Meaning is implicated in the sign: the sign is a kind of monad, in the folds of which an entire world is contained. Interpretation etymologically explicates those folds. But the function of the essence is even more important: it holds the whole structure together by complicating both the object and the subject within the sign. The sign is folded, but the active enfolding is the work of the essence. In this description we recognise two constant themes in Deleuze's philosophy: the theme of expression, which he explores in his first book on Spinoza; and the theme of the fold, at the heart of his book on Leibniz. But we also recognise a problem: for the essence, as active enfolder, is placed in a position of transcendence, a fact duly noted in the diagram. And our philosopher is notorious for being a philosopher of immanence. So was _Proust and Signs_ a Platonist book, which means that he changed his position afterwards, or can there be such a thing as an immanent essence? I shall plump for the second solution, but this involves a reconsideration of the signs of art.
What allows signs of art to express essences is that they are immaterial. This does not mean that they have no material existence ( _le petit pan de mur jaune_ – the patch of yellow wall – in the Vermeer painting is a coloured fragment of canvas), but that such existence envelops an immaterial entity (what identifies that patch of yellow wall as a specific fragment, not as an indistinct region of a larger canvas, or again, the musical note as opposed to the sound it makes and we hear). This is where we have a potential difference between Deleuze's Proust and Deleuze _tout court_. Proust's spontaneous philosophy (a philosophy unable to reach truth and consequently inferior to art) is Platonism whereas Deleuze has always opted, most explicitly in _The Logic of Sense_ , for the Stoics against Plato. The problem of essences, therefore, is how to divest Proust of his instinctive Platonism. This operation takes the form of the construction by Deleuze of a concept of essence that is not transcendent, that is not a Platonist idea, but that is defined as _absolute difference_. Deleuze's solution is to treat the essence, and not only the sign, as a monad. More specifically, he insists on one characteristic of Leibniz's monad: that it is a unique point of view on the world. Each essence enfolds an entire world, complicates objects and subjects. This is what in literature we call an original voice, or more generally what in art we describe under the name of style. Thus the Proustian sentence or Cézanne's brush stroke encapsulates a point of view on the world, a unique way of viewing the world. So the essence is concerned with style, but not with a subject (the author or the artist): it is a point of view that complicates subject and object in a sign, or a work, of art. The central dimension in my last diagram is the vertical axis, the axis that goes from sign to essence.
Although we are no longer in Platonist transcendence (the essence is not a form, it is immanent in the sign it complicates – the sign is no longer a copy, the essence is not a model), there is more than residual idealism in Leibniz's doctrine of monads. This is discarded in the second part of _Proust and Signs_ , where the essence is described in terms of materiality and machines: the title of this section, we remember, is 'The Literary Machine'. This occurs through the production of a new correlation, contrasting the image of thought of Greek philosophy, called _logos_ for short (the character that incarnates it is of course Plato), and the _antilogos_ of Proust's art. Here is the correlation:
The proximity of this correlation to the correlation formulated earlier is clear. But the differences are equally obvious. This is an anti-philosophical correlation where philosophy is demoted to the status of _doxa_ and opposed to thought, where philosophical conversation (Deleuze, as we know, hated dialogue, including academic conferences, all through his life) induces the garrulous communication of explicit meaning, not the silent interpretation of the signification implicated in the signs of art. We are moving away from a logic of representation characterised by observation and reflection (an apt word), into something closer to an etymologically aesthetic logic of sensation (where the subject is in the world, acting and acted upon) where signs are sites for intervention, here called translation. So it is art, not philosophy, that thinks. It is art, not philosophy, that instead of being content with mere words, is capable of the highest operation, the operation of naming that calls into being and does not merely represent the given (a whole poetics is implied here). This new world, which the bottom line of the correlation defines, is the world of _antilogos_ , the world of signs.
The two lines of the correlation can be contrasted as describing two different forms of language: the language of _logos_ , of conversation, is opposed to the language of signs, of translation and interpretation. In the terms of our first diagram (p. 76), the first type of language is the one that yields meaning, the second is characterised by style. For this is the main characteristic of style: _it is of the essence_. It is essential to the theory of art implicit in Deleuze's Proust, and it belongs not to the individual author, but to the essence.
So the essence links the subject and the object, as in our last diagram, by imposing the monadic point of view of style. This is the first answer, still tainted with idealism, to the question of the essence. The second answer, where the essence becomes thoroughly immanent, is materialist: the point of view of the essence is embodied in _the treatment of the materials of art_ , of sounds, images and words. Style is the acting out of the essence, the incarnation of an incorporeal quality. This paradox of the incarnation of the immaterial occurs, Deleuze claims, in the process of _metaphor_ – a surprising choice again, as Deleuze is widely known as the philosopher who hates metaphors, who is fond of quoting Kafka's pronouncement, 'Metaphors are one of the things that make me despair of literature'. But here metaphor is the expression of the essence, of the incorporeal quality that achieves a link between different objects. When Deleuze claims that in Proust 'style is essentially metaphor', he means that style acts out, or captures, the essence by establishing a creative or imaginative equivalence between two objects. But there is a materialist twist to this: metaphor does not represent an ideal link between two objects, it materially makes them touch and coalesce. In other words, if style is 'essentially' metaphor, metaphor is 'essentially' _metamorphosis_. Two objects united by metaphor exchange their determinations, even their names. Thus (remember we are dealing with essences, with the world of art), Picasso's handlebar and saddle become the head of a bull, and the cine-metaphor fuses the two objects it convokes, even as Daphne becomes a laurel in countless Italian paintings and sculptures of the Renaissance. We understand why we must take style not as a representational operation but as a form of intervention. And the Stoic theory of causality later expounded in _A Logic of Sense_ enables us to understand how an immaterial and incorporeal essence can be an immanent effect of material causes. This is how style creates a world: a world of essences incarnated in the material metamorphoses of the object, in the capture of the interpreting subject's gaze. We have, therefore, a new chain of concepts:
Essence is the immanent point of view in the world created by style.
Lastly, we understand Deleuze's strangest pronouncement about style (one which he repeats at the very end of his _oeuvre_ , in _Essays Critical and Clinical_ ): that style is equivalent to non-style. How can he say this of Proust, how can Proust's highly characteristic style be equated with an absence of style? The answer is that the concept of style is the site of a paradox: it is both highly individual (recognisable, likely to be imitated and parodied, etc.) _and_ entirely non-subjective. Style is pure capture of the essence, which distributes both subject and object. Style is never 'the man' ( _le style, c'est l'homme_ ), always of the essence. There is non-subjective style in the same way as there is non-subjective interpretation.
**_An illustration of the concept of style: Boldini's portrait_**
Because this is all too abstract, here is an illustration. In 1897, the Italian painter Boldini painted a portrait of Count Robert de Montesquiou, the model of the Proustian aristocratic aesthete (Monsieur de Norpois, etc.). The count, complete with handlebar moustache, goatee and loosely tied cravat, cuts a dashing figure, a worthy representative of the world of _mondanité_ , the world of the vacuous signs of fashion. He looks with an interest mingled with reverence at an elaborately adorned cane which he holds in his right hand, no doubt the cane that he flaunts as he struts in the park.
That the portrait is rich in signs, that it gives forth all sorts of signs, is obvious. And it is equally obvious that the world of those signs is the world of worldliness. For the painting is indeed pervaded with vacuous signs: everything in it signifies, but only its own vacuity. The sitter's posture, his dress, his haircut, his cane – each of these is a statement of fashion. And all these signs have the specific characteristics of signs of worldliness. They are neither discrete nor articulated (they connote more than they denote, or rather they do denote, but their denotation is irrelevant: any other object might have replaced the cane, provided it was a pretext for a fashionable statement). They are caught up in ritual (the ritual of daily dressing; the ritual of partying in Faubourg St Honoré). They are ontologically heterogeneous (the cane is inextricably mixed up with the hand that holds it and the exaggerated gesture it expresses). They are local (such a portrait today makes us smile: it is dated and outdated; _our_ statements of fashion take other forms, and our appreciation of the portrait is purely nostalgic). And they are, consequently, unstable: the posture and look of the sitter expresses a structure of feeling which is alien to us and has only survived thanks to Proust.
Can we go further in the analysis of signs? We must. So far, I have conformed to the logic of representation and talked of the person of the sitter and his statements, forgetting the rather conspicuous fact that this is a portrait, that those signs of worldliness are also signs of art. (We remember that one of the characteristics of signs of art is that they are all-embracing: they include signs of worldliness, and can be constructed out of them.) So we do find the other characteristics of signs of art in the portrait. The fact that we are looking at a reproduction makes the first characteristic (that signs of art are immaterial) trivially true: the portrait has material existence, it is unique and monumental, and can be seen in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris: but it is also a type, reproduced in endless tokens. The second characteristic of signs of art is their climactic nature: they are the best signs, or signs par excellence. And indeed our sitter, the Comte de Montesquiou, who thought very highly of himself as a writer, is today completely forgotten, and only remembered through the signs of art in whose excellence he survives, Boldini's portrait and a few pages in _La Recherche_ : only through the signs of art has he acquired a modicum of eternity. The last, and main, characteristic is that signs of art express essences. But the painting is remarkable not so much for the fashionable statement made by the sitter as for the aesthetic statement made by the painter. Thus we notice a certain irony in the exaggerated pose of the sitter, captured in a careful and deliberate composition; thus, when we see the actual painting, we are struck by the treatment of the materials: the top of the cane, for instance, provides a dash of vivid blue in a portrait otherwise dominated by black, grey and brown tones; and the creamy white of the gloves – which Montesquiou had specially made for the sitting – is a way of making them appear _plus vrais que nature_ (in this proverbial phrase, 'truer than nature', the French language pays homage to the power of the false, which is central to Deleuze's aesthetic). And the portrait obviously belongs to a long and glorious tradition (we could compare it to Lotto's _Portrait of a Young Man Reading a Book_ , which is in Venice). So, in the portrait, there is every sign of the presence of style. That cane, of which Montesquiou was so inordinately proud because it had belonged to Louis XV, is typical of this: it fixes the beholder's gaze; it acts, in its dash of vivid colour, as a deliberate _punctum_. It is a sign of worldliness, a metaphor, but one that is metamorphosed into an object of aesthetic gaze, an aesthetic object – the cane of an aristocratic fop, and yet far more than a cane, the sign of the appearance of the essence.
**_Reading for style_**
I have tried to read Deleuze reading Proust in order to illustrate his version of a strong reading. And the conclusion I have reached is that Deleuze's strong reading reads for style: the emergence of style and the capture of essences is its objective. Deleuze does read Proust for style, even if he is paradoxically inclined to maintain that Proust has no style: he constructs a concept of style out of Proust, a concept that concerns the problem Deleuze extracts from Proust, the problem of signs. My own contention, which was developed in my own reading of Deleuze,18 is that in the rest of his work the concept of style (the presence of which is constant) names Deleuze's own problem, the problem of language.
There is indeed a history of the concept of style in Deleuze. We have caught it, in _Proust et les signes_ , at its very beginning (hence its strange associates: interpretation, essence, metaphor). But the concept persists, and it is always associated with the name of Proust, especially with the famous statement, 'The poet speaks a foreign tongue in his own language'. At the other end of the _oeuvre_ , in _Essays Critical and Clinical_ , we catch a final glimpse of the concept, now defined through the twin characteristics of a-grammaticality, or stuttering, and the striving of language towards its limits in silence or in non-linguistic media, images or sounds. We are again back to my first diagram, where style is opposed, within language, to meaning, that is to good sense and common sense. And we note that the cline of the sign puts language in its place: it is not situated at the apex of a spiritual progression, as in Hegel's aesthetics, where poetry is the highest, because the most spiritual, form of art.
We are now in a better position to characterise what a _problem_ is for Deleuze: it is not a question, it does not have solutions that put an end to it. It insists in the solutions offered and outlives them. It must therefore open up unexpected and creative vistas on its object, and yet it is not a case of 'anything goes': it must provide retrospective coherence for its object, it must be named by a single concept that must be constructed. In other words, a problem is the occasion for a strong reading. Or again, a Deleuzian problem is best described by the operation of the Lacanian stitching point ( _point de capiton_ ). The chain of signifiers majestically goes from word to word. At one point, it is intersected by the backward loop of the chain of signifieds, which goes back from the stitching point of comprehension to the beginning of the chain, as the stitching point is the point where suddenly meaning emerges, but only retrospectively ('so _that_ 's what it all meant'). My canonical example of this is 'Pride comes before a . . . vote of impeachment': so I was talking about Nixon all the time, not merely quoting the well-known proverb.
A strong reading, a reading for style, proceeds in similar fashion. We have a chain of signs of art, sentence after sentence, page after page, chapter after interminable chapter, that make up _La Recherche_. And we have a process of interpretation, of deciphering of those signs, which goes back from the stitching point of comprehension to the beginning of the chain. The intersected segment, from the stitching point backwards, is a reading of Proust: a reading that retrospectively, or against the grain of the text, extracts a problem. When the reading is achieved, it produces the concept that names it. For this is what reading for style is: reading towards style, in order to construct a concept of style. In Proust and, _en abyme_ , in Deleuze, Deleuze's reading of Proust induces a counter-reading, where the historicity of his philosophy is put in perspective (as interpretation and metaphor play a major role and are not merely the butts of his philosophical satire) and where philosophy itself, rather than exploiting literature, using it for its own ends, for the elaboration of the concepts of which it is only dimly aware, becomes subservient to art, the only path towards essences.
**_Notes_**
1. | D. Drouet, 'Index des références littéraires dans l'œuvre de Gilles Deleuze', in B. Gelas and H. Micolet (eds), _Deleuze et les écrivains_ , Nantes: Cécile Defaut, 2007, pp. 551–81.
---|---
2. | J.-J. Lecercle, _Deleuze and Language_ , Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002, ch. 6.
3. | B. Baugh, 'How Deleuze Can Help Us Make Literature Work', in I. Buchanan and J. Marks (eds), _Deleuze and Literature_ , Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000, pp. 42–3.
4. | G. Deleuze, _Cinema 2. The Time-Image_ , London: Continuum, 2005, pp. 24–9 (38–45).
5. | Ibid., p. 26 (41).
6. | Cf. C. Panaccio, _Le Discours intérieur_ , Paris: Seuil, 1999.
7. | Deleuze, op. cit., p. 28 (45).
8. | Ibid.
9. | F. Guattari, _Molecular Revolution_ , Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, pp. 189–90.
10. | G. Deleuze, _Proust and Signs_ , London: Continuum, 2008 (1960, 1970, 1977).
11. | Ibid., p. 3 (9).
12. | Ibid., pp. 3–4 (10).
13. | For an analysis of these four types of signs, see A. P. Colombat, 'Deleuze and Signs', in Buchanan and Marks, op. cit., pp. 14–33.
14. | Deleuze, _Proust and Signs_ , op. cit., p. 4 (12).
15. | H. P. Grice, 'Logic and Conversation', in _Studies in the Way of Words_ , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
16. | V. Woolf, 'The Mark on the Wall', in _A Haunted House_ , Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973, pp. 43–52.
17. | G. Deleuze, _Empiricism and Subjectivity_ , New York: Columbia University Press, 1991 (1953).
18. | See Lecercle, op. cit.
4
Badiou Reads Mallarmé
Mallarmé is an important figure for Badiou. In the very first pages of _Logic of Worlds_ he calls him 'his master' and claims that the first proposition he states: 'There are only bodies and languages, except that there are truths', is formulated in Mallarmean style.1 And he has been a consistent reader of Mallarmé: in _Théorie du sujet_ , we find a close commentary of two sonnets;2 in _Being and Event_ , the nineteenth 'meditation' is devoted to a reading of Mallarmé's famous spatial poem, 'Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard';3 the early collection of essays, _Conditions_ , contains an essay on Mallarmé's 'method'4 in which the same two sonnets and another poem, _Prose (pour des Esseintes)_ , are analysed; in _Handbook of Inaesthetics_ , Mallarmé is evoked in two essays, in a discussion with the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz and through a comparison with the Arab poet Labîd ben Rabi'a;5 finally, at the end of _Logic of Worlds_ , in a section entitled 'Commentaries and Digressions', Badiou, in reminiscent mode, evokes his intellectual debt to both Mallarmé and Beckett ('thinking under condition of Mallarmé', as he calls it) and even states that the whole of his philosophy has perhaps consisted of an attempt to understand the works of those two authors – this is no mean claim.6
So Badiou reads Mallarmé, compulsively and in detail, even if his is a restricted corpus (two sonnets and two longer poems): it is obvious he has a great book on Mallarmé in him. But it is equally true, as he himself insists, that Mallarmé reads Badiou: the shipwreck, the Mallarmean image which he privileges in his reading, is the poetic inscription of a Badiou event ('The "shipwreck" alone gives us the allusive debris from which (in the one of the site) the indecidable multiple of the event is composed'),7 and the cast of dice as event is nothing but the event of the production of the very symbol of an event, a second degree event ('The event in question in _A Cast of Dice_ . . . is therefore that of the production of an absolute symbol of the event. The stakes of casting dice "from the bottom of a shipwreck" are those of making an event out of the thought of the event').8 This attitude to the poem is entirely consistent with Badiou's concepts of truth and event: procedures of truth only occur in the four fields of science, art, love and politics, the four conditions under which philosophy, which does not produce truths itself but only 'compossibilises' the truths produced in other fields, operates. And the poem is sometimes given an even more important role to play, as matheme and poem are the archetypal conditions under which philosophy develops (a situation consistent with Badiou's lifelong interest in mathematics, which he ascribes to the influence of his father, and his lifelong passion for poetry, which he ascribes to the influence of his mother) – it is either an event itself, the event of the inscription of the event, or part of an artistic configuration where the event occurs (the event, in that case, is a group of poems, or works of art): 'In the final analysis, the pertinent unit for the thinking of art as an immanent and singular truth is neither the work nor the author, but rather the artistic configuration initiated by an evental rupture').9 The seriousness of the enterprise of reading Mallarmé therefore is not in doubt: the question that arises is not why Badiou reads Mallarmé (that he finds in his poetry an inscription of the very event of which he constructs the concept, that, in that sense, it is Mallarmé who reads Badiou, is abundantly clear), but _how_ he reads him.
**_How Badiou reads Mallarmé_**
The most striking aspects of Badiou's reading technique are the closeness and explicit nature of the reading. What we have is an example of the French tradition of _explication de textes_ , that glory of the French educational system which combines the most precise and detailed analysis of the text with the clarity that pedagogic exposition demands: an ex-plication in the etymological sense, not merely an interpretation of the text but an unfolding of its complexity. Badiou is not only a considerable philosopher, he is also a gifted teacher, and the closeness of his reading sharply differentiates him from Deleuze, who has a more distant and sometimes offhanded attitude to the text he reads.
The first reading occurs in _Théorie du sujet_ , and the pedagogic aspect is partly explained by the fact that the book is the transcription (somewhat rewritten, I suspect) of an oral seminar: there are moments when Badiou is 'in front of the blackboard', drawing diagrams or clarifying things to a benighted audience.10 Two sonnets, usually known by their first lines ('A la nue accablante tu' and 'Ses purs ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx'), are presented in two sessions of the seminar. Before reading the sonnets, at the end of a previous seminar, Badiou indicates the object of Mallarmé's poetic writing: precisely the vanishing of the object, the evocation of its lack, in necessarily allusive language, as the word is divided between its usual verbal value and the silence which the evocation of an absence calls, as in the poem even the lack, the trace of the absence of the vanished object, is lacking (this lack of the lack is, according to Lacan, the source of anguish, _angoisse_ ). The reference to Lacan at this point is not innocent, as the respective styles, identified by the complexity of syntax, of the psychoanalyst and the poet, are the first things Badiou mentions when he starts his reading. And the reason for this is that the very complexity of the syntax guarantees that there is a meaning in the text, and a single meaning.
Having thus evoked both the univocity of meaning in a Mallarmé sonnet and the role of syntax, Badiou proceeds to read the poem. He starts by quoting it in full: an _explication de texte_ needs the physical presence of the text, so the reader can check the progress of the reading. We may imagine that, in the seminar, there was a handout or that the sonnet was written on the blackboard. The next move is more surprising: Badiou gives a prose translation of the sonnet ('What shipwreck has drowned even the masts and torn sails that were the last remnants of a ship? The foam that covers the sea, which bears the trace of the catastrophe, knows, but will not tell . . .'). Such a summary is coherent with the thesis that there is a unique meaning of the text: it becomes accessible to the puzzled reader, after syntactic parsing, in the form of the prose summary. The third move is precisely the syntactic parsing: thus the word _tu_ , the last word of the first line, is the past participle of the verb _taire_ and not the second person pronoun, even as the word _nue_ is an archaic word for 'cloud' and not a feminine adjective, and so on and so forth. The combination of prose summary and syntactic parsing allows Badiou to develop the semantic structure as a series of metaphors and metonymic chains.
The metaphorical sequence is given in the following diagram:
M0 is the mark of the metaphorical transfer from one couple of terms to the next. The interesting point is that the metaphorical chain begins with Badiou's two concepts for the description of a structure in _Théorie du sujet_ , with their picturesque names (there is system of placement in the structure, named _esplace_ , a space of places, as there is an element which rejects such placing, and finds itself _horlieu_ , out of the space of the structure). And this accounts for the next couple of terms, as the splace of the blank page bears the traces of the offsite inscription of the words, even as the metaphorical offsite of the foam corresponds to the splace of the cloud. The object of Mallarmé's poem therefore is the evocation of the absence of the structural dialectic itself.
The next move is the identification of metonymic chains, associated with one word, _écume_ , by way of two semantic hypotheses: the foam is the trace left by the shipwreck on the emptiness of the sea, and it is also the trace left by a diving, and drowning, siren. The apparition of the siren, in the form of its disappearance, redoubles the vanishing of the ship: it vanishes once in the shipwreck, and it vanishes a second time, and even more so, in a reinterpretation of the traces left on the surface of the sea, which suggest that the foam was not produced by a shipwreck but by a diving siren, so that there never was any ship. The shipwrecked boat and the drowning siren are evoked not directly as they are both absent from the scene of the poem, but by metonymic representatives: the mast of the vanished ship, the hair of the siren. The double semantic value of the word 'foam' presents the importance of the vanishing of the object, through a _terme évanouissant_ , a vanishing term, but also the division ( _clivage_ , a term with strong Lacanian connotations) of the word between verbal meaning and silence.
The last move, which closes the reading in that session of the seminar, is a diagram of the semantic constitution of the poem, of Byzantine complexity, in which the metaphorical movements and the metonymic chains are faithfully charted. And the last paragraphs, curiously but also typically of _Théorie du sujet_ , offer a transposition of the operation of Mallarmé's sonnet into the terms of revolutionary politics, where it appears that the spurious workers' state, the Soviet Union, with its belief in established and stable socialism, is not aware (this is 1976 and the Berlin Wall has not fallen) of the very instability of the structure of which the poet, with his vanishing siren, is fully aware.
In the next session of the seminar Badiou comes back to the sonnet by way of a discussion of Mallarmé's interest in the theatre, a discussion of the vanishing of the vanishing, exhibiting the causality of lack, in which the subject as literal exception emerges, and he criticises the closure of the sonnet on its fourteenth line. It is there that he makes his boldest move, by adding a new stanza, in his own writing, to the finished work of art. The objective is to reopen the sonnet, to reintroduce the vanished shipwreck that had been cancelled by the siren, in other words to reintroduce a form of infinity (the poem never ends) into the finitude of the sonnet (he adds, in his typical vein, that Stalin wanted to reach an end, but that Mao knew that the revolutionary process knew no end). This is of course anathema, as Badiou well knows (he is cocking a snook at the tradition of literary criticism): not only because Badiou is not Mallarmé and the added tercet is a paltry pastiche of the grand Mallarmean style, but because he goes against what is perhaps the main principle underlying the analysis of a work of art, which the work of Mallarmé consistently illustrates, the very closure of the work of art, the fact that it constitutes a self-contained totality, _tel qu'en lui-même enfin l'éternité le change_ : every work of art is a Grecian Urn – a sonnet with seventeen lines is indeed a strange object. And it is significant that when Badiou reads the sonnet again in _Conditions_ , the analysis takes only five pages of text, the prose summary is still there, as is the diagram of the metonymic chains, but the added tercet has vanished, in a shipwreck of theory.11
In the next session of the seminar, Badiou proceeds to the _mise à plat_ , the 'flattening out', etymologically the explication of a second sonnet, 'Ses purs ongles très hauts dédiant leur onyx'. Again absence, the void, are prevalent in the sonnet: the dying day has not even left a trace, the sitting room is empty, and the sonnet contains a famous coinage, the word _ptyx_ (the sonnet is a rhyming tour de force, rhymes in '-yx' not being frequent in the French language), which means nothing except the 'sonorous void of the signifier', in excess of the encyclopaedia of existing signifiers, but subtracted from the system of language in that no signified may be attached to it. The sonnet is in fact the staging of the three types of absence through subtraction, the vanishing (of the object), the cancellation (of the trace of the absence) and the forclusion (of the inexistent signifier). The method of analysis is the same as for the first sonnet: it begins with a prose summary of the sonnet, it goes on with the establishment of a univocal meaning of the sonnet (Badiou even discusses a letter by Mallarmé about an illustration for the sonnet: the univocal meaning can be made literally visible), followed by a translation of this meaning into concepts (void, forclusion, etc.) that belong to the philosopher's theoretical language and ending in a complex schema that again visualises the structure of the sonnet: a _mise à plat_ indeed.
So if there is a method in Mallarmé (the essay in _Conditions_ is entitled 'Mallarmé's method'), there is a method of reading Mallarmé in Badiou. This is usually called a poetics.
**_Badiou's poetics_**
A number of axioms, always made explicit at one moment or other of the text, guide Badiou's reading.
The first axiom is the axiom of the univocity of meaning. There is one and only one meaning in the text and it is the object of the reading to disclose it. Badiou here knows full well that he moves against the current of literary criticism (but he never hesitates to be _à contre courant_ ), the contemporary form of which is supported by the axiom of the infinite polysemy of the text. This is how he formulates the axiom in _Théorie du sujet_ : 'In spite of its opaque appearance, the machinery of a Mallarmé poem, let us emphatically state it, admits of one meaning only.'12
The second axiom is that the univocity of meaning is guaranteed by syntax. Mallarmé's syntax is notoriously hermetic, but this hermeticism is not a cover for semantic chaos: syntax conforms to fixed rules and the most complex sentence can be parsed to yield only one syntactic interpretation. Syntax it is that sustains the architecture of the poem and guarantees the solidity of its structure. This is a point where Badiou's Mallarmean poetics can be generalised, as syntax is equally a guarantee for Pessoa's poems and it is obvious that the axiom of the guarantee of syntax involves far more than a poetics – an entire metaphysics (Badiou is fond of saying that he is not afraid of the term):
I consider Pessoa's syntax to be the instrument of such a project [of building a modern metaphysics]. In this poet – beneath the images and the metaphors, as it were – there is a constant _syntactical machination_ whose complexity prohibits the hold of sensation and natural emotion from remaining sovereign. On this point, in any case, Pessoa resembles Mallarmé: often, the sentence must be reconstructed and reread for the Idea to traverse and transcend the apparent image. Pessoa wants to endow language – as varied, surprising and suggestive as it may be – with a subterranean _exactitude_ that I will not hesitate to declare algebraic. On this point, a comparison can be made to the alliance within Plato's dialogues between, on the one hand, a singular charm, a constant literary seduction, and, on the other, an implacable argumentative severity.13
As in Chomsky's picture of language, the deep structure of poetry is provided not by images and metaphors, but by syntax.
The third axiom is that of the precedence of prose. As we saw, Badiou systematically begins his analysis of the poems with a prose summary, something no self-respecting literary critic would dare to do, as it strongly suggests a conception of the poetic text where the poetic form is merely an ornament for a meaning if not better, at least more clearly expressed in prose. And Badiou is entirely explicit about it:
In appropriating the Mallarméan poem at a philosophical level, which presupposes that the absence be restituted (i.e. the thinking, under the sign of Truth, of the operation of a thought), I shall always begin with a 'translation', a sort of 'review from scratch', or punctuation of the poem's syntactic unfolding.14
And such translation must be in prose: 'the first reconstructed state [of the poem], where any form of poetry is withdrawn from the poem, which is left to its latent prose, so that philosophy may start from prose _back_ to the poetry, in order to reach its own ends.'15 In the formulation of this third axiom, danger words abound: not only because philosophy 'appropriates' the poem, which sounds like a form of exploitation, but because the idea that there should be 'latent prose' in a poem is singular, and the practice is reminiscent of the commentary of a poem for beginners, in a pedagogic situation (but Badiou, as we have seen, is a born pedagogue). We must note, however, that the third axiom is coherent with the first two: if meaning is univocal and syntax is complex, a clarification inevitably takes the form of an unravelling of the syntactic complexity in order to make the one and only meaning entirely explicit. The prose summary is the equivalent of the grammarian's parsing of the sentence in the shape of syntagmatic trees.
The fourth axiom sums up the first three. It is most clearly formulated in the nineteenth meditation of _Being and Event_ , when Badiou reads _A Cast of Dice . . ._ Here, for once, Badiou does not provide a prose summary of the text: the poem is probably protected from such iconoclasm by its spatial nature, the layout of the words on the page being an essential part of the text. This, of course, raises interesting questions: 'ordinary' sonnets are treated as if the spatial layout had no importance, or as if the poetic 'layout' of the text could be safely neglected, as if the latent prose of the sonnets were closer to the surface. (This idea that prose is the deep contents of the poem and that the poetry lies on the surface is deeply worrying.) The fourth axiom, then, states that a poem is an enigma and that its meaning is concealed (under the poetic surface) and must be disclosed by the analysis. This is how the nineteenth meditation begins:
A poem by Mallarmé always fixes the place of an aleatory event: an event to be interpreted on the basis of the traces it leaves behind. Poetry is no longer submitted to action, since the meaning (univocal) of the text depends on what is declared to have happened therein. There is a certain element of the detective novel in the Mallarmean enigma: an empty salon, a vase, a dark sea – what crime, what catastrophe, what enormous misadventure is indicated by these clues.16
Detective novel, crime, enigma, clues: the comparison is thorough. _Mallarmé, Agatha Christie, même combat!_ It would appear that Badiou can only deal with poetry by getting rid of the poetry (he says: only provisionally), as if poetry were an outer garment, easily discarded when the weather gets too hot.
**_Annoying the literary critic_**
It appears that Badiou's poetics is in fact a counter-poetics, as the four axioms go counter to the axioms, whether explicit or not, that support the literary critic's critical practice. Thus the literary critic, duly annoyed, is inclined to speak roughly to Badiou, as the Duchess in _Alice in Wonderland_ does in the famous ditty when she nurses what will turn out to be a pig:
Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes;
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases.17
Badiou's sneezes go against the four axioms of the literary critic. The first axiom is that a poem is infinitely polysemous, or rather, since this seems slightly exaggerated, that the function of the poem is to free the semantic potentialities of language, so that the poem cannot be pinned down to a single meaning but is rather a coalescence of various meanings. The second axiom is that the syntactic structure of the poem does not guarantee a single meaning since, if syntax does structure the text, it is not univocal itself, and the poem is the type of text that consistently plays with syntactic ambiguity or ambivalence. (The trope called 'double syntax' is a good instance of this constitutive slippage of syntax.) And if in a poem the syntax is not ambiguous, it may well be creative and subvert its own rules. This axiom follows from the first, as it simply transports it into the domain of syntax, even as Badiou's second axiom follows from the first. The third axiom is that there is no possible translation of poetry into prose: prose cannot in any way precede the poetic shaping of the text. A poem is a poem is a poem, and there cannot be any 'latent prose' in it, unless it deliberately plays with the prosaic idiom, as is often the case with the poetry of Rimbaud but certainly not of Mallarmé, at least of the texts Badiou reads. Any reduction of the poem to prose is inadmissible, as ludicrous as A. L. Rowse's transposition of Shakespeare's sonnets into modern English for the benefit of a philistine American public. The fourth axiom sums up the first three, even as Badiou's fourth axiom also sums up the three preceding ones: to treat the poem as an enigma to be deciphered, in the best style of Bletchley Park, is to adopt the rather simplistic theory of interpretation which I have called the 'tin-opener' theory of interpretation (if you peel down the thin layer of metal, you can tuck into the luscious sardines of meaning).18
But the literary critic soon gets even more annoyed. For he holds an essential fifth axiom, which Badiou's reading method implicitly denies. This fifth axiom states that in the matter of poetry, or indeed of any literary text, the signifier plays a central role: in literary texts, language can never be a mere instrument of communication, it can never be reduced to a transparent conveyor of signifiers (as it becomes when the poem is reduced to its latent prose). There is no analysis of a poem that does not ascribe a central function, in the construction of an interpretation, to rhyme, rhythm, assonance, alliteration and the material shape of the signifier, all of which Badiou, in spite of his Lacanian origins, blissfully ignores, as we saw with the second sonnet, which is written for an 'impossible' rhyme, the '-yx' rhyme. Badiou's metaphoric and metonymic chains, in which his close reading of the text mainly consists, operate at the level of the signified: that this cloud should be a _nue_ , with the obvious lexical ambiguity with the feminine adjective meaning 'naked' (whereby the siren of the last line is already convoked) is of no importance. And it is significant that, although syntax is supposed to play an important part in Badiou's reading, no syntactic analysis, except the simplest translation into the 'normal' order of words, is suggested by Badiou. In order to understand this, all we have to do is to compare his reading to Jean-Claude Milner's reading of another Mallarmé sonnet: Milner, who is a Lacanian linguist, proceeds through a careful analysis of the syntax, in all its complexity (Mallarmé exploits all the resources that syntax gives, including all the possible ambiguities it involves), and one of his conclusions is that 'Mallarmé well knows the powers of homophony and all forms of playing with language'.19
In reading poems in this fashion, Badiou merely reproduces the practice of the most traditional form of literary criticism, which is erudite but literal and simplistic. In the Pléiade edition of the complete works of Mallarmé, which is the edition of reference, the sonnet has a note that tells us where it was originally published and mentions the existence of a manuscript version in a private collection. It goes on by providing a prose translation or summary of the poem, which reads exactly like Badiou's, and a syntactic re-transcription of the poem, with the following comment: 'This sonnet, which is considered to be one of the most difficult of Mallarmé's sonnets, loses any obscurity of meaning when, by cancelling the syntactic inversions, the order of the scattered words (suggestively so, like the debris of a shipwrecked boat) is recovered.'20 That enlightened commentary was published in 1945: since then literary theory has somewhat progressed.
The five axioms that Badiou holds (the fifth, implicit axiom reads: in a Mallarmé poem, the signifier is negligible) are coherent in so far as they inscribe a philosophy of language of a traditional kind. That philosophy underpins the tin-opener theory of interpretation, which has the following four characteristics:21 (1) the interpretation follows a path from the benighted first reading (the text has encrypted its meaning) to the enlightened reading that the interpretation produces, even as the interpretation of a dream is a passage from its manifest to its latent content; (2) this path is unique, the right path as opposed to the _impasse_ of false understanding; (3) progress along the path of interpretation is achieved by _glossing_ (translating the poetry into prose, syntactic reordering) and _guessing_ (solving the enigma of the text); (4) progress along the path will be achieved by using critical tools, such as the construction of metaphoric or metonymic chains, and the result will be a matheme of the poem, inscribed in the diagram that gives its structure, or semantic skeleton (the flesh of the signifier being negligible).
This theory of interpretation in turn involves a philosophy of language which, because it remains implicit in Badiou, is nothing but the mainstream, or commonsense, philosophy of language. Badiou, as we have seen, resists the 'linguistic turn' in contemporary philosophy, and his system has no place for language, except in the shape of naming (the naming of the event is an integral part of it) – language itself, being the language of the situation and as such incapable of dealing with the radically new, that is the event, is of no consequence. But the repressed philosophy of language returns, here in the shape of a theory of meaning aptly captured by what is known as the 'conduit metaphor': ideas are objects, linguistic expressions are containers, communication is sending.22 Or again, there is an intention of meaning in Mallarmé, which precedes the text (he knows exactly what he wants to say; he also wants to express his meaning obliquely, so that it will have to be deciphered by the clever interpreter). Such an intention of meaning is embedded in a form of linguistic expression that renders the meaning temporarily obscure. And successful communication is achieved when the poet encounters a reader subtle enough to understand what was meant and altruistic enough to make it clear to a mass of unenlightened readers. This conception of interpretation and of language is widely shared (it is apparently shared by Milner in the text I quoted: he also treats Mallarmé's sonnet as an enigma, even if his analysis is based on a careful study of the signifier, which is no longer negligible). It is nevertheless rather dubious.
**_Paradoxes_**
Am I being unjust to Badiou? His reading method is difficult to accept for a literary critic, but it is meant to yield results, and it does. So we have not only axioms, but a number of theorems on Mallarmé's poetry, of which the passage on Pessoa's syntactic machinations I quoted earlier gives an idea. A poem by Mallarmé fixes the place of an event. It stages the traces of the vanishing of the event, or rather their absence. It operates, by subtraction, on such absence. It can be treated as an enquiry into the appearance of the event, which results in its naming, in a procedure of truth from which a faithful subject emerges. The operation of syntax in the poem preserves it from the _pathos_ of imaginary identification and the revelling in bodily affect: there is a _logos_ , not a _pathos_ , of poetry. And such interpretation of Mallarmé's poetry is compelling. Here, the literary critic may well argue that Badiou finds in Mallarmé exactly what he wanted to find in him, namely the concepts of his philosophical system, and that the result of the analysis precedes the analysis itself. But this argument is not sufficient, as the relationship may be inverted: Badiou thinks under the condition of Mallarmé, it is Mallarmé that reads Badiou. In a spirited defence of Badiou's reading of Mallarmé in _Théorie du sujet_ , Oliver Feltham attempts to show that Badiou's reading method, far from being imposition and appropriation (of philosophical concepts on to the text, of the text by an invasive philosopher), actually treats Mallarmé's sonnet as a model for Badiou's theory, in the precise sense of the term which he developed in his first philosophical work, _Le concept de modèle_.23 In Badiou's reading, 'semantic values, such as "foam" and "siren", are assigned to the syntax of the structural dialectic, and then the re-evaluated dialectic is tested for completion within the semantic field of the sonnet.'24 So Badiou's interpretation does not stop at the tin-opener stage: there is not only parsing and the solution of an enigma (though there is also that), there is translation (of the text into the language of the theory) and modelling (of the theory by the text), which is a form of intervention (the text reads the theory that reads it). By a sort of _felix culpa_ , dubious axioms deliver what is undoubtedly a strong reading. We find ourselves immersed in paradox. But paradox, the outside of _doxa_ , is the very site of philosophy. Indeed, Badiou's poetics may be characterised by a number of paradoxes.
The _first paradox_ is trivial enough. It concerns the philosopher who denies the centrality of language, has no place for language in his philosophical outlook and yet waxes eloquent in the denunciation of the despised medium. For philosophy, like poetry, is an exercise of/in language. This of course reminds us of Deleuze's essay, 'The Exhausted', which deals with Beckett's late television plays, where language there is none, but where Deleuze deals with the situation not only in terms of Beckett's language, but of three different types of language.25
Badiou does belong to that line of philosophers (rather rare these days) who resist the overwhelming importance of language for philosophy. He does this in two ways. He upholds the position of truth against the modern sophistry of the poststructuralists and postmodernists, and he rejects the linguistic turn taken by philosophy, both in the Wittgensteinian version (where all philosophical problems are grammatical problems) and in the Heidegerrian, hermeneutic, version, so that for him this first paradox is no paradox. Philosophy operates by subtraction, and what the subtraction mainly achieves is breaking the surface of language, where the Sophist has established himself.26 This abandonment of language as a field of philosophical enquiry is a small price to pay for avoiding the position of the Sophist, for whom there are no truths but only techniques of utterance and sites for enunciation, and for whom there is nothing but a multiplicity of language-games, as being is inaccessible to thought.27 We have seen that there is a price to pay for this: the implicit reliance on a concept of language of the most traditional and doxic kind. But avoidance of the paradox is easy for Badiou: all he has to do is carefully separate natural language, a hindrance to philosophy, from the language of ontology, which is the language of mathematics.
Is this merely a restatement of Carnap's traditional position? It is not: Badiou does not use the contrast between natural and artificial languages, and, more important for us and a major difference with Carnap, he raises the question of the poem: perhaps there is a way, after all, of saving language for philosophy through a celebration of poetical practice.
This seems in fact to be Badiou's real answer: the operation of subtraction separates philosophical discourse from the poem. This is a Platonist gesture, the recognition of the constitutive diaphor ( _diaphora_ ), or discord, between philosophy and poetry, between the poem and philosophical argument. We can express this through a correlation, with Greek names, for this philosophical battle was fought long ago on the Aegean, and we, on this distant northern sea, have merely inherited it: _poiesis_ versus _dianoia_28 (the vatic celebration of being is opposed to the slow and painful argumentative path that rises up to first principles), _pathos_ versus _logos_ (the poem is a site for the expression of affect, the philosophical text deals with argument and logic).
This solution to our first paradox, which separates a reasonable or purified use of language from its poetic uses, is essentially Plato's solution in his expulsion of poetry from the ideal _polis_. But it is still unsatisfactory, not least for Badiou: it tends to reduce the poem to an exercise in sophistry.29 He duly notes that Plato, having explored the limits of _dianoia_ , 'must himself resort to images, like that of the sun; to metaphors, like those of "prestige" and "power"; to myths, like the myth of Er the Pamphylian . . .'30 It appears that there might be more to language than 'idealinguistery', the Lacanian term by which, in _Théorie du sujet_ , he dismisses any attempt at a philosophy of language as mere sophistry.31 Badiou's materialism implies the rejection of the idealism that any thinking of language inevitably carries with it. This is one of the things that, according to him, we learn from Celan:
Contrary to the declarations of the modern sophists, there is indeed a fixed point. Not everything is caught in the slippage of language games or the immaterial variability of occurrences. Being and truth, even if now stripped of any grasp upon the Whole, have not vanished. One will find that they are precariously rooted precisely at the point where the Whole offers its own nothingness.32
By the modern sophists he means practically every contemporary philosopher (Derrida, Lyotard, etc.), but not Deleuze, who shares his intense dislike for Witggenstein's philosophy.
But Badiou is, in this respect, singularly placed. Hence a second paradox.
The _second paradox_ notes that Badiou, the arch anti-Sophist, he that almost single-handedly resists the linguistic turn, is, as a novelist and playwright, a technician if not of language in general (he is no linguist), at least of poetic language. As we know, he shares with contemporary Sophists a passion for literature. And like all those philosophers, he has constructed his own idiosyncratic canon, a number of poets whose names appear again and again in his work: Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Celan, Pessoa.
An elementary solution to the second paradox consists of producing a symmetrical position to that of the philosopher who becomes a surrogate poet: the position of the poet as surrogate philosopher. If, when the limits of argumentative thought, of _dianoia_ , have been reached, philosophy waxes poetic, then we may call for a moment when, the vatic impulse of the poem being exhausted, the poem abandons _pathos_ for _logos_. We may wish for a poetry of pure _logos_ , the only object of which is the contemplation of ideas, the production of truths. Such a poem, as we saw, Badiou finds in the works of Mallarmé, a poem that presents itself as thought. And we may now rehearse the not unproblematic progression towards the poetic climax of the modern poem in Mallarmé.
It all begins, inevitably, with Parmenides: the first philosophical argument takes the form of a poem and the founding philosopher is also a poet. This is where the separation must operate: the first move in philosophy is the desacralisation of the poem, the interruption of the revelling in _pathos_ , its substitution with rational argument, a violent form of intervention. Here is how Badiou describes the process: 'Philosophy requires [ _exige_ ] that the authority of _profound_ utterance [ _profération_ ] be interrupted by argumentative secularization.'33
From this violent intervention, three types of relationship between philosophy and poetry emerge. First comes the Romantic tradition, from Parmenides to Heidegger, where poetic language is the natural site for authenticity and the disclosure of being and truth. This is clearly the wrong path, as it is the path that resists the separation between the two modes of language. Second comes the aesthetic tradition that begins with Aristotle, where the poem is no longer a source of knowledge but the object of the theoretical gaze of the philosopher, on a par with natural phenomena and no longer concerned with truth but only with verisimilitude. This path, too, is clearly wrong: it fails to do justice to the power of the poem. Third comes the Platonist gesture of exclusion, which rejects the poem because of its very power, of its charm in the etymological sense. Such a gesture recognises the extraordinary power of poetry and constantly re-enacts the movement of separation that constitutes philosophy, thereby also recognising, through a form of Freudian denial, that philosophy and poetry, at least at the beginning if not in principle, are inextricably mixed. The three positions are sometimes called by Badiou 'artistic schemata': Plato's schema is didactic in so far as it asserts that art is incapable of truth, although it exerts considerable charm and must therefore be kept under close surveillance. In an interesting, and faintly ironic twist, Badiou notes that the contemporary version of this schema is the Marxist position towards art, captured at its didactic best in Brecht – there lies his 'greatness'.34
Badiou's own poetics can be described as an effort to reach a fourth position, which would maintain the separation between the poem and philosophical discourse, but would accept that the poem is the site for the production of truths. (We remember that, for Badiou, truths always come in the plural: the concept of Truth is empty.) Such a position may be expressed through a _third paradox_ , this time an entirely positive one.
On the one hand, the poem is a site for truth, and as such a _condition_ for philosophy. If philosophy, as Badiou claims, is a procuress of truths (he uses the word _maquerelle_ , with its fine eighteenth-century connotations), the poem creates any number of ravishing young persons, of either sex, for philosophy to thrive upon.
On the other hand, philosophy operates as a _deposition_ of poetry: it demands of the poem that it should abandon its auratic search of or revelling in meaning, it demands the abandonment of all forms of _pathos_. Thus Deleuze must be criticised for taking his aesthetics seriously, that is literally, for constructing an aesthetics on the extraction of blocks of affects from affections, of percepts from perceptions, and thus sharply separating concepts from percepts and affects. The tables have been turned: it is Deleuze who accomplishes the Platonist gesture of separation between philosophy and the poem, whereas Badiou's deposition relieves such separation in the Hegelian sense, which explains the proximity of philosophy to myth and metaphor, and also the distance between _logos_ and _pathos_ : deposition operates through the de-aesthetisation of the poem, the separation between the presence of the idea, which the poem captures, and the _pathos_ of bodily affection, which it must discard.
In this type of poetics, a lot is demanded of literature: what the poem must renounce, what is deposed in it, is all that seems to concern the poem's relationship to language.
Here is Badiou in the essay tellingly entitled 'The philosophical recourse to the poem': 'Philosophy wants to and must be established in this subtractive point where language, divested of the prestige, or mimetic incitement, of images, of fiction and of narrative, is consigned [ _s'ordonne_ ] to thought.'35 Two pages later, he adds comparison and rhythm to this list. But of course Badiou is aware that not only the poem, but philosophy itself, has recourse to all those techniques of language. The difference between the poem and philosophy (deposition is merely the inscription of the necessity of this difference) lies in the fact that, in philosophy, such techniques are precisely _located_ , at the place where a truth emerges that punctures meaning and defies interpretation. What is demanded of the poem, in order for it to condition philosophy, is that, in resisting the charm and incitement of fiction, image and narrative, it should choose truth, which does not make sense, against meaning, which all too readily makes conventional sense, and thereby fosters interpretation. For what fiction, narrative and metaphor, in their literary pervasiveness, produce is a plurality, or a surfeit, of interpretations.
Hence the poetry that Badiou calls for, and finds in Mallarmé. Such a poem has two singular characteristics: it is a poem of _logos_ , a poem concerned with thought, and it is a poem capable of naming the event, of extracting from the advent of the event not affects and percepts but truths (where it appears that Badiou's poetics is the inverse of Deleuze's aesthetics).
It is easy to see why language is a problem in Badiou's poetics, why its importance for poetry, as indeed for philosophy, is obvious and crucial but deeply paradoxical. Language is always, at first at least, the language of the situation, in which the event cannot be named, in which the truths that follow from the event cannot be formulated. And yet the unnameable event _must_ be named, and a new language, adapted to that naming, must be forged, a violent process. The language of the poem is paradoxical because it is the site of a violent birth: in order to attempt to name the unnameable, the poem must break and reconstruct language. There are revolutions in language, as there are in society. 'Mallarmé' is the name for this new operation of the poem. And indeed Badiou's poetics seems to be a reformulation of Mallarmé's poetic programme, as expressed by the famous sentence, _donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu_ ('give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe').
Having said this, we immediately encounter the _fourth paradox_ with which I have already dealt at length, as it is at the heart of Badiou's technique of reading the poem: on the one hand, the poem, qua thought, has nothing to do with semantics and meaning and everything with 'negation' and with syntax; on the other hand, much to the surprise and the indignation of the literary critic, he begins with a prose translation of the poem. And since Badiou is too subtle a reader not to be aware of what he does (and of the literary critic's potential indignation), it is time to try and make positive sense of what he does.
I shall suggest a number of propositions.
The first thing to note is that this poetics is not an aesthetics. This is the note that defines his 'inaesthetics', at the very beginning of his _Handbook of Inaesthetics_ :
By 'inaesthetics', I understand a relation of philosophy to art, maintaining that art is in itself a producer of truths, makes no claim to turn art into an object for philosophy. Against aesthetic speculation, inaesthetics describes the strictly intraphilosophical effects produced by the independent existence of some works of art.36
This gives us a frame for a number of positive propositions about art _in its relation to philosophy_ , that is art as it must be in order to condition philosophy (and conversely, philosophy as it must be in order to be conditioned by art: the relationship is not one-sided).
The first proposition is by now familiar to us: syntax is essential to the constitution of the poem. The contrast between semantics and syntax is a constant in Badiou's reflections on the poem: in this, he follows Mallarmé, whom he is fond of quoting on the subject ('We need a guarantee: syntax').37 Hence the _syntactic machination_ he finds in both Pessoa and Mallarmé: the poem disturbs the natural flow of reading and delays interpretation, a constant but mistaken urge; it does this in order to give time to the Idea to work through the immediate image. In his answer to the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, who deplores the hermeticism of modernist poetry, Badiou insists on the crucial function of such syntactic convolutions. This is of considerable interest for the literary critic, even if the claim is still largely formal (there is no real syntactic analysis in his readings, as we saw). It should be the task of the critic to develop such intuitions of the philosopher.
The second proposition is specific to Mallarmé's poems. In his reading, Badiou identifies three types of 'negation'. (This is one of the statements that I have called his 'theorems'.) The first is the _vanishing_ that marks the absence of the event in the site of its emergence. Thus, in the first sonnet he reads, the absent word, 'shipwreck' ( _le naufrage_ ), names the event and is represented in the text by a chain of metonyms of which it is the absent source. The second is the _cancellation_ , which is a mark of the undecidability of the event. The traces left by the shipwreck on the surface of the sea may have been left by the vanishing siren: the vanishing of the ship is thus itself cancelled. The third is the _forclusion_ that marks the absence of even the slightest trace, the paradoxical marking of the impossibility of the mark, the forceful absence of the radically unnameable. The foreclosed terms are that which no poetic truth can force into expression: the subject (the poet), the end (of the poem, of the subject: death), the material worked upon (language itself is foreclosed in the poem: you can poetically express any number of things, but not language). This, to the literary critic, is highly interesting in that it might be a characterisation of style: the forcing out ( _forçage_ ) of language, when it is taken to its limits, towards its vanishing point into mere gibberish or silence. Except of course, there is no lyrical revelling in the ineffable in Badiou's poetics: such negations, such absences, are structural. A poetics of truth has the clarity and asceticism of rational structure, and the absence of the relevant term is part of the argument of the poem.
As a result of this, this is the third proposition, the poem is no lyrical celebration of affect or disclosure of meaning, but an _operation_ : neither a description nor an expression.38 Such an 'operation', when the reader has to accomplish it in her turn, is the inverse of interpretation: it does not claim to offer a key to the meaning of the poem that is being read, it provides an entry into the poet's syntactic machination. Let the poem itself operate: this is what the surface hermeticism of the text demands. The term 'operation' is chosen advisedly: it radically cuts off any reference to affect and the ineffable. A poetry of _logos_ is a poetry of operations, not strictly mathematical ones, but certainly as rational as those of mathematics.
The fourth proposition is that this defines a poetics of purity and void. The 'purer sense' that the poem, in Mallarmé's phrase, gives 'the words of the tribe' is a reaching out for the purity of what he calls 'the Notion' and what the philosopher calls the Idea. Neither elegy, nor hymn, nor lyrical outburst, the poem is a reaching out for the purity of the Idea (this is the poetic version of the operation of subtraction). These are the four words in which Badiou sums up the operations of poetry qua thought, to be found in Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Hölderlin and Beckett: disobjectivation, disorientation, interruption and isolation. As we can see, such poetics relies on negation in the same sense as negative theology does, or in the sense that the Real in Lacan can only be grasped through negative description (it is senseless, indifferent, impossible, etc.): in the same vein, a truth for Badiou is undecidable, indiscernible, unnameable and generic. (The last term is as negative as the others: it means that no characteristic of such truth may be expressed in the prevailing encyclopaedia.)
I think that we now understand why such a poetics, obnoxious as it may appear to be to the literary critic, is so fascinating: it makes for what are undoubtedly strong readings, of Rimbaud, for instance ( _Conditions_ has an essay entitled 'Rimbaud's method'), and certainly of Mallarmé. In spite of the initial operation of translation, in spite of the precedence of prose, in spite of the dubious philosophy of language such method convokes, the readings of the Mallarmé poems are compelling. Suddenly the words of those hermetic poems come alive (I almost wrote 'make sense', which is exactly what, according to Badiou, they do not), and a coherence emerges around the concepts of event, naming and fidelity.39 But can we go further? Can we find interest in this reading for the literary critic, independently of the philosopher?
The interest of such reading is that it ascribes its true power to poetry. Badiou is fond of the French phrase _à la hauteur de_. _Penser à la hauteur de Pessoa_ (the English version, inevitably, loses the metaphor: '[thought] that is worthy of Pessoa'):40 what is this 'height' which the philosopher must share with the poet? It is the singular power of language. We must beware of the traps of translation here, lest we fall back into the sophistic celebration of language which Badiou wishes to avoid at all costs. His phrase is _les puissances de la langue_ , 'the powers of language'41 – the lexicon is not entirely consistent, since a few lines later this _puissance_ becomes _pouvoir_ (translated as 'power'). But the general drift is clear: _potentia_ is not merely power and _langue_ is not language. In Mallarmé, such power is identified as the power eternally to state the disappearance of what presents itself, in other words to capture the emergence of the event. Such _hauteur_ enables us to understand why the poem is indeed a condition of philosophy.
But other poetics, not least the Romantic tradition that gives all power to language, ascribe similar, if not greater, importance to the poem. So there is something else that, in Badiou's poetics, deeply satisfies the literary critic. It is a poetics of the anti-lyrical, of the impersonal, as opposed to the effusions of an affected subject (what Deleuze contemptuously calls his 'dirty little story' – and by which, unlike Badiou, he means what psychoanalysis is looking for). Badiou's poetics does not take as its elementary unit of poetic thought the single work or the personal author, but what he calls the artistic configuration, which is the true site for the emergence of the event and the production of truths. In this, Badiou shares the modernist poetics one can find in his contemporaries, Foucault or Deleuze.
Badiou's originality, however, lies in the articulation of the two seemingly independent words, 'poem' and 'thought'. This is of special interest to the literary critic, at least if he takes his task seriously and holds, as I do, that literature thinks. Badiou is the thinker of poetry as thought. In this he has truly found a fourth path, or site, for the relationship between poetry and philosophy, beyond the _aporia_ of the contrast between _pathos_ and _logos_ , between auratic or lyrical vaticination and the exclusion of thought from poetry or poetry from thought. Badiou is one of the rare people, perhaps the only one, capable of making a decision, of solving the paradox the two terms form by firmly excluding one of them, the unexpected one, and turning the other, _logos_ , into the very stuff that poetry is made of.
Yet, fascinated as the literary critic is, sometimes to the point of enthusiasm, he cannot conceal a feeling of unease. The strong reservations that Badiou's reading technique has suggested will not vanish. Let me propose three reasons for this.
The first reason may be entirely contingent. We can formulate in a _fifth paradox_. Badiou appears to be a novelist whose thinking about art well nigh ignores the novel. Apart from a few references to the artistic configuration of the novel, culminating in Joyce, and giving the impression that it is now exhausted, the Badiou canon seems to be entirely composed of poets (this is a major difference from Deleuze). Since what must be deposed from poetry in order for it to think is the mimetic, characterised as the combination of image, fiction and narrative, there seems to be no place for the novel in Badiou's poetics: where poetry is concerned with truth, the novel is concerned with fiction and make-believe. In other words, the novel is an Aristotelian genre. But I think such a view would be deeply mistaken. Truths in Badiou are generic in yet another sense: artistic truths are situated in a genre. So his poetics is not a general aesthetics, not even a poetics of literature, but a poetics of the poem as specific site for specific truths, which are different from the truths of the novel. After all, Badiou is singular among contemporary philosophers in that he is not only a philosopher but has a recognised artistic position, at least in the field of drama: a notable dramatist himself (in this, his only rival, and predecessor, is Jean-Paul Sartre), he is also a well-known theorist of the theatre, whose positions are at the centre of lively discussion. (A trace of this may be found in the _Handbook of Inaesthetics_ in the shape of 'Theses for the theatre', the first of which, in a move that is by now familiar to us, states that 'the theatre thinks'.)42 There remains a nagging suspicion, however, that for Badiou qua philosopher, the novel is not the literary genre where literature thinks par excellence, whereas for Badiou the artist, novel and drama are the two genres he practises. Perhaps we should remember that in the interview published at the end of Oliver Feltham's book, he describes himself as an optimistic thinker but a melancholy writer.43 The poem presents the event which the novel can only represent: the optimism of capturing truth through artistic practice gives way to the melancholy of being able only to represent such truth in the language of the situation. We are not so far from Deleuze's definition of style as a-grammaticality and a reaching out to silence or images.
But the problem subsists, in the shape of a _sixth paradox_. As we have seen, Badiou's treatment of syntax is not yet _à la hauteur_ of Mallarmé's dictum on syntax as guarantee. The limited examples he provides in his readings reduce syntactic analysis to mere parsing, which in turn opens the way for semantic glossing, the reality behind the 'prose preparation' of the poem. We have already formulated this paradox: syntax here is merely another name for semantics, it is merely the name for the imposition on the poem of a single, because true, interpretation of the text. But this need not be so. I have already alluded to the concept of _forçage_ , 'a forcing of language enacted by the advent of an "other" language that is at once immanent and created', 44as Badiou puts it: this opens up vistas of a truly syntactic analysis of the poem, in which, again, Badiou would be close to his philosophical other, Deleuze, who, as we just saw, defines style through a-grammaticality and who tries to define what he calls an 'intensive line of syntax'.45
Nevertheless, the insistence on syntax as guarantee involves a _seventh paradox_ , the paradox of the precedence of prose in a poem, or, which is the same, of an analysis of a poem that totally neglects the role of signifiers. If syntax offers a guarantee, we are entitled to ask what it is a guarantee of. And Badiou's answer is unequivocal: it guarantees the univocal meaning of the text, the solution of the enigma that the text encapsulates. It enables the reader to have a mental picture of the scene described, of the actors involved and of the events which the poem narrates. In other words, it allows the reader to gain access to the representation that the poem stages. This combination of stable syntactic rules and univocal meaning, however, provides an excellent description of the language of what Badiou calls the situation: the already established language that will be recognisable to any speaker or reader that belongs to the situation. So the reader of Badiou's reading will duly 'understand' the meaning of the poem when its syntax has been 'flattened out' ( _mise à plat_ ). But this means that neither the poem nor the reading are _à la hauteur_ of the event: they merely _represent_ the event, they cannot _present_ it, as such presentation, of the traces of the vanished event if not of the event itself, requires an entirely new language. In other words, the poem represents an event but cannot be an event itself. This paradox has a potentially unfortunate side: a preference for the arch canonical author that is Mallarmé, a defender of the aesthetics of _Parnasse_ (a better version of Leconte de Lisle), over the rebellious or extra-canonical authors that are Rimbaud or Lautréamont, although Rimbaud too is part of the Badiou canon, as he devoted an essay to him in _Conditions_.46 As the title of the essay states, Rimbaud, like Mallarmé, has a 'method'. He too is a thinker of the event, and therefore of subtraction: but his favourite form of subtraction is not absence or forclusion, but interruption. The specific 'machination' of the Rimbaud poem is the non-fulfilment of the poetic promise that it contains, inscribed within the work of prose within poetry. Prose is with us again, but this time not as the medium in which the meaning of the poem is made clear, but as what subverts the canonical language of poetry, the symbolist idiom of which Mallarmé is the archetypal representative. Here prose is what subverts the language of the canonical situation, as a result of which the evental nature of the poem is easier to grasp. We are not so far from Kristin Ross's reading of Rimbaud in terms of the emergence of social space, the right to laziness and the participation in that political event (in the strong sense) that the 1870 Paris Commune was.47 Her reading of Mallarmé, however, is strikingly different from Badiou's as she interprets his poetry in terms of the fetishisation of the poetic text ('the thing which appears without a producer, which appears, according to Mallarmé's famous dictum, with "the elocutory disappearance of the poet" – in fact ends up promoting the reification it sought to resist').48 She contrasts Rimbaud's strategy of resistance ending in flight with Mallarmé's denial of the social, and his insistence on the performative function of language, the violence of slogans and the operation of denotation as opposed to signification with Mallarmé's problematic of signifier and signified where poetic discourse replaces the referent, a typical strategy for the canonical avant-garde. As we read her reading of Rimbaud, we realise the paradoxical nature of Badiou's privileging of Mallarmé as the poet of the event.
**_A strong reading_**
Since paradox has a constitutive relation to philosophy, its is only natural that Badiou should consistently indulge in it. The result is undoubtedly a strong reading, so we can leave him the last word. In the essay 'Art and philosophy' in his _Handbook of Aesthetics_ , he encapsulates the result of his reading of poetry in a number of propositions:
1. | As a general rule, a work is not an event. A work is a fact of art. It is the fabric from which the artistic procedure is woven.
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2. | Nor is a work of art a truth. A truth is an artistic procedure initiated by an event. This procedure is _composed_ of nothing but works. But it does not manifest itself (as infinity) in any of them. The work is thus the local instance or the differential point of a truth.
3. | We will call this differential point of the artistic procedure its _subject_. A work is the subject of the artistic procedure in question, that is the procedure to which this work belongs. In other words, an artwork is a subject of an artistic truth.
4. | The sole being of a truth is that of works. An artistic truth is a (infinite) generic multiple of works. But these works weave together the being of an artistic truth only by the chance of their successive occurrences.
5. | We can also say this: a work is a situated _enquiry_ about the truth that it locally actualises or of which it is a finite fragment.
6. | The work is thus submitted to a principle of novelty. This is because an enquiry is retroactively validated as a real work of art only inasmuch as it is an enquiry _that had not taken place_ , an unprecedented subject-point within the trajectory of truth.
7. | Works compose a truth within the post-evental dimension that institutes _the constraint of an artistic configuration_. In the end, a truth is an artistic configuration initiated by an event (in general, an event is a group of works, a singular multiple of works) and unfolded through chance in the form of the works that serve as its subject points.49
We have noted the presence of the chain of concepts that make up _Being and Event_ : event, truth, subject, enquiry, multiple. We also note the hesitation as to the nature of the work of art: is it an event or merely a fact of art, an element in the collective entity that is an artistic configuration? (In the next paragraph, Badiou states that the pertinent unit for thinking art is neither the individual work nor the individual author but the artistic configuration.) And Badiou's is undoubtedly a strong reading. The six characteristics of such a reading, as stated in the last chapter, are strikingly present in Badiou's reading of Mallarmé.
The first characteristic of a strong reading is that it goes against the grain of received _doxa_. It forces the reader into thinking. It insists on the violence of the practice of reading. And Badiou's reading of Mallarmé, which is traditional in its method, certainly goes against the grain of current interpretations, not least in its neglect of the role of the signifier. Thus we learn that the poet's hermeticism is only superficial and that the _préciosité_ , the euphuistic complexity, of his style is merely transitory, an unavoidable passage to the univocal meaning of the text which is what really counts.
The second characteristic inscribes this forcing of thought in the shape of the extraction of a problem. Even as Deleuze extracted the problem of the learning of signs from his reading of Proust, Badiou extracts the problem of the paradoxical presence of the absence of the vanished event.
The third characteristic moves from the extraction of a problem to the construction of the concept that grasps it. In the case of Deleuze's reading of Proust, the concept was a non-Saussurian concept of sign. In the case of Badiou, his reading of Mallarmé, or Mallarmé's reading of him, engages the construction of the system of concepts (event, truth, subject, fidelity, etc.) which _Being and Event_ expounds.
The fourth characteristic of a strong reading is its sheer persistence. The right problem, and the correct concept that grasps it, do not vanish once they have been respectively extracted and constructed: they persist. And even as Deleuze compulsively returns to his reading of Proust, Badiou keeps going back to his reading of Mallarmé and to the same few texts. Thus to say that Mallarmé consistently conditions Badiou's thinking is no exaggeration.
The fifth characteristic is that the consequence of such extraction, construction, persistence and insistence is an intervention rather than an interpretation. In the case of Deleuze, the best test of such an intervention was its capacity to shock the critical tradition of readings of Proust. That Badiou's reading of Mallarmé is meant to annoy the literary critic who believes in his _doxa_ is, I think, clear. Badiou's reading is as outrageous as it is compelling.
The sixth characteristic of a strong reading is that its very strength is a provocation for readers. In other words a strong reading is an instance of what Harold Bloom calls a creative misprision, a blatant misunderstanding that produces positive artistic or critical effects. As such, it calls for a _counter-reading_. Such, for instance, is the effect produced upon readers of Deleuze by Badiou's reading of Deleuze in his eponymous book. Such, as we saw, is the effect on the literary critic of his reading of Mallarmé. However, the literary critic, being an unredeemable sophist, rejoices at this characteristic, as it ensures the unending continuation of the chain of interpretations: a strong reading calls for a strong counter-reading.
**_Notes_**
1. | A. Badiou, _Logic of Worlds_ , London: Continuum, 2009, p. 4 (12).
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2. | A. Badiou, _Théorie du sujet_ , Paris: Seuil, 1982, pp. 92–109 and 118–27.
3. | A. Badiou, _Being and Event_ , London: Continuum, 2006 (1988), pp. 191–8 (213–20).
4. | A. Badiou, 'Mallarmé's Method: Subtraction and Isolation', in _Conditions_ , London: Continuum, 2008, pp. 49–67 (108–29).
5. | A. Badiou, 'A French Philosopher Responds to a Polish Poet' and 'A Poetic Dialectic: Labîd ben Rabi'a and Mallarmé', in _Handbook of Inaesthetics_ , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.
6. | Badiou, _Logic of Worlds_ , op. cit., p. 548 (573).
7. | Badiou, _Being and Event_ , op. cit., pp. 192–3 (214–15).
8. | Ibid., p. 193.
9. | Badiou, _Handbook of Inaesthetics_ , op. cit., p. 12 (25).
10. | Badiou, _Théorie du sujet_ , op. cit., pp. 92–128.
11. | Badiou, _Conditions_ , op. cit., pp. 49–53 (108–13).
12. | Badiou, _Théorie du sujet_ , op. cit., p. 92.
13. | Badiou, _Handbook of Inaesthetics_ , op. cit., p. 42 (70).
14. | Badiou, _Conditions_ , op. cit., p. 49 (109). This 'review from scratch' in French is a _mise à plat_ , a flattening out or etymological ex-plication.
15. | Ibid., p. 110.
16. | Badiou, _Being and Event_ , op. cit., p. 191 (213).
17. | L. Carroll, _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_ , Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994, p. 72.
18. | J.-J. Lecercle, _Interpretation as Pragmatics_ , Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999.
19. | J.-C. Milner, _Constats_ , Paris: Gallimard, 1999, p. 149.
20. | S. Mallarmé, _Œuvres Complètes_ , Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 1945, p. 1503.
21. | See Lecercle, _Interpretation as Pragmatics_ , op. cit., pp. 4–5.
22. | M. J. Reddy, 'The Conduit Metaphor – A Case of Frame Conflict in Language about Language', in A. Ortony (ed.), _Metaphor and Thought_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979, pp. 284–324.
23. | A. Badiou, _Le concept de modèle_ , Paris: Maspéro, 1969; new edition: Paris: Fayard, 2007.
24. | O. Feltham, _Alain Badiou. Live Theory_. London: Continuum, 2008, pp. 129–31.
25. | G. Deleuze, 'The Exhausted', in _Essays Critical and Clinical_ , London: Verso, 1998, pp. 152–74.
26. | Badiou, _Conditions_ , op. cit., p. 24 (81).
27. | Ibid., pp. 18–19 (74).
28. | Badiou, _Handbook of Inaesthetics_ , op. cit., pp. 17–18 (33).
29. | Ibid., p. 18 (33).
30. | Ibid., p. 19 (36).
31. | Badiou, _Théorie du sujet_ , op. cit., p. 204.
32. | Badiou, _Handbook of Inaesthetics_ , op. cit., p. 33 (56).
33. | Badiou, _Conditions_ , op. cit., p. 36 (94).
34. | Badiou, _Handbook of Inaesthetics_ , op. cit., p. 6 (16).
35. | Badiou, _Conditions_ , op. cit., p. 43 (101).
36. | Badiou, _Handbook of Inaesthetics_ , op. cit., p. xiv (7).
37. | Badiou, _Conditions_ , op. cit., p. 49 (109).
38. | Badiou, _Handbook of Inaesthetics_ , op. cit., p. 29 (50).
39. | Ibid., pp. 139–40 (213–14).
40. | Ibid., p. 36 (62).
41. | Ibid., p. 24 (43).
42. | Ibid., pp. 72–7 (113–20).
43. | Feltham, _Alain Badiou_ , op. cit., p. 137.
44. | Badiou, _Handbook of Inaesthetics_ , op. cit., p. 23 (41).
45. | See J.-J. Lecercle, _Deleuze and Language_ , London: Palgrave, 2002, ch. 6.
46. | A. Badiou, 'La méthode de Rimbaud', in _Conditions_ , op. cit., pp. 130–54.
47. | K. Ross, _The Emergence of Social Space_ , London: Verso, 2008.
48. | Ibid., p. 65.
49. | Badiou, _Handbook of Inaesthetics_ , op. cit., p. 12 (24–5).
5
A Modernist Canon? Badiou and Deleuze Read
Beckett
**_A modernist canon_**
Badiou and Deleuze both indulge in a canon, which means two things: they defend a number of writers about whom they write extensively; and this personal choice they project onto a theory of literature based on a discrimination of great art and a rejection of false or doxic art, what Badiou calls the art of communication and commerce. There is no cultural relativism in either Badiou or Deleuze: there are great texts, faithful either to the event or to life, and the task of the philosopher-critic is to find them and extol their greatness.
Being the result of personal taste and biographical chance (as is the case with Deleuze's admiration of Anglo-American literature), their canons somewhat differ. But, which is much more relevant, they also intersect to a considerable extent: in a word, both their canons are modernist canons. Thus Deleuze's canon will include Proust, Kafka, Artaud, Beckett and Woolf, with extensions to Carroll, Sacher Masoch and Melville, whereas Badiou's canon will include Beckett, Pessoa, Celan and Mandelstam, with extension to Mallarmé and Rimbaud. In his 'Third Sketch for a Manifesto of Affirmationist Art', Badiou takes mischievous delight in the adolescent game of making a list of great twentieth-century artists: Pessoa, Picasso, Schönberg, Brecht, Zadkine, Chaplin, Faulkner, Merle Cunningham; but also Wallace Stevens, Mandelstam, Celan, Berg, Bartok, Pirandello, Claudel and Brancusi; and again, Woolf, Mansfield, Beckett and Malraux.1 I have not quoted the list in full, but we note that, if we except the absence of Proust (for whom, unlike Deleuze, Badiou has little taste) and D. H. Lawrence, this is essentially a modernist canon, vigorously defended in these our postmodern times (the French version of Badiou's text appeared in 2004).2 We also note that for Badiou there is no unified art of literature (unlike painting – represented in the list by Picasso, music – Schönberg, or sculpture – Zadkine), as 'literary' texts are distributed across the poem (Pessoa), the theatre (Brecht) and the novel (Faulkner).
And of course, we note that the core of the intersection of Deleuze's and Badiou's canons is Beckett, to whom they both devoted a separate, if brief, text and to whose work they come back repeatedly in the course of their _oeuvre_.3 The English version of Badiou's collected texts on Beckett has three essays on top of the text of the short book,4 and the index of literary references in Deleuze's works has a whole page and no less than fifty-two entries.5
The adoption of a modernist literary canon is not original to Badiou and Deleuze: they share it with the so-called 'poststructuralist' philosophers, a category that includes Derrida, Lyotard and Foucault, that sometimes includes Deleuze (a somewhat doubtful ascription) and emphatically fails to include Badiou (for whom they are the modern Sophists). The question, therefore, is raised of this rather strange consensus.
There is a general answer to this question in Jameson's critique of what he calls 'the ideology of modernism' in _A Singular Modernity_ : for him, the very idea of a canon is a modernist stance, and consequently a canon is always a modernist canon.6 My question, therefore, is naive: it is always-already answered. But Jameson's assertion is highly questionable, not least in that it talks of _a_ canon: we have learnt to come to terms with the fact that there is more than one canon, that our academic canon, even if it is the best, is no longer the most influential, etc. Even if we forget about the vulgar middle-brow canons that dominate the current field (the canons of publishers, school boards and reading groups), the canon is still declined in the plural: Lukács's realist canon is not a modernist canon. And one might expect that 'poststructuralist' philosophers would adopt a postmodernist literary canon. But they don't.
Deleuze and Badiou, however, do believe in a canon of 'great' literature. And this apparently essentialist view of literature needs to be explained. Jameson himself provides another answer: Deleuze, Foucault and Lyotard are 'quintessentially' modernist philosophers. Thus, 'like Deleuze, Lyotard was himself in many ways a quintessential modernist, passionately committed to the eruption of the genuinely, the radically and, dare one say, the authentically new: a commitment which ultimately marks the politics of both men [. . .] as aesthetic.'7 We note the innuendo in the last words of the quote, which remind us of Benjamin's characterisation of the politics of national-socialism as aesthetic, although the commitment to the radically new does concern both Badiou and Deleuze.
Nevertheless, Jameson is aware of our question, as the following passage shows (he is speaking of the aesthetics of de Man and Adorno):
[E]ach is certainly to be counted as a modernist in his own fashion (as are, philosophically and aesthetically, yet in their various unique ways, Deleuze, Lyotard and Foucault, whose 'poststructuralism' – to raise a flag of passionate discord and heated debate – might rather have seemed consistent with some larger narrative of the postmodern).8
A few pages later he even contends that one cannot even call Deleuze a 'closet' modernist because of his explicit commitment to art and to the New.9
We need not necessarily adopt Jameson's definition of modernism as the cult of the New, which may sound more than a little reductive. But I shall briefly explore the intuition that Deleuze, but not Badiou, is a 'quintessentially' modernist philosopher.
**_Modernism in Foucault and Jameson_**
An elementary characteristic of literary modernism, which it is supposed to share with poststructuralist philosophers, is its critique of representation. The modernist break with realism and its attempt at representation finds its equivalent, for instance, either in the contrast between presentation and representation that sustains the argument in Lyotard's _Discours, figure_ ,10 or in the theory of literature sketched by Foucault in two famous passages of _The Order of Things_. The first passage occurs at the end of the second chapter, a chapter entitled 'La Prose du monde'.11 Foucault is trying to characterise the passage from Renaissance _episteme_ to the two _epistemai_ that can be called 'modern', the classical _episteme_ of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the truly modern _episteme_ of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is analysing 'the moments when things and words parted for good', 'an immense reorganisation of culture', as he calls it. This involves a characterisation of the function of literature, of its essence, and an account of its appearance, a periodisation. For literature, it seems, as symptom and heuristic device, plays a considerable part in our attempts at periodisation (this is strikingly the case in Rancière's theory of literature).12
The second passage occurs at the end of Chapter 4, entitled 'Parler'.13 The chapter deals with the place of language in the classical _episteme_ , and the text provides an account of both language and literature around the practice of naming: it stresses the crucial importance of the work of Sade (a typical hero of this canon, from Lacan to Adorno, even if his 'modernism' is questionable).
A general theory of literature is thus offered (the boldness of the gesture, in these our anti-essentialist times, hardly needs to be emphasised). But it has a function: it serves to bolster up the periodisation of Foucault's archaeology, which is divided into four periods. Jameson's account provides a convenient summary.14 There are four historical moments. The first is the pre-modern moment 'in which elements of the medieval are combined with the more superstitious features of the Renaissance'. The second is the classical moment of representation. The third is characterised by Jameson as 'the very moment of the invention of modern history as such, the moment of historicism, vitalism and humanism.' We could call this the moment of literature. But there is a fourth period, one that is hardly with us yet, 'a shadowy and prophetic realm, the realm of language and death, which lives in the interstices of modernity as its negation and denial.' That literature is also concerned with this moment, that it is in fact the privileged inscription of this moment (a privilege that is embodied in the choice of a canon), is clear: and that moment may rightly be called the moment of modernism.
We understand why Badiou cannot be called a modernist: he certainly does not belong to that 'fourth moment', the moment of language and death, as he rejects any centrality of language to philosophy and his thought is one of infinity as opposed to finitude, and the immortality to which the human subject must aspire rather than the obsession with death that characterises the melancholy side of contemporary philosophy. We also understand why Deleuze might be called a modernist philosopher. We note the appearance, in Jameson's account, of a concept to which Deleuze is not indifferent, the concept of vitalism. We also note, which is more to the point, that the 'dogmatic image of thought' which Deleuze wishes to overturn has representation for its central characteristic. Deleuze's 'modernism', if there is such a thing, will be closely associated with his critique of representation.
**_A critique of representation_**
We may start with a puzzle well known to students of Deleuze and which we have already encountered: the contradiction between his notorious hostility to metaphor (there are numerous passages in his work that insist on this) and his equally notoriously metaphorical style.15 It is all very well to claim that metaphor is one of the reasons why one must despair of literature or to coin the slogan 'not metaphor but metamorphosis', but there is a problem if one, in the same breath, describes a face as a combination of a black hole and a blank wall. The black hole is a metaphor borrowed from one of the hard sciences and the whole construction of the concept of 'face' (and the co-occurrent concept of 'faciality', 'visagéité') is itself metaphorical (which does not mean that the concept has no interest – witness the use Garin Dowd makes of it in his study of Beckett after Deleuze and Guattari).16
There is, however, good reason for Deleuze's hostility to metaphor: it is part and parcel of a thoroughgoing critique of representation. We may start from a well known passage in the second chapter of _Anti-Oedipus_ , in a section entitled, in the English translation 'The Imperialism of Oedipus':
The whole of desiring _production_ is crushed, subjected to the requirements of _representation_ , and to the dreary games of what is representative and represented in representation. And there is the essential thing: the reproduction of representation, in the process as well as theory of the cure. The productive unconscious makes way for an unconscious that knows only how to express itself – express itself in myth, in tragedy, in dream.17
We find here, in a nutshell, the essence of Deleuze and Guattari's critique of psychoanalysis, in the contrasts between production and representation, which is linked to reproduction, and between the productive and the representative unconscious (on what psychoanalysts are fond of calling _l'autre scène_ ). Let us try to decline the moments of this critique of representation.
The critique, naturally, will start from the double ambiguity of the term: like all deverbal nouns ending in '-tion' (interpretation for instance), it is ambiguous between process and result (the process of representing yields, as its end-result, a representation), and the prefix 're-' is ambiguous between the 're-' of repetition (representation is second degree presentation) and the 're-' of regress (representation is a moving away, and backwards, from presentation). Familiar philosophical contrasts are thus evoked: similitude versus resemblance, presence versus separation, difference and repetition, etc. The last of these contrasts, of course, is closest to Deleuze's philosophical concerns.
To put it briefly, from the linguistic analysis of the ambiguities of the term, a concept of representation may be constructed around the five following characteristics:
1. | Representation is characterised by a _difference_ between representative and represented: they do not belong to the same order of being.
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2. | Representation is characterised by the _separation_ between representative and represented: there is no contiguity or continuity between them.
3. | The third characteristic is _replacement_ : the representative is present in the absence of the represented, for that is the essence of his (or its) representativeness.
4. | The fourth is _hierarchy_. The representative and the represented are not only separated, but differently valued. The direction of the hierarchic relation may vary: often the representative dominates the represented, but the opposite may be true as well.
5. | The fifth and last characteristic is the _generalisation_ , or _abstraction_ , of the representative from the represented.
It would be easy to decline the five characteristics of representations here suggested in all the fields where the concept operates, from image and word to politics. Thus the word is different from its referent; it is separated from it, except in the case of labels or Swift's island of Laputa; it replaces it in its absence (that is the essential characteristic of a sign); it is deemed to be less important than its referent, being a tool for reference that satisfies the needs of communication (although sometimes the relation, or the direction of fit, as Searle calls it, is reversed, as in the case of performative utterances); and it generalises and abstracts, as the word is the carrier of a linguistic notion, which in the best of cases becomes a philosophical concept.
We could play the same game with political representation. The King, or the MP for that matter, in spite of proclamations to the contrary, is different from his subjects, or constituents, in terms of money, power, lifestyle and Spitting Image puppet (remember that the King has two bodies: one more than the average subject). The system of democratic representation is, as we know, a system in which everybody is eligible but only the elect are elected. Not anybody can be a candidate with a chance of succeeding and the metamorphosis is a long process. The King, but also the MP, is separated from his subjects or constituents, not being answerable till the next election, if there is one, and not being obliged to keep his promises: thus Tony Blair goes to war and Nicolas Sarkozy is elected on the basis of electoral promises he has no means of keeping. The King, or the MP, replaces his subjects or constituents, he acts in their place. This is not a Swiss canton or the _agora_ in Athens, and not everybody can have a seat in parliament. The King, naturally, is in a hierarchic position vis à vis his subjects. So is, in spite of proclamations to the contrary, the MP. Lastly, the King, or the MP, is abstracted from the generality of subjects or constituents: this is embodied in the fiction that the MP represents not only the constituents that have voted for him, but the totality of his (the word is significant) constituents.
But the five characteristics of representation can also account for the contrast between the metaphoric and the metamorphic, using the characteristic Deleuzean device of the correlation. Metaphor first (as the climax of the logic of representation and the point where it gives rise to another logic). First, metaphor is based on difference: there must be sufficient distance between tenor and vehicle for the metaphor to work: you do not choose your metaphors if the objects of the implicit simile are too closely related. Second, this difference involves separation: if the literal relation is by definition true (a rose is a rose is a rose), the metaphorical relation is blatantly false (Sally is _not_ an English rose). The metaphorical sign is a false sign, separated from the literal sign that picks out the referent. Thirdly, metaphor involves replacement. The evoked tenor of the metaphor (the literal lion that Richard is not) is doubly absent: replaced by the true sign, displaced in the metaphorical sign. In Plato's gradient of representation via signs, metaphor is the idol to the literal icon: it completely cancels the point of departure of the signifying process, which normally starts with the referent. Fourthly, metaphor involves hierarchy. That relation has always been central to the theory of metaphor. The usual posture is that literal meaning, in so far as it is 'true', is more valuable than metaphorical meaning, which it precedes. But this is not always the case: the tradition of hostility to metaphor (from Locke and Hobbes onwards) is now opposed by another tradition, of the centrality of metaphor, from Rousseau and Vico to de Man. Lastly, metaphor involves abstraction. Whether ontological, orientational or structural (I am using Lakoff and Johnson's classification here),18 metaphor abstracts and generalises.
This position of metaphor as the climax of representation can be systematically contrasted with metamorphosis. With metamorphosis, in spite of the obvious ontological difference between mice and horses, a pumpkin and a carriage, there is no parallelism in the links between words (taken literally or metaphorically) and their referents, because words and things are taken as being on the same ontological level, and a direct word–object linking which shortcuts the sign process becomes possible: words no longer represent objects because they are themselves objects (they have material shape, they exert force, they mix with objects). Secondly, there is no separation through obvious falsity: a metamorphic Richard _is_ a lion. From this point of view, metaphor is seen as an attempt to deflate the violent potential of words, their ability to intervene, as objects, among objects: suddenly, like the werewolf in our favourite horror film, Richard roars in his rage and claws his opponent into shreds. Thirdly, there is no replacement of tenor by vehicle. In metamorphosis, as in a dream, the chessboard actually turns into a railway and the train, not its image, is in the mind (you have recognised the world of Lewis Carroll's _Through the Looking-Glass_ ). Neither element in the transformation is allowed to stand for the other. Metamorphosis connects what metaphor, in spite of its revolutionary aura, carefully keeps apart, at a safe distance. Fourthly, since there is neither difference nor possible replacement, there is no hierarchy between the two terms involved in metamorphosis. What we have is not a hierarchic tree, whatever its direction, but an anarchic rhizome. Deleuze's ontology is sometimes said to be 'flat'19 because all entities exist on the same plane of immanence. Lastly, metamorphosis fails to abstract and generalise for reasons that are by now entirely clear: the world of metamorphosis is a world of singularities, not abstractions. It appears, therefore, that Deleuze's preference for metamorphosis over metaphor is a modernist stance.
**_Deleuze as modernist_**
In Foucault's periodisation, we might be inclined to interpret modernism as the literary expression of the second modern period, the period of literature, which would make postmodernism the incarnation of the shadowy fourth period, in the interstices of modernity. The immediate historical problem is that, for Foucault, that period goes from the nineteenth century to structuralism, with the relevant break occurring roughly with Romanticism, a traditional candidate for the break with classicism. Hence the question of the historical place of modernism is still unanswered.
There is an answer in Jameson, where modernism is the literary name for modernity as a whole, conceived as an internal critique of both _epistemai_ : a critique of the classical _episteme_ of representation, and a critique of the nineteenth-century _episteme_ characterised by humanism and historicism. Hence the rightful place of modernism is the fourth period, where this double critique is enacted. Modernism is the literary incarnation of a double cultural shift.
The consequences of this are interesting. We have already seen some of them. First, modernism is synonymous with literature, and the canon of literature can only be the canon of modernism. Second, modernism not only precedes, but is always already beyond, or in advance of, postmodernism. Third, we may even go further and state that postmodernism, in the field of literature, cannot exist, as its positions are always already pre-empted by modernism. So, if, for the needs of critical contrast, we wish to find the natural opponent of modernism, there is no point in looking for it in postmodernism.
But there is a place where such contrast can be usefully found, thus allowing us to produce non-trivial characteristics of modernism (beyond the Jamesonian 'obsession with the New', which is too pat): in the debate with Marxism, its arch-enemy. One only has to think of the direct polemics between Lukács, Brecht and Bloch in the 1920s, or of the indirect polemics, later on, between Lukács and Adorno. Lukács still remains the critic who preferred Thomas Mann and Romain Rolland to Joyce and Beckett.
In Eugene Lunn's book on modernism and Marxism we find a characterisation of modernism. I shall take that necessarily simplistic account with the necessary pinch of salt, but it will provide a starting point. Lunn ascribes the four following characteristics to modernism:20 (1) aesthetic self-consciousness or self-reflexiveness; (2) simultaneity, juxtaposition or _montage_ ; (3) paradox, ambiguity and uncertainty; (4) the demise of the integrated individual subject. When contrasted with the four equivalent characteristics he ascribes to realism (typicality, individuality, organic plot construction and the presentation of humans as subjects as well as objects of history), they make a fairly clear, if slightly gross or exaggerated, picture: the picture of the opposition between realist representation and modernist presentation (even if the first characteristic ascribed to modernism, reflexivity, is shared, at least in Foucault's interpretation, with classical representation). So the general name of the game is the presentation of chaotic experience in its state of near chaos, rather than the ordering of representation. And there is a link between this feature, which is the central one, and the demise of the integrated subject: the integrated individual subject it is that orders chaos into a representation.
If we take this as a very rough picture of modernism, we are in a position to account for Deleuze as a modernist: we may consider that his philosophy exemplifies the four characteristics ascribed by Lunn to modernism, without forcing the text of either Deleuze or Lunn.
Thus the aesthetic self-reflexiveness of literary modernism is reflected in the conscious writerly stance of the work of Deleuze and Guattari: philosophy as a kind of writing, with a vengeance. Witness the all too famous opening of _Anti-Oedipus_ , with its provocative linguistic playfulness: 'It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said _the_ id. Everywhere it is machines – real ones, not figurative ones . . .'21 We note of course the usual paradox: the text expresses Deleuze's hostility to metaphor, here in the guise of the 'figurative', and yet it engages in a series of rhetorical tropes, the object of which is the third person pronoun, 'it', on which the text opens (for instance, the narrative trope of topicalisation, of the _quis_ who will be revealed as the hero of the tale).
The second characteristic, the fragmentation of literary modernism (juxtaposition or _montage_ ), finds consonance not only in Deleuze's keen interest in the cinema ( _montage_ is no longer a mere technical device, it becomes a philosophical concept), but in his conception of the text as rhizome (rather than a tree, with univocal branching causality and hierarchy, as in Chomsky's conception of syntax), with concomitant effects of juxtaposition (Deleuze, being a philosopher of surfaces, is the philosopher of cartography and _calque_ ), of intensities and regimes of signs.
The third characteristic of literary modernism, paradox, is familiar to readers of Deleuze, being the central concept of _Logique du sens_ , which is divided not into chapters, but into 'series of paradoxes', some of them originating in Lewis Carroll. Such paradoxes provide the characterisation of sense (as opposed to the fixed meaning of _doxa_ which in Deleuze goes under the names of good sense and common sense).22 The very concept of sense as opposed to meaning is based on systematic ambiguity: it is that which (chrono)logically precedes meaning, and therefore has neither the shared consensual fixity of common sense, nor the right directionality of good sense (here of course Deleuze is punning on the two meanings of the French word _sens_ ). In the words of the medieval philosopher Nicolas d'Hautrecourt, the formula of sense is _contradictoria ad invicem_ _idem significant_ ('contradictories have the same sense'). From this theory of meaning and sense Deleuze derives nothing less than a fully fledged theory of language.23
The fourth characteristic of literary modernism, the demise of the integrated individual subject, is perhaps the one that is most spectacularly exemplified in Deleuze's philosophy. It is perhaps in his philosophy more than in anyone else's that the all-pervading concept of subject (from philosophies of consciousness to psychoanalysis) is most explicitly superseded – this is a striking difference from Badiou, who clings to a concept of a subject, albeit not the subject traditionally conceived as a unitary centre of consciousness or action. And it is superseded in two ways or two directions: in the multiplicity and ontological mixture or rather 'flatness' of the collective assemblage of enunciation; and in the individuation of an a-personal, a-subjective, pre-individual haecceity.
So the choice of a canon of modernist writers is coherent with crucial aspects of Deleuze's philosophy: his adoption of those texts is not merely due to a blind following of the current avant-garde: he can in fact be called a modernist philosopher, perhaps even a modernist linguist. For this is the interesting paradox of this characterisation which sharply distinguishes Deleuze from Badiou: in many ways, in the tradition of Bergson, Deleuze resists the linguistic turn taken by contemporary philosophy. But his 'modernism' means that he has a concept of language (remember that Jameson defines Foucault's 'fourth period' as 'the realm of language' and such a reflexive concept of language is characteristic of literary modernism, in advance of post-modernism). I have tried elsewhere to show that language is a point of entry, in the shape of a problem, to Deleuze's philosophy.24 We understand the consonance of Deleuze's philosophy with literature, the art of language (Deleuze, unlike Badiou, has a concept of _écriture_ and style), which explains the sheer range of his literary corpus and the privileging of modernist writers as the centre of his literary canon. But there remains a question: where is Badiou situated in all this?
**_Badiou reads Beckett_**
Badiou is emphatically not a modernist philosopher (and Jameson is careful not to include him in his list). His rejection of the linguistic turn is _sans appel_ , he refuses to let concepts of language and style play a role in his philosophy and the four characteristics of Lunn's simplified theory of modernism do not in the least fit him: although he is a writer himself, there is no aesthetic self-relexiveness in his writing of philosophy, rather the asceticism of formalisation; the total coherence of his chain of concepts (Badiou is the archetype of systematic philosophers) has nothing to do with juxtaposition and montage; he has no time for the ambiguity and uncertainty in which modernism and postmodernism revel: his is a philosophy of strong affirmation and Badiou is not much troubled by ambiguity or doubt; and, as we saw, he retains a concept of subject, even if his subject is not the 'integrated and individual subject' whose demise modernism celebrates. For Badiou the subject is collective, as in the couple who construct a procedure of fidelity to the event of a _coup de foudre_ ; and the subject of art is neither the author nor the reader, but the work itself. Rancière, however, has argued that Badiou cannot be called an unqualified modernist because of his rejection of the role of language in art (of the languages of art) in favour of the Platonist Idea, but that he is nevertheless a 'twisted modernist' in his insistence on subtraction, an anti-mimetic position that absolves art of any obligation to imitate external reality, and in his assertion that the truths of art are proper to it: for Rancière these are two characteristics of modernism, which makes Badiou an 'undoubted', if twisted, modernist.25
It is no wonder, therefore, that Badiou is an obsessive reader of modernist literature, with two qualifications: his corpus is almost exclusively poetic (in spite of the presence of Faulkner, Woolf and Mansfield in the list quoted above, he does not really engage with the modernist novel – as we saw, a paradox for an author who is a novelist himself) and not exclusively modernist as Mallarmé and Rimbaud figure prominently in it. But he does read Beckett obsessively.
Badiou's reading of Beckett is now well documented. His texts have been collected in an English translation, complete with a long introduction by Nina Power and Alberto Toscano and a postface by Andrew Gibson, and Andrew Gibson has devoted a massive volume to Beckett and Badiou.26 And this reading has a number of striking characteristics.
1. Badiou's reading goes against the grain (a familiar tactic with him) of traditional and doxic readings of Beckett as an existentialist writer, 'a writer of the absurd, of despair, of empty skies, of incommunicability and eternal solitude'.27 It is true that Beckett criticism has moved away from this, as Gibson demonstrates in his postface, but Badiou blissfully ignores such criticism: he is in fact nostalgically evoking his own youth and himself as a Sartrian 'young cretin'28 (he ascribes that interesting quality not only to himself but to youth in general), whose task, as he then thought, was 'to complete Sartre's theory of freedom by means of a careful investigation into the opacities of the signifier.'29 Perhaps this is the source of his later refusal to treat language as an object worthy of philosophical analysis, as the inconsistent alliance between nihilism and the imperative of language was typical of the young cretin that he claims to have been. Against this critical _doxa_ , the older Badiou constructs a reading of Beckett as the writer of tireless desire (or desire unstoppable), of exactitude and courage, but also of joy, the joy that provokes not the grin of irony but the frank laughter of comedy. That such a reading goes against the _sensus communis_ of traditional readings of Beckett is obvious.
2. This reading is also a strange reading, in that a concept of beauty lies at the centre of it. 'Beauty' has come to be a danger word for literary critics, and you would be hard put to find a contemporary analysis of Keats's poems that would be conducted in terms of their beauty. But Badiou, as always, is indifferent to such _doxa_ , especially as the term, which might be taken to make trivial sense in the case of Keats, appears to be singularly ill-chosen in the case of Beckett: you would hardly describe the two lovers on their bench in the opening pages of _Watt_ , or the reaction of Mr Hackett who is annoyed by their presence on his bench, as 'beautiful'. But 'beauty', the title of the second section of Badiou's _Beckett_ , is given a technical meaning in three ways. First, beauty is the specific characteristic of literature as the art of language, in so far as it works on and subverts ordinary or natural language. In a move that is reminiscent of Deleuze's analysis of Beckett as that Irishman who writes in French and thus turns every language, including his own, into a foreign tongue, Badiou links beauty with Beckett's specific practice of language:
Beckett truly was a constant and attentive servant of beauty, which is why, at a distance from himself (at a distance from nature, from a 'natural' language, and at a distance from the mother, from the mother-tongue) he called upon the services of a secondary and learnt idiom, a 'foreign' language: French.30
So beauty is in that distance from nature, from the natural tongue and of the writer from himself. Secondly, beauty is captured by a number of stylistic operations:
Rectification, or the work on the isolation of terms. Expansion, or the poetic incision of memory. Declaration, or the function of emergence of prose. Declension, or the tender cadence of disaster. Interruption, or the maxims of comedy. Elongation, or the phrased embodiment of variants.31
The names of these operations all make stylistic sense, in that they seem to describe what might be called the 'Beckett sentence'. Yet some of the glosses of these names seem to forget language: I can understand that 'elongation' (of the Beckett sentence) should be 'the phrased embodiment of variants', as this corresponds to the reader's experience of a Beckett text as the exhaustion of possibilities (a stylistic device that is prevalent in _Watt_ ), but I cannot make stylistic sense of 'declension' (a technical word in grammatical discourse) as 'the tender cadence of disaster'. This is because the third characteristic of beauty takes us way beyond language: '[T]he destiny of beauty, and in particular of the beauty that Beckett aims at, is to separate. To separate appearance, which it both restores and obliterates, from the universal core of experience.'32
3. Badiou's reading of Beckett, being, as may be expected, a strong reading, is based on an intervention in the Beckett corpus. In a move reminiscent of Althusser's separation, through epistemological break, between the young, humanist Marx and the later, scientific Marx, he holds that there is a break in Beckett's _oeuvre_ in the 1960s with _How It Is_ , when the three 'functions' of movement (how to move, how to rest), being (what there is, questions of identity) and language (the imperative of language, the centrality of silence) are supplemented with a fourth, the encounter with the other. In such supplementation, Badiou sees the abandonment of Beckett's Cartesianism and a conversion to a form of Platonism, an opening up to the thought of the event. Naturally, such intervention provokes counter-readings. Even Andrew Gibson, the Beckett critic most sympathetic to Badiou, casts doubts on the brutality of this _coupure_ : it is doubtful that such a clear-cut separation can be discerned. Nevertheless, in this matter, Badiou is not alone; he follows one of the critical traditions among Beckett scholars, and we may note that in 'The Exhausted', Deleuze also holds that _How It Is_ is a landmark in Beckett's _oeuvre_.33
4. The main word has been uttered: what Badiou reads in Beckett is an ascesis towards thought, the thought of the event. Beckett's is a Platonism of the event:
We can see that the ascesis – metaphorically enacted as loss, destitution, poverty, a relentlessness based on almost nothing – leads to a conceptual economy of an ancient or Platonic type. If we disregard (and Beckett's prose is the movement of this disregard, of this abandon) what is inessential, what distracts us (in Pascal's sense), we see that generic humanity can be reduced to the complex of movement, of rest (of dying), of language (as imperative without respite) and of the paradoxes of the Same and the Other. We are very close to what Plato, in _The Sophist_ , names as the five supreme genera: Being, Sameness, Movement, Rest, and Other. If Plato the philosopher uses these to determine the general conditions for all thinking, then Beckett the writer intends, through the ascetic movement of prose, to present in fiction the atemporal determinants of humanity.34
Reading for the event means that there is a consonance between Beckett's literary thought and the thought of the philosopher who reads him. Indeed, Badiou's reading often sounds like a roll call of the main concepts of his system. This is how Andrew Gibson, whose reading of Beckett is closest to Badiou's (even if it is often critical of him), sums up this consonance:
I have argued for the relevance to Beckett's work of many of the key terms in Badiou's philosophy: subtraction, restricted action, actual infinity, the event, subjectification, the logic of appearance, naming, fidelity, apagogic reason, the waiting subject, investigations, inexistents, patience, vigilance, objectivity, undecidables, indiscernibles and unnameables, _événementialité_ and the event of the event.35
Even if we note an inflexion which is Gibson's own (apagogic reason, _événementialité_ , the event of the event are his terms as much as Badiou's), even if he immediately adds that although they offer an understanding of Beckett's 'extreme brilliance of purpose', Badiou's use of them to read Beckett is somewhat 'unsatisfying', we note the presence in that list of the chain of concepts that make up Badiou's theory of the event (subtraction, subjectification, naming, fidelity, etc.), with a hint of the later work (logic of appearance).
5. There is one last aspect of Badiou's strong reading of Beckett which is relevant to my analysis. A strong reading, as we have seen, is not afraid of paradox. One of the paradoxes of Badiou's reading of Mallarmé is that he reads the poems for their latent prose (which justifies the prose summary of the sonnets with which he begins his reading). Now that he is reading Beckett's prose, he celebrates the 'latent poem' that governs it:
The effect of this oscillation and this caesura is that no single literary genre can command the comprehension of Beckett's enterprise. The novel form is still perceptible in _Molloy_ , but in _The Unnameable_ it is exhausted, though it is not possible to say that the poem prevails – even if the cadence, the disposition of the paragraphs and the intrinsic value of the visions indicate that the text is governed by what could be defined as a 'latent poem'.36
The passage has two interesting aspects. The first is the appearance of stylistic terms like 'cadence', which suggest that reading the literary text for its language might be relevant after all, even if the remark about 'the disposition of the paragraphs' is immediately followed by 'the intrinsic value of the vision', where we have abandoned the materiality of the language of the text. The second is the recurrence of the word 'latent' (the latent prose, the latent poem), which inscribes the paradox I mentioned: the Freudian connotation of the term confirms the idea that Badiou's concept of literary reading is predicated on what I have called the 'tin-opener' theory of interpretation. But Badiou's theory of reading is in fact more complex. Reading for the latent poem applies to a moment in Beckett's work, the moment of transition, the moment of _The Unnameable_ , neither fowl nor fish, neither novel nor poem. It must be abandoned when we come to the break. Thus _Worstward Ho_ (which is sometimes called a novel but hardly reads like one) 'is not governed by a sort of latent poem' and must be read otherwise. How? As a philosophical treatise: 'It is entirely possible to read _Worstward Ho_ as a short philosophical treatise, as a treatment in shorthand of the question of being.'37 The paradox rebounds: we no longer read the prose text for its latent poem, we read the work of literature for its latent (or not so latent) philosophy: a shorthand kind of philosophy, which presumably needs the gaze of the philosopher to articulate its condensed philosophical contents in full. As we shall see, this paradoxical method of reading raises serious problems: Beckett risks being taken for a proto-Badiou, a literary John the Baptist announcing the advent of his philosophical Christ, and the status of the event whose truth procedure the literary text constructs becomes highly problematic.38
Because all this is rather abstract, let us look at how Badiou reads a single text, _Ill Seen Ill Said_. In the course of a chapter in the Beckett book entitled 'The event and its name', Badiou reads the following paragraph:
Alone the face remains. Of the rest beneath its covering no trace. During the inspection a sudden sound. Starting without consequence for the gaze the mind awakes. How explain it? And without going so far how say it? Far behind the eye the quest begins. What time the event recedes. When suddenly to the rescue it comes again. Forthwith the uncommon common noun collapsion. Reinforced a little later if not enfeebled by the infrequent slumberous. A slumberous collapsion. Two. Then far from the still agonizing eye a gleam of hope. By the grace of these modest beginnings. With a second sight the shack in ruins. To scrute together with the inscrutable face. All curiosity spent.39
Badiou gives a brilliant account of the movement of what Gibson, in his reading of Badiou's reading of the passage, calls 'a phenomenology of the event' (and he stresses the importance of the passage for Badiou's understanding of Beckett as a whole).40 This movement goes through the following stages: (1) the 'inspection' of the situation that serves as a starting point, through the normal activity of seeing; (2) in this situation an event occurs, whose presence is marked by a 'sudden sound'; (3) 'the mind awakes', as 'thought is vigilant under the effect of an event'; (4) the reaction of the mind to the event is not one of understanding (the question of interpretation) but of naming: 'how say it'; (5) the name, inscribed in two rare words, an 'uncommon common noun', 'collapsion', and the adjective 'slumberous', bores a hole in ordinary language – and Badiou notes that the putting together of adjective and noun in a single phrase is paradoxical, as the adjective both 'reinforces' and 'enfeebles' the noun; (6) lastly, the naming of the event produces a 'gleam of hope'. Badiou concludes: 'And though it is certainly nothing more than a commencement, a modest beginning, it is a commencement that comes to the thought that it awakens like an act of grace.'41 And he adds that such gleam of hope marks the hope of the advent of a truth:
A truth begins with the organisation of an agreement between, on the one hand, a separable event 'shining with formal clarity' and, on the other, the invention in language of a name that from now on retains this event, even if – inevitably – the event 'recedes' and finally disappears. The name will guarantee within language that the event is sheltered.42
Beckett is the poet of the event, as the chain of concepts, event, naming, truth, etc. can be extracted from his text, even if the nature of the event in question is not clear, and the name that Beckett has chosen for it, 'slumberous collapsion', is neither helpful nor hopeful: the name is both uncommon and common, and the common meaning it conveys, that of a collapse, seems to contradict that 'gleam of hope' and 'effect of grace' Badiou reads in the text. Indeed, Gibson, who is too skilful a reader of Beckett not to be slightly worried by the reading he admires, notes that Badiou's reading is based on a single passage of the text: in spite of the title, he notes, what Badiou calls the 'poetics of nomination' is hardly central to the text as a whole; the term 'event' has only one occurrence in the whole text, in this passage (he accounts for this by the rarity of the event); and the larger part of the text 'is representational, if hardly in a Balzacian manner'.43 And it is true that an old woman waiting for death is an unpromising witness to the radical novelty of the event. But there is worse. Beckett's text is written in paragraphs, and I have quoted the whole paragraph. Badiou, however, does not. He omits the first two and the last two sentences, and it is easy to understand why: they hardly confirm his affirmative interpretation of the text, which is centred on that gleam of hope. The absent sentences provide a negative framework to the advent of the event: 'alone', 'no trace', 'the shack in ruins'. And the _chute_ of the paragraph, 'all curiosity spent', introduces a note of resignation if not despair, hardly conducive to the construction of a procedure of truth, with its eager enquiries and fidelity to the radically new. Badiou's reading proceeds through a double extraction: of the passage from the text as a whole; of the core of the passage from the paragraph that frames it. As if the sole presence of the word he was looking for, 'event', was sufficient to colour the whole paragraph and the whole text in the exact shade required. What disappears from Beckett's text is its resolute ambivalence (what Badiou finds is indeed in the text, only to be immediately denied), what Gibson, in his own, even if Badiou inspired, reading of Beckett, calls 'the pathos of intermittency'.
Badiou's reading of this short passage raises a question that can be generalised. If the object of the work of art worthy of that name is the naming of the event, the specificity of the single text is compromised: there is a risk that the event in question is always the same event, the event in general, what Gibson calls the event of the event. This is how Rancière, reading Badiou reading Mallarmé, puts it:
The inscription of the name and the declaration of the maxim are posited as effects of the poem-form – which is to say, of an apparatus of naming – and following good Althusserian logic, philosophy is then summoned in order to discern the truths encrypted in the poem, even if this means miraculously rediscovering its own, which it claims to have been divested of [. . .] At a stroke, the Mallarmean poem, which is already an allegory of the poem [. . .] becomes in Badiou an allegory of the form of the event in general and of the courage of the thought that withstands its ordeal in particular. Which also means that in this regard it is comparable with every other poem that allows itself to be bent to the same demonstration, to be assigned the same task of speaking twice, to say the same event of the Idea twice: the first time as a maxim, the second time as an enigma.44
What Rancière is suggesting is that Badiou's reading method always yields the same result, whatever the poem or literary text he reads: that it finds what it wanted to find, namely the event and its naming, at the cost of 'bending' the text to its 'demonstration'. It also suggests that, contrary to Badiou's doctrine, the poem cannot really think the truth it encrypts, and needs philosophy to decrypt it, which re-establishes the superiority of philosophy to the text of art, in spite of Badiou's declarations of modesty (philosophy does not produce truths, it only 'compossibilises' the truths that emerge in other fields). In fact, the term 'compossibilise' is the site of a problem: why should the truths of art, politics, science and love need to be 'grasped together', if not in order to produce a general concept of truth (a possibility which Badiou denies, even if his philosophy's main task is to construct it)? It seems to me we are back with the conception of philosophy defended by Third International Marxism under the name of dialectical materialism: one claims to respect the capacity of each science to produce its type of knowledge independently, and the task of philosophy is to produce the general laws (the laws of the dialectic) that apply to every science and compossibilise all sciences. By this means philosophy, which claims to be the servant of science, 'miraculously' recovers its position of superiority, as the science of generalities.
Rancière's critique raises two other problems related to the first. First, if the task of the poem is to speak 'the event of the Idea', we are back to the transparency of language which we already noted when we read Badiou reading Mallarmé: such a decrypting of an encrypted truth ignores the materiality of the language of the text, or, in other words, there is no concept of _écriture_ in Badiou (since the task of the reader is to solve the enigma of the text, the role of the language of the text is simply to conceal the truth that it contains). When Badiou, in _Logic of Worlds_ , analyses a painting by Hubert Robert, it is in terms of the world it presents and 'the transcendental construction of phenomena'. He pays lip service to the painter's technique and to the materiality of the work, but his analysis is conducted almost exclusively in terms of what the painting represents, so that in a painting, as he says, the figurative or abstract character of the work is not relevant.45 It would be instructive to compare this attitude to painting to that of Deleuze in his Bacon book, where the materiality of the pictorial gesture is at the centre of the analysis. Secondly, the specific nature of the event in a literary text is not clear. A text, as Badiou says, is not itself an event, but an element in an artistic configuration which seeks to construct the truth of an event: the text, then, is rather a subject in this truth-seeking process of enquiry and fidelity. But an artistic event in that sense cannot be other than a change in artistic paradigm, a literary revolution (even as the event in politics is a revolution, in science a change in paradigm). However, Badiou appears to read the single text for the event to which it bears witness, which is encrypted in it and only recoverable in the traces it has left. And it is obvious that there is more to a Mallarmé sonnet than the trace of the Parnassian poetic 'revolution', if there is such a thing. Three solutions have been offered to this paradox. Badiou sometimes suggests that Mallarmé is to be understood in terms of the traces that a political event, the Paris Commune, with its glorious failure, has left in the situation: in which case, literature seeks to capture an event which has not occurred in its own field, it has a representative rather than a presentative function. Andrew Gibson introduces the concept of 'the event of the event' ('Mallarmé makes an event of the thought of the event'),46 which again places literature, among the evental fields, in a singular position: its event is a second-degree event, and literature is both less important than other evental fields (there is no direct event in literature) and more so (it has a reflexive function, a function traditionally attributed to philosophy). Nina Power and Alberto Toscano, in their introduction to Badiou's collected texts on Beckett, describe a typology of literary events in the texts Badiou reads: Mallarmé deals with the consequences of the event, his text is situated after the event; Rimbaud deals with the event at the time it occurs, and immediately interrupts the process of fidelity his recognition of the event implies; Beckett tries to think the possibility of the event that is to come, he anticipates it.47 These three attitudes towards the event are embodied in three qualities of the texts: Mallarmé's patience, Rimbaud's impatience, Beckett's courage.
It would appear that, in spite of such defences, Badiou's reading of literary texts is deeply flawed. It appears to exploit the text, treat it as a pretext for philosophy. Badiou seems to find something in the text only because he sought it, and what he finds is always philosophical propositions, and always the propositions of his own philosophy. The strength of such reading is the strength of the bulldozer. Yet, after this firm condemnation of an exaggeratedly strong reading practice, we are left with a problem, and you will have noted the tentative modal verbs in the first sentences of this paragraph: in spite of the flaws of the reading, Badiou's accounts of single literary texts, of Mallarmé and of Beckett, are compelling and often brilliant. The bulldozing of the text uncovers archaeological treasures. Perhaps those defences are not as off the mark as it seems. Perhaps, when Badiou reads Beckett and finds in his work the rudiments of his philosophy, it is also Beckett that reads Badiou.
**_Beckett reads Badiou_**
This is the position of Power and Toscano in their introduction: Beckett is not merely a site for the miraculous rediscovery of Badiou's system. His work raises questions for the system and induces revisions of it: Badiou reading Beckett is also read by him, and the system is not left untouched by the reading. And the point where the system is modified is of extreme interest to us, as it concerns language, which the system so far deliberately neglected. This is how they make their point:
Beckett does demand from Badiou the recognition, otherwise foreign to his doctrine, of an irreducibility proper to language or speech as a 'region of existence'. Moreover, though language is not itself an object of speculation (whether structural or hermeneutic) or adulation (it is the very stuff of our earthly ordeals), it is nevertheless identified as an ineluctable and ineliminable 'function' of the human, an essential compound of that capacity for thought that determines the existence of humanity. It is this role of language that Badiou is obliged to assume and, in a qualified manner, affirm. What his reconstruction of Beckett does not involve, however, is any specific attention to the 'texture' of language itself – to the operations undergone in Beckett by grammar, to the usage of certain tropes, etc. While the linguistic dimension is indeed ineliminable, what captivates Badiou when it comes to Beckett as a thinker is precisely what emerges from a subtraction _of_ and, of course, _through_ language.48
You will have noted the convoluted and defensive tone of that account. We must rejoice at the thought that Badiou has finally recognised that language was 'an ineluctable function of the human'. Even if such recognition is 'qualified' and reluctant, we should be grateful to Beckett for having provoked it. And you will have noted that such recognition remains abstract, as language cannot be an object of speculation, and the texture of the text is not worthy of the philosopher's attention. Yet, Power and Toscano have a point, and we must look more closely at the treatment of language in Badiou's texts on Beckett.
At first sight, however, we shall be disappointed. The treatment of language in Badiou's texts on Beckett is limited (there is a section entitled 'Being and Language' in the Beckett book, and the order of the terms is relevant), and limited to a small number of ever recurrent propositions or themes:
1. | The first is the insistence on reading the latent poem that underlies Beckett's late prose:
I would say that the prose – segmented into paragraphs – will come to be governed by a _latent poem_. This poem holds together what is given in the texts, but it is not itself given. The thematic recurrences appear on the surface of the text, characterised by their slow motion. Beneath the surface, however, this movement is regulated or unified by an inapparent poetic matrix.49
I am afraid this 'poetic matrix' of the poem is reduced to thematic recurrence, and the ghost of the tin-opener theory of interpretation has not been laid to rest.
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2. | The second is the statement of the imperative of language. Not only is language an inescapable human function, but saying, in the works of Beckett, has become an imperative: the subject and her language strive towards silence, but language never entirely disappears. 'On. Say on. Be said on.' is the famous opening of _Worstward Ho_.
3. | The third is the centrality of naming. This is the main characteristic of Beckett's late prose as regards language: he has renounced his hermeneutic quest for the operation of naming – naming, not meaning (or the absence thereof) is the order of the day.
4. | The fourth is that there is a form of violence involved in the operation of naming, a violence done through language and to language: naming subverts the established significations. This is an integral part of the doctrine of the event: naming is itself part of the event and it bores a hole in the language of the situation. A Beckettian way of formulating this is: saying is always ill-saying, well-saying being defined by the adequacy of the saying to the said, which implies that we remain within the language of the situation.50
5. | In the Beckett book, there is an opening towards the role of fiction and an attempt to think, among the 'pretty three in one', the triple subject in Beckett's texts, the subject of enunciation (the other two are the subject of passivity and the subject of the question).51
It would be easy to dismiss this by saying that Badiou has a concept of language that is both vague and skeletal. It appears that he has no concept of the material workings of language in the play of signifiers (nor does he want to have one), that he has only the most superficial concept of syntax and that the poetic character of the poem is reduced to the work of the lexicon, to the subversion of established language by naming, whether it takes the form of coinage or of the emptying and resignification of the common noun into a name. What he calls the 'cadence' of Beckett's language in his late prose, surely one of the most striking characteristics of the text, is reduced to the division in paragraphs and a form of repetition in slow motion: Badiou's limited poetics do not equip him to capture this, which is so neatly captured by Deleuze's concept of 'stuttering'.
But that would be to miss the very centre of Badiou's reading of Beckett, or rather of Beckett's reading of Badiou: reading the text for the event means being aware of the ever renewed stylistic work whereby the text worries a common noun, as a dog worries a bone, to abstract or extract from it a thought, the thought of the anticipated event. And we may go even further: what Beckett brings to Badiou by reading him is a development of the concept of event, which is no longer as univocal as the doctrine suggests. After reading Beckett, and Badiou on Beckett, we must realise that there are four levels, or types of events, in Badiou's use of the term.
The first type is what the doctrine describes: there is an ontological deduction of the emergence of events in the four evental fields. We may call this type of event a revolution. In the field of art, the single work of art is not an event, but an element in a chain of works, an artistic configuration, which constructs the procedure of truth initiated by the event of an artistic revolution (for instance the break between the baroque and the classical styles of music).
There is one of the four evental fields in which the event is not only an occurrence, the source of a procedure of truth, but where it is represented or staged. This field is of course the field of art. Let us call this second event the staged event: the work of art stages an event that occurs in one of the three other fields. Thus with Rimbaud, Mallarmé and the Paris Commune. Note that this is not a return to the old Marxist theory of literature as reflection: what is staged is not the event itself, which is indiscernible, but the traces it leaves, its vanishing, absence or irremediable pastness (Mallarmé), the interruption of the procedure of truth and fidelity that its occurrence initiates (Rimbaud), the anticipation of its coming, or failure to come (Beckett). And here lies the first contribution that Beckett makes to the theory of the event in his reading of Badiou: he helps Badiou to think the temporality of the event as in the _future anterior_. When the procedure of truth is initiated, the prospective subject of such truth must make a decision, the decision that what she is being faithful to will turn out to have been an event (you will have noted the appearance of the grammatical markers of a past in the future, or future anterior).
But the work of art, being capable of staging or representing events in other fields, is also capable of reflexively staging the event in its own field. The artistic event represented in the artistic work is _the event of the event_ , or the _événementialité_ of the event, as Andrew Gibson develops it.52 What the text of art represents here is the general characteristics of what it takes to be an event. We are moving from representation and staging towards abstraction. And this is the second specific contribution that Beckett's reading of Badiou makes to the doctrine: he stages the abstraction of _événementialité_ as both the object of the work of art and a mode of access to the event. The importance, in Beckett's text, of the operations of abstraction, subtraction and extraction, operations that are mimicked in Badiou's reading of him, is clear.
But there is a fourth level of eventhood, when we reach the level of philosophy. There is, as we know, no procedure of truth in philosophy, which is not an evental field. But the generalised event that the work of art abstracts through the operation of naming (whose centrality in Badiou's treatment of Beckett's language is now clear) remains precisely what it is: an abstraction. The thought of the event in the work of art can never be successfully achieved: it requires the light that a _concept_ of event, which only philosophy can offer, will provide. And it requires precisely the concept of event that Badiou extracts from it and transforms into a doctrine, through the philosophical operation of compossibilisation, which, as we saw, is not as modest as it seems.
Event (revolution), representation of the event (staged event), _événementialité_ (event of the event), concept of event: my four types of event are rather four levels of a hierarchy. It would seem that transcendence is hard to kill. That is exactly the criticism Deleuze and Guattari in _What Is Philosophy?_ level at Badiou.
**_Deleuze reads Beckett_**
Deleuze is not as copious or consistent a reader of Beckett as Badiou is. He never wrote a book about him, only one long piece and a very brief essay.53 The longer piece, however, was originally published as an afterword to the French translation of Beckett's late television plays, which suggests a kind of proximity, if not with the writer himself (the French text was published after Beckett's death), at least with his literary executors.54 And Beckett does occupy a central position in Deleuze's modernist canon: there are myriads of references to him in his works throughout his publishing career.
There are four types of presence of Beckett in Deleuze's works. First, Deleuze is fond of quoting, repeatedly so, a number of 'formulas' of Beckett, extracted out of their context and imported into Deleuze's current concerns. Secondly, Deleuze comes back repeatedly to certain scenes in Beckett, which are inserted in his own philosophical argument as stepping stones rather than illustrations. The most consistently mentioned of such scenes concerns Molloy's four pockets and sixteen stones. Thirdly, there is the close reading of the television plays, from which Deleuze unexpectedly extracts the problematic of language: the unexpectedness concerns both Beckett (as language, in those plays, has vanished) and Deleuze (whose resistance to the linguistic turn of philosophy, if it is not as definitive and radical as Badiou's, is nevertheless notorious). Lastly, Beckett plays a central part in the literary canon that enables Deleuze to construct a concept of style as stuttering. In the last two instances, it can be said that Beckett reads Deleuze as he reads Badiou, as he contributes to the development of Deleuze's thinking in an area that turns out to be of crucial importance.55
'Formula' is a Deleuzian word. His essay on Melville is entitled 'Bartleby; or, the formula', and his deliberately provocative treatment of Kant, his old philosophical opponent, takes the form of a 'summary' of Kantian philosophy by way of four 'poetic formulas' extracted from Shakespeare, Rimbaud and Kafka.56 The essay on 'Bartleby', as its very title indicates, offers a theory of the Deleuzian formula. Bartleby's famous rejoinder, 'I would prefer not to', is analysed in terms of its agrammaticality. The formula is profoundly agrammatical, even if it respects the rules of morphology and syntax. It pushes language to its limits, it creates an event in language ('it hollows out a zone of indetermination that renders words indistinguishable, that creates a vacuum within language').57 It is contagious, it disturbs the usual contrast between affirmation and negation, it turns the maternal or national language into a foreign tongue: 'by means of driftings, deviations, de-taxes or sur-taxes (as opposed to the standard syntax)', Bartleby's formula makes the English language 'slip' ( _fait filer la langue_ ).58 Therein lies the 'eccentricity' of Bartleby ( _un original_ ).
But the ex-centricity of the formula goes further than this: for Deleuze the formula is a way of ex-centring thought. The formula has a provocative value: like a live metaphor, or like a conceit, there is something blatantly false or exaggerated, as in the famous opening sentence of Beckett's _Murphy_ , 'The sun shone, having no alternative, upon the nothing new'.59 Because it is agrammatical in this extended sense, the formula jogs language into thought, it deterritorialises it. We recognise the familiar Deleuzian theme of the violence necessary for thinking: we are forced into thought by the formula. What is interesting here is that – herein lies a difference to Badiou – such violent entry into thought is managed by and with language, which obtrudes, which is no transparent medium for thought nor (this is closer to Badiou) a mere hindrance to thought, an inevitable torture. This is where the formula, in the terms of Garin Dowd, provides sites for the unexpected encounter between philosophy and literature: Deleuze himself is a philosophical Bartleby.
Here are a few examples of Beckettian formulas in the work of Deleuze. Beckett is being provocative about the uselessness of travel, in the manner of Roussel, who is supposed to have gone through Peking in a closed car, all windows obscured: 'We don't travel for the fun of it, as far as I know; we're foolish, but not that foolish' – the French word is rather stronger, as a result of which the English version of the formula loses much of its strength.60 This obviously delights Deleuze, who despised conferences and rarely travelled himself. In another passage, Beckett provides a dismissive _chute_ to a convoluted Deleuzian argument against theories of the cinema inspired by linguistics, where the thought of the image is modelled on language: to the verticality that governs both the hierarchical conception of language (to be found, for instance, in Chomsky's contrast of deep and surface structure) and our visual world, he opposes the thought of the plane, of horizontal surfaces, on which the inscription is not that of hierarchical language but of diagram. And this is where Beckett's formula, which on the face of it has little to do with the current problem, clinches his argument: 'As Beckett says, it's better to be sitting than standing, and better to be lying down than sitting.'61 No wonder another gem of Beckett's comes to comfort the vision of Kant's philosophy through Hamlet's dictum, 'The time is out of joint': Hamlet is a deeply Kantian character 'whenever he appears as a passive existence', and this in turn evokes Murphy's 'metabulia'.62
Beckett's formulas are crystals of thought: they open up a world of thought, they jog us into thought, they force a conclusion upon us, which their offhandedness immediately questions – they are Deleuzian philosophemes, temporary accretions on the plane of immanence that relay or relaunch the lines of flight of thought. We understand why they are the sites of the encounter between philosophy and literature: their workings are those of wit, and Deleuze is not merely a philosophical Bartleby, an ex-centric of thought, he is also a philosophical Oscar Wilde. No wonder again he, like Badiou, stresses the importance of laughter in Beckett, far from any sinister or absurdist interpretation of his work.
The episode of Molloy, his pockets and his sucking pebbles or stones is well-known, and Deleuze is not the first to read it. It is presented as a kind of algorithm ('Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it into my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers . . .' – and so on and so forth till all the combinations are exhausted),63 and Deleuze compulsively returns to it. As a result of this, there is a history of the scene in his works. The first occurrence is to be found in the second chapter of _Difference and Repetition_ , as Deleuze is making ready to deal with the syntheses of time:
In all his novels, Samuel Beckett has traced the inventory of peculiarities pursued with fatigue and passion by larval subjects: Molloy's series of stones, Murphy's biscuits, Malone's possessions – it is always a question of drawing a small difference, a weak generality, from the repetition of elements or the organisation of cases. It is undoubtedly one of the more profound intentions of the 'new novel' to rediscover, below the level of active syntheses, the domain of passive syntheses which constitute us, the domain of modifications, tropisms and little peculiarities.64
Although the context is highly specific and concerns the analysis of 'repetition for itself', as the title of the chapter indicates, the main elements of the recurring analysis of that scene are already present: the larval subject, no longer a centre of action; the series of elements and its exhaustion; the link between the waning of the subject, the exhaustion of the series and the concept of synthesis; and lastly, but not least, a characterisation of the scene as typical of the current state of the novel (this 'new novel' is of course the French _nouveau roman_ , to which _Molloy_ is, perhaps a little too easily, associated).
When the scene reappears, in _Anti_ - _Oedipus_ , it embodies the Guattarian concept of machine, or rather of machinic assemblage, thus justifying Garin Dowd's reading of Beckett 'after Deleuze and Guattari' in terms of abstract machines.65 The importance of the concept for the _Capitalism and Schizophrenia_ project, its origin in the early work of Guattari,66 the systematic contrast between the machinic and the mechanical (the body is a machine and a machine of machines, it is not mechanical – the machine is defined as a 'neighbourhood' of heterogeneous independent elements),67 all this is well-known, as is the transformation of the concept of machine into the concept of assemblage (the machine is the original form of what became a machinic assemblage of desire). Beckett's Molloy scene can in fact be considered, if not as the source, at least as the archetypal inscription of the machinic assemblage: as early as the second page of _Anti-Oedipus_ , the Beckett desiring machines are duly mentioned – not only Molloy's stones, but Watt's strange way of walking. (In fact, the metaphors of rolling and pitching, by which Deleuze characterises style as the stuttering of language, are not, as we might think, nautical metaphors but accurate descriptions of Watt's idiosyncratic manner of walking). A few pages later, a link is made between machines, series (the distinct Deleuzian contribution to the construction of the concept of assemblage which comes from _The Logic of Sense_ ) and synthesis – where we shall recognise our old friend the disjunctive synthesis. This time, it is not Molloy and his stones but Malone and his possessions that occupy the centre of the stage, but, as we have seen, they are linked by a relation of metonymy:
Thus the schizophrenic, the possessor of the most touchingly meagre capital – Malone's belongings, for instance – inscribes on his own body the litany of disjunctions, and creates for himself a world of parries where the most minute of permutations is supposed to be a response to the new situation or a reply to the indiscreet questioner. The disjunctive synthesis of recording therefore comes to overlap the connective synthesis of production. The process as process of production extends into the method as method of inscription.68
Beckett's characters are constructed through disjunctions, by the schizophrenic affirmative use of the disjunctive synthesis, whereby 'everything divides, but into itself'.69 This induces a concept of subject which is, if not 'larval', at least marginalised: the subject is a residual product of the machinic assemblage. Thus the typical Beckett character, the unnameable, Murphy, Watt or Mercier, is 'with no fixed identity, forever decentered, _defined_ [ _conclu_ ] by the states through which it passes'.70 In the end, Molloy sucking his stones becomes the figure of the schizo-analyst, who is neither a theatre director nor an interpreter, but 'a mechanic, a micromechanic'71 and Beckett is the literary master of syntheses.
But the machinic assemblage of desire does not stand on its own: it is associated with a collective assemblage of enunciation. And here also Beckett is an inspiration. Deleuze never tires of referring to his bilingualism: an Irishman writing in both English and French is the best example (with a Czech Jew writing in German), of the minorisation of the standard dialect and of the creation of style by carving a foreign language in one's own tongue. This is _Mille Plateaux_ , but similar passages may be found in _Dialogues_ , in _Kafka_ , in _Superpositions_ :
What is called a style can be the most natural thing in the world; it is nothing other than the procedure of a continuous variation. Of the dualisms established by linguistics, there are few with a more shaky foundation than the separation between linguistics and stylistics: Because style is not an individual psychological creation but an assemblage of enunciation, it inevitably produces a language within a language. Take an arbitrary list of authors we are fond of: Kafka once again, Beckett, Gherasim Luca, Jean-Luc Godard.72
'Stylistics' here must be understood in its French acceptation: not as a form of grammatical analysis of texts, but as an equivalent for literary theory. And it appears that Deleuze's specific canon, undoubtedly a modernist one, is not merely the reflection of his literary taste: it is the canon he needs to construct his concept of style. We shall not wonder, therefore, at the references to Beckett as a typical novelist, as the allusion to the _nouveau roman_ above already suggested. Deleuze is fond of bracketing together Beckett and Chrétien de Troyes, the author of a medieval proto-novel, as archetypal novelists, a _rapprochement_ that will leave the historian of literature gasping. But such linking is not as provocative and arbitrary as it seems: as we saw, one of the things Deleuze has found confirmed in Beckett is the centrality of disjunctive syntheses.
What emerges from this journey through the historical layers of the Deleuze corpus is the growing importance of the question of language. Deleuze, we have seen, is wary of language, in the tradition of Bergson, and in this he resists the linguistic turn: he shares with Badiou the idea that there is something in thought that language alone cannot capture. But, unlike Badiou, or to a much greater extent than Badiou, his philosophical reading of literary texts, of Beckett in particular, has convinced him that language was for philosophy an object of thought. So when he indulges in the close reading of a text by Beckett, in the afterword to _Quad_ , he reads it from the point of view of language.
In Beckett's late television plays, _Ghost Trio_ , . . . _but the clouds . . ._ , _Quad_ and _Nacht und Traüme_ ,73 what Badiou calls 'the imperative of language' seems not to be imperative any longer, as language is hardly present in the first two plays and has completely disappeared in the last two, with the usual paradox that they are now published in the collected dramatic works and therefore consist of strings of words, even if those words are reduced to stage directions and the legends of diagrams. This paradox is central to Deleuze's essay, which naturally deals with the exhaustion of language in late Beckett.74 Towards the end of his trajectory, the famous playwright moves away from language, the stuff that drama is made off, altogether. He does so in all possible ways, by moving on to other media, like music and the visual arts, by striving for complete silence as the climax, but also the substitute, of language, or, when language persists, by exiling it to the margins of the play, the voice off of commentary or the stage directions. Deleuze, however, in his reading carefully avoids taking such an obvious path for his commentary and offering us a disquisition on the dereliction of language in late Beckett. On the contrary, he constructs his reading around a theory of Beckett's language, even a theory of three types of language in Beckett.
He begins by extracting a problem from the text, the problem of _exhaustion_ , in all the senses of the term: physical exhaustion (the characters in the plays obviously suffer from terminal fatigue); logical exhaustion of all possible combinations (the primitive scene in _Molloy_ is with us again), but also the exhaustion of language, which is the exhaustion of the characters, who no longer speak, but also of the writer, who no longer writes, having no language at his disposal. But he goes on by describing not one but three types of language in Beckett.
_Language no. 1_ is a language of _names_. It is already far from language as we know it. We no longer find the syntactic constructions that yield meaning, the references that propositions convey: names qua words are disjunct atoms, their sequence forms enumerations or lists, not propositions, and their combination is algebraic rather than syntactic. Outlandish as it sounds, however, such language is still closer to our language than the next.
_Language no. 2_ is the language of _voices_. In the first language, there is still a subject, the speaker, who is in charge of naming: he offers the guarantee of a form of reference, albeit disjointed and non-propositional, to the world. But in the second language, which it is difficult still to call a 'language', this is no longer possible, as words have disappeared, with two striking consequences. First, such language is no longer _our_ language, a language that we can share with Beckett and his characters, since we fail not only to make sense out of it, but to grasp it as an expression of meaning. Second, meaning has of course absconded: such language, if a tongue at all, can only be a foreign tongue, a tongue of which I am ignorant, uttered by the utterly Other. Deleuze takes advantage of this situation to sketch a theory of the Other as a possible world, whose only point of contact with the world of our reality is the Voice that no longer makes sense. Yet, foreign as it is, this second language is still closer to language as we know it than the third.
_Language no. 3_ is the language of _images_ and _spaces_. Its name of 'language' is highly dubious, as it seems to have abandoned all the characteristics we ascribe to language and to have moved towards other media, the auditory and the visual. We no longer have series, as in language no. 1, or a voice, as in language no. 2: language no. 3 consists merely of impersonal images, both in sound and picture. We no longer have a message, with its syntax, however rudimentary; we no longer have a sender, with her voice; all we seem to have is a heap of broken images. Why call it a language still? Because there is still an addressee, the audience, and there is still something going on, the process of emergence of those images, which, reflexively, is the process of emergence of language itself, when art takes it to its limits, closer and closer to silence, to which it aspires, and which it achieves with this 'language'.
Deleuze describes the progression from the first to the third language in terms of the development of Beckett's _oeuvre_ : like Badiou, he orders the texts into a historical narrative. Language no. 1 corresponds to the first novels, above all _Watt_ ; language no. 2 is to be found in novels and plays; language no. 3 appears with a prose text, _How It Is_ (like Badiou, he ascribes a function of epistemological break to this text), and flourishes with the television plays. But the progression is also a logical one: there is a form of progress in the development of Beckett's _oeuvre_ , as language becomes purified of what is 'annoying' about it. For language as we practise it, the language Beckett tries to get rid of, is not only deceitful in the ambiguity of its words, it is laden with all the paraphernalia of communication and interlocution: intentions, significations, memories and clichés – all of which freeze and poison our words and stifle us, their speakers. The speaker is always foiled by her language: a wet blanket of signification damps down any attempt at expression. Hence the necessity, as Deleuze formulates it, of 'boring holes' in language to find out 'what is hidden behind'. Only a change in medium, the combination of image and music in _Nacht und Traüme_ , can achieve this.
_The Exhausted_ concludes, in a manner reminiscent of Badiou, on poetic language as ill seen ill said:
Is there then no salvation for words, like a new style in which words would at last open up by themselves, where language would become poetry, in such a way as to actually produce the visions and sounds that remain imperceptible behind the old language ('the old style')? Visions or sounds: how can they be distinguished? So pure and so simple, so strong, they are said to be _ill seen ill said_ whenever words pierce themselves and turn against themselves so as to reveal their outside. A music proper to a poetry read aloud without music.75
As in Badiou, the 'ill said' of poetic language (whether latent or explicit) subverts the language of communication. Unlike Badiou, however, this process of boring holes in language to take it to its limit in silence or other media is described in terms of style. This is indeed the climax of Deleuze's reading of Beckett: his works play a central part in Deleuze's construction of a concept of style.
The essay, 'He Stuttered' is the site of the most comprehensive and explicit construction of such a concept in Deleuze. The beginning is innocuous enough: 'It is sometimes said that bad novelists feel the need to vary their dialogic markers by substituting for "he said" expressions like "he murmured", "he stammered", "he sobbed" . . .'.76 But bad novelists soon give way to the canon of practitioners of style, and to the systematic construction of the concept, around the paradox of 'style = non-style'. The gist of the theory appears in the following passage:
_When a language is so strained_ that it starts to stutter, or to murmur or stammer . . . _then language in its entirety reaches the limit_ that marks its outside and makes it confront silence. When a language is strained in this way, language in its entirety is submitted to a pressure that makes it fall silent. Style – the foreign language within language – is made up of these two operations, or should we speak with Proust of a nonstyle.77
This definition of style as a straining of language is based on a concept of syntax as the most important aspect of language: the writer creates a syntax that makes language stammer. I have developed elsewhere this Deleuzian concept of the centrality of syntax (a Chomskyan theme, but one to which Deleuze gives a totally different content) under the name of 'the intensive line of syntax'.78 But Deleuze's definition has two further characteristics. The first is his insistence on the _impersonality_ of style: the subject of style, which is both individual (Cézanne's style) and collective (the style of a school of painting, or of Mods and Rockers) is in no way reducible to a person, and the old tag, 'the style is the man', cannot be further removed from his conception of style. Secondly, the possibility of style is conditioned by the fact that the workings of language cannot be captured, as 'scientific' linguistics tries to do, by a system of rules and functions, but must be described as an array of continuous variations (in other words, Deleuze prefers the linguistics of Labov and Hjelmslev to the linguistics of Saussure and Chomsky).
The determinations of the concept are of course much more precise than that, and the essay charts the progress of language from meaning to silence through style. The language of everyday communication produces meaning, which is a function of common sense and good sense and corresponds to Beckett's 'well saying'. The work of style, the torsion that the writer imposes on language, makes it forego meaning and strive after silence: silence is the limit towards which language strives, and the means and medium of such striving is style. That Beckett should be central to the canon of practitioners of style in this sense will come as no surprise: indeed the concept in its determinations seems to be made especially for Beckett's style.
The meaning to silence progression goes through no fewer than eleven stations, all spelt out in the essay. Here is the glorious list: disequilibrium, continuous variation, trembling (zone of vibration), line, minorisation, stuttering (rolling and pitching), repetition, digression, line of syntax, rhythm, limit (in silence or in other media).
It all starts with the instability of language. Language stutters and style encourages it to do so: it is not a stable or fixed system, but a system of variations, in a constant state of _disequilibrium_. This does not mean that language is entirely chaotic. This is why I have kept the word 'system', understood as a system of _variations_ : no element is fixed in its place; each element occupies a zone of variation. This zone of variation is a zone of _vibration_. Style makes language tremble: it vibrates like a musical instrument or hums like a machine. Such vibration occurs along a _line_ : language is no longer conceived as a system of hierarchic trees or modules, as in Chomsky, but as a vibrating line, it is 'stretched along an abstract and infinitely varied line'. This line, which is a line of flight, or what Deleuze calls a 'witch's line', is what enables style to _minorise_ the standard dialect of communication, to counteract its attempts at stabilisation through good sense and common sense and lets it move towards its limits. With _stuttering_ , which marks the very middle of the progression of style (a position Deleuze is fond of: one must always start from the middle), we reach the essential characteristics of style: it makes language stutter, or, in two Beckettian metaphors, it makes it pitch and roll, through inclusive disjunctions and reflexive connections. Since those are the two main concepts through which Deleuze constructs his concept, I must quote the relevant text:
Language is subject to a double process, that of the choices to be made and that of the sequence to be established: disjunction or the selection of similars, connection or the consecution of combinables. As long as language is considered as a system in equilibrium, the disjunctions are necessarily exclusive (we do not say 'passion,' 'ration,' 'nation,' at the same time but we must choose between them) and the connections progressive (we do not combine a word with its own elements, in a kind of stop-start or forward-backward jerk). But far from equilibrium, _the disjunctions become included or inclusive, and the connections reflexive_ , following a rolling gait that concerns the process of language and no longer the flow of speech. Every word is divided, but into itself ( _pas_ – _rats_ , _passions_ – _rations_ ) and every word is combined with itself ( _pas_ – _passé_ – _passion_ ). It is as if the entire language started to roll from right to left, and to pitch backward and forward: _the two stutterings_.79
The two types of stuttering describe the subversion, _which is inscribed in the very constitution of language_ , of the two types of structuring that linguistics (aptly called 'structural') ascribes to language: paradigm and syntagm, the two axes of selection and combination. Their philosophical constitution is expressed according to the Deleuzian analysis of syntheses, that is in terms of disjunctions and connections: but here both types of synthesis become paradoxical, as disjunctions include instead of excluding (we recognise a version of the disjunctive synthesis) and connections reflexively connect their own elements (instead of connecting elements that are at first separate).
The last five characteristics may be considered as developments of those two types of stuttering. Thus _repetition_ is a form of literal stuttering. _Digression_ works against the determination and fixity, the teleology of meaning; it enforces an open-endedness of sense. The _intensive line of syntax_ , 'a ramified variation of language', an iconic rather than arbitrary sequence of linguistic signs, marks the creative aspect of language intended not as a fixed system but as a system of variation, that is as a process of becoming. Such syntax is endowed with _rhythm_ , as in Artaud's _mots-souffles_ and _mots-cris_ , or in Beckett's haunting repetitive style in _Worstward Ho_. Lastly, and this is what style makes language strive for, a _limit_ is reached, what is _the_ outside of language and yet not outside language (you will have recognised the usual paradox of the concept of limit): there are still words, but hardly so, as in Beckett's second language, and language is moving towards silence, sounds or images, as in Beckett's third language. Beckett's three languages chart this progression from meaning to silence, which style organises.
The Deleuze canon is constituted around these eleven characteristics of style. Gherasim Luca, the Romanian poet who writes in French, practises compulsive reflexive connection (the _pas_ , _passé_ , _passion_ sequence comes from one of his poems, which runs to twenty pages); Charles Péguy is as well-known for his repetitive style as Raymond Roussel is for his structural use of systematic digression; the agrammaticality (in a wide sense) of Bartleby's formula shows that Melville is aware that syntax develops along an intensive line, as is e. e. cummings in his poetry; Artaud, as we just saw, incarnates the moment when language becomes unintelligible because rhythm has taken over; and Céline illustrates the moment when style has been pushed to the limit and language has become not a system of arbitrary signs but an iconic reflection of being and becoming.
In this canonical list, Beckett is everywhere, but especially in the middle, where the two stutterings occur, and a whole page is devoted to him. The following two quotations give us the gist of Deleuze's account:
Beckett took his art of inclusive disjunctions to its highest point, an art that no longer selects but affirms the disjointed terms through their distance, without limiting one by the other or excluding one from the other, laying out and passing through the entire set of possibilities. Hence, in _Watt_ , the ways in which Knott puts on his shoes, moves about his room, or changes his furniture. It is true that, in Beckett, these affirmative disjunctions usually concern the bearing or gait of the characters: an inef-fable manner of walking, while rolling and pitching.80
Beckett's procedure, which is different from Luca's, is as follows: he places himself in the middle of the sentence and makes the sentence grow out from the middle, adding particle upon particle [. . .] so as to pilot the block of a single expiring breath [. . .]. Creative stuttering is what makes language a rhizome instead of a tree, what puts language in perpetual disequilibrium: _Ill Seen Ill Said_ (content and expression). Being well spoken has never been either the distinctive feature or the concern of great writers.81
Style is a function of stuttering, a term which must be understood in the active as in the passive sense: language stutters because the great writer stutters language (this trope is of course itself an example of stuttering in Deleuze's sense). In Beckett, such stuttering is intimately linked with the practice of disjunctive synthesis, with starting in the middle, that is with producing an image of language as a rhizome, not as a tree. And the quotations aptly finish on a reference to the title _Ill Seen Ill Said_ , a phrase that has obviously struck Deleuze as much as it has struck Badiou. And the two analyses have strong similarities, in the contrast between the ill said of the great writer (as we have seen, neither of our philosophers is shy of making value judgements, that is of constructing a canon) and the well said of the language of ordinary communication. But they are also considerable differences: in Deleuze, the workings of language in Beckett are not merely thematised, they are analysed in the detail of their stylistic operations. This is why Deleuze has a concept of style and a non-trivial concept of language where Badiou has neither, with the two consequences that Deleuze's account of Beckett is closer to the critical mainstream than Badiou's (Deleuze's Beckett is a modernist writer where Badiou's is not) and therefore less original and in a way less compelling. But it is much more detailed, as Deleuze engages with the materiality of Beckett's language, with the literariness of the literary work of art, which makes his account, in another way, much more compelling than Badiou's. Perhaps the close proximity, in the French edition, of Deleuze's essay, 'The Exhausted', to Beckett's own text, is indeed more than a fortunate coincidence: perhaps it is a symptom.
**_Notes_**
1. | A. Badiou, 'Third Sketch for a Manifesto of Affirmationist Art', in _Polemics_ , London: Verso, 2006, pp. 141–2.
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2. | A. Badiou, _Circonstances 2: Irak, foulard, Allemagne/France_ , Paris: Lignes, 2004.
3. | A. Badiou, _Beckett_ , Paris: Hachette, 1995; S. Beckett, _Quad, suivi de L'Epuisé, par Gilles Deleuze_ , Paris: Minuit, 1992.
4. | A. Badiou, _On Beckett_ , Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003.
5. | D. Drouet, 'Index des références littéraires dans l'œuvre de Gilles Deleuze', in B. Gelas and H. Micolet (eds), _Deleuze et les écrivains_ , Nantes: Cécile Defaut, 2007, p. 553.
6. | F. Jameson, _A Singular Modernity_ , London: Verso, 2002, pp. 179, 210.
7. | Ibid., p. 4.
8. | Ibid., p. 181.
9. | Ibid., p. 203.
10. | J.-F. Lyotard, _Discours, Figure_ , Paris: Klincksieck, 1971.
11. | M. Foucault, _Les Mots et les choses_ , Paris: Gallimard, 1966, pp. 58–9.
12. | J. Rancière, _Politique de la littérature_ , Paris: Galilée, 2007.
13. | Ibid., pp. 134–5.
14. | Jameson, op. cit., pp. 61 ff.
15. | G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, _Kafka_ , Paris: Minuit, 1975, p. 40; G. Deleuze and C. Parnet, _Dialogues_ , Paris: Flammarion, 1977, p. 25; G. Deleuze, _Pourparlers_ , Paris: Minuit, 1990, p. 44.
16. | G. Dowd, _Abstract Machines_ , Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007, ch. 2.
17. | G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, _Anti-Oedipus_ , London: Athlone Press, 1984, p. 54 (63).
18. | G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, _Metaphors We Live By_ , Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980.
19. | S. Žižek, _Organs Without Bodies. On Deleuze and Consequences_ , London: Routledge, 2004, p. 53.
20. | E. Lunn, _Marxism and Modernism_ , London: Verso, 1985, pp. 34–7.
21. | Deleuze and Guattari, _Anti-Oedipus_ , op. cit., p. 1 (7).
22. | It is even possible to read the whole of Deleuze's _oeuvre_ from the vantage point of a number of paradoxes, as P. Montebello does in his _Deleuze_ , Paris: Vrin, 2008.
23. | J.-J. Lecercle, _Deleuze and Language_ , Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002, ch. 3.
24. | Ibid.
25. | J. Rancière, 'Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-aesthetics', in P. Hallward (ed.), _Think Again_ , London: Continuum, 2004, p. 222.
26. | A. Badiou, _On Beckett_ , eds N. Power and A. Toscano, Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003; A. Gibson, _Beckett and Badiou_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
27. | Badiou, _On Beckett_ , op. cit., p. 38 (6).
28. | Ibid.
29. | Ibid., p.39 (7).
30. | Ibid., p. 42 (14).
31. | Ibid., p. 44 (16).
32. | Ibid.
33. | See Gibson, op. cit., pp. 131–2; Dowd, op. cit., p. 163.
34. | Badiou, _On Beckett_ , op. cit., p. 47 (24).
35. | Gibson, op. cit., p. 285.
36. | Badiou, _On Beckett_ , op. cit., p. 41 (12).
37. | Ibid., p. 40.
38. | On Badiou's reading of _Worstward Ho_ , see Dodd, op. cit., pp. 219–21.
39. | S. Beckett, _Ill Seen Ill Said_ , London: John Calder, 1981, p. 55.
40. | Gibson, op. cit., p. 217.
41. | Badiou, _On Beckett_ , op. cit., pp. 58–9 (44–6). See Gibson's analysis of this passage, op. cit., pp. 127–8.
42. | Ibid., p. 59 (46).
43. | Gibson, op. cit., p. 217.
44. | Rancière, 'Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-aesthetics', op. cit., p. 227.
45. | A. Badiou, _Logic of Worlds_ , London: Continuum, 2009, pp. 204 ff. (216 ff.).
46. | Gibson, op. cit., p. 185.
47. | N. Power and A. Toscano, 'Introduction', in A. Badiou, _On Beckett_ , op. cit., pp. xx–xxi.
48. | Ibid., p. xxv.
49. | Badiou, _On Beckett_ , op. cit., p. 17.
50. | Ibid., p. 90.
51. | Ibid., p. 53 (36).
52. | Gibson, op. cit., pp. 138–42 and _passim_.
53. | G. Deleuze, 'The Exhausted' and 'The Greatest Irish Film (Beckett's « Film »)', in _Esssays Critical and Clinical_ , London: Verso, 1998, pp. 152–74 and 23–6.
54. | Beckett, _Quad, suivi de L'Epuisé, par Gilles Deleuze_ , op. cit.
55. | On this, see Lecercle, op. cit.
56. | G. Deleuze, 'Bartleby, or: The Formula' and 'On Four Poetic Formulas that Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy', in _Essays Critical and Clinical_ , op. cit., pp. 68–90 (40–9) and 27–35 (89–114).
57. | Deleuze, 'Bartleby, or: The Formula', op. cit., p. 73 (95).
58. | Ibid., p. 72 (93).
59. | S. Beckett, _Murphy_ , London: John Calder, 1963 (1938), p. 5.
60. | G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, _A Thousand Plateaus_ , London: Athlone, 1988, p. 199 (244). The French says: _nous sommes cons, mais pas à ce point_.
61. | G. Deleuze, _Negotiations_ , New York: Columbia University Press, 1995, p. 53 (77).
62. | Deleuze, _Essays Critical and Clinical_ , op. cit., p. 30 (43).
63. | S. Beckett, _The Beckett Trilogy_ , London: Picador, 1979, p. 64.
64. | G. Deleuze, _Difference and Repetition_ , London: Continuum, 2004, p. 100 (107–8).
65. | Dowd, op. cit.
66. | F. Guattari, 'Machine et structure', in _Psychanalyse et transversalité_ , Paris: Maspéro, 1972.
67. | Lecercle, op. cit., pp. 180–4.
68. | Deleuze and Guattari, _Anti-Oedipus_ , op. cit., pp. 12–13 (19).
69. | Ibid., p. 76 (91).
70. | Ibid., p. 20 (27).
71. | Ibid., p. 338 (404).
72. | Deleuze and Guattari, _A Thousand Plateaus_ , op. cit., p. 97 (123).
73. | S. Beckett, _The Complete Dramatic Works_ , London: Faber, 1986.
74. | See Lecercle, op. cit., pp. 1–7; Dowd, op. cit., pp. 58–61.
75. | Deleuze, _Essays Critical and Clinical_ , op. cit., p. 173 ( _Quad_ , op. cit., pp. 104–5).
76. | Ibid., p. 107 (135).
77. | Ibid., p. 113 (142).
78. | Lecercle, op. cit., ch. 6.
79. | Deleuze, _Essays Critical and Clinical_ , op. cit., p. 110 (138–9).
80. | Ibid., pp. 110–11 (139).
81. | Ibid., p. 111 (139–40).
6
Reading the Fantastic after Badiou and Deleuze
So far, in their reading of literature, Badiou and Deleuze have dictated the agenda. Reading Mallarmé with Badiou and a host of writers, modernist and otherwise, with Deleuze has confined us to the narrow, or not so narrow, ambit of their respective canons. The time has come to try to put their strong readings to work on texts which they themselves blissfully ignore. There is no mention of either _Frankenstein_ or _Dracula_ in Badiou, because when he is not reading _poems_ for their latent prose, he is reading avant-garde prose for its latent _poem_ : something which cannot easily be done with prose narratives, with novels and tales. And if Deleuze is not shy of dealing with prose narratives, as his belief in the superiority of Anglo-American literature inclines him to do, from the short stories of Melville and Fitzgerald to Stephen Crane's _The Red Badge of Courage_ and the tales of Lewis Carroll, his interest does not extend to the gothic: there is no allusion to Dracula in his complete works, and only one to Frankenstein, taken, as we shall see, as a counter-example.
The gothic, however, or rather the literary genre the French have called _le fantastique_ , may well lend itself to the type of strong reading our philosophers practise. A gothic novel, even the most illustrious one, may not be the site of a literary event in the sense of Badiou. But if my surmise is right that there is a slippage in the concept which allows a literary text not only to be the site of an event but to stage it, the gothic text may well be an excellent candidate for the staging or capture of a Badiou type event. And a gothic text may also be the site of processes of becoming, of deterritorialisation, of minorisation that will be aptly accounted for in Deleuzian terms. So I shall try to read the gothic, or rather the fantastic, with Badiou and Deleuze. But first, I must clarify exactly what I mean by 'the fantastic'.
**_The narwhal and the unicorn_**
In the Christmas issue of the French daily, _Le Monde_ , in 1972, the sociologist and poet Roger Caillois published a short piece, entitled 'The Narwhal and the Unicorn', based on the following proportion: the fantastic is to the marvellous what the narwhal is to the unicorn.1 The object was a definition of _le fantastique_ , that French invention which seeks to capture a subpart of what the English call fantasy: tales of horror and the uncanny, rather than fairy tales or tales of the supernatural, dismissed under the name of _le merveilleux_ , the marvellous. The question of the fantastic was once very much in fashion among French literary theorists, the standard text being Tzvetan Todorov's _Théorie du fantastique_ ( _The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre_ ), where the genre was defined by its recourse to ambiguity (the reader is never sure whether the ghost is real within the fiction, or merely a figment of the narrator's overheated brains) and the canonical text was _The Turn of the Screw_.2
Caillois has a different view of the fantastic, which for him is defined by its subversion of the normal order of the world, which the marvellous, in spite of its frequent recourse to the supernatural, comforts. The gist of his argument was that the two beasts, the narwhal and the unicorn, have inverse and symmetrical characteristics: one really exists, the other is a mythical creature; the one that exists subverts the order of the world, the non-existent one comforts it. Here, a word of explanation is in order. The narwhal does exist (less and less so): it is a small whale found in the Arctic, characterised by a two-yard long horn protruding from its jaw, the function of which is obscure. But it subverts the natural order: the horn is in fact its upper left eye-tooth, grown immoderately long, which makes the beast an exception to a law governing the external appearance of animals, the law of sagittal symmetry, which states that if you cut an animal into two lengthways, you will get two symmetrical halves, as far as the external organs are concerned. If you cut an elephant into two along the sagittal axis, each half will have one tusk, half a trunk, two legs and half a tail. A spider treated in the same way will have four legs for each half. And the viscount in Calvino's famous tale, who was cut into two in a battle, yielded two perfectly symmetrical selves.3 Not so the narwhal, as its horn will be on the left half, an asymmetry that only one another animal possesses, a crab with one pincer considerably larger than the other. Note that the unicorn, although it does not exist, conforms to sagittal symmetry, as its horn stands right in the middle of its forehead. And the unicorn comforts the natural but also the moral order of the world. In medieval times, its horn was deemed to have medical properties and one could purchase vials of water in which a unicorn's horn had been dipped as one buys paracetamol today. And if a father had doubts about the virtue of his daughter he could take her into the forest and leave her to the unicorn, which was gentle with the virtuous but stabbed the errant ones with its phallic horn.
No doubt you will have asked yourself a question: how can the horn of a non-existent beast be dipped into water and sold as medicine? The answer is that the medieval reality of the non-existent unicorn's horn was the existent narwhal's horn, a precious possession, which led to the animal being over-fished and today almost extinct. That is the rationale behind Caillois' proportion, which develops into a correlation in the following way: like the narwhal the fantastic uses the _realia_ of our ordinary world (it has no need of the supernatural), which it seriously subverts by introducing an impossible element (there is a link, therefore, between the fantastic and paradox); like the unicorn, the marvellous indulges in the supernatural, but it comforts the moral order of the world, as in the end villains are duly chastised and the hero and heroine are happy and have many children. Kafka's _Metamorphosis_ , where the cockroach makes an unwelcome appearance in the comfortable petty-bourgeois world of the Samsa family, is an archetypal fantastic text, and _Cinderella_ , with its mice turned into horses and its pumpkin turned into a carriage, not to mention a glass slipper, is an archetypal marvellous text.
The correlation is coherent with the definition of the fantastic Caillois gives in another text, his introduction to an anthology of fantastic paintings:
The fantastic operates a break with established order, it captures the irruption of the inadmissible within our inalterable daily legality; it does not involve the substitution of an exclusively supernatural world for the real world.4
The fantastic has no need of invasions from outer space, or of a double world as in _Harry Potter_ : all it requires is the world of our daily life, and an element that cannot belong to it and subverts it. The archetypal fantastic story would go like this. You are walking in your home town and you come across a small street that you had never noticed before. You enter the street in a spirit of exploration. Through an open window, you hear the best violinist you have ever heard. When he stops, you vow to come back the next day and listen again. And the next day, the street is no longer there: the two buildings at the corner of the street are joined up and there is no opening. This is why, unlike a marvellous tale, which requires a certain length to construct that alternative world, a fantastic story may be very brief, the narrative equivalent of a _haiku_. This is the shortest story I know, which Calvino maintained was also the best. Its author is the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso:
And when he woke up, the dinosaur was still looking at him.5
According to this type of theory, a fantastic story needs the presence of four elements: (1) a world which is our world, which we recognise, and in which the 'inalterable daily legality' reigns; (2) a narrator, the hero of the tale, who is an ordinary inhabitant of the world; (3) a phenomenon, that is an alien element, whose presence threatens the disintegration of the normal world (the word is to be understood in its strong sense, as when we talk of a success that is 'phenomenal'); (4) an encounter between the hero and the phenomenon, which transforms the life of the hero, who becomes a witness to the phenomenon, sometimes with dire consequences to himself, as nobody else believes in the phenomenon and he passes for mad.
It is easy to see that Mary Shelley's _Frankenstein_ , for instance, is a fantastic tale in this sense: the city of Geneva and the university of Ingolstadt provide recognisable elements of a normal world; the monster is a good example of a phenomenon, in that he appears in the normal world but is entirely out of it (he does not even have a name); the encounter between the phenomenon and the character, Victor, comes through an act of creation, but it has all the qualities of an encounter: hardly has the monster opened one eye when his creator experiences an overwhelming feeling of revulsion and tries to deny his existence by taking flight; and the character's life is irrevocably changed by the encounter: his younger brother, his friend and his fiancée are murdered, he passes for mad, nobody will believe in the existence of the monster, etc.
We can sum up this theory of the fantastic by using a deliberately down-to-earth formula: the problem with the phenomenon is that it cannot fill in a passport application form, in other words it is deprived of identity in our world in which it appears, a monster in all the senses of the term. The table below provides a typology of fantastic phenomena; it also explains why Frankenstein's monster is a fantastic phenomenon, whereas count Dracula is not.
_Passport application form_ | _Contribution to identity_ | _Type of fantastic phenomenon_ | _Frankenstein_ | _Dracula_
---|---|---|---|---
1. Photograph | Recognition | Vampires | + | –
2. Name | Insertion within the tribe | Frankenstein's monster; _Them_ | – | +
3. Christian name | Insertion within a lineage | Frankenstein's monster; Rosemary's baby | – | +
4. Date of birth | Insertion within history, a generation, an individual destiny | _She,_ Dracula, Lovecraft's Charles Dexter Ward | – | \--
5. Place of birth | Insertion within a neighbourhood | Alien | + | +
6. Nationality | Insertion within a nation state | Conrad's _Secret Sharer_ | – | +
7. Address | Electoral register; supports a football team | Melmoth the Wanderer and the wandering Jew | – | +
8. Signature | Capacity to be a party to legal transactions | Madman, Lovecaft's archaic monsters | – | +
9. Official stamps | Official guarantee | Outlaws and various criminals | – | –--
A few words of explanation are in order. The left-hand column lists the items of information the applicant must provide on a passport application form. Failure to do so will prevent you from getting papers establishing your identity.
The next column spells out the contribution of those items to the construction of the social identity of the applicant: it is all a question of recognition (I recognise myself, I am recognised by others) and integration (I am who I am because I am a member – of a nation, a neighbourhood, a profession, etc.).
The next column again suggests that a fantastic character, the embodiment of the phenomenon, is simply a creature that, not for a temporary or accidental reason, is unable to fill in one or several rubrics in a passport application form. Thus, if we think of someone whose photograph cannot be taken because he or she has no mirror image, we are thinking of a vampire. A creature which cannot be named will be in the same situation as Frankenstein's monster, or the mutant ants in the American horror film _Them_ , which are so monstrous they cannot be named and can only be described by the vague pronoun that gives its title to the film. In the same vein, Polanski's Rosemary's baby, whose father is the devil, has no Christian name, nor for that matter has Frankenstein's monster, who has no ancestors. Count Dracula, the heroine of Rider Haggard's _She_ or the eponymous hero of H. P. Lovecraft's _Adventures of Charles Dexter Ward_ dare not confess their date of birth since, as they are unnaturally old, no official would believe them, even as the monster in the series of _Alien_ films would not be able to mention a credible place of birth. Conrad's 'secret sharer' owes his aura of mystery to the fact that he comes from nowhere and goes nobody knows where – he is an alien in the legal sense of the term, as are the contemporary French _sans papiers_ , those real-life embodiments of a fantastic character. The wandering Jew has no fixed address, the madman cannot sign a legally binding document (nor can Lovecraft's archaic monsters, for lack of a hand to hold the pen) and outlaws of all description cannot obtain the official stamps which guarantee that, legally and socially speaking, all is as it should be. In the end, what emerges from this column is a typology of fantastic characters: going down the rubrics of the passport application form is like visiting a museum of horrors.
The last two columns are attempts by Frankenstein's monster and count Dracula to fill in their passport application form. Where it appears that although the count cannot provide a photograph or mention his real date of birth, which will deprive him of the official stamps, he can fill in all the other rubrics: he has a name, a lineage, an address, a nationality, etc., whereas the poor monster, who can provide a photograph (of extraordinary ugliness) can only give a place of birth (provided he does not mention that his birth took place in a laboratory, by unnatural means). We can safely conclude that he is much more of a fantastic phenomenon than the count: if we go back to Caillois' correlation, and treat the contrast as a gradient, Frankenstein's monster will occupy the fantastic pole, whereas Dracula will be closer to the marvellous pole.
A few conclusions may be derived from this table:
1. | The object of the fantastic text is the destruction of social identity and the subversion of the world that such identity constructs, the world of our reality, as opposed to the Lacanian Real. The object of the marvellous text is to resist such dissolution or subversion by comforting our social identity.
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2. | The fantastic crisis is caused by a void in the world of our everyday reality. The absence of only one element in the construction of identity, symbolised by the inability to fill in only one of the rubrics of a passport application form (provided that such inability is not merely contingent) is sufficient to precipitate the crisis.
3. | The contrast between the fantastic and the marvellous is better thought of as a gradient (the degree of fantastic is marked by the number of rubrics the fantastic phenomenon would be unable to fill in). In this theory of the fantastic, _Frankenstein_ is in the position of the archetypal fantastic text (the role played by _The Turn of the Screw_ in Todorov's theory), whereas _Dracula_ is a mixture of fantastic and marvellous elements.
The question naturally is: in what way does the theory of the fantastic that I have just sketched concern Badiou and Deleuze?
**_Reading the fantastic after Badiou_**
The account of the four elements necessary for a fantastic text can easily be retranslated into the terms of Badiou's theory of the event. A fantastic text needs a world, in other words a situation: a multiple of multiples – settings, characters, customs and habits, the world as we experience it, or the _realia_ on which the fantastic text thrives. Something emerges in that situation that makes manifest the void on which it is based, something impossible, an embodied paradox, an unnameable element, the phenomenon which is at the heart of the fantastic text. A monster is created, a nose acquires its independence, as in Gogol, a clerk is metamorphosed into a cockroach, as in Kafka. This phenomenon is the incarnation and the trace of an event, _the_ event, whether it be creation, metamorphosis or quasi miraculous emergence, that gave birth to it. Being indiscernible, the event has escaped the notice of ordinary members of the situation, as it cannot be named in their language. There occurs, however, an encounter, between the phenomenon, the trace of the event, and a character, the narrator of the tale, who starts the process of enquiry, bears witness to the retroactive existence of the event and engages the procedure of truth. This encounter produces the subject of the procedure of truth: monster and creator, vampire and vampire hunter, the subject is always dual, as in a procedure of love. A world or situation, a narrator-hero as part of a subject, a phenomenon as trace of an event, and an encounter as the beginning of a procedure of subjectivation and of truth: the theory of the fantastic I have sketched is indeed translatable in the terms of Badiou's philosophy. We may reformulate it in the following manner: the object of a fantastic text is the inscription and capture of an event in the sense of Badiou and the staging of its consequences.
However, 'inscription', 'capture', 'staging' are danger words, in so far as we are moving from the enactment or presentation of an event, which Badiou's philosophy describes, to its representation in literature. But we saw in the last chapter that the concept of event was understood in more than one sense: the event proper, or revolution; the staged event, originating in another evental field, and represented, in its anticipation, its traces and its consequences, in the field of art; and the 'eventuality', or _événementialité_ of the event, art having the capacity to stage not only a specific event (the Paris Commune in Rimbaud or Mallarmé) but the general conditions of all events, what Gibson calls the event of the event. The last two senses may be deviations from the straight and narrow path of Badiou's theory of the event, but they are what literature is about, or, if you prefer, they are the specific contribution of literature to the construction of a theory of the event, when literature reads the philosophy of Alain Badiou. In a sense, this is where Badiou the writer reads Badiou the philosopher as, in his latest novel, _Calme bloc ici-bas_ , what we have is a staging of events in the four fields where they may occur: the field of politics (the traces left by a vanquished regime of political commissars, the new historical sequence determined by the movement of the masses – there is a sense in which Badiou's novel is a modern version of Jack London's _The Iron Heel_ , that classic of the revolutionary socialist novel), the field of science (the toucan, or very large, cardinal number which one of the characters constructs), the field of love (a devastating passion is described) and literature (one of the characters is composing a long and particularly abstruse poem, out-Mallarmeing Mallarmé, and we are given extracts). All these events are caught in a narrative framework, in other words they are represented, even if the representation is no mere attempt at reflection, being expressed, for instance, in the three different styles in which the novel is written.
We may therefore treat the fantastic as the inscription of Badiou events in their three senses. We might, for instance, make a case for the constitution of an artistic configuration to which the 'fantastic' would give a name: a name originating in nineteenth-century France and making unified sense of a series of texts, all the way through the tradition of world literature, and bringing together apparently unconnected or little connected texts like _Frankenstein_ , the works of Kafka or the tales of Borges. Caillois' correlation of the marvellous and the fantastic might be understood in this way, the fantastic text marking a break, an evental break, with the tradition of fantasy. But that is the subject of another book.
For the time being I shall concentrate on a more modest task: I shall try to put to work Badiou's theory of the event to produce an interpretation of _Frankenstein_. I shall try to ascertain whether Mary Shelley's tale inscribes an event in another field, the field of politics; and I shall try to see whether it is the narrative enactment of the eventuality of an event, whether it deals with the occurrence of an event, with the traces it leaves and their consequences for the situation and for the characters immersed in it, and with the construction of a procedure of truth, with the co-occurring process of fidelity and subjectivation. Badiou's philosophy of the event will have been fruitfully 'put to work' if it casts a non-trivial light and 'compossibilises' elements of the narrative, on which interpretation stumbles, into a coherent account. For instance, it may be wondered why Victor Frankenstein, having sacrificed everything to the fabrication of his creature and having finally succeeded in doing what nobody before him except God had done, is immediately seized with a feeling of revulsion and horror rather than calmly waiting for the attribution of the Nobel prize for biology.
Let us take these two enquiries in order. At first glance, there is little history in _Frankenstein_. A gothic novel is not a historical novel: the castle of Otranto has nothing to do with the eponymous Italian town and its history, and the castle of Udolpho is erected in a historical and geographical no man's land. However, there is a reference to time, at the very beginning of _Frankenstein_ : captain Walton's first letter to his sister is dated 'St Petersburgh, _Dec 11 th, 17–_'. The action, therefore, takes place in the eighteenth century. And in the second chapter of volume III, we do find a historical allusion, when Victor, on his way to Scotland (where he intends to give the monster a bride) stops at Oxford:
From thence we proceeded to Oxford. As we entered the city, our minds were filled with the remembrance of the events that had been transacted there more than a century and a half before. It was there that Charles I had collected his forces.6
This passage gives us a date, 1642, the year when Charles I fled London to prepare for the civil war. 'More than a century and a half after' means that the narrative cannot take place before 1792, and Walton's letter tells us it cannot take place after 1800: the action takes place between those two dates, in other words _at the time of the French Revolution_. We shall not, of course, interpret these indirect references as an attempt at historical realism, but we must take them as a symptom. The Europe which provides the backcloth to the tale is torn by war and revolution, yet there is not the slightest mention of those historical events in the text, and the characters are able to travel freely all over the continent. But there is a trace of the political event of the French revolution in the character of the monster, who wreaks havoc not in society at large but among Victor's family and friends. Contemporary readers did perceive this symptom, as the monster was soon taken as the metaphor for all sorts of revolutionary or rebellious mobs, the archetype of which were the Parisian sans-culottes, and the historical incarnation of it was Napoleon, that child of the French Revolution who was also Bony, the scarecrow with whom unruly British children who refused to go to bed were threatened. We understand why the revolutionary monster, but also the irresponsible intellectual who had created him, must die at the end of the novel: to allow the bourgeoisie to breathe a sigh of relief at the closure of that historical sequence. And we also understand that, the event having produced a truth that is eternal and survives the end of the historical sequence of its birth (the spirit of the French Revolution still lives), the dead monster remained eternally very much alive, in the form of the myth: very few people nowadays know who Mary Shelley was, but everybody knows Frankenstein, and believes that it is the name of the monster.7
But it is not enough to decide that the tale bears witness to a political event in the sense of Badiou. We must look at the staging of the traces in more detail, especially since, as I suggested, such traces are the traces of the _événementialité_ of an event. We must be able to tell the tale of Victor and his monster in the language of Badiou.
It all starts with the initial situation, a multiple of multiples: Victor's family circle and their history (the story of Victor's mother and of her untimely death), the town of Geneva as it was at the end of the eighteenth century, the state of knowledge prevailing at the university of Ingolstadt, in other words an encyclopaedia of knowledge and belief and the language necessary to phrase it. And, within that language, we remember the contradiction between an archaic conception of science as alchemy and the more modern version defended in the university: Victor's scientific breakthrough takes the paradoxical form of a return to the archaic concept of science.
In a situation, as described by Badiou, when an event occurs, since it is indiscernible, evanescent and unnameable, it can only be grasped in the future anterior, it _will have_ occurred, and it will be grasped retrospectively through a process of enquiry. But it is the privilege of narrative to stage what is not immediately perceivable, and to represent it as a miracle, as an epiphany. Here is how Victor Frankenstein conceived his wondrous idea – the scientific event that might have changed the world and certainly changed his life:
I paused, examining and analysing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life, until from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke upon me – a light so brilliant and wondrous, yet so simple, that while I became dizzy with the immensity of the prospect which it illustrated, I was surprised, that among so many men of genius who had directed their inquiries towards the same science, that I alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret.
Remember, I am not recording the visions of a madman. The sun does not more certainly shine in the heaven, than that which I now affirm is true. Some miracle might have produced it, yet the stages of the discovery were distinct and probable. After days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue, I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter.8
What is striking in this passage is the intertwining of two discourses, the discourse of epiphany and miracle, and the discourse of science, of causation, enquiry and experiment. The event itself, the spark of light of the idea that disperses the cloud of unknowing and shatters established knowledge, is ineffable, and can be captured only in the metaphorical language of light inserted in the discourse of theology – this is indeed Victor Frankenstein's encounter on the road to Damascus. But the event, being evanescent, always already past, can only be confirmed by a process of enquiry and a procedure of truth that in turn will produce a faithful subject.
So a subject is constituted, but it is not an individual subject (the mad scientist pursuing his solitary task in his 'workshop of filthy creation'),9 but a couple, as in the event of love: what Victor creates when he assembles the monster from bits of corpses is the subject of the event. We understand why the technicalities of such fabrication are of no importance and are passed over by Mary Shelley in a few vague sentences, and we also understand why the creator and his creature are inseparable, why, when the former dies, the latter must commit suicide. Here is the famous scene, the most remarkable aspect of which is its brevity:
It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of life into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.10
'A spark of life': that is all we shall ever know of the actual making of the monster – a vague reference to the marvellous powers of newly discovered electricity.
The constitution of a subject is the outcome of a series of enquiries and the initiation of a procedure of truth requiring fidelity. And Victor does undergo such a process. When he sees the light, he abandons his old life in order to devote himself to his enquiries: he forgets his family and friends, neglects his fiancée, no longer attends the lectures at the university, shuts himself up in his laboratory. He has become a monomaniac, the militant of a single idea, which is a truth, and to which he must be faithful whatever the cost. He is engaged in a process of _fuite en avant_ , he is carried away by his research, at the expense of his social identity: unlike the monster, he would have no difficulty filling in a passport application form, except that he has become, if not an outlaw, at least a hermit.
But here we encounter the strangest turn in the story of Victor. The continued engagement in this procedure of truth should have induced him to accept the possibility of a race of _Übermenschen_ , by him created, no longer monsters but creatures stronger, more intelligent, and very likely morally better than common-or-garden humanity. In other words, he should have nurtured the innocent monster, educated him and enthusiastically given him not only a bride but brothers and sisters. But he does not. The scene of creation is immediately, in the next paragraph, followed by a scene of violent and irrational repulsion:
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! – Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of health and rest. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.11
Overwhelmed by such strong feelings, Victor leaves the room and goes to bed, where, in correct gothic fashion, he dreams he embraces the corpse of his dead mother, only to wake up and see the monster looking at him, upon which he flees the house and abandons his creature. And you will have noted the tensions that animate the language of our passage, the inversion of feelings that the birth of the monster provokes, when love turns to hatred, as well as the contradictory description of the monster's physical appearance, a mixture of the _blason_ of courtly love, when each part of the loved object's body is celebrated in turn ('his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing, his teeth of a pearly whiteness' – this is the lover praising the beauty of his beloved) and of the teratological description of an unnatural creature, with those 'dun white' eye sockets and those black lips (this is no longer the loved object, this is the Devil himself).
So the procedure of truth is brutally interrupted, the subject dissolved, with dire consequences. But such interruption is described in Badiou's system: not all subjects remain faithful to the event, not all procedures of truth endure. The account of such failure occurs twice in his works, in the theory of evil, to be found in his _Ethics_ , and in the renewed 'metaphysics' of the subject in _Logic of Worlds_ , where the older theory of the subject developed in _Théorie du sujet_ is revisited in the light of the theory of the event.
In _Ethics_ , evil is not primary, it is not an unfortunate but inevitable part of human nature, but what occurs when a procedure of truth goes wrong.12 Accordingly, there are three varieties of evil. _Terror_ is produced by a commitment not to a truth but to its simulacrum, when the procedure is initiated not from the void of the situation, from an indiscernible and unnameable element that does not belong to the situation, but from one particular section of the situation, which is therefore already given, the object of a form of knowledge or belief, and only too easily named in the language of the situation. The example Badiou gives is the spurious Nazi 'revolution', which does not revolutionise the situation, only projects a part of it, the German _Volk_ , on to the whole. _Betrayal_ occurs when a genuine procedure of truth is initiated, but its subject is unable to pursue it and ends up denying the event of which he had made himself a militant. The canonical example is provided by the French _nouveaux philosophes_ , who begun as militants of the political event of May '68 and ended up as supporters of the capitalist status quo, not to mention a few imperialist wars. _Disaster_ occurs when a procedure of truth has been conducted but the fragility and inbuilt incompleteness of the process is forgotten and the truth is imposed on the new situation it has engendered: that truth is no longer predicated on the void, it becomes a form of absolute knowledge. The canonical version of this is the Stalinist transformation of the political truth of the October revolution into a dogma, the consequence of which is not only a freezing of revolutionary Marxism into the dogma of historical and dialectical materialism, but the Gulag.
In _Frankenstein_ , Victor has initiated a genuine procedure of truth: the creation of the monster is the embodiment of such a procedure; it marks Victor's fidelity to the scientific event which occurred in a flash, in the sudden discovery of the secret of creation. The creation acknowledges the fact that the event is always situated in the future anterior, as the scientific event will have occurred when the monster, who is the living proof of it, is created. And the creation of the monster also creates the dual subject of the event. So, when Victor falls into evil, it is not through terror and simulacrum as the procedure was genuine. It is not through disaster either, as he does not attempt to impose the truth of his discovery on the world he and the monster inhabit, but rather renounces the truth and tries to deny the existence of the monster, first by taking refuge in sleep, then by sheer flight. This is a characteristic example of betrayal, of not having the courage to go on with the truth of which one has had a glimpse. Truth is difficult, the path is uneven, and the subject of truth finds himself in the situation of the character of Beckett's _The Unnameable_ , whose situation is summed up in the famous last words of the text: 'You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.'13 Not so Victor Frankenstein, who goes away instead of going on, and seeks to destroy what he has created. In so doing, he actively betrays the event of which he was a subject not so much by denying it (as reality will insist, and the monster will soon remind his creator of his existence) as by reversing the procedure of truth into a procedure of untruth, or of evil, which ends up in his and the monster's annihilation.
The second _locus_ for the account of the failure of the procedure of truth occurs in the first book of _Logic of Worlds_ , which is entitled 'Formal Theory of the Subject (Meta-Physics)'.14 In the wake of _Being and Event_ , the subject is conceived as the outcome of a procedure of subjectivation, in other words a procedure of truth: it is a consequence of the event. In _Being and Event_ , only one subject was envisaged, the subject faithful to the truth she follows. But in _Logic of Worlds_ , account is taken of the possibility that the procedure of truth should abort and the procedure of subjectivation should continue, producing the wrong subjects. There are two of those, the reactive subject and the obscure, or obscurantist, subject. The first book is devoted to a demonstration of the structure, or matheme, of each of these three subjects, a structure that involves three elements: the traces of the vanished event, the body produced by the advent of the event (Badiou is a materialist, the traces of the event are inscribed on bodies, and the subject emerges from the body, or from its repression) and the present, defined as the consequences in the world of the presence of the traces of the event. Each subject combines those three elements (and their denial or repression) in a different way.
The faithful subject, whose figure is Spartacus, the leader of the revolt of the slaves, affirms the event in its traces, incarnates such affirmation in a cleft body (there are always parts of the body that evade capture by the traces of the event) and faces the consequences of this decision in the evental present. In the case of Spartacus, the faithful subject is that part of the body of revolting slaves that is willing to form a united army in order to do battle with the Roman legions.
The reactive subject, whose figure is the conservative slave who is terrified at the thought of revolt, or the _nouveau philosophe_ (Badiou singles out André Glucksmann, the former militant Maoist turned supporter of imperialism), denies the actuality of the traces of the event and represses the structure of the faithful subject which he once was or tried to be, thus 'switching off' the present ( _il éteint les lumières de l'événement_ : the French language has the same word for 'light' and 'enlightenment').15 The obscure subject, whose figure is the religious fundamentalist, is bent not on affirming the present as a consequence of the event, but on obscuring it, which means a return to the past of tradition (there is nothing new under the sun, there never was an event) and the affirmation of an eternal transcendence which underpins the radical lack of novelty: the function of the priest is to substitute a fetish for the traces of the event.
If we go back to _Frankenstein_ , we understand what happens to Victor, who fits the description of the reactive subject: an event has indeed occurred, which has left traces in the world and produced a dual subject. But his subject immediately divides into two. There is a faithful part, embodied by the monster, who wants to 'hold the point' of the event, as Badiou calls it, in other words make the series of decisions called for by the fidelity to the event, and who also wants to affirm the consequences of the event in the present, in the form of the creation of a race of _Übermenschen_ who will replace our puny humanity. But there is also a reactive part, embodied by Victor, who denies the traces of the event, refuses the present that is their consequence, and represses his erstwhile fidelity to the event. This is why he feels an overwhelming repulsion at the sight of the incarnation of the event in the living monster, why he makes his escape in sleep and sheer flight, why later he actively tries to destroy the traces of the event of which he was the subject by pursuing the monster to the end of the world. Only the strength of such denial, where the reactive subject reacts against what he once was and hates the result of his work, can explain the suddenness and violence of Victor's change of heart.
_Frankenstein_ is the fictional account of the advent of an event, of the traces that it leaves, of the procedure of truth that it initiates, and of the process of subjectivation that ensues, a process that produces a reactive subject in the person of Victor. And the evental field in which the event occurs is the field of science: Victor Frankenstein is a genius at chemistry and biology, and Mary Shelley has firmly placed her tale under the auspices of Dr Darwin, Charles's grandfather. But it is, as we saw, a characteristic of the event as narrated by literature that it can also stage events in an indirect fashion, as well as present the general characteristics of any event, its _événementialité_. This _Frankenstein_ does in two ways. First, as we saw, there are traces of the event of the French revolution in the tale, where the presence of the political event can be paradoxically inferred from the absence of any mention of it. And we could go a little further by interpreting Victor's relation with his creature, the labour of love that finds its outcome in the creation, followed by the immediate and violent inversion of affect, as a description of another event and another process of subjectivation, the event of love, here denied by the hatred at first sight that both creates and destroys the inseparable couple of creator and creature. Secondly, the tale is the site of an event which occurs in its specific field, the field of literature. The novel is not merely a product of the gothic tradition: it initiates what Badiou calls an artistic configuration, a series of works that constitute the procedure of truth typical of the field of art. Whether we call this artistic configuration the fantastic or science fiction (it has been asserted that Mary Shelley invented science-fiction with _The Last Man_ , but the same may be more plausibly said of _Frankenstein_ ) is irrelevant. The literary consequences of this invention are still with us.
So _Frankenstein_ stages an event and its consequences not merely in its own, artistic field, but in the three other fields where events occur. And I think we understand why _Frankenstein_ is more of a fantastic text than _Dracula_. There is no trace of an event in _Dracula_ , and no process of subjectivation. The vampire, an archaic form of evil, almost as old as the Devil himself, is always already part of the situation: his tale is narrated in ancient tomes, his feeding habits are known to the enlightened few, as are known the traditional methods, from consecrated wafers to cloves of garlic, of combating him. Van Helsing, no modern scientist in spite of his love of telegrams, is the recipient of this traditional knowledge. As a result of this, the vampire never lacks a name, unlike Frankenstein's monster, who is unnameable: not only has Count Dracula an immemorial social identity, but what he is called, a vampire, is sufficiently known to strike terror in the heart of human multiples of the situation. An occurrence which has always already happened, whose origin is lost in a long forgotten past, cannot be an event, its traces cannot constitute a present and initiate a procedure of truth. _Dracula_ is a tale of ascendance turned towards the past, towards a long lineage of vampires of which the count is the last representative: it is a reactionary tale, the tale of the ritual expulsion of an evil that is too well known, whereas _Frankenstein_ is a tale of descendance, turned towards the future, towards the utopian development of a race of better humans: the monster is not only more agile and more intelligent than the rest of us, he is also morally superior, more virtuous, at least when he is born, before unjust rejection has embittered him and converted him to evil because he is miserable. In other words, _Frankenstein_ is a progressive tale, a tale of the epoch of revolutions, not a medieval resurgence. That is why it initiates a new artistic configuration, which is still alive (Badiou has written a short essay on the philosophical import of _The Matrix_ , a worthy member of the artistic configuration of science-fiction),16 whereas _Dracula_ is, at the very end of the nineteenth century, a late survivor of the long exhausted genre of the gothic.
**_Reading_ Dracula _after Deleuze_**
There is no more mention of fantastic texts in Deleuze than in Badiou, unless we decide that the works of Kafka and Borges are an integral part of the genre: a few allusions to Poe, none to Hoffmann and only one mention of _Frankenstein_. In plateau no. 7 of _A Thousand Plateaus_ , 'Year Zero: Faciality', Deleuze and Guattari are contrasting their concept of faciality with the concept of gaze, whether in phenomenological garb, as in Sartre, or in psychoanalytic parlance, as in Lacan. And they are particularly hostile to the psychoanalytic concept of part object:
An approach based on part objects is even worse: it is the approach of a demented experimenter who flays, slices, and anatomizes everything in sight, and then proceeds to sew things randomly back together again. You can make any list of part-objects you want: hand, breast mouth, eyes . . . It's still Frankenstein. What we need to consider is not fundamentally organs without bodies, or the fragmented body; it is the body without organs, animated by various intensive movements that determine the nature and emplacement of the organs in question and make that body an organism, or even a system of strata of which the organism is only a part.17
So poor Victor is no longer a scientist who deserves a Nobel prize, but a demented experimenter. His dabbling with part objects in order to construct an organism (the result of his celebrated visits to various graveyards) goes against the germinal unity of the body without organs, which precedes and eventually produces the organism.
There is, however, a deeper reason why the fantastic is not mentioned in Deleuze, whose reading of narrative is extensive. If, with the help of Caillois, but also of Badiou, we define the fantastic as the genre whose object is the capture of/by the event and the staging of the consequences of such capture, the concept of event referred to will always be close to Badiou's concept: a radical novelty, a subversion of the order of the world, a hole in the situation. But such a concept of event is alien to Deleuze, whose conception of what an event is is entirely different. Thus the two concepts of event in Badiou and Deleuze may be systematically contrasted. (For a systematic study of the similarities and differences in the concepts of event in Deleuze and Badiou, see James Williams's remarkable essay.18) The Badiou event is a flash of lightning; the Deleuze event is a mist. The Badiou event is extremely rare, as rare as a political revolution or a change of scientific paradigm; the Deleuze event is everywhere, it is occurring all the time – every accident finds its virtual counterpart in the event it actualises. (Williams stresses the ubiquity of the Deleuze event: 'There is an event whenever there is a change in intensity accompanying novel effects along actual and ideal series.'19) The Badiou event is impossible, but only too real, according to Lacan's definition of the real as the impossible (it is impossible in the situation, being indiscernible and having no name, but it is real in its traces and in the procedures of truth and subjectivation it initiates); the Deleuze event is virtual, and actualised in the accident, with its mixture of bodies in the approved Stoic fashion. The Badiou event is not the object of a hermeneutic quest, it does not provide meaning, but destroys the established meanings of the language and encyclopaedia of the situation; the Deleuze event makes sense, in the precise meaning that term takes in Deleuze's philosophy. In Deleuze, the event is an in-between element, attributed to a state of affairs (this is captured by the Deleuzian concept of phantasy) and expressed in a proposition (this expression is captured by the concept of sense). The Deleuze event is a ghost, a phantasm, hovering over the mixtures of bodies; in so far as it is what is expressed in propositions, it becomes inseparable from the words that express it, from the thoughts the proposition is made of, and its name under that aspect is sense. Finally, the temporality of the Badiou event is the future anterior, whereas the temporality of the Deleuze event is not the time of the accident, _chronos_ , the time of present past and future, but the a-temporal time of the infinitive, _aion_ , the time of a present outside time's arrow, inscrutable and neutral.
In Deleuze, the concept of event is developed in _Logic of Sense_ , but, unlike other concepts, it survives in later works. In the earlier work, it is developed through a reading of a literary text, Stephen Crane's _The Red Badge of Courage_. The archetype of the event is the battle, as experienced by the hero of the tale, who is very much part of it as this is a tale of fear and bravery, but who can never perceive it as a determinate object of experience as the battle is both everywhere and nowhere: it does not reside in the actions and passions of the participants, yet it envelops them like a vapour, always present and always elusive. The event is that mist that trails over the battlefield. This is how Deleuze, in a late text, accounts for it:
Now, if we go back up in the opposite direction, from states of affairs to the virtual, the line is not the same because it is not the same virtual [. . .]. The virtual is no longer the chaotic virtual but rather virtuality that has become consistent, that has become an entity formed on a plane of immanence that sections the chaos. This is what we call the Event, or the part that eludes its own actualization in everything that happens. The event is not the state of affairs. It is actualized in a state of affairs, in a body, in an experience, but it has a shadowy and secret part that is continually subtracted from or added to its actualization: in contrast with the state of affairs, it neither begins nor ends but has gained or kept the infinite movement to which it gives consistency. It is the virtual that is distinct from the actual, but a virtual that is no longer chaotic, that has become consistent or real on the plane of immanence that wrests it from chaos – it is a virtual that is real without being actual, ideal without being abstract.20
We understand the difference between the Deleuze event and what common sense calls an event. Deleuze's 'pure' event belongs to the realm of the virtual, it is ideal but not abstract, real but not corporeal. It is also unique, must be spelt with a capital E, the Event, in and through which all individual events communicate: the one dice-throw, another name for the one Being. Badiou, in his critique of Deleuze, takes advantage of such formulations to describe Deleuze's philosophy as a metaphysics of the One. This is what he has to say of Deleuze's 'true throw of the dice':
It is _unique_. For were there (really, ontologically) several throws, the statistical revenge of the Same would be ineluctable. This is, no doubt, the point at which Deleuze's philosophy as philosophy of the One is at its most concentrated. For, if there is only one throw of the dice, if the 'throws are formally distinct, but with regard to an ontologically unique throw, while the outcomes implicate, displace and recover their combinations in one another throughout the unique and open space of the univocal', then one has to uphold that the plurality of events is purely formal, and that there is only one event, which is, as it were, the event of the One. And we have seen that Deleuze does not, in fact, draw back from this consequence. Being is indeed the unique event.21
We understand why Deleuze and Badiou cannot mean the same thing under the term 'event'. The Badiou event is conceived in the emphatic plural, and it is both real and actual: or rather, Badiou utterly rejects the virtual that Deleuze inherited from Bergson.
We understand why there is no marked interest in the fantastic in Deleuze: the creation of Frankenstein's monster cannot be usefully described as a Deleuze event. Or rather it is an event in so far as, in every occurrence, the event is the part that resists actualisation. But in this, the rather extraordinary creation of a totally new being is in no way different from any other occurrence. Deleuze is trying to make philosophical sense of ordinary occurrences, and indeed the theory of the event in _The Logic of Sense_ is linked to the theory of sense on which it rests. If the battle is the best image of the pure event, the only access we have to it is through the proposition that expresses it and that allows it to be attributed to the state of affairs. And that proposition is best exemplified by a literary proposition, by a literary text: it takes a Tolstoy, a Stendhal or a Stephen Crane to express the event of the battle, to make us perceive it. Only in the eternal and motionless surface of the text can the event, in its virtuality, be captured. So the fantastic text is not the best text for a Deleuzian reading of literature, for two related reasons: the fantastic event can no longer be taken as extraordinary, as phenomenal in the intensive sense of the term, as a result of which the capture of the event in a fantastic text loses any specificity; and the fantastic text, if we wish to concentrate on its specificity, is not the best text to capture the essence of the event, because it focuses on the radically new rather than on the vaporous virtual nature of the event that accompanies every accident.
However, there is another type of fantasy that may strike a chord in the Deleuzian philosopher, the type of texts Caillois contrasts with fantastic texts, which he calls marvellous texts because of their recourse to the supernatural. _Dracula_ , in which there is no trace of a Badiou event, might be treated as such a text: as we saw, it was far less of a fantastic text than _Frankenstein_. And there may be elements in it which the reader of Deleuze will readily recognise.
The problem with Caillois' contrast, strongly supported as it is by Badiou's theory of the event, is that it creates a hierarchy with implicit value judgement. The narwhal is a more interesting creature than the unicorn, which is supernatural but trivially moral. As we saw, Caillois mentions the medieval legend which suggested that if a father had doubts about the virtue of his daughter, all he had to do was to expose her to the unicorn in the nearby woods: the beast, a conservative and highly moral creature, a servant of the _doxa_ , fawned on the virtuous ones and stabbed the fallen ones with its horn. As a consequence, the fantastic text, a para-doxical text, is greater than the marvellous text, which is tendentially confined to old wives' tales, superstitions and what is usually known as paraliterature. And when I sought to demonstrate that from the point of view of the passport application form, that is from the point of view of the situation, _Frankenstein_ was a more fantastic text than _Dracula_ , I implicitly endorsed the hierarchy and the value judgement.
There is, of course, every reason to decide that _Frankenstein_ is a better text than _Dracula_. The so-called monster in _Frankenstein_ is a round character, capable of putting forward his point of view with considerable eloquence, of obtaining the reader's sympathy, in spite of his nefarious deeds – he is a complex and contradictory character, indissolubly both good and evil, and he provokes the passions of pity and fear in the reader like the tragic figure that he is. The count, on the other hand, hardly ever talks, and never in the first person (a few of his conversations are reported by Jonathan Harker), and therefore he cannot hope for the reader's sympathy; he is a flat character, a walking embodiment of evil, an object of abhorrence and little else. The two novels also differ in so far as _Frankenstein_ is progressive in the political sense whereas _Dracula_ is reactionary. _Frankenstein_ basks in the philosophical and ideological light of the Enlightenment, it is a European tale (Victor wanders throughout Europe in the course of the narrative: from Geneva to Germany, then to England and Scotland, before the monster attracts him to the end of the world), and there is not the slightest trace of nationalism and masculinism in the tale (the fact that it was written by a woman is no assurance). On the other hand, _Dracula_ is a woman-hating tale, but also a tale of rejection of all aliens: the vampire is, in the immortal words of Tony Blair, a bogus asylum seeker. The utopian longings of Mary Shelley's tale are replaced by the grossest form of sexual titillation: vampirism is described in the language of rape, and _Dracula_ is in many ways close to what we would today call soft porn. But perhaps the most striking difference lies in the style. _Frankenstein_ is written in the idiom of high Romanticism: its rhetorical eloquence is tempered by the elegance of the syntax. Mary Shelley is not Jane Austen, and the distance of irony is not one of her most striking characteristics, but she can write, which Bram Stoker, at least for most of his novel (if we except a number of set scenes like the miraculous arrival in Whitby harbour of the ghost ship in the midst of the wildest storm), cannot. His text bristles with the most trivial clichés and grossest rhetorical tropes. The following passage is a good example of Stoker at his worst. The scene is well-known: the count is vampirising Mina Harker on the marital bed, while Jonathan lies in a stupor; he is interrupted by a posse of vampire-haters, who burst in on an episode of what can only be described as fellatio. The speaker is Doctor Seward, the psychiatrist:
The moonlight was so bright that through the thick yellow blind the room was light enough to see. On the bed beside the window lay Jonathan Harker, his face flushed and breathing as if in a stupor. Kneeling on the near edge of the bed facing outwards was the white-clad figure of his wife. By her side stood a tall, thin man, clad in black. His face was turned from me, but the instant we saw all recognized the Count – in every way, even to the scar on his forehead. With his left hand he held both Mrs Harker's hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white dress was smeared with blood and a thin stream trickled down the man's bare breast which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten's nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink. As we burst into the room, the Count turned his face, and the hellish look that I had heard described seemed to leap into it.22
I spare you the rest of the scene. The piece is written in the typical style of a pornographic novel: the positions of the two bodies must be described with the utmost precision in order to titillate the reader and leave little to his imagination. But what interests me in this passage is the fine instance of bathos in the last but one sentence. This lurid description of rape ends on a comparison of surprising and mawkish innocence, involving a kitten and a child. If we forget the possibility of a pun _in absentia_ on the word 'pussy', which only our cynicism may have suggested, we start wondering about the real object of the scene. And here a Deleuzian note creeps into the analysis and inclines us to read the novel as a whole in a slightly different way. The Count, we remember, has entered the marital chamber not as man or beast, but as a mist, which will remind us of the ghostly nature of the Deleuze event, hovering over the battlefield like a vapour. And we also remember that the count has the capacity not only to metamorphose into an animal, a black dog or a bat, but to attract animals, like the poor wolf in London zoo, which went berserk when it sensed the arrival of the vampire. So the animal comparison is not merely an instance of bathos (but of course it is also that, and a blatant one too): it illustrates a Deleuzian concept, which the vampire embodies, the becoming-animal of the human being. Two heterogeneous terms meet to form a single unit, through reciprocal deterritorialisation; an assemblage is created, new intensities emerge. The vampire is a becoming-animal of the human, the wolves who respond to the call of the vampire a becoming-human of the animal. And metamorphosis is the literary name of the becoming-animal. We know that Deleuze dislikes metaphor, that purely linguistic tropism, and prefers metamorphosis, which involves a machinic assemblage of desire as well as an assemblage of enunciation. And we also know his fascination with the work of Kafka, where Gregor Samsa is the very embodiment of a metaphor (what a cockroach that man is!) taken literally, that is, in the world of fiction, as metamorphosis (Gregor _is_ a cockroach, and the tale develops the ineluctable consequences of this becoming insect). What I am suggesting is that the vampire too is a good literary incarnation of the becoming animal that potentially affects all of us.
Here, however, the slightest doubt creeps in. The metamorphoses of Count Dracula are temporary and instrumental: he turns into a black dog in Whitby to enter England unobserved; he turns into a mist in order to creep under the door of Mina's bedroom, and the assemblage of vampire and wolf is not so much a machine as an instrument. So in the case of the vampire, metamorphosis is not really a line of flight: the vampire is characterised by the stability of his identity over centuries (he does not grow older, he cannot die) rather than by the Heraclitean fluidity of becoming. The vampire has Being, not becoming, he has strong social identity (which will be the cause of his downfall, as he is too attached to Castle Dracula, his lair), and we saw that he had less difficulty filling in the passport application form than Frankenstein's monster. But there is another twist to the story. In their _Kafka_ , where Deleuze and Guattari analyse forms of becoming-animal in Kafka's works, they define such a becoming in terms of deterritorialisation: becoming-animal is strongly contrasted with the fixity of the Oedipal structure, as fine an example of reterritorialisation as you can get, and territorial movements are clearly at the heart of _Dracula_.
The narrative structure of _Dracula_ can be described in terms of a game of draughts or of a conventional cowboy film. In the first half of the novel, the villain invades the good characters' territory and tries to reach their base, the town of London. In the second half of the novel, the posse of goodies counter-attack, give chase to the villain who flees to his own base, and in a last battle succeed in destroying him in his lair. The vampire, therefore, is not quite a nomad (he is too deeply anchored in the territory of his ancestors, to the point of travelling with coffins filled with the consecrated earth of his local graveyard), but he is moved by the need to deterritorialise, to destabilise the pristine stability of his enemies' attachment to the glebe (remember Jonathan Harker's qualms when his employer decides to send him to Transylvania), and in order to do so he turns himself into a one-man, or rather a one-vampire, war machine, even if he is ultimately defeated by the regular army of the despotic state, in other words the assembled goodies. The problem of Count Dracula is not so different from Victor Frankenstein's monster: he may not betray the event he has provoked, but he does not take his lines of flight far enough, he is still, in the midst of his attempt at deterritorialisation, too attached to his ancestral grounds, he does not let himself be carried far enough by his becoming-animal, and this is the cause of his undoing. _Dracula_ , a reactionary novel, pictures the ritual expulsion of the deterritorialising scapegoat: the vampire is ultimately vanquished, but in the few moments of his frantic undeath (the narrative covers a period of no more than a year), he has threatened to replace the striated space of the state with the smooth space of the nomad. It is significant that when the female vampire, Lucy, a recent convert, goes on the rampage in the night, the scene is described in the famous phrase: 'she walks'. If we go beyond the obvious sexual connotations of the phrase (the female vampire as streetwalker or vamp) we may decide that the vampire in fact subverts the established order because she is a rambler, literally and metaphorically. This is Rebecca Solnit, the historian of walking, on the century-old struggle between ramblers and landowners in the United Kingdom:
The conflict is over two ways of imagining the landscape. Imagine the countryside as a vast body. Ownership pictures it divided in economic units like internal organs, or like a cow divided into cuts of meat, and certainly such division is one way to organize a food-producing landscape, but it doesn't explain why moors, mountains, and forests should be similarly fenced and divided. Walking focuses not on the boundary lines of ownership that break the land into pieces but on the path that functions as a kind of circulatory system connecting the whole organism. Walking is, in this way, the antithesis of owning. It postulates a mobile, empty-handed, shareable experience of the land. Nomads have often been disturbing to nationalism because their roving blurs and perforate the boundaries that define nations; walking does the same thing on the smaller scale of private property.23
The vampire is on the side of the body without organs, not of the order of the organism. He is concerned with biological as with spatial circulation, the circulation of the walking, but also of the bleeding body. His is a nomadic and therefore deeply subversive experience: he is ruined by his homing instinct, when the nomad yields to an ancestral yearning for his birthplace. Deleuze's geophilosophy is perhaps the best way to account for the myth of the vampire, and we begin to understand why _Frankenstein_ 's superiority over _Dracula_ as a literary text gives way to the equal importance, success and survival of the two stories considered as myths.
One of the literary inferiorities of _Dracula_ is that the characters are flat, as flat as the playing cards in _Alice in Wonderland_ , puppets rather than persons. But Deleuze's philosophy enables us to understand why this is not a liability but an asset. His is an aesthetic of affects and percepts: the task of the novelist is not to create person-like characters, but to extract blocks of affects and percepts from affections and perceptions. The difference between those similarly sounding pairs of terms (affect is a Spinozist term, which covers what is usually known as 'passion') is that affections (of the body) and perceptions are human, subjective and temporal, whereas affects and percepts are none of this: they are impersonal, objective, not affected by time. For Deleuze and Guattari in _What Is Philosophy?_ , art has nothing to do with perception, and everything to do with sensation, a mixture of affects and percepts: the function of the work of art is to tear affect and percept from human perceptions and affections. Affect is defined as 'man's non-human becoming',24 and the artist is a creator of unknown affects (the becoming-whale of Captain Achab, the violent affect that circulates between Catherine and Heathcliff in _Wuthering Heights_ ). Some animals can be described as the sites of a limited number of affects. Thus the tick evoked in _A Thousand Plateaus_ :
Von Uexküll, in defining animal worlds, looks for the active and passive affects of which the animal is capable in the individual assemblage of which it is part. For example the Tick, attracted by the light, hoists itself up to the tip of a branch; it is sensitive to the smell of mammals, and lets itself fall when one passes beneath the branch; it digs into its skin, at the least hairy place it can find. Just three affects; the rest of the time the Tick sleeps, sometimes for years on end, indifferent to all that goes on in the immense forest. Its degree of power is indeed bounded by two limits: the optimal limit of the feast after which it dies, and the pessimal limit of the fast as it waits.25
The tick sleeps: so does the vampire, a tick in human shape. The tick is characterised by, and limited to, three affects: so is the vampire, who is no longer a human being, but a machine that is sensitive to the presence of mammals, pounces when one passes by, and bites. He is however, slightly more active than the tick, in spite of his periods of passivity, sometimes for centuries on end, in that he actively seeks the mammals on which he will pounce. But we understand why Count Dracula is almost mute, why, unlike Ann Rice's vampire Lestat, he never tells us his side of the story: because there is no such thing as his side of the story, because he is reduced to three affects, within the optimal limits of the feast of blood after which he goes back to sleep and the pessimal limit of the fast to which his isolation in Transylvania condemns him. As such, the Count is a fine figure of a character in a novel, being the incarnation of the extraction of a block of affects.
There is another aspect of _Dracula_ which strikes a sympathetic chord in the reader of Deleuze, the rather striking names the novel gives vampires: the Undead, an impossible name that turns them into walking paradoxes. This name may be taken as central to the novel. If we indulge in a Greimassian analysis in the shape of a semiotic square, we shall discover that the name involves a distribution of the characters, or roles, in the novel as well as the logical development of the narrative.26 As we know, for Greimas the deep structure of a narrative is provided by the logical development of a semantic contrast, in the shape of a semiotic square. And since it will be readily granted that the _Dracula_ myth deals with life and death, and the possibility of an in-between state, we may take the 'alive' versus 'dead' contrast as the basis of a semiotic square, which will have the following shape: | |
2. The Haunted | |
---|---|---|---|---
|
A. Alive | |
B. Dead
|
1. The Living | | | |
3. The Dead
|
C. Not Dead | |
D. Not Alive
|
| | 4. The Undead | |
The semiotic square involves positions A to D. The relationship between A and B, C and D, is a relationship between contraries. This means that the contrast admits of a third term ('white' is the contrary of 'black' because there are third terms, both black and white, meaning 'grey', or neither black nor white, meaning 'red' or 'blue'), whereas A and D on the one hand and B and C on the other are contradictories, which means that no third term is possible ('white' and 'not white' cover the whole range of possibilities). So there may be a third term between 'alive' and 'dead', but not between 'alive' and 'not alive'. This provides the general semiotic framework of _Dracula_ : some characters are alive, some die and some do not quite manage to die. In order to obtain a distribution of the characters into the functions or roles they play in the novel, all we have to do is take positions A to D in couples, thus obtaining four other positions numbered 1 to 4. Position 1 combines A and C, position 2 combines A and B, etc. The new positions are given names which define the characters that fill in those slots in the structure. Thus characters that are both alive and not dead are, trivially enough, called the Living. In the same vein, characters that are dead and not alive (position 3) are called the Dead. The interesting positions, however, are the two other possible combinations, 2 and 4. In position 2, characters are both alive and dead, a manifest impossibility in our world, but one exemplified in the novel by the victims of the vampire, no longer quite alive and yet not quite dead either: this is the state of Lucy in the last stages of her vampirisation. On the other hand in position 4, characters are neither alive nor dead but persist in a strange limbo, in other words they are undead. We can use these four positions to describe the narrative structure of the novel and the fate of the single characters. There is, for characters, a traditional path that goes from 1 to 3: in our normal world, we all proceed, at as slow a pace as possible, from life to death, from the realm of the Living to the realm of the Dead. Not so for everyone in _Dracula_ , which is situated in an abnormal world. Quincey Morris, who dies a heroic death fighting the allies of the vampire, goes the normal path. But the vampire replaces the horizontal journey, from 1 to 3, with a vertical, unnatural journey from 2 to 4, from the position of the Haunted to the position of the Undead. This is what happened to Count Dracula long ago; this is what happens to Lucy in the course of the narrative. But the most interesting journey is that of Mina Harker, who is raped by the Count, but not enough for her to become a vampire, and who ultimately escapes a fate worse than death, namely undeath. She goes from position 1, where she is fully alive, to position 2, where she is haunted by the vampire (and indeed, when she is in that state, she remains in telepathic communication with her potential new Master, which allows the league of vampire hunters to track him down to his lair). In position 2 she is in great danger of moving to position 4, along the vertical path, but all is well in the end (the novel ends on the announcement, or annunciation, of the coming of a child to Mina and Jonathan Harker) and she is firmly and definitively shunted to the right path, in the direction of position 3.
But the name of the vampire, the Undead, is more than an instrument of narrative development, it is the point where the story as a whole takes its sense. My contention is that we must understand this process of taking or making sense in the acceptation in which Deleuze uses that term, the central concept in _The Logic of Sense_. The semiotic square charts the conventional aspect of a story with strong traditional elements (the vampire has always already been there, from the eighteenth century onwards): it defines the walks of life open to various characters; it evokes unnatural slippery paths only to use them as moral foils. Mina, not Lucy, is the heroine of this moral tale, in so far as she temporarily strays from the path of righteousness in order the better to find it again in the female fulfilment that motherhood (within holy matrimony) provides. But Lucy does not simply stray, she walks, and the impossible name, the unnatural coinage, that designates her and all her kin subverts that doxic order. In fact it precedes and underlies it in that, like Deleuzian sense of which it is the very inscription, it is impossible, a contradiction in terms, giving birth to monsters. (There has always been a link between the linguistic teratology of coinages, like Lewis Carroll's portmanteau words, and the natural teratology of the _lusus naturae_ , the biological monster.) As we know, in his theory of sense, Deleuze plays on the two meanings of the French term, _sens_ : direction and meaning.27 Sense is the fourth element of the proposition, neither designation (by which a referent is pointed out), manifestation (in which a speaker expresses herself) nor signification (whereby God guarantees, with the help of the logical and grammatical structure of the proposition, that everything is as it should be and the world is a coherent whole), but something that precedes it, not so much in the chronological as in the logical sense in which the virtual enjoys precedence over the accident of its actualisation. In an as yet hazy and shapeless chaos of meaning in formation, sense develops in all possible directions, even opposite ones (as we saw, Deleuze is fond of quoting the dictum of the medieval philosopher Nicolas d'Hautrecourt, _contradictoria ad invicem idem significant_ , contradictories enjoy the same sense), and provides the foundation on which the proposition will establish meaning, at the cost of freezing it into doxa, in the right direction of good sense, and the generally accepted meaning of common sense. The impossible name of the vampire, as fine an example of self-contradiction as there is, the only rational response to which is the flattest tautology (the dead are dead because they're no longer alive, death can't be undone, etc.) does not induce a conventional story of righted wrong that strays beyond the moral _doxa_ the better to comfort it, but it is the matrix of a rambling beyond the bounds of meaning, a return into sense, to the moment when lines of flight (the vampire is a rambler) are not fixed into the striated space of the state with its conventional morality.
Becoming animal, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, the vampire as block of affect, a human tick, the impossible names as the very inscription of sense: only the concepts of Deleuze philosophy enable our reading of _Dracula_ to go beyond a bad novel, steeped in misogyny and the most blatant form of xenophobia, written in the wooden style of cliché and adorned with the cheap titillation of purple passages, and emerge into the glory of a great myth, the worthy counterpart of the myth of _Frankenstein_.
**_Notes_**
1. | R. Caillois, 'Le narval et la licorne', _Le Monde_ , 24 December 1976, pp. 1, 11.
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2. | T. Todorov, _The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre_ , Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975.
3. | I. Calvino, _Il visconte dimezzato_ , Turin: Einaudi, 1952.
4. | R. Caillois, _Cohérences aventureuses_ , Paris: Gallimard, 1965, p. 174.
5. | A. Monterroso, 'El dinosauro', in _Œuvres complètes (et autres contes)_ , Geneva: Patiño, 2000.
6. | M. Shelley, _Frankenstein_ , London: Penguin, 1985, p. 154.
7. | On all this, see J.-J. Lecercle, _Frankenstein: mythe et philosophie_ , Paris: PUF, 1988, ch. 3.
8. | Shelley, op. cit.., p. 51.
9. | Ibid., p. 53.
10. | Ibid., p. 56.
11. | Ibid.
12. | A. Badiou, _Ethics_ , London, Verso, 2001, pp. 64–5 (72–87).
13. | S. Beckett, _The Beckett Trilogy_ , London: Picador, 1979, p. 382.
14. | A. Badiou, _Logic of Worlds_ , London: Continuum, 2009, pp. 43–78 (51–99).
15. | Ibid., p. 55 (64).
16. | A. Badiou, 'Dialectiques de la fable', in E. During (ed.), _Matrix, machine philosophique_ , Paris: Ellipses, 2003, pp. 120–9.
17. | G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, _A Thousand Plateaus_ , London: Athlone Press, 1988, pp. 171–2 (210).
18. | J. Williams, 'If Not Here, Then Where? On the Location and Individuation of Events in Badiou and Deleuze', in _Deleuze Studies_ , 3 (1), 2009, pp. 97–122. See also J.-J. Lecercle, _Deleuze and Language_ , Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002, pp. 108–18.
19. | Williams, op. cit., p. 114.
20. | G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, _What Is Philosophy?_ , London: Verso, 1994, p. 156 (147–8) ; translation slightly modified.
21. | A. Badiou, _Deleuze_ , Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, pp. 73–4 (111).
22. | B. Stoker, _Dracula_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 281–2.
23. | R. Solnit, _Wanderlust. A History of Walking_ , London: Verso, 2001, p. 162.
24. | Deleuze and Guattari, _What Is Philosophy?_ , op. cit., p. 173 (163).
25. | Deleuze and Guattari, _A Thousand Plateaus_ , op. cit., p. 257 (314).
26. | A. J. Greimas, _Sémantique structurale_ , Paris: Larousse, 1966.
27. | G. Deleuze, _The Logic of Sense_ , London: Athlone Press, 1990; Lecercle, _Deleuze and Language_ , op. cit., ch. 3.
Conclusion: Aesthetics or Inaesthetics?
The question that remains is: what exactly have I described in attempting to account for my two philosophers' mode of reading literature? Or, which is another way of asking the same question: what is the exact status of their 'strong readings' of literature? Or again, if we wish to generalise, what are the relationships between philosophy and literature that such a mode of reading involves?
**_Two philosophies of literature?_**
An immediate answer to my questions would be: I have described two philosophies of literature, conjoined and disjoined in disjunctive synthesis, as I suggested in theses two and three of my introduction: two similar and yet distinctive modes of reading literature philosophically, that is of applying to literary texts the techniques of reading and constructing concepts which are the usual province of philosophy. Yet such an answer, and such descriptions, would be indignantly rejected by Badiou and Deleuze: whatever they are doing when reading literary texts certainly does not amount to a philosophy of literature. The first reason for such rejection is cultural and contingent: the phrase 'philosophy of literature' is tarred with the brush of Anglo-Saxon and analytic philosophy, and it immediately suggests a philosophical agenda that has nothing to do with the way Deleuze and Badiou read literature. Such an agenda, with its specific set of themes, is exemplified in the work of Thomas Pavel:1 the ontological status of characters of fiction (the object of a seminal essay by Searle); worlds of fiction that are, or fail to be, possible, consistent and complete; mimesis as make-believe (as in Kendall Walton); the status and workings of metaphor; the relations between author's intention and textual meaning, and between literature, truth and morality. In spite of the mention of the word 'truth', this has nothing to do with Badiou's concerns when he reads literature, even less with Deleuze's. To caricature: the analytic philosophy of literature is mostly preoccupied with the questions of whether Sherlock Holmes had a mole on his left buttock, and whether the blob of green slime that appears on the screen of a horror film and advances in a threatening fashion causes in me, as a member of the audience, genuine fear or only quasi-fear. Deleuze and Badiou would despise such _enfantillages_ , such childish pursuits, unworthy of the seriousness with which they read literature.
More seriously, their objections might develop along the following two lines. First, the very name of a philosophy _of_ literature presupposes a hierarchy, whereby philosophy thinks, and literature is thought, as an object for philosophical speculation – literature is merely yet another region over which philosophy exerts its jurisdiction, as a result of which, of course, the literary text is a mere pretext for the development of philosophical analyses that are independent of it, and for the illustration of philosophical concepts whose main field of relevance is located elsewhere. And this is exactly what Badiou and Deleuze, when they read literature, refuse to do: their strong readings are based on the idea that literature thinks on its own, that it is not one more object for philosophical theorising and that, therefore, the reading of literary texts by philosophers cannot be mere exploitation of the text for philosophical purposes. It is not certain, of course, that our philosophers' reading is _à la hauteur_ of such exalted views, but if we wish to understand what they have to say about literature, we must begin by taking into account the high role they ascribe to literature in the realm of thought.
In Badiou, literature is one of the evental fields, one of the fields where procedures of truth occur, and, as we have seen, this implies a superiority of literature over philosophy, which does not produce independent truths, but only thinks, or 'compossibilises', truths produced in other fields. Compared to the artist, the philosopher, as Badiou reminds us in an interview for _Le Monde_ newspaper, is reduced to the role of a _second couteau_ , a sidekick.2 Literature is one of the _conditions_ for philosophy, it produces 'intraphilosophical effects', even if the strange term 'compossibilise', which defines the specific task of philosophy, may be deemed to reintroduce a form of transcendence (philosophy, if not as 'the science of generality', at least as a second-order form of thought, that thinks the thoughts other practices cannot, or cannot explicitly, think). In Deleuze too, art is one of the ways in which thought emerges, in its specific way: thought by way of percepts and affects, where philosophy is concerned with concepts, even if this separation involves more than a simple division of labour, as the thoughts of art, more often than not, turn out to be similar to the thoughts of philosophy, or rather to be the very thoughts that philosophy had always already shaped into concepts. But both aspects of the paradox must be maintained: even if we have the impression that, in the end, philosophy will impose its agenda on the thoughts of literature, the claims of subservience (in Badiou) or (in Deleuze) strict equality between philosophy and literature must be taken seriously, and if the relationship between philosophy and art eventually turns out, once again, to be a form of exploitation, such exploitation, if I may say so, is less exploitative than the practice of the philosophy of literature, which treats literary texts as mere objects of analysis. To speak the language of Deleuze, what is wrong with the analytic philosophy of literature is that it belongs to the representative image of thought that it is the philosopher's task to overturn.
Perhaps the most striking difference between the strong readings that Deleuze and Badiou practise and the customary modes of analysis of literary texts is the depth of their engagement with the singular text and with literature in general, in terms both of quantity and of quality. It is an easily acknowledged fact that analytic philosophers rarely deal with literature in the sense of actually reading, that is closely reading, specific texts (Bouveresse on Musil is an exception): when they do deal with literature, it is in the most general terms, with little or no reference to text, form, plot or character (the truth or falsity of the proposition that Sherlock Holmes lives in Baker Street is usually enough), whereas Badiou and Deleuze not only read literature incessantly, as we saw, but, in a reversal that is no mere rhetorical trope, they are read by literature. In an important sense Artaud and Lewis Carroll read Deleuze, with their paradoxes and bodies without organs, as much as Mallarmé and Beckett read Badiou, as he himself acknowledges. The central concepts of their philosophies, truth and life respectively, are not concepts that emerge independently of literature: they are not merely illustrated by literary texts, they are produced by them. This is why, in the last months of his life, Deleuze engages with Dickens, and this is why Badiou, in his book on 'the communist hypothesis', a book which, he claims, is a book of philosophy, not merely a political pamphlet, establishes his hypothesis by quoting extensively from two of his own literary texts, the opera _L'Echarpe rouge_ and his play _L'incident d'Antioche_.3 There are truths that can only be formulated in the language of art – it is the task of philosophy to accommodate them, to do what it can with them; and there is a form of life which can only find expression in the work of art, before the philosopher starts constructing it into a concept. I have tried to formulate this engagement and this relationship between literature and philosophy through the Deleuzian concept of style: when the philosopher reads literature, he reads it for style.
**_Aesthetics?_**
Perhaps what I do not dare call a philosophy of language I might call an aesthetics. For Deleuze and Badiou do not merely read individual texts, they generalise, they talk about the relationship between philosophy and literature or art in general. And to be sure, one could maintain that there is a Deleuzian aesthetics. Mireille Buydens has devoted a book to the subject, prefaced by a letter by Deleuze himself: he appears to have given his blessing to the enterprise.4
Buydens's account of Deleuze's aesthetics is centred on the dialectic of form and deformation, in the opposition between the figurative and the 'figural', which can be expressed, as usual, in a correlation: figurative versus figural; optic versus haptic; striated versus smooth space; representation versus presentation. Only the second column, 'optic' versus 'haptic' needs an explanation: the contrast, which is traditional in art history and originally comes from Worringer, opposes _optic_ contemplation of the painting to _haptic_ grasping, where the painting is metaphorically touched upon by the spectator's gaze. In Deleuze, the contrast opposes optic distance, form and abstract line to haptic proximity, deformation and concrete line, the kind of line which delineates the figure in Bacon's paintings.
As we can see, the correlation, and indeed the whole dialectic of form and deformation (which places Deleuze in an old and venerable aesthetic tradition), concerns the art of painting, possibly the art of music, but not, or not directly, the art of literature. But it is entirely coherent with Deleuze's general philosophical agenda of overturning the representative image of thought, represented here by the chain of concepts, figurative – representation – narrative – perspective, hence a history of modern painting according to Deleuze, with its three moments of abstract art where form is dominant, informal art where form is dissolved and chaos reigns, and deformative art as exemplified by Deleuze's favourite painters, Bacon and Cézanne. There is one passage, however, where Buydens applies this analysis to Deleuze's reading of literature, namely his return to Proust, by quoting a passage from _A Thousand Plateaus_ :
Three moments in the story of Swann and Odette. First, a whole signifying mechanism is set up. [. . .] That is Swann's aestheticism, his amateurism: a thing must always recall something else, in a network of interpretations under the sign of the signifier. [. . .] This entire mechanism of signifiance, with its referral of interpretations, prepares the way for the second, passional subjective, moment, during which Swann's jealousy, querulous delusion, and erotomania develop. Now Odette's face races down a line hurtling toward a single black hole, that of Swann's Passion. The other lines, of landscapity, picturality, and musicality, also rush toward this catatonic hole and coil around it, bordering it several times.
But in the third moment, at the end of his long passion, Swann attends a reception where he sees the faces of the servants and guests _disaggregate_ into autonomous aesthetic traits, as if the line of picturality regained its independence, both beyond the wall and outside the black hole. Then Vinteuil's little phrase regains its transcendence and renews its connection with a still more intense, asignifying, and asubjective line of pure musicality.5
Buydens comments on this passage by suggesting that it is the most significant formulation, in a condensed form, of Deleuze's aesthetics. And it is clear that, in it, we find a number of key Deleuzian concepts: the limits of interpretation (its reign occurs in the 'first moment' of Swann's passion, soon to be superseded), the insistence on a-signifying semiotics, the account of the work of art in terms of lines of flight, together with the picturesque Deleuzian metaphors (the metaphorical nature of which is vigorously denied by Deleuze and Guattari) of faciality, black hole, with the added lexical monstrosity of 'landscapity' ( _paysagéité_ ). But it is also clear that, if this passage does seem to support Buyden's general interpretation of Deleuze's aesthetics, and even if it concerns a literary text, it has very little to say about the specificity of the art of language, captured under the concept of style: this is about the pictoriality or musicality of Proust's texts, not about his _écriture_. Yet, as we know, there is at least an adumbration of a Deleuzian aesthetics of literature, or rather of a general aesthetics that would include literature as an integral part of its object.
The most likely place is undoubtedly the last chapter of _What Is Philosophy?_ , entitled 'Percept, Affect, and Concept'.6 In that chapter, a concept of art is constructed, in terms corresponding to the high modernist canon which is at the heart of Deleuze's understanding of art. We can formulate that aesthetics around a number of theses: 'art preserves, and it is the only thing in the world that is preserved' (p. 163) – in other words the test of time, the eternity of aesthetic temporality, is the criterion for art; as a result of which each work of art is a monument (p. 167), even if Deleuze is careful to add that the temporality of such monumentality is not only the past but also the present and the future; the artistic monument is 'a bloc of sensations' (p. 164) and as such 'must stand up on its own' (p. 164); and the bloc of sensations that the work of art is, is a compound of affect and percept (p. 164). Affects and percepts must be distinguished from affections and perceptions (the contrast of affect and affection comes straight from Spinoza); in so far as they exist in the absence of man, they do not need a human subject as their bearer: affects are non-human becomings and percepts are non-human landscapes of nature (p. 169). The task of the artist is not to express her mediocre feelings and trite perceptions, but to extract from them blocs of sensation, to invent and present affects and percepts. This is why Deleuze devotes a significant part of the chapter to a critique of Merleau-Ponty's concept of 'flesh', that 'final avatar of phenomenology' (p. 178), which is too dependent on the lived human body to support affect and percept, since they are non-human, impersonal, pre-individual and non-subjective (in which they are like haecceities). The language of aesthetic grandiloquence can be heard in the summing up of the discussion of the inadequacy of the concept of flesh:
The being of sensation is not the flesh but the compound of nonhuman forces of the cosmos, of man's nonhuman becomings, and of the ambiguous house that exchanges and adjusts them, makes them whirl around like winds. (p. 183)
Words and phrases like 'art preserves' (that the work of art should be _aere perennius_ is no novelty), 'monument', 'aesthetic figures' (contrasted with 'conceptual personae' on p. 177), 'composition', do seem to formulate a kind of aesthetics, of a modernist kind.
As usual, this form of aesthetic grandiloquence (words like 'monument' are hardly innocent) in the discourse of a philosopher is associated with the need to ascribe strict limits to the field of art, and to see to it that it does not trespass on the precincts of philosophy. Aesthetic figures are not conceptual personae, affects and percepts are not concepts: the domain of art is circumscribed not only by the general title of the book (the question mark concerns philosophy before it does art) and by the very title of the chapter, which ends on the important word, 'concept'. Deleuze, of course, is not suggesting that art is a marginal and subordinate practice, and the claim he makes for it has nothing to do with classical mimesis, adornment or entertainment. Art, like philosophy, like science, is one of the three varieties of thought, and 'art thinks' is a characteristically modernist thesis. But art thinks differently from philosophy or science, and the chapter ends on the typical figure of a Deleuzian correlation, the correlation of the three forms of thought. There is no hierarchy between them, but their difference must be carefully charted:
_Art_ | _Science_ | _Philosophy_
---|---|---
Plane of composition | Plane of coordinates | Plane of consistency
Sensations | Functions | Concepts
Monuments | States of affairs | Events
The function of thought is to draw a plane of immanence over chaos, but this plane is differentiated according to the type of thought. Thus science draws a plane of coordinates for its functions to construct and describe states of affairs, philosophy draws a plane of consistency for its concepts to capture events, or rather the one Event, and art draws a plane of composition ('composition is the sole definition of art', p. 191), extracting blocs of sensations and erecting monuments. Which means that art is not concerned with either concepts or events (and events in Deleuze, as we know, are closely associated with sense). No wonder the chapter ends on a thesis, the high modernist flavour of which will not escape us: the compounds of sensations that make up the work of art deterritorialise the system of opinion, or _doxa_ , in other words the dominant perceptions and affections within a natural, historical and social situation (p.197).
What we have reached with the end of this argument is a concept of style, Deleuze's concept of style, where _doxa_ is subverted by taking language to its limits, towards silence or towards images, through stuttering, rolling and pitching. There is, as we know, a Deleuzian literary gradient of language which moves from meaning or _doxa_ to style through the stages (each associated with a representative of Deleuze's literary canon) of disequilibrium, continuous variation, vibration, minorisation, stuttering (the vital centre of the gradient), repetition, systematic digression, the sinuous line of syntax and rhythm.7
I have called this aesthetics 'grandiloquent'. Not a strictly positive word. It has received its philosophical elaboration in the work of Clément Rosset, another philosopher who mistrusts the powers of language: for him grandiloquence is the name of a disease of language, whereby words cease to have any reference to reality; they are foreign or indifferent to reality and create the fictitious world of which they appear to talk. In that sense, performative utterances, which claim to do things by saying them are the acme of grandiloquence.8 No doubt Rosset would argue that calling a work of art a 'monument' is merely an example of the 'imperialism of language', calling for the reader's acquiescence by referring to a hoary tradition of value judgement. And no doubt Deleuze would respond that, far from using grandiloquent terms, he is constructing a number of concepts to capture the thought that art develops. This fictional controversy is meant to point out two questions raised by the aesthetics of _What Is Philosophy?_ : Is it new, or a mere repetition of a modernist or perhaps even a Romantic aesthetics? And is it faithful to the specific thought of the work of art, or merely another case of the exploitation of art by philosophy?
Jacques Rancière has used the same chapter of _What Is Philosophy?_ , supplemented by a passage from _The Logic of Sense_ , to raise the first question, in an essay fittingly entitled 'Is There Such a Thing as a Deleuzian Aesthetics?'.9 His conclusion is that 'Deleuze accomplishes the destiny of aesthetics, by ascribing the whole power of the work of art to _le sensible_ " _pur_ ", pure sensation.'10 In other words, Deleuze is situated at the end of a tradition, or rather of what Rancière calls 'the aesthetic regime of art' which, in the last two centuries has replaced the representative regime of art, with its hierarchy in the distribution of the sensible (a hierarchy that implied the superiority of speech over the visible). With Deleuze, the work of art finds truth in sensation, in the blocs of sensation that it extracts – not the consensual or conventional sensations described or represented by _doxa_ , the series of conventions whereby we interpret the world we live in, but dissensual sensation, beyond _doxa_ , that is beyond common sensory experience. (We recognise here the difference between affection and affect.) That zone of sensation or affect separated from the ordinary realm of sensations and affections bears witness to the presence of another power, the power of spirit, of the idea, an idea, however, which is not transcendent as in the Platonist scheme, but immanent in the sensation the work of art extracts: it is the task of the figure, as in the work of Francis Bacon, in its disfiguring, to make the presence of the spirit in sensation manifest. All this, according to Rancière, defines an aesthetics which, if not new (Deleuze is a representative of the aesthetic regime of art), is at least genuine, as it accounts for the work of art not in terms of _phusis_ (its nature, different from the nature of ordinary objects, as it is the embodiment of a transcendent idea), not in terms of _techne_ (the representative regime of art describes the work in the terms of the techniques used to give form to the raw material of sensation), but in terms of _aisthesis_ , in terms of affects extracted from ordinary sensations, disfiguring our conventional representations, finding truth and thought in pure sensation as manifesting the presence of a spirit or idea that is immanent in it.
There remains the question of the relation between art and philosophy, between what Rancière calls 'a thought that does not think' (the spirit immanent in the bloc of sensation extracted by the artist) and the thought that thinks, the philosophical concept.11 The separation between the two types of thought, which, as we have seen, is at the centre of Deleuze's chapter on aesthetics, still raises the question whether aesthetics is always, of necessity, a thought of the submission of art to philosophy, of the exploitation of art by philosophy – another form of the grandiloquence I have mentioned.
**_Inaesthetics?_**
This is what Badiou rejects – this is the rationale behind his adoption of the coinage 'inaesthetics'. I shall quote again the single paragraph by which he prefaces his _Handbook of Inaesthetics_ :
By 'inaesthetics' I understand a relation of philosophy to art that, maintaining that art is itself a producer of truths, makes no claim to turn art into an object for philosophy. Against aesthetic speculation, inaesthetics describes the strictly intraphilosophical effects produced by the independent existence of some works of art.12
The concept is not developed further in the text, except in the form of a practice of strong reading. But this paragraph is as dense as it is short and contains a number of theses. First, there is the idea, which Badiou shares with Deleuze and modernist thinkers, that art thinks – there is an independent thought of art, which cannot even be said to need philosophy to be made explicit or to be thought. Secondly, there is the rejection of any exploitation of art by philosophy: a work of art cannot be an object for philosophy, or a pretext for the rediscovery of philosophical concepts created independently of it – this implies an explicit rejection of any form of aesthetics. Thirdly, it appears that the relationship between art and philosophy, for relationship there is, contrary to what we might expect (the independence of art might be construed as implying that art has no need of other forms of thought, and so of philosophy) is inverted: far from being art that is in need of philosophy, it seems that it is philosophy that needs art, in the form of a kind of contamination (art induces 'intraphilosophical' effects within philosophy – an action from a distance, like a kind of radiation). For philosophy, as we know, does not produce independent truths, and therefore it needs the truths of art to reflect upon. But, fourthly, this reflection upon the truths of art and of other forms of thought, which, as we saw, takes the strange shape of a 'compossibilisation', is not a covert return to an aesthetics, as the last sentence makes it clear: it is the independent existence of 'a few works of art', and not of art in general, that sets philosophy thinking. So each work of art that belongs to the happy few of Badiou's artistic canon has the independent capacity to induce philosophical effects, which have nothing to do with the construction of a philosophical concept of art: this is what is meant when we suggest that Mallarmé or Beckett read Badiou, as much as Badiou reads Mallarmé or Beckett.
This attitude to art, at least according to Badiou, creates a sharp contrast between the ways our two philosophers read literature. This is what Badiou, in his _Deleuze_ , has to say about Deleuze's method of reading (he is speaking of his attitude to the cinema, but this can easily be extended to his reading of literature):
On the one hand, Deleuze singularly analyzes work after work, with the disconcerting erudition of a nonspecialist. Yet, on the other hand, what finally comes out of this is siphoned into the reservoir of concepts that, from the very beginning of his work, Deleuze has established and linked together.13
In other words, Deleuze exploits art, whether the cinema or literature, by finding in the works of art what he is bent on finding in them: the main concepts of his own philosophy. One has the impression that Proust or Lewis Carroll have read Deleuze and been influenced by him – a form of anticipatory plagiarism, as when Artaud, who 'translated' the poem _Jabberwocky_ , accused Carroll of having plagiarised him in advance.14 It would appear, therefore, that Deleuze's aesthetic position makes him a typical representative of what Badiou calls the _didactic schema_ , one of the schemas under which one can think the _nouage_ , the 'knot', the tying together (which Badiou calls suture) of philosophy and art. This schema is based on the thesis that art is incapable of truth, that truth is always exterior to art, that the claims of art to truth are false claims, as art can only imitate truth. The definition of art according to this schema is: 'to be the charm of a semblance of truth'.15 The result of this, which is the Platonist conception of art, is that art must remain under the careful watch of philosophy, and that its only function is didactic: art is 'a sensible didactic', the main interest of which is not the capture of truth but the effects that its charm, the charm of pure semblance, achieves. Badiou goes on to mention two other schemas for thinking art in its relation to philosophy, the _Romantic schema_ whereby art is the sole source of truth, and the _classical schema_ , represented by Aristotle, whereby art is incapable of truth and its essence is purely mimetic (in which this schema is similar to the didactic schema), but it does not matter, as art lays no claim to truth: its end is not cognitive but ethical – it is _catharsis_ , the purgation and overcoming of passion.
The three schemas define the range of aesthetics, and Badiou contrasts them with a fourth schema, which characterises inaesthetics and may be called the _productive schema_. It is based on the following thesis: art is, in itself, a procedure of truth, a site in which truths emerge, with the twin characteristics of immanence (art is 'art is rigorously coextensive with the truths it generates')16 and singularity (such truths can be found only in art). The consequence is that art is entirely separated from philosophy, which cannot claim to control it or express the thoughts that it produces better than it can think them itself. The only role of philosophy is one of monstration: simply to _show_ the truths that art produces. There is no longer any exploitation of art by philosophy (as in the didactic schema) or any fusion between art and philosophy (as in the Romantic schema).
From these Badiouesque insights, Philippe Sabot has derived a systematic treatment of the relations between art and contemporary philosophy.17 He seems to conflate the didactic and classical schemas under the didactic, and calls the Romantic schema a hermeneutic schema. He illustrates the didactic schema, which will not surprise us, by the readings of literature Deleuze practises: he insists on the indefinite variation in the readings of literary texts and the almost identical repetition of the contents of those readings (p. 37). The hermeneutic schema is illustrated by Ricœur's famous book on time and narrative.18 But there is of course a third schema, illustrated by Vincent Descombes's reading of Proust19 and by Badiou reading Mallarmé and Beckett, the productive schema, where the exploitative drive of philosophy or the contamination of philosophy by art are both avoided. In this schema only does the literary experience become an experience of thought.
The account of the supersession of aesthetics by inaesthetics, both in Badiou and in his disciple, creates a certain uneasiness. For it is clear that if Deleuze's method of strong reading can be charged with exploiting literature for the benefit of philosophy, because it finds in its analyses what it expects to find, namely the very concepts of Deleuze's philosophy, the charge can easily be reversed, as Badiou's strong reading seems to benefit from the same miracle and to find the very concepts of his ontology in Beckett and Mallarmé. It is not a case of Mallarmé and Beckett reading Badiou in the sense of producing literary truths that will help shape the philosophical concepts; it is rather a case of the two authors having read Badiou in anticipation and conforming their poetic practice to his philosophical constructions: another case of plagiarism in anticipation. Everything that Sabot says about Deleuze's didactic mode of dealing with literature can also be said about Badiou.
In his critical account of Badiou's inaesthetics, Rancière makes a similar point: he ascribes Badiou's version of the submission of poetic truth to philosophy to the deleterious influence of the philosophy of Althusser, an old enemy of his: 'Following good Althusserian logic, philosophy is [. . .] summoned in order to discover the truths encrypted in the poem, even if this means miraculously rediscovering its own, which it claims to have been divested of.'20 That Rancière should be hostile to the idea of an inaesthetics is only to be expected, since, as we have seen, he analyses the modern attitude to art in the terms of an aesthetic regime of art. But his account of Badiou's inaesthetics is interesting to us as it confirms that Deleuze's and Badiou's attitudes to art are not as different as Badiou would claim. Rancière, unexpectedly, against the grain of received critical opinion (but then, there are as many definitions of modernism as there are critics), ascribes this to the fact that they are both modernist in their attitude to literature. That Deleuze is, almost explicitly, a modernist we have already noted. But for Rancière, Badiou too is a modernist, although a 'twisted' one: his modernism takes the form of an ultra-Platonism that situates him within the didactic schema in which he seeks to place Deleuze. Rancière firmly places Badiou's inaesthetics within the aesthetic regime of art that characterises modernity, and of which modernism is a product, as it shares with it the paradox of an affirmation of the specificity of art (what he calls 'the aesthetic identification of art') combined with the affirmation of the vanishing of the differentiation between forms of art and forms of ordinary life (what he calls the 'disidentification of art'). In this context Badiou's inaesthetics is seen to share a number of characteristics with modernist aesthetics: a rejection of mimesis (art is free of any obligation to imitate external reality – this, as we saw, is a central tenet of Deleuze's aesthetics), the assertion that the truths of art are proper to it, and the separation between the various arts. But his modernism, being that strange monster, a Platonist modernism, is a twisted modernism, in so far, for instance, as he rejects what is thought to be the main characteristic of modernism, the idea that the specificity of art resides in its language: for him, as indeed for Deleuze, such specificity resides not in language but in ideas, hence his distancing not so much from _mimesis_ as, Rancière claims, from _aisthesis_ : the idea is pure subtraction, it involves the disappearance of the sensible.21 Hence the two contradictory requirements of Badiou's inaesthetics:
The knot [ _nouage_ ] – or in Badiou's own vocabulary, the suture – through which philosophy is tied to the poem is then brought about through its very denial. The poem only says what philosophy needs it to say and what it pretends to discover in the surprise of the poem. This denial of the knot, this knotting carried out through denial, is not a matter of mere oversight. It is the only way of ensuring the necessary and impossible coincidence of two contradictory requirements: the Platonist/anti-Platonist requirement of a poem that teaches us about the courage of truth on the one hand, and the modernist requirement of the autonomy of art on the other.22
We shall take Rancière's strictures with the usual calm: what he is describing is what I have attempted to account for under the name of 'strong reading', which both Badiou and Deleuze practise with the same zest. The time, therefore, has come for a last comparison between their methods of reading literary texts, in the shape of a last correlation.
**_The final correlation_**
What I have described is two modes of writing about literature, two styles with strong similarities. Both philosophers share the modernist attitude towards literature, with the qualification that both mistrust language and therefore refuse to account for literary texts in terms of their autonomous language. And this is probably why both insist on a strict separation between literature and philosophy (thus distancing themselves from the Romantic schema): Sabot mentions an intuition of Derrida's, who claimed that the concept of literature had been invented by philosophers in order to fix the boundaries of their own discipline.23 And both philosophers really engage with literature and its texts, which gives their readings an urgency and depth that are characteristics of a strong reading, at the cost of rediscovering in literature the concepts independently elaborated by their philosophies, but with the benefit of new insights into the literary texts thus 'exploited': the strong reading submits the literary text to the rule of the concept, but it does not kill it, it makes it alive – it reaches parts of the text that ordinary literary criticism cannot reach.
But such similarities are not the most important aspect of Badiou and Deleuze as readers of literature. Hence my final correlation, where their independent versions of a strong reading are contrasted and where two distinct concepts of literature emerge:
_Badiou_ | _Deleuze_
---|---
Event | Life
Logos (truth) | Pathos (sensation)
Poem (restricted corpus) | Prose (extended corpus)
Contents (enigma) | Form (deformation: pictorial gesture, agrammaticality)
Syntactic machination | Intensive line of syntax (lines of flight)
The correlation pictures a Platonist whose modernism is duly twisted and a poststructuralist philosopher bent on overturning Platonism: from this point of view, the two columns are entirely coherent. We understand why Badiou's corpus has to be restricted: only the poem can be the site of the 'syntactic machination' (a characteristic, as we saw in Chapter 4, of Pessoa's poetry, but one that must be generalised), whereby the poem divests itself of its aura of pathos. And we also understand why Badiou's reading is always a reading in terms of contents (the poem takes the form of an 'enigma' in so far as its object is to inscribe the traces of the vanished event, or to anticipate the event that will come, or fail to come) whereas Deleuze's reading is closer to the traditional concerns of the literary critic, in so far as the text is read for its lines of flight, its deformations (both philosophers are 'modernists' in so far as they reject mimesis, or the representative image of thought as the characteristic of art), in other words for its style. We understand why, when Badiou analyses a picture (in _Logic of Worlds_ ), it is the figurative art of Hubert Robert, the eighteenth-century painter of ruins whereas Deleuze writes about the deformed figures of Francis Bacon. The main aspect of the correlation, however, contrasts Badiou's philosophy of the event and Deleuze's vitalism. This determines both their style of writing and their writing about style. For Badiou, style means the syntactic machination that informs and guarantees the emergence of the truth of art in its relation to the vanished event. For Deleuze, style lies in the deformation, small agrammaticalities and intensive line of syntax whereby literature becomes not the representation but the expression of life, not the individual or personal life of a character or an author, but _a_ life, in its non-human, a-subjective and pre-personal development or becoming, an intensity on the plane of immanence which literature draws on chaos and constructs into a plane of composition. There is no better last word than Deleuze's own last words: immanence, a life.
**_Notes_**
1. | T. Pavel, _Fictional Worlds_ , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986; see also, for an introduction to the subject, C. New, _Philosophy of Literature_ , London: Routledge, 1999.
---|---
2. | A. Badiou, 'En tant que philosophe je ne peux rendre raison du roman, entretien avec Alain Badiou', in _Le Monde des livres_ , 22 May 2009, p. 12.
3. | A. Badiou, _L'Hypothèse communiste_ , Paris: Lignes, 2009.
4. | M. Buydens, _Sahara. L'esthétique de Gilles Deleuze_. Paris: Vrin, 1990.
5. | Ibid., pp. 136–7. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, _A Thousand Plateaus_ , London: Athlone Press, 1988, pp. 185–6 (226–7).
6. | G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, _What Is Philosophy?_ , London: Verso, 1994, pp. 163–200.
7. | On this, see J.-J. Lecercle, _Deleuze and Language_ (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), ch. 6.
8. | C. Rosset, _Le réel, traité de l'idiotie_ , Paris: Minuit, 1971, pp. 81–90.
9. | J. Rancière, 'Existe-t-il une esthétique deleuzienne?', in E. Alliez (ed.), _Gilles Deleuze, une vie philosophique_ , Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 1998, pp. 525–36.
10. | Ibid., p. 536.
11. | Ibid., p. 533.
12. | A. Badiou, _Handbook of Inaesthetics_ , Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005, p. 1 (7).
13. | Badiou, _Deleuze_ , p. 15 (27).
14. | This fascinating subject has been treated by Pierre Bayard in _Le plagiat par anticipation_ , Paris: Minuit, 2009.
15. | Badiou, _Handbook of Inaesthetics_ , op. cit., p. 2 (11).
16. | Ibid., p. 9 (21)
17. | P. Sabot, _Philosophie et littérature_ , Paris: PUF, 2002.
18. | P. Ricœur, _Time and Narrative_ , three vols, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984–7.
19. | V. Descombes, _Proust_ , Paris: Minuit, 1987.
20. | J. Rancière, 'Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-aesthetics', in P. Hallward (ed.), _Think Again_ , London: Continuum, 2004, p. 227.
21. | Ibid., p. 225.
22. | Ibid., p. 228.
23. | Sabot, op. cit., p. 30.
Bibliography
**_Works by Alain Badiou_**
NOVELS AND PLAYS
_Almagestes_ , Paris: Seuil, 1964.
_Portulans_ , Paris: Seuil, 1967.
_L'Echarpe Rouge_ , Paris: Maspéro, 1979.
_Ahmed le subtil_ , Arles: Actes Sud, 1994.
_Calme bloc ici-bas_ , Paris: POL, 1997.
PHILOSOPHY
_Le concept de modèle_ , Paris: Maspéro, 1972 (new edition, Paris: Fayard, 2007).
_Théorie de la contradiction_ , Paris: Maspéro, 1975.
_De l'idéologie_ , Paris: Maspéro, 1976 (with F. Balmes). 'Le flux et le parti', in _La situation actuelle sur le front de la philosophie_ , _Cahiers Yennan_ , 4, Paris: Maspéro, 1977.
_Théorie du sujet_ , Paris: Seuil, 1982.
_L'Etre et l'événement_ , Paris: Seuil, 1988 ( _Being and Event_ , trans. O. Feltham, London: Continuum, 2006).
_Conditions_ , Paris: Seuil, 1992 ( _Conditions_ , trans. S. Corcoran, London: Continuum, 2008).
_L'Ethique_ , Paris: Hatier, 1993 ( _Ethics_ , trans. P. Hallward, London: Verso, 2001).
_Beckett: L'increvable désir_ , Paris: Hachette, 1995 ( _On Beckett_ , trans A. Toscano and N. Power, Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003).
_Gilles Deleuze: 'La Clameur de l'Etre'_ , Paris: Hachette, 1997 ( _Deleuze: The Clamor of Being_ , trans. L. Burchill, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
_Saint Paul et la fondation de l'universalisme_ , Paris: PUF, 1997 ( _Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism_ , trans. R. Brassier, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
_Court traité d'ontologie transitoire_ , Paris: Seuil, 1998 ( _Briefings on Existence_ , trans. N. Madarasz, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003).
_Petit manuel d'inesthétique_ , Paris: Seuil, 1998 ( _Handbook of Inaesthetics_ , trans. A. Toscano, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
_Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy_ , eds J. Clemens and O. Feltham, London: Continuum, 2003.
_Circonstances 1_ , Paris: Lignes, 2003 (part 1 of _Polemics_ , trans. S. Corcoran, London: Verso, 2006).
'Dialectiques de la fable', in E. During (ed.), _Matrix, machine philosophique_ , Paris: Ellipses, 2003.
_Circonstances 2_ , Paris: Lignes, 2004 (part 2 of _Polemics_ , trans. S. Corcoran, London: Verso, 2006).
'Afterword', in P. Hallward (ed.), _Think Again_ , London: Continuum, 2004.
_Badiou: Theoretical Writings_ , eds A. Toscano and R. Brassier, London: Continuum, 2004.
'The Adventure of French Philosophy', _New Left Review_ , 35, 2005.
_Le Siècle_ , Paris: Seuil, 2005 ( _The Century_ , trans. A. Toscano, London: Polity, 2007).
_Logique des mondes_ , Paris: Seuil, 2006 ( _Logic of Worlds_ , trans. A. Toscano, London: Continuum, 2009).
_De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?_ Paris: Lignes, 2007 ( _The Meaning of Sarkozy_ , trans. D. Fernbach, London: Verso, 2008).
_Petit Panthéon portatif_ , Paris: La Fabrique, 2008 ( _Pocket Pantheon_ , trans. D. Macey, London: Verso, 2009).
_L'hypothèse communiste_ , Paris: Lignes, 2009.
_L'antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein_ , Caen: Nous, 2009.
'En tant que philosophe, je ne peux rendre raison du roman, entretien avec Alain Badiou', in _Le Monde des Livres_ , 22 May 2009, p. 12.
**_Works by Gilles Deleuze_**
_Empirisme et subjectivité: Essai sur la nature humaine selon Hume_ , Paris: PUF, 1953 ( _Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature_ , trans. C. Boundas, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
_Proust et les signes_ , Paris: PUF, 1964, 2nd edn, 1972 ( _Proust and Signs_ , trans. R. Howard, London: Continuum, 2008).
_Différence et repetition_ , Paris: PUF, 1968 ( _Difference and Repetition_ , trans. P. Patton, London: Continuum, 2004).
_Spinoza et le problème de l'expression_ , Paris: Minuit, 1968 ( _Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza_ , trans. M. Joughin, New York: Zone Books, 1990).
_Logique du sens_ , Paris: Minuit, 1969 ( _The Logic of Sense_ , trans. M. Lester and C. Stivale, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
and Félix Guattari, 'La synthèse disjonctive', in _L'Arc_ , 43, 1970, pp. 54–62.
and Félix Guattari, _L'Anti-Oedipe_ , Paris: Minuit, 1972 ( _Anti-Oedipus_ , trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. Lane, London: Athlone Press, 1984).
and Félix Guattari, _Kafka_ , Paris: Minuit, 1975 ( _Kafka_ , trans. D. Polan, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
and Claire Parnet, _Dialogues_ , Paris: Flammarion, 1977 ( _Dialogues_ , trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
and Félix Guattari, _Mille plateaux_ , Paris: Minuit, 1980 ( _A Thousand Plateaus_ , trans. B. Massumi, London: Athlone Press, 1988).
_Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation_ , Paris: Editions de la Différence, 1981 ( _Francis Bacon: the Logic of Sensation_ , trans. D. Smith, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
_Cinema 1: L'image-mouvement_ , Paris: Minuit, 1983 ( _Cinema 1: The Movement-Image_ , trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, London: Continuum, 1987).
_Cinema 2: L'image-temps_ , Paris: Minuit, 1985 ( _Cinema 2: The Time-Image_ , trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Galeta, London: Athlone Press, 1989).
_Foucault_ , Paris: Minuit, 1986 ( _Foucault_ , trans. S. Hand, London: Athlone Press, 1988).
_Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque_ , Paris: Minuit, 1988 ( _The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque_ , trans. T. Conley, London: Continuum, 2001).
_Pourparlers 1972–1990_ , Paris: Minuit, 1990 ( _Negotiations_ , _1972_ – _1990_ , trans. M. Joughin, New York, Columbia University Press, 1995).
and Félix Guattari, _Qu'est-ce que la philosophie?_ , Paris: Minuit, 1991 ( _What Is Philosophy?_ , trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchill, London: Verso, 1994).
_Critique et clinique_ , Paris: Minuit, 1993 ( _Essays Critical and Clinical_ , trans. D. Smith and A. Greco, London: Verso, 1998).
and Claire Parnet, _L'Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze_ , Paris: Editions du Montparnasse, 1997.
_L'Ile déserte et autres textes, 1953–1974_ , Paris: Minuit, 2002 ( _Desert Islands and Other Texts_ , trans. M. Taormina, New York: Semiotext(e), 2003).
_Deux regimes de fous, textes et entretiens 1975–1995_ , Paris: Minuit, 2003 ( _Two Regimes of Madness,_ trans. A. Hodges and M. Taormina, New York: Semiotext(e), 2007.
**_Other works cited_**
Alliez, Eric (ed.), _Gilles Deleuze, une vie philosophique_ , Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 1998.
Althusser, Louis, _Positions_ , Paris: Editions Sociales, 1976.
Antonioli, Manola, _Géophilosophie de Deleuze et Guattari_ , Paris: L'Harmattan, 2003.
Austin, J. L., _Philosophical Papers_ , Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970.
Bayard, Pierre, _Le plagiat par anticipation_ , Paris: Minuit, 2009.
Beckett, Samuel, _Murphy_ , London: John Calder, 1963 (1938).
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Beckett, Samuel, _Ill Seen Ill Said_ , London: John Calder, 1981.
Beckett, Samuel, _The Complete Dramatic Works_ , London: Faber, 1986.
Beckett, Samuel, _Quad, suivi de L'Epuisé, par Gilles Deleuze_ , Paris: Minuit, 1992.
Bergen, Véronique, _L'ontologie de Gilles Deleuze_ , Paris: L'Harmattan, 2001.
Boundas, Constantin and Dorothea Olkowski (eds), _Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy_ , London: Routledge, 1994.
Bouveresse, Jacques, _La connaissance de l'écrivain_ , Paris: Agone, 2007.
Buchanan, Ian and Marks, John (eds), _Deleuze and Literature_ , Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
Buydens, Mireille, _Sahara. L'esthétique de Gilles Deleuze_ , Paris: Vrin, 1990.
Caillois, Roger, _Cohérences aventureuses_ , Paris: Gallimard, 1965.
Caillois, Roger, 'Le narval et la licorne', in _Le Monde_ , 24 December 1976, pp. 1 and 11.
Calvino, Italo, _Il visconte dimezzato_ , Turin: Einaudi, 1952.
Carroll, Lewis, _The Annotated Snark_ , ed. M. Gardner, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967.
Carroll, Lewis, _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_ , Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994.
Cressole, Michel, _Deleuze_ , Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1973.
Cusset, François, _La décennie. Le grand cauchemar des années 1980_ , Paris: La Découverte, 2006.
Descombes, Vincent, _Proust_ , Paris: Minuit, 1987.
Descombes, Vincent, _Le platonisme_ , Paris: PUF, 2007 (1971).
Dickens, Charles, _Our Mutual Friend_ , Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971 (1864–5).
Dosse, François, _Gilles Deleuze Félix Guattari_ , Paris: La Découverte, 2007.
Dowd, Garin, _Abstract Machines_ , Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007.
Feltham, Oliver, _Alain Badiou, Live Theory_ , London: Continuum, 2008.
Foucault, Michel, _Les mots et les choses_ , Paris: Gallimard, 1966.
Gelas, B. and Micolet, H. (eds), _Deleuze et les écrivains_ , Nantes: Cécile Defaut, 2007.
Gibson, Andrew, _Beckett and Badiou_ , Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Grice, H. P., _Studies in the Way of Words_ , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Greimas, Algirdas Julien, _Sémantique structurale_ , Paris: Larousse, 1966.
Guattari, Félix, _Psychanalyse et transversalité_ , Paris: Maspéro, 1972.
Guattari, Félix, _Molecular Revolution_ , Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.
Hallward, Peter (ed.), _Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy_ , London: Continuum, 2004.
Hallward, Peter, _Out of This World. Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation_ , London: Verso, 2006.
James, Henry, _Selected Literary Criticism_ , Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.
Jameson, Fredric, _A Singular Modernity_ , London: Verso, 2002.
Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark, _Metaphors We Live By_ , Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980.
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, _Interpretation as Pragmatics_ , Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999.
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, _Deleuze and Language_ , Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002.
Leclaire, Serge, _Psychanalyser_ , Paris: Seuil, 1968.
Lyotard, Jean-François, _Discours, figure_ , Paris: Klincksieck, 1971.
Lyotard, Jean-François, _The Differend_ , Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988 (1983).
Lunn, Eugene, _Marxism and Modernism_ , London: Verso, 1985.
Macherey, Pierre, _Marx 1845_ , Paris: Amsterdam, 2008.
Mallarmé, Stéphane, _Œuvres Complètes_ , Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), 1945.
Milner, Jan-Claude, _Constats_ , Paris: Gallimard, 1999.
Montebello, Pierre, _Deleuze_ , Paris: Vrin, 2008.
Monterroso, Augusto, _Œuvres complètes (et autres contes)_ , Geneva, Patiño, 2000.
New, Christopher, _Philosophy of Literature_ , London: Routledge, 1999.
Olkowski, Dorothea, _Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation_ , Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998.
Ortony, Andrew (ed.), _Metaphor and Thought_ , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Panaccio, Claude, _Le discours intérieur_ , Paris: Seuil, 1999.
Pavel, Thomas, _Fictional Worlds_ , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.
Ramond, Charles (ed.), _Alain Badiou. Penser le multiple_ , Paris: L'Harmattan, 2002.
Rancière, Jacques, _Mallarmé, la politique de la sirène_ , Paris: Hachette, 1966.
Rancière, Jacques, _Politique de la littérature_ , Paris: Galilée, 2007.
Ricœur, Paul, _Time and Narrative_ , three vols, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984–7.
Rinzler, Simone, _La Passion du discours_ , forthcoming.
Ross, Kristin, _The Emergence of Social Space_ , London: Verso, 2008.
Rosset, Clément, _Le réel, traité de l'idiotie_ , Paris: Minuit, 1971.
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Saint-Girons, Baldine, _L'acte esthétique_ , Paris: Klincksieck, 2007.
Sauvagnargues, Anne, _Deleuze et l'art_ , Paris: PUF, 2005.
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Solnit, Rebecca, _Wanderlust. A History of Walking_ , London: Verso, 2001.
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Index
Althusser, L., ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Aristotle, ref1
Artaud, A., ref1, ref2
assemblage, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Bacon, F., ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7
Badiou, A.
Badiou sentence, ref1
inaesthetics, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
language, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
matheme, ref1, ref2
metaphor/metonymy, ref1, ref2
mode of reading, ref1
paradoxes, ref1
philosophical importance, ref1
poetics, ref1, ref2
reading Deleuze, ref1
relationship with Deleuze, ref1
Balibar, E., ref1
Beckett, S., ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Bergson, H., ref1, ref2
Boldini, A., ref1
Bosteels, B., ref1
Bouveresse, J., ref1
Brecht, B., ref1
Burchill, L., ref1
Buydens, M., ref1
Caillois, R., ref1, ref2
canon, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15
Carroll, L., ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Céline, L. F., ref1
Chomsky, N., ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
compossibilisation, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
Conley, T., ref1
continental philosophy, ref1
correlation, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10
Crane, S., ref1, ref2, ref3
Cressole, M., ref1
Cusset, F., ref1
Descombes, V., ref1
Deleuze, G.
aesthetics, ref1, ref2
cinema, ref1
Deleuze sentence, ref1
language, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
metaphor/metamorphosis, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
paradox, ref1
philosophical importance, ref1
reading Badiou, ref1
relationship with Badiou, ref1
Dickens, C., ref1
disjunctive synthesis, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12
Dowd, G., ref1, ref2
_Dracula_ , ref1, ref2, ref3
Eisenstein, S., ref1
essence, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5
event, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11
_fantastique_ , ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Feltham, O., ref1, ref2
Foucault, M., ref1, ref2
_Frankenstein_ , ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4
Gibson, A., ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6
Greimas, A. J., ref1
Grice, H. P., ref1, ref2
Guattari, F., ref1, ref2, ref3
Hallward, P., ref1, ref2, ref3
interpretation, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14
Jakobson, R., ref1
James, H., ref1
Jameson, F., ref1, ref2
Kafka, F., ref1, ref2, ref3
Kant, I., ref1, ref2
Lacan, J., ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14, ref15
Lalouette, J.-F., ref1
Leclaire, S., ref1
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Wednesday, May 24, 2017
Facebook redesigns Trending topics to make news easier to find
Facebook is introducing a couple of changes today that make it easier to spot trending topics and the coverage around them. First up, there’s a bit of a visual redesign. Previously, clicking on a trending topic would highlight a story from one publication, and you’d have to scroll down past a live video section to view related stories. Facebook is replacing that system with a simple carousel, which does a better job of showing you different coverage options. To be clear, the change doesn’t affect how stories are sourced, according to Facebook. It’s still the same algorithm picking out some of the most… | {
"pile_set_name": "Pile-CC"
} |
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an improved dispensing apparatus. More particularly, a dispenser that incorporates a timing means in conjunction with audio and visual output to assist the user in proper washing techniques for compliance with recommended guidelines and to monitor the number of usages.
2. Background Art
Each year, millions of reported illnesses and serious infections are attributable to improper hand washing. The unreported cases are estimated to be much higher. Food borne illness kills over 10,000 people each year, and 70% of the outbreaks originate in food service sector. The passage of viral and bacterial contaminants result from physical contact with an infected source and are carried from one site to another with each successive physical contact.
The problem is most evident in hospital and related medical establishments, as well as those businesses associated with preparing and distributing food and food products. A person that handles a single contaminated source will spread the contaminant to every person, article and surface touched by that person. The subsequent contaminated sources represent additional contamination sites that spread the contaminant. The liability of contamination or illness caused by inadequate washing techniques is very high. And, a single food borne illness can tarnish a long-standing reputation and wreak financial havoc.
Proper washing of hands has been demonstrated to kill the contaminants and prevent the spread of disease and contaminants. According to the Centers for Disease Control, proper hand washing is the single most important process in preventing the spread of the pathogens. Microbial contamination refers to microscopic organisms, especially any of the bacteria that cause disease, e.g.: germs. A germ is the rudimentary form in which a new organism is developed, and encompasses any microscopic organism and any one of the bacteria that can cause disease. A bacterium is typically a one-celled microorganism, wherein some cause diseases such as pneumonia, tuberculosis, or anthrax while other bacteria are necessary for fermentation and nitrogen fixation.
Some industries are much more sensitive to proper washing techniques. Restaurants are particularly prone to the dissemination of food-borne contaminants and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has specific guidelines articulated in the Food Code. The Food Code has several sections that address the washing of hands for food service and related personnel. According to the Food Code regulations, a person must wash after using the bathroom, sneezing, coughing, using a disposable tissue, using tobacco, eating or drinking, handling soiled utensils, and when switching from raw foods to ready-to-eat foods, and any other activity that potentially contaminates the hands.
In addition, the Food Code describes a proper hand washing technique as lasting at least 20 seconds, washing up to the forearms, and a special emphasis on between the fingers and underneath fingernails. In addition to timing the washing, it is important to consider the different steps in the washing procedure. A proper washing cycle commences with combining water and soap and scrubbing the hands vigorously. There are various soaps or cleansing liquids that can be used, preferably having anti-bacterial or anti-microbial properties. Nails should be cleaned and scrubbed. After scrubbing, the hands should be thoroughly rinsed with water. The areas between the finger and underneath the fingernails should be specifically cleaned and checked.
The regulations also require a supervisor ensure compliance with the regulations and promote the effective washing protocols. Employers may be fined or lose licenses if employees do not observe these regulations, and such employees are likely to lose their employment.
Although there may not be specific codes governing all industries and circumstance, it is common sense that adherence to the regulations will instill a safer environment for all. And, in a litigious environment, adhering to a strict standard is also a cost-effective and practical measure. There are varying international standards for the washing of hands, but in general, the U.S. standard provides a reasonable approach to follow.
Unfortunately, the proper washing guidelines are not regularly and rigorously followed. Many food service personnel do not appreciate the significance of proper washing. The restaurants rarely provide adequate training to the personnel, and seldom encompass sufficient supervision during the work shifts. In addition, the employees at restaurants and dining establishments tend to be lower paid and may not care or understand the posted written guidelines, especially if the guidelines are in an unfamiliar language. Presently there is no adequate means of providing proper guidance and instruction during washing, no system designed to walk a user through the washing steps, and no simple means of monitoring or tracking employee washing.
Contributing to the problem of inadequate washing is the lack of formal education by those in the food services segment, the low pay scale, and the periods of rushed food preparation. These factors all contribute to a potential for poor washing conditions. Due to the many illnesses caused by food preparation, the FDA continues to apply more formal regulations and guidelines for employers regarding proper washing skills. Employers are demanding a better system of aiding and monitoring employee washing habits.
The soap and liquid compounds for hand washing come from a number of different dispensers available in the marketplace. Liquid and semi-liquid dispensers are used in numerous applications and are used to dispense metered portions of cremes, lotions, gels, soaps, anti-bacterial cleansing liquids, anti-microbial cleansing liquids, and similar materials. A typical dispenser allows the user to obtain a specific amount of liquid matter with minimal ease. Manual and semi-automatic dispensing systems are common in the industry, and automated dispensers are beginning to enter the marketplace.
The manual dispensers utilize levers and other mechanical assemblies wherein the user must provide some physical contact with the unit in order to dispense the liquid. The physical contact in manipulating the lever does provide a contact with a surface that is typically wet and dirty, and may harbor contaminants. Automated dispensers are becoming more popular, and operate with a variety of electrical and electromechanical components to automatically dispense the liquid after triggering some sensory input. The automatic or xe2x80x98touchlessxe2x80x99 dispensers do not require any physical contact with the dispenser.
Unfortunately, the touchless dispensers are fairly expensive and require fairly complex electrical and electrical components in order to function. Besides electronic equipment, there are mechanical components such as plungers and gear trains that work in conjunction with the electronics. The mechanical gears draw substantial energy during the xe2x80x98pinch and squeezexe2x80x99 operation to deliver liquid cleanser, requiring frequent battery replacement. In addition, if the batteries are drained, the electrical elements are not functioning properly, or the mechanical functions are broken, the entire unit is disabled and will not dispense any liquid cleansers. The low reliability and the catastrophic failure mode are a major concern in the touchless dispenser market.
Within the field of liquid dispensers, there are many types of dispensers. The most common and cost effective is the bag-in-box system, where the liquid comes in a no-leak pouch with pump tip and is disposable. This system is a closed system, and all the air is removed from the pouch during manufacturing. The bag collapses upon itself once the liquid is evacuated, minimizing waste disposal. The closed system has many advantages, including being a more sanitary system. The standard size pouch is 800 ml, but other sizes are in use, including 500 ml to 900 ml. It is a necessary requirement that the cost to produce a disposable pouch be kept to a minimum, while still delivering consistent results. The dispensers are installed in many public facilities, and are subject to extreme wear and tear. Due to the excessive use, the devices must be robust and relatively maintenance free.
Other dispensers use cartridges or refillable containers. The cartridges must be pierced, are generally not refillable, and produce greater waste. Both cartridges and refillable containers introduce air into the system, aiding the production of bacteria and mold. The cost and administrative complexity in using these other forms of dispensing liquids, as well as the decreased sanitary conditions limit their market appeal. Also, these semi-automatic and automatic systems can be designed to complete the cycle, metering exactly the correct amount of liquid, independently of successive and rapid pushes of the actuating member that frequently occur.
The liquid soap industry has numerous brands and categories of cleansing liquids. The viscosity and particulate content are also subject to extreme variations. There is an array of particulate matter that can be added to cleansing liquids to form a grit soap compound that is more effective in cleaning. The most common grit material is plastic microspheres, although other materials such as clay, walnut shells and corn cobs have also been used. Besides the variations of compounds used to form grit soap, the size of the grit also varies.
There has also been a consumer demand for anti-microbial cleansing liquids and anti-bacterial cleansing liquids, and the industry has reacted by adding creating new compounds with these properties. These anti-microbial and anti-bacterial cleansing liquids are available with or without grit and have certain characteristics and viscosity differences as compared to standard liquid soap. Besides liquid soap, other compounds dispensed include body and hair shampoo, hand creme solutions, lotions, cleansing liquids, and shaving creme.
In a typical bag-in-box operation, a user depresses a lever or controller. This applies pressure to the dispenser tube that creates a vacuum in the collapsible pouch that exerts fluid pressure against the ball in the ball check valve. If the pressure is sufficient, the ball is displaced, and the liquid flows around the ball and into the ball check valve chamber. The liquid flows into the space between the spring and the interior wall of the ball check valve chamber. Once the chamber is sufficiently full, the liquid is forced through the compressed spring and out through the lower fitment hole and through the nozzle.
The transition from a user applying purely mechanical forces to meter out some liquid to a semi-automated or automated dispensing unit is appealing to the industry and the public. Soap dispensers tend to become dirty and wet during frequent use, and users are reluctant to touch such units. The wet dispensing units also harbor germs and microbes that could be transferred to the next user, especially is the user does not wash properly. If washed properly, all contaminants should be removed during the subsequent washing.
There is growing trend for dispensers that do not require a manual touching due to bacteria and microbial contamination. Touchless dispensers are well known in the prior art and incorporate various means to detect when a user is ready to receive the cleaner from the dispenser. Semi-automatic and automatic systems are designed to complete the cycle, metering exactly the correct amount of liquid, independently of successive and rapid pushes of the actuating member. Additionally, the user no longer has to touch the wet and often dirty dispenser. Unfortunately, many of the touchless dispensers are expensive devices that are prone to electrical and mechanical failures as well as constant battery replacement. Once a touchless dispenser loses power or has some mechanical or electronic failure, the entire unit is inoperable and will not dispense liquid cleanser. And, even using a touchless dispenser and metering the proper amount of liquid cleaning agent does not guarantee that the user will employ proper washing techniques.
In order to reduce the aforementioned problems, attempts have been made to produce an improved dispensing system. The prior art systems have general shortcomings and do not adequately address the aforementioned problems. Most generally, the prior art dispenser systems do not provide any instructions or timing for a recommended washing cycle, there is no progress indication, usage numbers are lacking, and there are general reliability problems.
The invention of U.S. Pat. No. 5,810,201 (""201) provides some interaction between the dispenser and the user, such as a greeting or music when the user is proximate to the dispenser. This device is not intended to aid in compliance with the recommended washing protocol nor does the ""201 invention encompass any timing means for the washing process. There is no number of usages for tracking purposes and no progress indicators for the user to follow during the washing cycle.
A timed washing dispenser is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,771,925 (""925) that detects the dispenser usage and activates a timing circuit and counts for the recommended washing cycle. There is audio means to signal the start and stop of the washing sequence.
One approach to aid in hand washing compliance is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,793,653 (""653). This complex monitoring system embodies several monitoring and data collection points. The ""653 system is intended to track employee hand washing usage and allow supervisor collection of data to check compliance. Another compliance-oriented invention is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,945,910 (""910) that shows a monitoring module that operates in conjunction with the dispenser to track employee usage and to provide a means of checking the data for compliance.
An all-encompassing system in shown in U.S. Pat. No. 5,765,242 (""242), wherein the water lines and a dispenser coordinate the washing and drying cycle. Soapy water is dispensed in the washing phase, rinsing water is dispensed in the rinse cycle, and finally the drying unit is actuated to dry the hands. A timer activated toilet bowl cleaner is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,611,465 that uses an automated timer to release cleaner into the toilet bowl.
Although the prior art discusses a start and stop signal for washing, it does not provide proper washing instructions or reminders to the user as an aid in compliance with recommended washing regulations. There is no progress indication to walk the user through the washing cycle to indicate the different steps of washing, such as lathering, scrubbing and rinsing. Finally, there is no simple tracking means for number of usages so that a supervisor can check the usage number and clear the usage number without generating a complex paper trail. Employees and supervisors are more likely to use and utilize a system that does not place undue hardship or difficulty in operation of the dispenser.
What is needed is a dispenser system that not only meters out the proper amount of liquid soap, but aids the user in complying with proper washing techniques. Such a system notifies the user via audio, visual, or a combination of audio/visual means of the industry acceptable washing intervals. Not only should the device alert the user as to the start and stop of the washing cycle, but it shows the progress of the cycle and provides instructions to the user. Such a device instructs and reminds the user of the steps in washing to aid in promoting compliance with the suggested and recommended guidelines. An overall aspiration is to produce a high reliability dispenser with few moving parts, and wherein a failure will not prevent the liquid cleanser from being dispensed. The design must also be cost effective to manufacture and implement, and allow for easy incorporation into current dispenser designs.
A further embodiment should make the dispenser more sanitary by employing anti-microbial and anti-bacterial properties into the dispenser plastic housing to reduce the contamination of dispensers requiring a manual or semi-manual engagement. Employing such contamination resistant plastic lowers the potential for spreading pathogens and allows employers to use the less expensive and more rugged mechanical dispenser designs without incurring any increase in the likelihood of spreading contaminants.
The present invention has been made in consideration of the aforementioned background. An object of the invention is to provide a dispenser system that aids in compliance with proper hand washing by instructing the user during the washing cycle. The voice instructions operate in conjunction with the recommended timing interval and coach the user on the various steps, three steps in the preferred embodiment, lathering, scrubbing, and rinsing. The multi-part voice instruction messages coach the user in the proper steps of washing and serve as reminders as well as a teaching tool for users.
A related object is a system of teaching employees the proper method of hand washing. Employees are given orientation or introduction to the dispenser of the present invention and the aural messages and visual feedback teach the user how to wash and the correct duration of washing. A user that follows the simple lesson will learn proper washing protocol, and decrease the likelihood of contamination as well as lowering liability for damages.
Another related object of the invention is to employ customizable instruction messages aimed at the specific target audience. Different languages, different speakers, and different wording can be used to optimize the washing for the particular target audience. Voices of characters or celebrities could be used to provide the instructions. Alternatively, voice instructions can be customized by the supervisor to include instructions specific to the bathroom facility or intended user.
Yet another object of the invention is to employ visual feedback during the washing. The voice instructions at each step are coordinated with visual signals that show the user the progress through the washing cycle. Such progress walks the user through the process and has a psychological incentive to complete the entire washing cycle. Multiple LED""s can be arranged to track the progress by using different colors such as green, yellow and red as the user progresses through the washing cycle. A line of LED""s could illuminate one at a time in procession every few seconds such as a countup. Alternatively, all the LED""s could be illuminated at the initiation of the sequence, and count off one by one until the countdown is completed. The feedback characteristic incorporates a continuous indication of time elapsed or remaining time to show the user the progression and allows the user to better manage the time. An LCD display can show a clock that counts up or down for the washing cycle.
A related feedback object of the invention is to employ electronics and include a microprocessor to provide customizable feedback, such as modulation of sound or visual signals to the user. The customizable feedback can include increasing frequency of beeps, raising the tone, blinking the displays differently through the cycle, or a count down time display. The feedback indicates where the user is in the cycle and encourages him/her to complete the cycle during the washing period and alert user when the time interval is completed.
An object of the invention is to provide a means of tracking the number of usages of the dispenser over a given time period. As a management tool, a supervisor needs to be able to approximately track whether the employees are washing their hands. The supervisor can obtain a simple approximation by tabulating the number of employees during a given shift and the length of time of the shift. Although the supervisor will not be able to identify which employees washed, he will be able to ascertain gross violations of protocol and respond accordingly.
A related object includes where the compliance can be monitored by the supervisor by accessing the microcontroller of the present invention and getting the number of usages. The access may be voice actuated, keypad, badge code, magnetic key or any other accessing means. In a preferred embodiment the supervisor uses a magnetic key to obtain dispenser count information as well as to reset the dispensers or customize the operation. The information can be displayed on an LCD or otherwise communicated, but in the preferred embodiment the number of usages is communicated verbally by the dispenser system. The magnetic key in conjunction with the Hall sensor yield a non-invasive method of quickly retrieving the number of usages. The dispenser does not need to be opened to read a counter and the number is not otherwise displayed on the dispenser. Rather, the supervisor swipes the magnet key and is quickly told the count number,
And another object is an LCD display provides text or images to assist in the washing process. The instructions could be displayed in conjunction with the audio instructions for the hearing impaired and comply with the various disability acts and requirements. Images could be shown depicting the various stages such as lathering, scrubbing as a means of communicating the information in a manner that is understandable by persons, even if the instruction language is unknown to the user.
Another object is to use verbal instructions for the washing sequence interspersed with music or silence rather than a complete verbal instructional message. The instructional message is broken into three steps in the preferred embodiment-lathering, scrubbing, and rinsing. An additional step of inspecting can be included in the instructions. Each step lasts a certain time interval and in a preferred embodiment, the lathering step takes approximately 8 seconds, the scrubbing step takes 7 seconds, and the rinsing step takes 5 secondsxe2x80x94for a total of 20 seconds.
An additional object is to provide for different time intervals and steps depending upon the industry or application. Certain sectors, such as nursing homes or health clinics, may require a longer washing cycle with additional steps for sterilization. The microcontroller can be pre-programmed in the factory with the appropriate messages or the user can configure the dispenser by customizing the time and/or messages.
Another object of the invention is to employ further electronics to play music or advertisements during the washing period. Such audio output can be interspersed around the voice instructions. Another object is to incorporate modulating patterns to indicate the timing position within the washing interval. The modulating patterns consist of tones that beep in an increasing frequency and can incorporate a visual flashing pattern in conjunction with the audible tones. In versions with a speech synthesizer, a numeric countdown or countup can instruct the user in the washing cycle.
Additional instructions are within the scope of the invention, and may include instructions on drying hands or inspecting hands. Additionally, the audio output may include advertisements or promotions to the user. As a captive audience, the audio output in the dispenser is an effective marketing tool. Such advertisement may promote a particular event or product.
A related object is to provide for randomization of each washing cycle step to prevent the messages from being mundane. Not only are the messages customizable, but the frequency or repetition can be set to occur at different pushbar requests. For example, the LED""s can continue to be employed, but the voice instructions can be played every fifth time, or every fifth time on average. A further implementation is to have the average duty cycle of voice messages get smaller with realtime, number of usages, or number of supervisor resets, and revert to a new average value. For example, the average duty cycle of voice messages will decrease to every third time and continue to become less frequent over time, number or usages or resets. If the supervisor notes a decrease in usage numbers, the dispenser can be reset to again play voice instructions every actuation.
Further objects include a dispenser, whereby the system provides audio guidance to proper washing intervals for the visually impaired. The instructions can aid those with visual difficulty in properly washing and provide other information specific to the facility.
Yet a further object is incorporating a means of actuating the sequence. In a preferred embodiment, a Hall effect sensor is triggered each time the pushbar containing a magnet is actuated to dispense liquid cleansers. The sensor can trigger the start of the washing process, and also serve to track the number of usages of the individual actuations of the lever bar. Hall effect sensors are well known in the art and are triggered by introducing a magnetic field in close proximity to the sensor.
And yet one further object is to monitor the amount of liquid cleanser in the dispenser by keeping track of the usages number. By knowing the amount of liquid in the dispenser and the amount metered out on each application, a simple processor calculation can approximate the amount of liquid and the remaining number of usages. An appropriate message can be communicated to ensure the dispenser is always adequately filled.
An object of the invention is to provide an actuation means such as a mechanical plunger, magnetic sensor, or spring assembly to actuate the timing mechanism. A preferred embodiment uses a magnet and a Hall effect sensor. Other electronic means include optical, ultrasound, or thermal sensing. The optical means encompasses a typical beam-breaking technology, while the ultrasound relies upon the reflected waves to trigger the event.
The simple electronic components are powered by a small battery, preferably lithium, for longer lasting duration. A further power source is gel pack batteries, wherein the smaller profile and longer lasting life would be a beneficial factor. Once again, the dispenser of the present embodiment does not require a power source to operate, and functions without any power applied to the unit. The power source is used for communicating the washing instructions, providing visual progress feedback, and recording and reporting number of usages.
An object of the invention is a tracking function for the number of usages in order for a supervisor to make an assessment of whether the employees are complying with the recommended guidelines. The number of usages also allows the supervisor to assess the dispenser as a teaching tool for assisting users in washing. The number of usages information is known only to the supervisor who resets the counter until the next inspection. The usage number is communicated by the dispenser aural output.
There are also means of using identification by the employee. The identification means includes entering an employee number or code number or PIN number. Alternatively, the employees could be issued RFID badges or name labels. This would serve as a tracking or monitoring mechanism for employers either voluntarily in order to reduce liability, or because of FDA regulations. Another embodiment encompasses a voice recognition means to detect an input voice cue. The users would have to have the voice input into the system, but once recorded, the identification of each user is possible. Technology has lowered the cost for such products while increasing reliability, ease of use and therefore compliance, and decreasing size and weight. The voice commands can be programmed to accept only certain commands and also to recognize an individual user""s voice, thus automating the tracking process and eliminate the need for entering of a PIN or code number. Such an implementation should be easy to operate by the users. A further detection means for outputting a count and re-setting the counter is a magnetic means using the Hall effect sensors.
Another object includes using optical, infrared, magnetic, or ultrasonic sensing in a touchless or semi-automatic operation and actuation rather than a mechanical means to allow the convenience of touchless operation. Electronic switching means includes capacitive switching. An object of the invention is an optical and/or mechanical activation where the soap dispensing operation is driven by a motor or solenoid. The motor or solenoid can be either rotary or linear and automatically provide the sufficient force to meter out a liquid portion. In a preferred embodiment, a force of less than five pounds is required to dispense the liquid. Such force complies with the American Disabilities Act requirements. Current gear/cam devices provide this force with minimal consumption of power.
And yet an additional object is the design of the present invention as a throw away module or a field replaceable module depending on the manufacturing costs and the operating usage/environment. The package is most conveniently locatable in the dispenser housing and can snap into position on the lid for easy access.
An object of the invention is the manufacture and construction of dispensers that incorporate anti-microbial, anti-fungal and anti-bacterial plastics in the design. Although anti-microbial, anti-fungal and anti-bacterial plastics have been deployed in some applications, it has not been introduced into the dispenser industry. The generic name for the agent added to the ABS plastic is OBPA (Oxybisphenoxarsine). The use of anti-microbial/fungal/bacterial thermoplastics resists the growth of germs such as E-Coli, and reduces the transfer of such diseases. The wet environment of dispensers combined with the frequent use by many persons create a breeding ground for various forms of unwanted germs. The use of anti-microbial/fungal/bacterial plastics, such as poly-alpha BN and poly-alpha BN-K, provide a necessary step in preventing the spread of germs. Although the entire unit can be manufactured using this plastic, the most important component is the pushbar.
And yet another object of the invention is a dispenser for metering a liquid cleanser to a user and prompting the user in compliance with a recommended washing technique, comprising a container suitable for housing the liquid soap, a power source, a microcontroller connected to the power source, an actuation means, wherein the actuation means is triggered by the user and dispenses the liquid cleanser. Furthermore, the actuation means initiates a washing cycle containing a plurality of washing steps. There is a timer or timing means to count for the washing cycle, and a means of outputting a plurality of aural messages for instructing the user during each of the plurality of washing steps.
Another object is a dispenser wherein the actuation means is a Hall effect sensor attached to the dispenser and a magnet attached to a pushbar, wherein the sensor is actuated when the pushbar is operated.
Yet a further object is a dispenser wherein there are a plurality of washing step aural messages for each of the washing steps, and the washing step aural messages are randomly selected for outputting as the plurality of aural messages. Additionally, the plurality of aural messages can be in different languages.
An additional object is a dispenser further comprising a means of determining realtime clock data.
And, a further object is a dispenser further comprising a means of calculating a refill date and communicating the refill date.
An object includes a dispenser wherein the plurality of washing steps are lathering, scrubbing, and rinsing.
In addition, an object is a dispenser wherein the dispenser is manufactured using an Oxybisphenoxarsine (OBPA) agent. Also, a dispenser further comprising a pushbar containing an Oxybisphenoxarsine (OBPA) agent.
An object of the invention is a dispenser for metering a liquid cleanser to a user and prompting the user in compliance with a recommended washing technique, comprising an actuation means, wherein the actuation means is triggered by the user and dispenses the liquid cleanser, and wherein the actuation means initiates a washing cycle containing a plurality of washing steps. There is a timer to count for the washing cycle, and a visual means of indicating progress during the washing cycle. Also included is a means of outputting a plurality of aural messages for instructing the user during each of the plurality of washing steps, as well as a means of tracking a number of usages.
A further object includes a dispenser wherein the visual means is a plurality of light emitting diodes.
Additionally, an object is a dispenser further comprising a means of sensing a usage number request, wherein the number of usages is output as a verbal numeral.
In addition, an object is a dispenser further comprising a means of identifying the user by voice recognition. Also, an object is dispenser further comprising a means of identifying a supervisor by voice recognition.
Furthermore, an object is a dispenser further comprising a means of customizing the plurality of aural messages for instructing the user during each of the plurality of washing steps.
An object of the invention is a dispenser for metering a liquid cleanser to a user and prompting the user in compliance with a recommended washing technique, comprising a power source, and an actuation means, wherein the actuation means is triggered by the user and dispenses the liquid cleanser, and wherein the actuation means initiates a washing cycle containing a plurality of washing steps. Additionally, there is a means of outputting aural messages, and a visual display means for indicating progress of the recommended washing technique. Finally, there is a processing means for tracking a usage number, and timing of each of the aural messages and the visual display means, wherein the processing means is connected to the power source and the actuation means.
A related object includes a dispenser wherein the power source is a gel pack.
Another related object is a dispenser wherein the processing means is a microcontroller.
And, an object includes a dispenser further comprising a means of customizing the timing of each of the aural messages and the visual display means.
An object also includes a method for teaching proper hand washing using a dispenser, wherein the dispenser contains a processing means, wherein the processing means initiates a timed washing cycle containing a plurality of timed washing steps. The method comprising the steps of actuating a mechanism of dispensing a liquid cleanser from a user input, wherein the actuating commences the timed washing cycle. Outputting an instructional message during a first of the plurality of timed washing steps, and displaying a first progress indication. Outputting an instructional message during a second of the plurality of timed washing steps, and displaying a second progress indication. Outputting an instructional message during a third of the plurality of timed washing steps, and displaying a third progress indication. Finally, ending the timed washing cycle.
Finally, a last object is a system for teaching a user the proper method of hand washing, comprising the steps of starting a washing cycle containing a plurality of washing steps once an actuation means to dispense liquid cleanser has been manipulated, outputting a first aural instruction during a first washing step, illuminating a first visual display during a first washing step, outputting a second aural instruction during a second washing step, illuminating a second visual display during a second washing step, outputting a third aural instruction during a third washing step and illuminating a third visual display during a third washing step.
Other objects, features and advantages are apparent from description in conjunction with the accompanying drawings. | {
"pile_set_name": "USPTO Backgrounds"
} |
Umeå School of Business
The Umeå School of Business, Economics and Statistics, USBE, or Handelshögskolan vid Umeå Universitet, is the business school of Umeå University in the north of Sweden, founded in 1989 "to strengthen education in research and business while contributing to the community". About 2000 students currently study at USBE. The School offers one Bachelor program, four undergraduate programs (Civilekonomprogram), seven Master's degree programs (including the Erasmus Mundus Master Program in Strategic Project Management) and doctoral programs.
The International atmosphere is important to the business school and it offers one undergraduate program (the International Business Program) and all Master's programs and doctoral programs entirely in English. USBE also accept a large number of international students as exchange or degree students.
USBE is located at the very heart of the University campus, a meeting-place for all academic disciplines, improving its opportunities to co-operate across traditional academic boundaries. It also gives USBE-students an opportunity to take an active part of student environment created for the 37 000 students at Umeå University.
Organization
Umeå School of Business, Economics and Statistics has three departments: the Department of Business Administration, the Department of Economics and the Department of Statistics.
USBE Career Center
USBE Career Center concentrates primarily on helping its graduates in the transition between graduation and the business world.
Research
Within the Umeå School of Business, Economics and Statistics, the Umeå Research Institute promotes research and awards funding to prospective researchers.
The School also hosts a group dedicated to research on decision-making in extreme environments. It is named Triple Ed (Research Group on Extreme Environments – Everyday Decisions).
Education
Master's Programs
Master's Program in Accounting
Master's Program in Finance
Master's Program in Business Development and Internationalization
Master's Program in Management
Master's Program in Marketing
Master's Program in Economics
Master's Program in Statistical Sciences
Masters in Strategic Project Management (European): offered jointly with Heriot-Watt University and Politecnico di Milano Erasmus Mundus
Undergraduate Programs
International Business Program (in English)
Business Administration and Economics Program (in Swedish)
Retail and Supply Chain Management Program (in Swedish)
Service Managementprogramet (in Swedish)
Bachelor's Program in Statistics
Notable alumni
Students
Linus Berg - founder and CEO of "Rest & Fly"
Frida Berglund - founder of the popular blogg "Husmusen"
Wilhelm Geijer, former CEO and Board member of Öhrlings PricewaterhouseCoopers
Christian Hermelin - CEO, Fabege
Leif Lindmark - former Rector, Stockholm School of Economics
Agneta Marell - Professor of Business Administration
Henrik P. Molin - Author
Göran Carstedt - Leading the global network "Society for Organizational Learning"
Malin Moström - Swedish woman footballer, nominated best in Sweden and the world.
Lars Petterson - CEO, Atea Sweden
Erik Wikström - CEO, Pizzeria Viking chain
Honorary Doctors
Carl Kempe, Swedish businessman
Robert H. Haveman, Professor
Lars Heikensten, former Governor of the Swedish Riksbank
International partnerships
USBE has over 70 partner universities all over the world, including:
See also
External links
Umeå University official site
HHUS The Student Association at USBE
References
Category:Educational institutions established in 1989
Category:Swedish university schools
Category:Business schools in Europe
Category:Business schools in Sweden
Category:Umeå
Category:Umeå University | {
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The content published in Cureus is the result of clinical experience and/or research by independent individuals or organizations. Cureus is not responsible for the scientific accuracy or reliability of data or conclusions published herein. All content published within Cureus is intended only for educational, research and reference purposes. Additionally, articles published within Cureus should not be deemed a suitable substitute for the advice of a qualified health care professional. Do not disregard or avoid professional medical advice due to content published within Cureus.
Introduction
============
Total knee arthroplasty (TKA) is a promising treatment for end-stage osteoarthritis (OA) of the knee for alleviating pain and restoring the function of the knee. Some of the cases with bilateral TKA are symptomatic, necessitating revision arthroplasty in both the knees. A bilateral revision TKA can be done either in two stage or simultaneously as a single stage procedure. However, the decision to perform simultaneous bilateral revision TKA is debatable because of possible higher complexity and complication rate. Very few cases have been reported in the literature on this issue. There are various advantages of doing simultaneous bilateral revision TKA compared with staged bilateral revision TKA. These include single operation and single anesthesia as well as better rehabilitation of both knees, apart from a significant reduction in the hospital stay and hospital costs.
Case presentation
=================
A 67-year-old hypothyroid and hypertensive female presented to us with unstable and painful knees 14 years after primary bilateral TKA for advanced OA. She began developing pain in both the knees for last six months, followed by instability in both knees (right \> left). She was managed symptomatically with painkillers, bracing, and physiotherapy but her pain and instability were not relieved.
On clinical examination, the active and passive knee range of motion was painful. The flexion was 0° to 100°, anterior--posterior laxity of 5--10 mm, and a mild valgus laxity. The plain radiographs showed malalignment and loosening of the implants (Figures [1](#FIG1){ref-type="fig"}-[2](#FIG2){ref-type="fig"}). The leucocyte counts, C-reactive protein, and erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) were within normal limits. A three-phase bone scan was also found to be negative for infection.
{#FIG1}
{#FIG2}
Bilateral revision TKAs were performed using modified Insall's midline approach with lateral retraction of the patella (Figure [3](#FIG3){ref-type="fig"}) \[[@REF1]\]. A joint wound swab was taken and sent for gram stain, culture, and sensitivity. It was found to be negative for any microorganisms. The original cemented TKA implants were removed carefully, preserving as much bone as possible. Revision TKA was done on both sides sequentially, under the same anesthesia, using Scorpio® Total Stabilizer (Stryker®, Mahwah, NJ) constrained implants with long femoral and tibial stems.
{#FIG3}
The knees were protected in hinged braces postoperatively. The drains were removed 48 hours postoperatively; continuous passive motion (CPM) and active knee flexion exercises were started on postoperative day one and gradually increased to 0°--90° of flexion (Figure [4](#FIG4){ref-type="fig"}).
{#FIG4}
The postoperative radiographs showed satisfactory implant positions (Figures [5](#FIG5){ref-type="fig"}-[6](#FIG6){ref-type="fig"}). The patient had no complaints and was able to flex the knee to 80° easily. The range of motion and quadriceps strengthening exercises continued without forced flexion. She gradually resumed full weight-bearing with the help of the walker. Three months after surgery, the brace was removed, and active pain-free range of motion of 0°--115° was achieved with complete stability. At four months, the patient had returned to full activity without the brace or cane. At the final follow-up of four years, the knee was fully stable, and the patient was pain-free with no loosening or wear of the implants.
{#FIG5}
{#FIG6}
Discussion
==========
Symptomatic instability and pain following primary TKA requires revision surgery. In one retrospective study of 49 TKA patients with bilateral simultaneous revision, no postoperative cardiovascular complications, stroke, or death were noted \[[@REF2]\]. The minor reported complications included transient, self-limited confusion (in three cases); pulmonary embolism (in one patient), which was treated successfully with an inferior vena cava filter and extended anticoagulation; posterior compartment syndrome (in one case), which was treated by fasciotomy; and stiff knee in one patient (that was manipulated under anesthesia at three months). In a retrospective cohort study, Carter, et al. \[[@REF3]\] found that 33 of 141 morbidly obese patients (23.4%) who had revision TKA had a complication compared to 10 of 96 patients with a BMI 18.5 - 25 (10.4%) (p = 0.011). The most common complication was wound healing.
Kevin, et al. reviewed 60,355 revision TKA procedures done in the USA and noted that the most common causes of revision TKA were an infection in 25.2%, implant loosening in 16.1%, and implant failure/breakage in 9.7% cases \[[@REF4]\]. They found that revision of all the components was the most common type of procedure done (35.2%). Singh, et al. found a high prevalence (46.5%) of overall moderate to severe activity limitation at two years and 50.5% at five years following revision TKA \[[@REF5]\]. Significantly higher odds of moderate to severe overall activity limitation was noted both at two and five-year follow-ups in patients with a BMI of 40 or higher, age greater than 80 years, higher Deyo-Charlson score, and in females.
Kasmire, et al. studied predictors of functional outcome after revision TKA by using various parameters, such as short-form 36 (SF-36), Western Ontario and McMaster Osteoarthritis Index (WOMAC), and Knee Society Scores (KSS) \[[@REF6]\]. The data was collected preoperatively and at two years follow-up in their 175 revision TKAs done for aseptic failure. All of the above-mentioned parameters improved significantly after revision TKA (p \< 0.001). Lower preoperative pain and higher clinical KSS were found to be predictors of a better outcome.
Sheth, et al. found that the complication rates were different for bilateral TKA done simultaneously and as staged procedures \[[@REF7]\]. These authors reported aseptic revision (1.17% vs. 0.9%), septic revision (0.8% vs. 0.7%), mortality (0.28% vs. 0.1%), and adverse events (2.49% vs. 1.97%). According to Bohm, et al., simultaneous bilateral primary TKA patients required more blood transfusions, a shorter hospital stay, more transfers to a rehabilitation facility, and less frequency of knee infections than staged bilateral TKA patients \[[@REF8]\]. However, these patients had a higher rate of cardiac complications and in-hospital mortality rate. The three-year revision, however, was same in both the groups.
In a meta-analysis of 14 studies, Hu, et al. showed that the prevalence of mortality immediately postoperatively, mortality at 30 days postoperatively, and neurological complications were significantly higher in simultaneous TKA compared to staged TKA patients \[[@REF9]\]. The prevalence of thromboembolic disease, infection, and cardiac complications were not significantly different between simultaneous TKA compared to staged TKA patients. According to Hersekli, et al., the amount of blood loss, intensive care unit days and perioperative complications were same between single- and two-staged operations (p \> 0.05) \[[@REF10]\]. However, hospital stay and overall cost were significantly less in single-staged operations.
We faced the challenge in decision-making regarding the staging of the procedures in this reported case, where revision of the components was necessary for both knees. We could not find proper guidelines regarding bilateral revision TKA as there are only a few documented reports of simultaneous bilateral revision TKA. There is limited evidence to support the one-stage practice of doing bilateral revision TKAs, as its safety remains controversial. We chose to do a single-staged bilateral revision TKA in this case, as a two-staged procedure would have required two anesthesias, longer hospital stay, more hospital bills, and surgery-related complications, which were overcome by a single-staged procedure in this case. With the use of constrained implants and long stems of the prosthetic components, we achieved good knee stability and satisfactory range of motion immediately postoperatively and at the four year follow-up.
Conclusions
===========
Two-staged bilateral revision total knee replacement (TKA) has many disadvantages, such as requiring anesthesia to be given twice, a longer hospital stay, more hospital bills, and higher surgery-related complications, which can be overcome by a single stage procedure. In carefully selected patients, single-staged bilateral revision TKAs should be considered over two-staged procedures.
The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Consent was obtained by all participants in this study
| {
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Glenea funerula
Glenea funerula is a species of beetle in the family Cerambycidae. It was described by James Thomson in 1857. It is known from Sumatra, India, Malaysia, and Java.
Subspecies
Glenea funerula funerula (J. Thomson, 1857)
Glenea funerula javana (Pic, 1946)
References
Category:Glenea
Category:Beetles described in 1857 | {
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Some voters with disabilities will be able to cast their ballots on smart phones using blockchain technology for the first time in a U.S. election on Tuesday. But while election officials and mobile voting advocates say the technology has the potential to increase access to the ballot box, election technology experts are raising serious security concerns about the idea.
The mobile voting system, a collaboration between Boston-based tech company Voatz, nonprofit Tusk Philanthropies and the National Cybersecurity Center, has previously been used for some military and overseas voters during test pilots in West Virginia, Denver and Utah County, Utah. Now, Utah County is expanding its program to include voters with disabilities in its municipal general election as well. Two Oregon counties, Jackson and Umatilla, will also pilot the system for military and overseas voters on Tuesday.
The idea, according to Bradley Tusk, the startup consultant and philanthropist who is funding the pilots, is to increase voter turnout. “We can’t take on every interest group in Washington around the country and beat them, but I think what we can do is let the genie out of the bottle,” he says.
After working in politics, Tusk built his name in the tech world developing Uber’s strategy of turning its customers into armies of grassroots lobbyists, getting them to advocate for the company they’d come to rely on. He hopes to use the same tactic with mobile voting. While Tusk has no financial stake in Voatz and says he is not committed to any particular technology, he believes mobile voting can work, and if he can convince enough Americans they want to vote on their cellphones, he says, those voters will put pressure on their officials to adopt the method.
So far, the pilots have included very small numbers of voters, but election officials have deemed them successful. Officials in West Virginia, Denver and Utah County have been pleased with their outcomes and with the feedback they’ve received from voters.
“The audit that we did on the votes that were cast in our primary came back very clean. So that gave me some more confidence in the system,” says Amelia Powers Gardner, the Utah county clerk/auditor.
But as concerns around foreign interference in elections have increased since 2016, election security experts have warned against any electronic voting methods. The Senate Intelligence Committee released a report this summer on Russian election interference that highlighted the importance of paper ballots to securing America’s vote. “States should resist pushes for online voting,” the report read. It said that while ensuring access, particularly for military voters, is crucial, “no system of online voting has yet established itself as secure.”
Independent experts agree. There is an overwhelming consensus in the election security community that mobile voting using blockchain technology—including Voatz—is not yet a reliable system, according to Mark Lindeman, senior science and technology policy officer at Verified Voting, a nonprofit that advocates for the accuracy, integrity and verifiability of elections.
“We think it’s great that election officials are are trying bold innovations to help people vote. But we think this bold innovation isn’t ready for prime time,” he says.
To use the Voatz system, voters download the Voatz app onto their iPhone or Android smartphone. They then scan their fingerprint and government-issued ID and take a “video selfie” to authenticate their identity before they can tap the screen to mark their digital ballot. (Voatz says it deletes the ID and facial scans soon after they are used.) After casting their vote, the voter receives an emailed receipt of their ballot to confirm their choices were marked correctly.
Election officials at the voter’s jurisdiction also receive a separate copy of that receipt, either through secure email, eFax or by logging into the the blockchain “lock box,” according to Voatz. The votes themselves are stored in the blockchain until Election Day, when election officials log into the “lock box” portal and print out the ballots.
This process is much quicker and potentially more secure than how military and overseas voters currently cast their ballots, Powers Gardner says. While laws can vary by state, Americans living overseas typically cast their votes through paper mail, fax or in many cases unsecured email. Sending mail internationally is not always reliable and can take weeks, while emailed votes are vulnerable to hacking and require overseas or military voters to waive their right to a private ballot.
For disabled voters, casting a ballot on their smartphones could potentially be a game-changer, says Michelle Bishop, the voting rights specialist at the National Disability Rights Network. Right now, people with disabilities face obstacles at every part of the voting process. While the Americans with Disabilities Act technically requires that people with disabilities have access to public services, programs and activities such as voting, it’s not well enforced. And even when polling places do have functioning accessible voting machines, there might be other impediments such as steps to get into the building or poll workers who don’t know how to work the accessible machine. When the Government Accountability Office examined polling place accessibility after the 2016 election, it found only 17% of polling places reviewed had no impediments outside or inside the voting area. “That’s horrifying and abysmal,” Bishop says.
Meanwhile, more and more people have smartphones, and mobile technology has done a good job of introducing accessible features. Phones allow users to zoom in on their screens, increase text size, read the screen’s content aloud and operate the device through voice commands, all of which can help voters with a range of disabilities. The National Disability Rights Network does not endorse any particular voting technology, but Bishop described Voatz and other applications like it as “incredibly promising.” Still, she takes the security concerns seriously.
“Voters with disabilities want elections to be accurate and fair and secure and for the process to have integrity as much as any other voter,” Bishop says. “I believe in testing and certification. I believe in piloting these kinds of technologies towards that end to see if it’s going to work for accessibility purposes and to make sure we can secure it.”
The problem, security experts say, is that it’s nearly impossible for third parties to verify that the Voatz system is secure and accurate with the level of information the company has released. Voatz published an eight-page white paper after its West Virginia pilot in 2018, but it did not name the four independent security auditors it said evaluated the pilot or go into detail about what information auditors could access, what vulnerabilities they found and whether those were fixed. More detailed reports came out after the Denver and first Utah County pilots this summer, but those still don’t provide a full picture, experts say.
While Voatz co-founder and CEO Nimit Sawhney says that his system is the first that “enables end-to-end auditability and verifiability in a remote voting scenario,” other elections experts dispute this. To audit the votes cast on Voatz, election officials print out a “paper ballot” and compare it to a copy of the “voter-verified digital receipts” created when the votes were submitted. Officials can compare these to the results of the tabulation and to the information stored in the blockchain. “So what’s missing? Almost everything,” says Verified Voting’s Mark Lindeman. “We don’t actually have any way of knowing that what the voter looked at is the same thing as what the Secretary of State’s office looked at. That’s that’s just not what voter verification means.”
Voatz also touts its use of blockchain as an additional security measure because the votes are stored in geographically distributed servers rather than all in one place. But experts say this provides little comfort. “Blockchain is the buzzword of the moment,” says Duncan Buell, a professor of computer science at University of South Carolina who has studied voting technologies and co-authored a paper in May detailing the many concerns that election experts have about Voatz. “Everybody regardless of what they’re doing, are going to claim they’re doing blockchain because that’s going to make it sound sexy and exciting and shiny.”
Tusk Philanthropies, for their part, hired outside security experts to review Voatz’s audits and security procedures. Andre McGregor, co-founder of ShiftState Security, told TIME he and his team spent about three weeks reviewing Voatz after the West Virginia pilot, and that he is scheduled to do another review before the end of the year. “The findings have been good,” McGregor said.
Voatz has also been working with the Department of Homeland Security to conduct tests of its system, and Sawhney says the company plans to release more detailed information about these tests and its software in the coming months. He understands the need for questions about security, he says, but adds that as a private company he also has to protect his intellectual property.
In the meantime, elections experts, government officials and disability advocates are left navigating the tension between accessibility and security—something that is only going to increase as the 2020 election approaches.
“What we haven’t solved in any context is how to make verification itself accessible,” Lindeman says. “And we need to keep wrestling with it as a really hard problem that deserves good solutions. I don’t have the solution. I just know I haven’t seen it yet.”
Get our Politics Newsletter. The headlines out of Washington never seem to slow. Subscribe to The D.C. Brief to make sense of what matters most. Please enter a valid email address. Sign Up Now Check the box if you do not wish to receive promotional offers via email from TIME. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder.
Write to Abigail Abrams at [email protected]. | {
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<html><head>
<title>struct::skiplist - Tcl Data Structures</title>
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<! -- Generated from file 'skiplist.man' by tcllib/doctools with format 'html'
-->
<! -- Copyright © 2000 Keith Vetter
-->
<! -- struct::skiplist.n
-->
<body><hr> [
<a href="../../../../../../../../home">Tcllib Home</a>
| <a href="../../../../toc.html">Main Table Of Contents</a>
| <a href="../../../toc.html">Table Of Contents</a>
| <a href="../../../../index.html">Keyword Index</a>
| <a href="../../../../toc0.html">Categories</a>
| <a href="../../../../toc1.html">Modules</a>
| <a href="../../../../toc2.html">Applications</a>
] <hr>
<div class="doctools">
<h1 class="doctools_title">struct::skiplist(n) 1.3 tcllib "Tcl Data Structures"</h1>
<div id="name" class="doctools_section"><h2><a name="name">Name</a></h2>
<p>struct::skiplist - Create and manipulate skiplists</p>
</div>
<div id="toc" class="doctools_section"><h2><a name="toc">Table Of Contents</a></h2>
<ul class="doctools_toc">
<li class="doctools_section"><a href="#toc">Table Of Contents</a></li>
<li class="doctools_section"><a href="#synopsis">Synopsis</a></li>
<li class="doctools_section"><a href="#section1">Description</a></li>
<li class="doctools_section"><a href="#section2">Bugs, Ideas, Feedback</a></li>
<li class="doctools_section"><a href="#keywords">Keywords</a></li>
<li class="doctools_section"><a href="#category">Category</a></li>
<li class="doctools_section"><a href="#copyright">Copyright</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<div id="synopsis" class="doctools_section"><h2><a name="synopsis">Synopsis</a></h2>
<div class="doctools_synopsis">
<ul class="doctools_requirements">
<li>package require <b class="pkgname">Tcl 8.2</b></li>
<li>package require <b class="pkgname">struct::skiplist <span class="opt">?1.3?</span></b></li>
</ul>
<ul class="doctools_syntax">
<li><a href="#1"><b class="cmd">skiplistName</b> <i class="arg">option</i> <span class="opt">?<i class="arg">arg arg ...</i>?</span></a></li>
<li><a href="#2"><i class="arg">skiplistName</i> <b class="method">delete</b> <i class="arg">node</i> <span class="opt">?<i class="arg">node</i>...?</span></a></li>
<li><a href="#3"><i class="arg">skiplistName</i> <b class="method">destroy</b></a></li>
<li><a href="#4"><i class="arg">skiplistName</i> <b class="method">insert</b> <i class="arg">key value</i></a></li>
<li><a href="#5"><i class="arg">skiplistName</i> <b class="method">search</b> <i class="arg">node</i> <span class="opt">?<b class="const">-key</b> <i class="arg">key</i>?</span></a></li>
<li><a href="#6"><i class="arg">skiplistName</i> <b class="method">size</b></a></li>
<li><a href="#7"><i class="arg">skiplistName</i> <b class="method">walk</b> <i class="arg">cmd</i></a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
<div id="section1" class="doctools_section"><h2><a name="section1">Description</a></h2>
<p>The <b class="cmd">::struct::skiplist</b> command creates a new skiplist object
with an associated global Tcl command whose name is
<i class="arg">skiplistName</i>. This command may be used to invoke various
operations on the skiplist. It has the following general form:</p>
<dl class="doctools_definitions">
<dt><a name="1"><b class="cmd">skiplistName</b> <i class="arg">option</i> <span class="opt">?<i class="arg">arg arg ...</i>?</span></a></dt>
<dd><p><i class="arg">Option</i> and the <i class="arg">arg</i>s determine the exact behavior of the
command.</p></dd>
</dl>
<p>Skip lists are an alternative data structure to binary trees. They can
be used to maintain ordered lists over any sequence of insertions and
deletions. Skip lists use randomness to achieve probabilistic
balancing, and as a result the algorithms for insertion and deletion
in skip lists are much simpler and faster than those for binary trees.</p>
<p>To read more about skip lists see Pugh, William.
<em>Skip lists: a probabilistic alternative to balanced trees</em>
In: Communications of the ACM, June 1990, 33(6) 668-676.</p>
<p>Currently, the key can be either a number or a string, and comparisons
are performed with the built in greater than operator.
The following commands are possible for skiplist objects:</p>
<dl class="doctools_definitions">
<dt><a name="2"><i class="arg">skiplistName</i> <b class="method">delete</b> <i class="arg">node</i> <span class="opt">?<i class="arg">node</i>...?</span></a></dt>
<dd><p>Remove the specified nodes from the skiplist.</p></dd>
<dt><a name="3"><i class="arg">skiplistName</i> <b class="method">destroy</b></a></dt>
<dd><p>Destroy the skiplist, including its storage space and associated command.</p></dd>
<dt><a name="4"><i class="arg">skiplistName</i> <b class="method">insert</b> <i class="arg">key value</i></a></dt>
<dd><p>Insert a node with the given <i class="arg">key</i> and <i class="arg">value</i> into the
skiplist. If a node with that key already exists, then the that node's
value is updated and its node level is returned. Otherwise a new node
is created and 0 is returned.</p></dd>
<dt><a name="5"><i class="arg">skiplistName</i> <b class="method">search</b> <i class="arg">node</i> <span class="opt">?<b class="const">-key</b> <i class="arg">key</i>?</span></a></dt>
<dd><p>Search for a given key in a skiplist. If not found then 0 is returned.
If found, then a two element list of 1 followed by the node's value is retuned.</p></dd>
<dt><a name="6"><i class="arg">skiplistName</i> <b class="method">size</b></a></dt>
<dd><p>Return a count of the number of nodes in the skiplist.</p></dd>
<dt><a name="7"><i class="arg">skiplistName</i> <b class="method">walk</b> <i class="arg">cmd</i></a></dt>
<dd><p>Walk the skiplist from the first node to the last. At each node, the
command <i class="arg">cmd</i> will be evaluated with the key and value of the
current node appended.</p></dd>
</dl>
</div>
<div id="section2" class="doctools_section"><h2><a name="section2">Bugs, Ideas, Feedback</a></h2>
<p>This document, and the package it describes, will undoubtedly contain
bugs and other problems.
Please report such in the category <em>struct :: skiplist</em> of the
<a href="http://core.tcl.tk/tcllib/reportlist">Tcllib Trackers</a>.
Please also report any ideas for enhancements you may have for either
package and/or documentation.</p>
</div>
<div id="keywords" class="doctools_section"><h2><a name="keywords">Keywords</a></h2>
<p><a href="../../../../index.html#key306">skiplist</a></p>
</div>
<div id="category" class="doctools_section"><h2><a name="category">Category</a></h2>
<p>Data structures</p>
</div>
<div id="copyright" class="doctools_section"><h2><a name="copyright">Copyright</a></h2>
<p>Copyright © 2000 Keith Vetter</p>
</div>
</div></body></html>
| {
"pile_set_name": "Github"
} |
Pößnitz (river)
The Pößnitz is a river of Brandenburg, Germany. It flows into the Black Elster near Ruhland.
See also
List of rivers of Brandenburg
Category:Rivers of Brandenburg
Category:Rivers of Germany | {
"pile_set_name": "Wikipedia (en)"
} |
Pages
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Watch fireworks reflect in LongviewLake at 99.7 The Point’s and JacksonCounty’s Christmas in the Sky event. At 6pm today, enjoy holiday stage productions. A fireworks display synchronized to your favorite holiday music begins at 7:30pm. For more info call (816) 503-4800.
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RUSKIN CHOIR PERFOMS AT PLAZA LIGHTING
RHS’ Advanced Choir will perform at this year’s Plaza Lighting Ceremony, Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 24. Ruskin will perform at 5:20-5:45 pm, then join other choirs for two opening numbers before the actual lighting ceremony at 7pm.
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KC Mayor’s Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony
On Friday, November 25, at 5:30pm, join Mayor Sly James and R&B/soul sensation Janelle Monae light the 100-foot-tall Mayor’s Christmas Tree at CrownCenter. The tree is a symbol of the Mayor’s Christmas Tree Fund, which assists the city’s less fortunate. For more info call 816-274-8444.
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GRANDVIEW MAYOR’S CHRISTMAS TREE LIGHTING
Get into the holiday spirit with live entertainment from local elementary schools and the lighting of Grandview’s Mayor’s Christmas Tree on Thursday, December 1st from 6:45-8pm at GrandviewCity Hall. Santa will be there passing out candy canes as well! Please bring a donation to benefit the Grandview Assistance Program. For more info, call 316-4888.
When local leaders cut the ribbon on the new RedBridge last Friday, they took a further step in a historic odyssey of pioneering transportation improvements that started in the early 1800s, when covered wagons first rolled through South Kansas City as part of the western expansion of the United States.
The new $14 million bridge, which had some $4 million in federal funds, replaces the decades-old covered bridge on Red Bridge Road with a new, two-lane structure with sidewalks and a multi-use trail.
“As I drive over this bridge in my hybrid electric car, I’m going to be marveling at all the covered wagons that came through this area,” said David Jackson, director of archives and education for the Jackson County Historical Society.
Jackson recounted the history of the region, from its early days as a trading post to a key gathering spot on the Santa Fe trail. Would-be settlers on their way to New Mexico gouged deep ruts in the landscape – those swales can still be seen in MinorPark, within view of the new RedBridge. The BlueRiver was the first major obstacle on the trail, and in 1859 a 100-foot long covered bridge was built. Someone painted it red, Jackson said, and the name has survived to this day. The bridge was replaced with steel in 1914, and again in the 1930s.
In the year 2000, as traffic volumes and population grew in the area, city officials began to talk seriously about replacing the Depression-era bridge, starting a plan that came to fruition on Friday.
While the bridge was open for traffic on Friday, there is still more to be done – including one of the key features of the bridge: lighted monument plaques that celebrate 10 influential historical figures that pioneered settlement in the RedBridge area. Still to be installed are a series of red LED lights that will light up at night to carry on the tradition of having a “red” bridge.
The old RedBridge, pictured below, will remain a part of the area’s history, Klein said, as it will be incorporated into bike and walking trails.
“The old bridge will remain for pedestrian use,” Klein said.
Councilman John Sharp said it was important to remember the core focus of the entire project – to improve public safety. He said the bridge saves commuters two or three minutes when trains pass – and those minutes could be vital.
“Two to three minutes may not mean much if you’re just driving home from work, but if you’re the one waiting for an ambulance to get to your home, if you’re the one waiting for a fire truck to get to your home, if you’re the one waiting for a police car to get to your home, those two to three minutes could mean the difference between life or death,” Sharp said. “That’s what this project is – a public safety enhancement.”
Sharp said he couldn’t wait for the lights and artwork to be installed.
“I think it’s a beautiful bridge now, but it’s going to be a lot more beautiful,” he said.
The bridge features several look-out points where pedestrians can stop and take in a scenic view of the [river] valley, Sharp said, and historical plaques will tell the pioneer history of the area.
“It will be an educational destination,” Sharp said. “Unlike a lot of monuments, it will be one that will reflect the ethnic and gender diversity of the pioneers of this area.”
Councilman Scott Taylor said the bridge was key to the future of South Kansas City, and that the associated pedestrian and bicycle paths could draw new people to the area.
“This RedBridge is so important in our district that it can’t be understated,” Taylor said. “It’s not only an improvement for commuters but for joggers and bikers. As we attract new families to Kansas City, this is one of the amenities that families are looking for.”
Taylor passed the microphone to his wife, former Councilwoman Cathy Jolly, who was a champion of the project during her time in office.
“Cathy put her heart and soul into this bridge,” Taylor said.
Jolly acknowledged that throughout the planning and design process, there were some residents who didn’t like the direction it was going. They felt it destroyed the rural character of their neighborhoods. But many others were enthusiastic about the need for a new bridge, Jolly said.
“It’s fair to say this bridge was controversial,” Jolly said.
Klein agreed, and spoke of numerous public meetings about the issue, some of which were occasionally contentious.
“This bridge has had more public input than any bridge in the city, trust me,” Klein said.
Jolly said the fact that the bridge opened, however, speaks to the forces that pull the communities of South Kansas City together.
“It took a lot of commitment and a lot of compromise to get to this point,” she said. “We’re a close community and we have a lot to celebrate.”
Friday, November 18, 2011
Families seeking services can do so over the phone and at other area offices
Kansas City, Mo. – The Missouri Department of Social Services’ South Jackson County Child Support Enforcement Office, located at 8800 Blue Ridge, is closed temporarily due to electrical problems identified by building inspectors with the Kansas City Fire Department.
“We apologize in advance for any inconvenience this temporary closure may cause our clients. Impacted staff will relocate to other areas offices to ensure that we continue to offer child support services in Jackson County without interruption,” said Seth Bundy, Missouri Department of Social Services spokesperson. “Meanwhile, we appreciate the work of the Kansas City Fire Department to ensure that our employees and the families we serve are kept safe, and that a potentially dangerous situation was avoided,”
Parents who would normally access child support services at the South Jackson County Office can do so by either visiting the next-nearest office, or calling the toll-free customer service center at 1-866-313-9960.
On the afternoon of Thursday, November 17, the Kansas City Fire Department determined that a water leak inside the office at 8800 Blue Ridge was causing an electrical short, which posed a risk of fire. This location will reopen after this issue has been permanently fixed, and the building is again inspected by fire department officials.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Alec Burks, Grandview High School alumnus, and National Basketball Association star for the Utah Jazz, will receive a proclamation on Tuesday, November 22, at 7:00 p.m. in the Grandview City Hall during the Board of Aldermen meeting, declaring Wednesday, November 23, as “Alec Burks Day”. The proclamation will be presented to Burks for his outstanding athletic accomplishments in basketball. Burkswas recently selected by the Utah Jazz in the first round (12th overall) of the National Basketball Association 2011 Draft, thus becoming the first Grandview High School athlete to ever play in the NBA.
During his years at Grandview High School, he was named the 2009 Gatorade Player of the Year in the State of Missouri as a senior, while averaging 23.0 points, 6.8 rebounds, 3.0 assists and 1.6 steals per game. Burks scored 33 points and had 13 rebounds while leading Grandview to runner-up in the Missouri Class 5A state championships; He also named the Kansas City Star and Metro Sports Player of the Year as the top player in the Kansas City metro area; In addition, he earned First Team All-Suburban Six League honors.
During his two seasons as a guard at the University of Colorado, Burks also broke numerous school records, including most points scored in a single season (779), most points scored by a sophomore (779), most points scored in a season by a guard (779), most free throws made in a season (249), most free throw attempts in a season (302) and first player with at least 500 points (779), 200 rebounds (247), 100 assists (112) in a single season.
Burks earned honorable mention 2010 – 2011 All-America honors from the Associated Press. He was awarded Andy Katz National Player of the Week for the week of February 21, 2011 to February 27, 2011. He was named to the Big XII Conference First Team and to the National Invitational Tournament All-Tournament Team. He was a Top-20 list finalist for the John R. Wooden Award. He was also part of the Lute Olson All-American Team, Big 12 Basketball Championships All-Tournament Team, and was named Big XII Conference 2009 – 2010 Freshman of the Year.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Grandview's beloved, unofficial mascot--Ebenezer the Donkey--is once again facing some challenges that his caretakers hope he can overcome with a little help from his friends.
If you have missed seeing the donkey trotting around his tree-covered lot on the west side of Grandview's Main Street this summer and fall, there is a reason.
"In May, Ebenezer started having issues with arthritis on the stifle joint and the howk joint," caretaker Shirley Phillips explained. To get up off the ground, the donkey had to be picked up using furniture straps over the course of several months.
An injection of an amino acid has helped Ebenezer once again get up on his own. However, the donkey needs to have the shot every two weeks for the rest of his life.
"We don't want to put him down because he's still really healthy besides the joints not working as well as they used to," Phillips said.
Friends and fans of the donkey can help in several ways.
A 2012 Ebenezer calendar is now on sale for $17 at May Milling, 606 Main Street, in downtown Grandview. The calendar features photos of the donkey showing his lively spirit, dressed in everything from his winter coat, to a variety of holiday-related hats each month. All proceeds will go toward Ebenezer's continued care.
"The 12 month calendar that has been put together is by George Gross, a professional photographer that is smitten with Ebenezer just like the rest of us," explained Joe Dimino, who administers the donkey's website. "This is a must for all fans of Ebenezer."
Those who wish to purchase the calendar online can do so as well. Visit www.ebenezerthedonkey.com and click on the Shutterfly link to purchase the calendar.
Ebenezer's new veterinarian has also agreed to accept donations for the donkey's medical care. The Koch-Stigge Veterinary Clinic can be reached at (816) 380-1990, or by mail at 28204 Southwest Outer Road, Harrisonville, MO 64701.
Friday, November 11, 2011
Hillcrest Country Club was scheduled for sale at public auction today, but a last-minute bankruptcy filing gives the owners more time to restructure, according to attorneys. Photo by Paul Thompson
The Hillcrest Country Club came only a day away this week from being sold in a foreclosure auction. The auction had been scheduled for Friday, November 11 at 2 p.m., but a last minute filing on Thursday led to the auction’s cancellation.
According to the group’s lawyer, Tim West of the Berkowitz Oliver law firm, Heartland Golf Development II, LLC filed for bankruptcy protection on Thursday to put off the sale.
“The foreclosure sale scheduled originally for tomorrow at 2:00 pm at the Jackson County Courthouse is off because the entity that owns Hillcrest, Heartland Golf Development II, LLC, filed for bankruptcy protection today,” said West in a phone message. “So that will obviously put the foreclosure sale off until they go through a restructuring process.”
For further details as the story develops, please refer back to jcadvocate.com.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
New animal exhibits and additional employees are in the KC Zoo’s future.
Jackson and Clay County voters on Tuesday passed an 1/8th-cent retail sales tax to help fund improvements at the Kansas City Zoo. In Jackson County, the issue was approved by 70%.
The tax will mean an additional penny for every $8 in taxable purchases in both counties, and is expected to fund more than 100 new permanent jobs, in addition to construction jobs.
The funds will pay for a Penguin Exhibit, Predator Canyon/Tiger Exhibit, new Kid’s Wet Play Zone, a Gorilla/Ape Exhibit, Orangutan Canopy, a Giraffe Tree Tops viewing area, a renovated sea lion cove and other projects. It will also expand the zoo’s education program, fully sponsoring science educational field trips for local schools, and creating dedicated “Zoomobiles” to bring programming to schools, libraries, community centers and other public places in each county.
Jackson County residents will also receive half-price admission to the Zoo, and four free Zoo days per year.
South Kansas City residents who are worried about code violations in their neighborhoods can now do something about it other than calling 3-1-1.
The Volunteer Inspector Program (VIP) is a city program that empowers neighborhoods to hold accountable owners who do not keep their properties up to code. Essentially, the program trains volunteers to notice and document codes violations.
“We can’t be everywhere,” said Carla Finch, of the city’s Neighborhood and Community Services department. “You pretty much know and see what’s going on in your neighborhood, so if you see violations you can let the city know.”
Currently, residents can call the city’s 3-1-1 service to report codes violations such as weeds, trash, peeling paint, and similar issues. But that can take up to 90 days, Finch said.
“This is much faster than going through 3-1-1,” Finch said, adding that most violations will be cleaned up in about 10 days after a citizen inspector reports them.
The way the program works is that neighbors – ideally a group, such as a homes association – can call Finch at 513-9039 to set up a training session. An employee of the city’s Neighborhood and Community Services department will schedule a session and come out to train volunteer citizen inspectors.
The volunteers attend a short training class, where they are informed about how to properly document codes violations.
“We ask that volunteers ensure they have the correct address, date, and violations documented on a 8.5 by 11 dry erase board or notebook,” said Mike Schumacher, assistant to the director of the Neighborhood and Community Services department. “The citizen inspector photographs this document and then photographs the property.”
And that’s all they’re to do, he said.
“They are not to leave the sidewalk of the street, and are not authorized to walk around the subject property,” Schumacher cautioned.
The citizen inspector would then submit those photos to the city, who will notify the property owner of the violation. After 10 days, the violations will be issued to a contractor for cleanup, and the city bills the property owner.
The citizen inspectors need to provide their own equipment, including cameras.
Orrin Ellis, of the KC Neighborhood Advisory Council, said he’s a big believer in the program.
“We’re trying to get every HOA involved in this,” Ellis said. “It makes them more self-sufficient and self-reliant in taking care of their own neighborhoods.”
Gary Kempf, president of the Terrace Lake Gardens Homes Association, said he hopes people in his area will want to get involved. He said people often don’t like to tattle on their neighbors, but they’re actually performing a service to the community when they do.
“You’re not being a busybody when you report codes violations,” he said. “In fact you’re being a responsible citizen.”
April Cushing, of the Ruskin neighborhoods, was trained in the program last year and said it’s been a big help in getting codes violations cleaned up in a more timely manner.
“These violations are usually in homes that are owned by absentee landlords,” Cushing said. “They can drive down everyone else’s property values and give a neighborhood a bad feel.”
Finch urged residents who are interested in setting up a training session to call her office at 513-9039 if they have more questions, or they can email her at [email protected].
Friday, November 4, 2011
A new playground at Grandview’s Meadowmere Park has been plagued with delays and will not be finished by the end of October – a deadline imposed by the Board of Aldermen after an earlier May deadline was missed by the contractor. Now city staff are consulting with legal counsel to see what can be done to get the project finished.
Update:The Board of Aldermen at its Nov. 1 work session decided against terminating a contract to build the park, saying it would delay the project even further. Kirk Decker, assistant city administrator, said the contractor believes the park can be completed in mid-December, weather permitting.
Cobra Contractors, of Overland Park, in Oct. 2010 was awarded an $896,000 contract for construction of the state-of-the-art playground, designed to resemble a magical forest kingdom. But bad weather slowed construction, which was supposed to be complete in May of this year.
“The original completion date was May 20,” said Tony Finlay, parks director, “but the contractor lost 113 days due to weather.”
That created a domino effect, Finlay said, because Cobra wasn’t ready for sub-contractors when they were scheduled, and at least one sub-contractor didn’t show up for scheduled work.
“Of course we’re extremely disappointed with that,” Finlay said.
This summer, the Board of Aldermen gave the contractor an extension due to weather delays, asking that the park be finished on Oct. 28.
“Progress has been made since our last notice to the contractor, but it does not appear that the contractor will complete the project by Friday,” said Cory Smith, city administrator. “The city is very disappointed in the slow progress.”
Smith said the city understands about weather-related construction delays, but that that recent weather has been ideal.
“The weather has been great for construction over the past two months, and the city is not aware of any viable reasons for delays during that period,” Smith said. “Due to the lack of progress to date, the city cannot provide a completion date at the present time.”
Alderman Jim Crain, who serves as a liaison to the Board of Parks and Recreation, echoed feelings of disappointment and said the city wants to work with the contractor so it doesn’t have to start from square one with a new contract. That could delay the project even further. At this point, he said, the city is exploring its legal options.
“We’ll just have to meet with our legal counsel and see where we go from there,” Crain said. Finlay agreed.
“Once we’re done reviewing our legal options we’ll have a statement,” he said. “We’re doing everything we can to get this done.”
Cobra checked out with good references when the city awarded the contract. The contractor has done work for the city before on some public works projects.
Smith said he is hopeful action can occur soon.
“The city is committed to completing the project and providing a quality project as expeditiously and effectively as possible, given the delays and the current status,” Smith said. “We will try to get everything but landscaping done this fall, before winter, if at all possible.”
Crain said it was possible city workers could complete some of the work.
Smith said it is preferable to complete the project without resorting to litigation, but that option is on the table.
“With the help of its attorney, the city is exploring ways to bring the project to a conclusion and reviewing the contract for legal options,” Smith said.
The Board of Aldermen discussed this issue at its November 1st work session.
On Tuesday, November 8th, residents of Clay and Jackson counties will decide whether to approve an 1/8th-cent retail sales tax to help fund new attractions and improvements at the Kansas City Zoo.
The funds would help pay for a new Penguin Exhibit, new Predator Canyon/Tiger Exhibit, new Kid’s Wet Play Zone, a Gorilla/Ape Exhibit, Orangutan Canopy, a Giraffe Tree Tops viewing area, a renovated sea lion cove and other projects.
It would also expand the zoo’s education program, fully sponsoring science educational field trips for local schools, and creating dedicated “Zoomobiles” to bring programming to schools, libraries, community centers and other public places in each county.
Jackson County residents would also receive half-price admission to the Zoo, and four free Zoo days per year.
If approved, the tax is expected to fund more than 100 new permanent jobs, in addition to construction jobs.
The tax would mean an additional penny for every $8 in taxable purchases in Jackson County.
Polls will be open from 6am to 7pm Tuesday. For more information about poll locations, Grandview residents should contact the Jackson County Election
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The Advocate is happy to include reader comments on this web site. However, we cannot post "Anonymous" comments. If you wish anyone to see your comments, please include your name and phone number for verification purposes. This information will not be shared with the public, but will be used by Advocate staff to determine that you are the writer of the comment. Thanks so much! | {
"pile_set_name": "Pile-CC"
} |
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to medical instruments and, more particularly, to an endoscope having flexible tubes within a passive deflection section.
2. Prior Art
Endoscopes with passive and active deflection sections are known in the art. U.S. Pat. No. 4,580,551 shows an endoscope with an elongated flexible plastic tube comprising a continuous sequence of connected vertebra-like elements. U.S. Pat. No. 3,162,214 discloses a thin walled tube of elastic material internally supported throughout its length by a series of tubular rigid rings. In one prior art embodiment, control wires from a deflection control to a distal tip of the active deflection are provided with a wire sheath along the passive deflection section. The wire sheath comprises a coiled wire to form a flexible tube around each control wire. A problem exists with these coil wire sheaths in that the coil shape can expand during compression. This can result in a loss of deflection at the active deflection section of the endoscope. In another prior art embodiment, stainless steel tubes are used as the sheaths for the control wires. However, these are only used in applications which have a large bend radius. These tubes can kink very easily, have no resilience, and can fatigue and permanently deform thereby shortening the working life of the endoscope. | {
"pile_set_name": "USPTO Backgrounds"
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Add a new Professor/TA
ENGL234
African-American Literature and Culture
An exploration of the stories black authors tell about themselves, their communities, and the nation as informed by time and place, gender, sexuality, and class. African American perspective themes such as art, childhood, sexuality, marriage, alienation and mortality, as well as representations of slavery, Reconstruction, racial violence and the Nadir, legalized racism and segregation, black patriotism and black ex-patriots, the optimism of integration, and the prospects of a post-racial America. | {
"pile_set_name": "Pile-CC"
} |
J Med Radiat Sci 65 (2018) 275--281
Introduction {#jmrs290-sec-0005}
============
There is a growing interest globally in making sure that graduates emerge from higher education with the capabilities and competencies that will equip them not only to be 'work ready' on graduation but also prepared for the development of technology, new models of service delivery and advances for practice in the future.[1](#jmrs290-bib-0001){ref-type="ref"}, [2](#jmrs290-bib-0002){ref-type="ref"}, [3](#jmrs290-bib-0003){ref-type="ref"} In a profession, such as medical imaging, the health workforce needs graduates who are ready to understand and apply emerging technology alongside meeting the demands of ever changing healthcare systems.[4](#jmrs290-bib-0004){ref-type="ref"}
This paper reports on the outcomes of a survey undertaken as part of preparation for the review and redesign of clinical placements in a medical imaging programme in New Zealand. The project embraced the goal of defining work ready plus graduates for the medical imaging workforce. Identification of the capabilities required of a medical imaging technologist (MIT) in their graduate years was critical for the development of the clinical experience programme, as it is clinical placement and emersion in work that is most likely to develop capability and work readiness skills in graduates. It was envisaged that by defining, for our regional context, the capabilities and work skills employers seek in our graduates, we would have the data we needed to review and if necessary rewrite the graduate profile and utilise fully and effectively the real‐life clinical experiences that support the development of these capabilities. The results are also impacting positively on lecturers teaching methods as they consider how they can develop these capabilities in students through teaching, learning, and assessment methodologies.
The theoretical underpinning for this study was Scott\'s fellowship work for the Australian Teaching and Learning Council and the professional and graduate capability framework published for the Australian tertiary environment.[1](#jmrs290-bib-0001){ref-type="ref"} The Professional Capability Framework as used by Western Sydney University was used as the foundation for the development of a survey tool as it was current and had been validated in a range of disciplines that included health professions. In addition, it looks beyond graduation and standards for practice (as required by the New Zealand Medical Radiation Technologist Registration Board and the Medical Radiation Practice Board of Australia towards the generic skills graduates need to flourish in a profession in the future.[1](#jmrs290-bib-0001){ref-type="ref"}, [5](#jmrs290-bib-0005){ref-type="ref"} Hence the term work ready plus. Using a validated and comprehensive professional and graduate capability framework ensured that all potentially relevant capability options had been considered. It was deemed generalisable to the New Zealand health care environment due to the similarities between both the health and education systems.
Figure [1](#jmrs290-fig-0001){ref-type="fig"} summarises the key elements of the professional capability framework. The overlapping aspects of professional capability are identified -- personal, interpersonal and cognitive which have been validated in a range of investigations, mainly focused on professional leadership.[1](#jmrs290-bib-0001){ref-type="ref"}, [5](#jmrs290-bib-0005){ref-type="ref"} These domains are underpinned by relevant role‐specific and generic competencies (the skills and knowledge found to be essential to the specific role of an MIT). The key terms "competence" and "capability" are problematic and therefore often confused. We adopted the definition that competence is the possession of the skills and knowledge necessary to perform the duties set down for a specific role. The New Zealand Medical Radiation Technologist Registration Board (MRTB) reviewed and updated their competencies for New Zealand registration in March 2017, so a list of competencies was current and available. We have adopted a definition of capability that goes beyond the skills to practice as a safe and competent practitioner, to embrace the concept of being work ready plus. Being "work ready *plus"* requires capabilities for not just today, for current practice but for the future. Capabilities include the ability to work with others from a range of professions and backgrounds, manage the unexpected, adopt new technology, to be changed implementation savvy, inventive, sustainability responsive, to learn from experience and to operate with a clear understanding of one\'s ethical position.[1](#jmrs290-bib-0001){ref-type="ref"}
{ref-type="ref"} Permission was obtained to reproduce this figure.](JMRS-65-275-g001){#jmrs290-fig-0001}
These capabilities require a mixture of emotional and cognitive intelligence, including the ability to determine when and when not to deploy these competences.[1](#jmrs290-bib-0001){ref-type="ref"} We believed this concept was less developed for the medical imaging profession in New Zealand.
The Professional Capability Framework developed through a scholarship awarded by the Australian Teaching and Learning Council formed the basis for the development of a survey that asked practicing MITs and MIT clinical managers at the three largest placements sites in New Zealand to rate the capabilities deemed critical in a graduate to ensure they are "work ready *plus"*.[1](#jmrs290-bib-0001){ref-type="ref"}
The items used in the survey fall into three domains which align with the capability domains identified in Figure [1](#jmrs290-fig-0001){ref-type="fig"}. These domains are discussed in more detail in Scott, Coates and Anderson[5](#jmrs290-bib-0005){ref-type="ref"} and Fullan and Scott.[6](#jmrs290-bib-0006){ref-type="ref"}
This paper shares the results from the survey and discusses the impact these are having on curriculum review and development.
Method {#jmrs290-sec-0006}
======
This study was carried within all the public (three District Health Board, which includes 2 hospitals on the Northshore, 3 Inner City and 1 in South Auckland), Radiology Services, in the Auckland Region, where Unitec Institute of Technology\'s MIT students are placed for clinical experience during their 3‐year training programme. Data collection period, April and August 2017.
A prospective survey was selected as the method of data collection tool as it allowed us to collect anonymous responses from stakeholders with minimal disruption to the work environment. The survey was distributed electronically.
The SurveyMonkey online tool was used to develop a rating scale questionnaire, using the statements and domains from the Australian Capability Framework.[1](#jmrs290-bib-0001){ref-type="ref"}
The survey was trialled by three clinicians and during this process one question was removed that was perceived repetitive. The final questionnaire had 39 capability statements that were clustered into three domains: personal, interpersonal and cognitive. The first question of the questionnaire requested participants consent before proceeding with the survey.
An open survey link was sent to MIT clinical managers for internal circulation. A participant information sheet was attached to the email invitation email. Participants were assured of the anonymity of their responses and this was achieved by using the anonymity function on SurveyMonkey.
Ethics approval was granted by the Unitec Research Ethics Committee (UREC) -- No 2017--1002.
Analysis design {#jmrs290-sec-0007}
---------------
For the demographic variables of the survey, the data were represented either in the form of tables or graphs.
Owing to the subjective nature of the data related to capabilities that participants were requested to provide in ordinal form (ranking), the average ranking measure was considered most appropriate to statistically determine which answer choice was most preferred overall. The answer choice with the largest average ranking is the most preferred choice.
The calculations were conducted using Microsoft Excel. The questionnaire was organised with a total of 39 statements which were grouped into the three domain categories: personal capabilities included 15 statements, interpersonal capabilities had 11 statements and cognitive capabilities had 13 statements. Thus, the ranking for personal capabilities was from 1 to 15, interpersonal from 1 to 11 and cognitive from 1 to 13.
The average ranking was calculated as follows:$${{Average}\mspace{720mu}{Ranking}} = \frac{x_{1}w_{1} + x_{2}w_{2} + \ldots + x_{n}w_{n}}{Total},$$where *w* represented the weight of ranked position and *x* represented the response count for the answer choice.
Weights are applied in reverse order. The respondent\'s most preferred choice, which is ranked 1, has the largest weight and their least preferred choice has a weight of 1. In our case, the personal capabilities had 15 statements. The highest ranked statement had a weight of 15, second highest had 14, third highest had 13 and so on with the last ranked statement having a weight of 1. Similar weights, depending on the number of statements, were applied to the interpersonal and cognitive capabilities.
Results {#jmrs290-sec-0008}
=======
A total of 52 responses were received from a maximum sample size of 265. This indicates a response rate of 19.6%. However, it is not possible to exactly predict the size of the actual sample pool, as the surveys were distributed via the clinical managers to their staff. From the responses, 90% (47) of the respondents were female and the remaining 10% (5) were males. In terms of the position/title of the respondents, the majority of the respondents (76%) were senior qualified MITs and 15% team leader/clinical specialist. 74% (39) had over 6 years experience.
Average ranking reported by domain {#jmrs290-sec-0009}
----------------------------------
Table [1](#jmrs290-tbl-0001){ref-type="table"} shows the average rankings for the domain personal capabilities with the top five clearly visible.
######
Average ranking scores for personal capabilities
Statements -- personal capabilities Average ranking score
------------------------------------------------------------------------- -----------------------
Being willing to face and learn from errors 11.56
Wanting to do as good a job as possible 11.21
Understanding personal strengths and limitations 11.12
Remaining calm under pressure or when things take an unexpected turn 10.98
Having energy, passion and enthusiasm for the profession and role 10.94
Willingness to persevere when things are not working out as anticipated 8.35
Pitching in and undertaking menial tasks as required 7.44
Being true to one\'s personal values and ethics 7.27
Deferring judgment and not jumping in too quickly to resolve a problem 7.1
Maintaining a good work/life balance and keeping things in perspective 6.61
Being willing to take a hard decision 6.52
Bouncing back from adversity 6.37
Being confident to take calculated risks 5.71
Being willing to take responsibility for projects and how they turn out 5.62
Tolerating ambiguity and uncertainty 4.69
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
Table [2](#jmrs290-tbl-0002){ref-type="table"} shows the average rankings for the domain interpersonal capabilities. These rankings have a flatter profile with eight capabilities ranking higher than 5.
######
Average ranking scores for interpersonal capabilities
Statements -- interpersonal capabilities Average ranking score
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -----------------------
Being transparent and honest in dealings with others 7.64
Empathising and working productively with people from a wide range of backgrounds 7.57
Listening to different points of view before coming to a decision 7.13
Understanding how the different groups that make up a work place operate and influence different situations 7.02
Giving and receiving constructive feedback to/from work colleagues and others 6.73
Being able to develop and contribute positively to team‐based programs 6.1
Being able to work with senior staff within and beyond the organisation without being intimidated 5.87
Motivating others to achieve positive outcomes 5.85
Being able to develop and use networks of colleagues to solve key workplace problems 4.77
Influencing people\'s behaviour and decisions in effective ways 3.96
Working constructively with people who are 'resistors' or are over‐enthusiastic 3.58
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
Table [3](#jmrs290-tbl-0003){ref-type="table"} shows the average rankings for the domain cognitive capabilities. All cognitive capabilities achieved an average ranking score of more than 5.
######
Average ranking scores for cognitive capabilities
Statements -- cognitive capabilities Average ranking score
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ -----------------------
Diagnosing the underlying causes of a problem and taking appropriate action to address it 9.2
Making sense of and learning from experience 9.19
Being able to identify the core issue from a mass of detail in any situation 8.04
Using previous experience to figure out what\'s going on when a current situation takes an unexpected turn 7.96
Having a clear, justified and achievable direction in area of responsibility 7.85
Thinking creatively and laterally 6.92
Seeing the best way to respond to a perplexing situation 6.72
Setting and justifying priorities for daily work 6.71
Adjusting a plan of action in response to problems that are identified during its implementation 6.67
Recognising patterns in a complex situation 5.94
Seeing and then acting on an opportunity for a new direction 5.88
Recognising how seemingly unconnected activities are linked 5.23
Tracing out and assessing the likely consequences of alternative courses of action 5.15
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
Discussion {#jmrs290-sec-0010}
==========
Personal domain capabilities {#jmrs290-sec-0011}
----------------------------
The results from the personal domain show a clear top five capability rated highly by the respondents. Namely: remaining calm under pressure or when things take an unexpected turn; understanding personal strengths and limitations; being willing to face and learn from errors; wanting to do as good a job as possible; having energy, passion and enthusiasm for the profession and role. These five capabilities had strong face validity when presented to a meeting of national managers. They certainly provide a clear mandate as to which personal qualities should be incorporated into the graduate profile. The challenge in curriculum design will be to find ways to highlight, reinforce and role model these capabilities. The literature provides limited guidance, however Fraser & Greenhalgh[3](#jmrs290-bib-0003){ref-type="ref"} suggest that capability can be strengthened by the use of feedback, self‐reflection, and consolidation, with students following a nonlinear education model. Therefore, the incorporation of directed educator and supervisor feedback could assist in the recognition and development of this capability. To further consolidate these skills, it would be advantageous to encourage students to observe these capabilities in others and reflect as to how their own developing practice incorporates and builds this capability.
Interpersonal domain capabilities {#jmrs290-sec-0012}
---------------------------------
We have noted that in the interpersonal domain, the six top ranked qualities (all with a ranking above 6) have an alignment to the competencies identified for those working in interprofessional teams. Ponzer et al.[7](#jmrs290-bib-0007){ref-type="ref"} published the five core competencies that form the basis of many interprofessional education activities which have been modified for specific contexts and are frequently used to describe strong interprofessional teams.[8](#jmrs290-bib-0008){ref-type="ref"} Table [4](#jmrs290-tbl-0004){ref-type="table"} compares these.
######
Frequently used statements of attributes of effective interprofessional teams compared to the top six interprofessional capabilities in this study
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Interpersonal capabilities compared to interprofessional team attributes
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------------------------------------------------------------
Understanding how the different groups that make up a work place operate and influence different situations\ Mutual understanding of roles and recognition of difference\
Empathising and working productively with people from a wide range of backgrounds\ Good patient‐ care/co‐operation\
Being able to develop and contribute positively to team‐based programs\ Mutual trust and respect\
Giving and receiving constructive feedback to/from work colleagues and others\ The importance of good communication for teamwork\
Listening to different points of view before coming to a decision\ Assertiveness needed for effective conflict management\
Being transparent and honest in dealings Be aware of ethical issues
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
Following the World Health Organisation report in 2010[9](#jmrs290-bib-0009){ref-type="ref"} there is a growing international commitment to the promotion of collaborative practice in healthcare delivery supported by interprofessional education to ensure graduates have the capabilities required for collaborative roles on graduation. In 2012, the national boards and the Australian Health Ministers' Advisory Council, conducted an independent Review of the National Registration and Accreditation Scheme for health professionals.[10](#jmrs290-bib-0010){ref-type="ref"} As part of this review, the Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) reviewed the performance of each of these accreditation authorities against the domains of the Quality Framework for the Accreditation Function to inform the decisions on how to continue to implement the accreditation function under the National Law. Following this review process, all the current profession‐specific accreditation authorities were asked to consider opportunities to increase cross‐profession collaboration and innovation and support interprofessional learning.[10](#jmrs290-bib-0010){ref-type="ref"} There is a close working relationship between New Zealand and Australian registration and accrediting bodies and considerable influence in both directions. The growth of the Australian interprofessional agenda is likely to have a growing impact on New Zealand health professional registration and accreditation requirements. The capabilities for team work and collaborative practice recognised by practicing MITs in New Zealand appears to support the growing international agenda supporting collaborative practice models of care.
There has been some substantial work in the interprofessional education and team working space around both learning and assessment methods that we can use to guide our curriculum planning.[11](#jmrs290-bib-0011){ref-type="ref"}, [12](#jmrs290-bib-0012){ref-type="ref"}, [13](#jmrs290-bib-0013){ref-type="ref"} Simulation with other professionals, interprofessional activities within the academic curriculum and opportunities to observe and engage with interprofessional teams while on placement (evidenced in a clinical portfolio) align to these capabilities.
Cognitive domain capabilities {#jmrs290-sec-0013}
-----------------------------
In the cognitive abilities domain diagnosing underlying causes of a problem, taking appropriate action and making sense of learning from experience are the most highly rated, followed by being able to identify the core issue from a mass of detail in any situation and using previous experience to figure out what\'s going on when a current situation takes an unexpected turn, are capabilities that aid problem solving. Overall the profile of preference in this domain is relatively flat. We note alignment to the concepts of clinical reasoning and critical thinking as it is described in the health professions. In the literature, the terms clinical reasoning, clinical judgment, problem‐solving, decision‐making and critical thinking are often used interchangeably. The term clinical reasoning is used to describe the process by which clinicians collect cues, process the information, come to an understanding of a patient problem or situation, plan and implement interventions, evaluate outcomes, and reflect on and learn from the process.[14](#jmrs290-bib-0014){ref-type="ref"}, [15](#jmrs290-bib-0015){ref-type="ref"}, [16](#jmrs290-bib-0016){ref-type="ref"} The clinical reasoning process is also described as dependent upon a critical thinking "disposition".[17](#jmrs290-bib-0017){ref-type="ref"} The American Philosophical Association defined critical thinking as purposeful, self‐regulatory judgment that uses cognitive tools such as interpretation, analysis, evaluation, inference, and explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological or contextual considerations on which judgment is based.[18](#jmrs290-bib-0018){ref-type="ref"} We have noted that some students have a problem understanding how these capabilities are demonstrated in the work place. Responses in this domain are assisting us to define what capabilities are associated with critical thinking and clinical reasoning in the medical imaging profession and how they are evidenced in clinical practice. We are turning our attention to building processes to support the development of these capabilities within our class‐based learning, simulated learning, and clinical supervision. We will also incorporate post‐practicum experiences that will encourage students to appraise their experiences, seek clarification and comparisons and link their learning to the future, including securing employment.[19](#jmrs290-bib-0019){ref-type="ref"} The goal is to develop the student\'s ability to make judgements and decisions about their work experiences and learning that will position them as future critical thinkers, life longer enquirers and learners.
Conclusion {#jmrs290-sec-0014}
==========
Identification of the core capabilities that our stakeholder community rate highly has proved informative in assisting us to describe a "work ready *plus"* medical imaging graduate for the New Zealand context. The results have provided data to the curriculum development team allowing them to align the graduate profile to these expectations and raised awareness among academic staff of the need to include these capabilities in the curriculum. In addition, it has enabled a dialog with stakeholders about capability in the profession, refreshing and revising the involvement of the professional community in the academic programme.
Scott reminds us that capability cannot be taught, people cannot be trained in it; but it can be learnt through exposure to educational experiences which entail coming to grips with real world dilemmas. Clinical placements provide this learning experience; it is here students learn what others do when the unexpected happens and develop the skills to make sense of what is unfolding to successfully resolve the situation. This naturally occurring curriculum of the workplace is often tacit and therefore not clearly visible to learners and students needs support.[19](#jmrs290-bib-0019){ref-type="ref"} These results provide a blue print for conceptualising the key opportunities a clinical placement offers beyond learning technical skills and competencies; highlighting the capabilities that can be learnt and developed on placement, bringing these learning opportunities to the attention of students and clinical supervisors alike and bringing a new clarity to the design of support for learning on placement. We now have descriptors of capability that will allow us to be more specific in our communication of the capabilities our graduates should aspire to (beyond but building on those established by the regulatory body) and we are incorporating these into the curriculum design process for both teaching and assessment purposes. They will inform clinical supervision and clinical learning, allowing clinical supervisors to focus on highlighting experiences that can develop these capabilities.
This study is informing curriculum planning and energising discussions around the design of simulation, class room teaching activities and clinical placements designed to develop these capabilities.
Conflict of Interest {#jmrs290-sec-0016}
====================
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
We acknowledge the help and support of the Radiology Services and Research Office staff at Auckland and Waitemata District Health Boards, Auckland New Zealand. This project was kindly supported by the Unitec Strategic Fund, Unitec Research Office.
| {
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Q:
How to change jump time in totem media player?
How to change jump time in totem media player? It's by default 60 sec jump forward and 15 sec jump back.
A:
shift, Right Arrow: forward 15 seconds
shift, left arrow: back for 5 seconds
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THE_URL:file://localhost/Users/hubery/Public/ucar/Document/Functions/Contributed/zonalAve.shtml
THE_TITLE:zonalAve
NCL Home > Documentation > Functions > General applied math
zonalAve
Computes a zonal average of the input array.
Prototype
load "$NCARG_ROOT/lib/ncarg/nclscripts/csm/contributed.ncl"
function zonalAve (
x : numeric
)
return_val : typeof(x)
Arguments
x
An array of any size and type.
Return value
The results are returned in an array of the same type and one dimension smaller than x. Metadata are preserved.
Description
This function computes a zonal average of the input array x. If the input array has a "long_name" or "short_name"
attribute, it will be updated.
©2015 UCAR | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use | Contact the Webmaster | Sponsored by NSF
| {
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{{/*
Copyright 2020 The Magma Authors.
This source code is licensed under the BSD-style license found in the
LICENSE file in the root directory of this source tree.
Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.
*/}}
{{- $serviceName := print .Release.Name "-controller" -}}
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: {{ $serviceName }}
labels:
app.kubernetes.io/component: controller
{{ include "labels" . | indent 4 }}
spec:
replicas: {{ .Values.controller.replicas }}
selector:
matchLabels:
app.kubernetes.io/component: controller
{{ include "selector-labels" . | indent 6 }}
template:
metadata:
labels:
app.kubernetes.io/component: controller
{{ include "selector-labels" . | indent 8 }}
annotations:
{{- with .Values.controller.podAnnotations }}
{{ toYaml . | indent 8 }}
{{- end }}
spec:
{{- with .Values.controller.nodeSelector }}
nodeSelector:
{{ toYaml . | indent 8 }}
{{- end }}
{{- with .Values.controller.tolerations }}
tolerations:
{{ toYaml . | indent 8 }}
{{- end }}
{{- with .Values.controller.affinity }}
affinity:
{{ toYaml . | indent 8 }}
{{- end }}
{{- with .Values.imagePullSecrets }}
imagePullSecrets:
{{ toYaml . | trimSuffix "\n" | indent 8 }}
{{- end }}
volumes:
- name: certs
secret:
secretName: {{ required "secret.certs must be provided" .Values.secret.certs }}
- name: envdir
secret:
secretName: {{ required "secret.envdir must be provided" .Values.secret.envdir }}
{{- if .Values.secret.configs }}
{{- range $module, $secretName := .Values.secret.configs }}
- name: {{ $secretName }}-{{ $module }}
secret:
secretName: {{ $secretName }}
{{- end }}
{{- else }}
- name: "empty-configs"
emptyDir: {}
{{- end }}
containers:
- name: {{ $serviceName }}
image: {{ required "controller.image.repository must be provided" .Values.controller.image.repository }}:{{ .Values.controller.image.tag }}
imagePullPolicy: {{ .Values.controller.image.pullPolicy }}
volumeMounts:
{{- range tuple "certs" "envdir" }}
- name: {{ . }}
mountPath: /var/opt/magma/{{ . }}
readOnly: true
{{- end }}
{{- if .Values.secret.configs }}
{{- range $module, $secretName := .Values.secret.configs }}
- name: {{ $secretName }}-{{ $module }}
mountPath: {{ print "/var/opt/magma/configs/" $module }}
readOnly: true
{{- end }}
{{- else }}
- name: "empty-configs"
mountPath: /var/opt/magma/configs
readOnly: true
{{- end }}
ports:
{{- with .Values.controller.service }}
- containerPort: {{ .targetPort }}
{{- range $_, $port := untilStep (.portStart | int) (.portEnd | add1 | int) 1 }}
- containerPort: {{ $port }}
{{- end }}
{{- end }}
env:
- name: DATABASE_SOURCE
valueFrom:
secretKeyRef:
name: {{ $serviceName }}
key: {{ .Values.controller.spec.database.driver }}.connstr
- name: SQL_DRIVER
value: {{ .Values.controller.spec.database.driver }}
- name: SQL_DIALECT
value: {{ .Values.controller.spec.database.sql_dialect }}
# Hostname override for dispatcher
- name: SERVICE_HOST_NAME
valueFrom:
fieldRef:
fieldPath: status.podIP
# Hostname override for metricsd
- name: HOST_NAME
valueFrom:
fieldRef:
fieldPath: status.podIP
livenessProbe:
tcpSocket:
port: 9081
initialDelaySeconds: 10
periodSeconds: 30
readinessProbe:
tcpSocket:
port: 9081
initialDelaySeconds: 5
periodSeconds: 10
resources:
{{ toYaml .Values.controller.resources | indent 12 }}
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Please check out our side project, OhLife (from MeetingMix, YC S08) - sgupta
http://ohlife.com/
======
aw3c2
Quick first glance feedback on the page, take it or leave it:
a) "the easiest way to" lowercase start and then "Write your life story"
uppercase start. Seems weird to me. The other way around or both uppercase.
b) Top bar seems empty, maybe an actual logo (that adds some other
color/shade) would chance that.
c) "See an example" needs no-Javascript fallback. I assumed a video behind it.
Pleasant surprise to see something that finally showed me what it is all
about. I strongly suggest not hiding that. It is below the break for me and
adds a lot.
d) Ned Flanders takes away the credibility and earnesty the page build up so
far. Bad!
e) "private, secure, & friendlier", the comma after secure seems out of place
to me. I am not an english native but from what I know it would be more normal
without it. "friendlier" is not a word, is it? Also, how is it secure if you
do not tell me how you actually secure it (both for normalos and hackers
please)...?
f) entry is a bad empty word. I guess you already tried to find a better one.
Can't think of one myself. :-(
g) "a personal journal that you'll love to use" = you love the journal
"why you'll love us" = you love the company
h) "Oh snap, remember this?" same as Ned, does not fit the otherwise very
noble theme at all.
i) The open book has a weird shape. Does not feel right to me. Maybe if it was
taller?
x) No privacy policy (as a techie "only you can see your entries" screams for
encryption against YOU (and/or hackers, this is important)), no contact, no
nothing to make it human.
y) Privacy tainted by Google Analytics.
~~~
ugh
Re: e) (This is purely my personal opinion, but …) Anyone who uses the serial
comma [1] must be seriously insane. How can you? Doesn’t your brain explode?
(Calm down, calm down … [2] … there, better.)
Friendlier is indeed a word, the comparative of friendly.
Amazing idea, by the way, beautifully executed and immediately captured my
imagination.
[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_comma>
[2] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_i1xk07o4g>
------
adammichaelc
I notice that a huge part of my daily life is recorded in email conversations
with other people -- it would be cool if I could forward a conversation to
[email protected] and it would automatically make it a part of my journal and
make it aesthetically pleasing at the same time.
Great job on the execution of this app. I have talked to others who have had
this same idea, but their execution was ugly/unexcting/etc. This is clean and
simple.
~~~
jbail
Taking your thought a step further, let's also save the comments you make on
others' blogs and bring them into your journal/blog as well.
At the end of the day, I don't need another blog or a slight variation on
blogging technology. I need something that basically blogs for me. If I can
add value to my site by adding comments like this one to other people's sites
(then pressing this "magic" button (maybe a bookmarket?) to automatically save
it as part of my blog), that'd be pure awesomeness.
Beyond saving boatloads of time for everyone who used it, it would create a
more connected blogosphere by allowing people to link their commenter accounts
(like HN, Reddit, etc) to their primary blog...effectively giving people more
ownership over the things they write on others blogs, increasing author
recognition, etc.
~~~
Lewisham
_I need something that basically blogs for me._
Tumblr is pretty close to doing this, but the problem is its just context-free
noise. It's echoes from a very, very noisy set of interactions that you
perform. I had a Tumblr blog that harvested photos, blog posts, Twitter,
last.fm etc etc. and it all meant absolutely nothing.
This isn't really blogging, it's journaling. Writing a diary is supposed to be
therapeutic because you're writing down the things you dare not talk about
with others (maybe not even your SO). It's not about what you do, it's about
how you feel.
That's why I would like to see encryption mentioned somewhere, and pushed
hard. I wrote one entry to see how it works, but I'm going to disable the
notifications until I know that my personal outpourings are not actually being
read by others.
------
sgupta
Hey HN - we made this in our spare time, just because it was something we
wanted to use. When we told some friends about the idea though they wanted to
use it too, so we decided to release it. Many thanks for checking it out.
~~~
evandavid
I love the idea. Love it. Like, really excited. However, I'm not prepared to
use a service like this in a hosted environment. Too many risks: you go out of
business, security, privacy, etc. Plus the information just feels to personal
to be sitting on someone else's server. I would love to see a quick daily
prompt like this added to Macjournal or similar software.
~~~
evandavid
That said, I'm sure there is a target market out there who will be more than
willing to use the product in its current format. I'm looking forward to
seeing where this idea goes.
------
pesco
Accept PGP-encrypted mail seamlessly and you won't need a privacy policy
except for those who like throwing their lifelog at random strangers. Be sure
to use PGP/MIME to include the old message in your mailing.
Of course, setting up PGP, let alone remembering the passphrase (gasp) is a
lot to ask of the typical user who needs to use his mail client as a text
editor.
Otherwise, it's a cute idea, really. Please excuse cynicism.
------
ryanwaggoner
The design is beautiful, but why would I use this over WriteRoom? For years
now, I've been writing at least 500 words in WriteRoom every single weekday,
and I'm closing in on a year of doing it (and a bunch of other habits) without
missing a single day. It's not that hard, I know I'll probably never lose my
entries (time machine + dropbox backups), and my privacy is more assured. I'm
just not sure I see the advantage here...
~~~
Terry_B
Writeroom + timemachine + dropbox. I don't think you're the target market :)
~~~
ryanwaggoner
Touché. Can't believe I didn't stop to think about this :)
------
iampims
No privacy policy is a no go for me.
~~~
KevinMS
I have never read a privacy policy, EVER. Am I missing something good?
If they violate their own privacy policy do I have legal recourse?
And is it even possible to write a privacy policy without loopholes?
------
mrduncan
First of all, fantastic design!
Is there any way to export posts - for example, if I wanted to share them with
a significant other or another family member?
Also, and this is mainly curiosity, how do you handle sending posts from the
past for the first few days where there really isn't much history?
~~~
sgupta
Thank you!
We don't have export yet, but we've definitely wanted to share some of our
entries with close friends and family too. We'll be brainstorming around this!
Regarding past history: For your first week, we just send you your entry from
the previous day. After you've been using it for a week though, and some
history has built up, we'll show you entries from a week ago (and then a month
ago, etc.).
Thanks for checking it out - really appreciate it!
------
thingie
It'd be nice to have some export feature. After few months, if I will use
this, you are going to have quite a lot of entries from me, and all of them
are important to me, I don't want to lose them, so I'd like to be able to
easily make backups to my own computer.
------
jasongullickson
Pardon my French but; fucking beautiful.
------
vessenes
I like it, and I signed up. I don't want to get emailed at 8pm -- that's after
my internet cutoff, so I faked a timezone. But, it would be nice to just
choose a time.
Also, who did your webdesign? I like it!
~~~
sgupta
We'll be adding the ability to change when the email is sent, and it should be
out by next week. Clever workaround though!
And thanks for the design compliment! We did it all in-house, so we really
appreciate the kind words.
------
pclark
This is really cool. I'm curious if _you_ can read the entries?
~~~
sgupta
Thanks for the kind words! We're currently working on encrypting the entries -
this is an MVP and we initially wanted to see if people like the idea.
~~~
martey
It does say on the home page that "Only you can see your entries." If they are
not currently encrypted, that would seem to be untrue.
~~~
colonelxc
Even if they do encrypt it, they will have to be able to decrypt them server
side to send you your month old posts. That means the owners are technically
capable of also reading all of your posts.
~~~
mbenjaminsmith
That's not entirely true. If this were purely a web-accessible blog, there's
no reason you couldn't encrypt/decrypt this in the client (sending and storing
encrypted text). You'd have to throw out email posting in that case though.
~~~
andreyf
I think you're on to something. I look forward to the day when we are shocked
by unencrypted private data accessible on the server as we do un-hashed
passwords.
~~~
dublinclontarf
There are a number of online password stores where all the information is only
decrypted on the client. Nothing new, just not widespread. Can't remember the
name.
------
hooande
OhLife is one of the few apps that I use every day. If you've ever tried to
keep a journal or any kind of organized daily log, I highly recommend it.
------
mdolon
I'm going to try to call this one now: my gut instinct says this will be a
huge success. Hopefully I remember to check back a few months down the line to
see how my prediction faired.
Great work guys!
Edit: I just noticed lists I email don't get formatted correctly. It's
slightly annoying for such an otherwise beautifully designed layout.
------
ajcronk
There is a typo in the url at the end of the How did your day go? email.
Should be ohlife.com/today, not ohlife.come/today
~~~
sgupta
Thanks for the heads up!
------
a3_nm
How exactly is this service better than, say, a simple text file on my own
machine with a daily reminder set up through some other means?
Why would I want to use some third-party website for something so simple that
I might as well do it myself? I can see some pretty annoying downsides (need
to have a crypto layer because I don't want you to be able to read my journal,
need to export regularly the data to my own computer because I don't want you
to be able to lose my journal), but no real advantages (it's not even more
convenient!).
In any case, I believe that the two following statements, at least, are plain
wrong:
\- "The easiest way to write your life story": no, the easiest way is to fire
up a text editor and start writing.
\- "Only you can see your entries": should read "Only you and us can see your
entries".
------
d0m
I'm not really sure I would use this. However, I really love the website
design.. It's so clean. The colors are nice. The forms are simple. Maybe a
little video would be nice on the frontpage.
------
blitzo
You wanna drop that ned flander out, not everyone know him
------
proexploit
I like it. Many times I've wanted to start a journal, just to record memories,
but I detest writing. This makes it feel easy. We'll see how it goes.
------
pesco
In reaction to the fact that I adore the idea despite the fundamental privacy
problem (see earlier comment), here is my spin on the theme in the form of two
really simple Unix shell scripts. :)
<http://www.khjk.org/log/2010/jul/journal.html>
Thank you for the inspiration!
------
cvg
Really like the simplicity of the idea and clean look of the site. Already
replied to the welcome message - waiting for it to post to the site.
I like the daily emails as I don't visit too many sites daily, apart from HN
and Gmail. This will be an easy way to log all that I'm up to. I'm not sure
how regularly I'll do this, but time will tell.
------
fizzfur
great now I have des'ray in my head.
interesting idea... I'll give it a go for a while until someone realises I
email myself everyday. Does it get angry if I don't reply?
mini feedback on home page: The 'see example' link needs to scroll the page
down for me, I didn't spot the page grow and was waiting for it to load.
------
yequalsx
I think the vertical spacing between the various components is too much. If
you could move things up a bit it would work real well. The colors, fonts, and
graphics are very soothing and welcoming. I just didn't expect to scroll down
so much.
------
techietim
I know your homepage says that all your posts are private, however, adding a
privacy policy page which outlines that in legal speak would probably be good
idea.
Otherwise, this looks great, and I'm looking forward to using it!
~~~
alttab
Yes, please! Tell me in no uncertain terms you will not give away, sell, or
crawl my data.
I will then use it as a personal journal for work purposes. Perfect for
filling out during the morning with a cup of coffee.
------
Glide
Love the design. I just signed up. Can't wait to see how well it'll help me
keep a journal.
One thing I noticed: on the login page can you make pressing tab in the login
box go directly to the password input box?
------
cheesey
Pleasing, private posterous?
~~~
sami_b
That is what I was also thinking. You could do that on Posterous with privacy
on, you can also attach files to the email.
------
dublinclontarf
"Once you have a few entries here, we recommend printing them out, sitting by
a fireplace, and reading them in Morgan Freeman’s voice: "
Like a twinkie, like a twinkie.
------
Tichy
Ok, nice enough, but why would I mail my private thoughts to the cloud?
Writing a small script that mails a random email by me to myself should be
easy enough.
------
yeti
Well done, great concept and already I see a practical use for it in my life
(tracking a new fitness program)
Thanks guys
------
chamza
Love the idea. Good work fellas
------
faramarz
Very cool. Does that mean YC has a vested interest in your side project?
------
someone_here
May I ask how this is different from, say, private wordpress.com blogs?
~~~
pclark
I think they clearly articulate this on the home page
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
1. Introduction {#sec1-jcm-08-02039}
===============
Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is a common cause of morbidity and mortality in hospitalized and non-hospitalized patients \[[@B1-jcm-08-02039]\]. The American Society of Hematology and American College of Chest Physicians guidelines recommend low-molecular-weight heparin (LMWH) as a first-line pharmacological option for most patients at risk of VTE \[[@B2-jcm-08-02039],[@B3-jcm-08-02039]\]. Several prophylactic doses and types of LMWH are used worldwide, which is reflected by differences in national summaries of product characteristics (SPCs) and dosing regimens of randomized controlled trials (RCTs). There is no high-quality evidence or guidance on the optimal prophylactic LMWH dose. Preceding systematic reviews on thrombosis prophylaxis have not specifically assessed benefits and harms associated with different LMWH doses \[[@B4-jcm-08-02039],[@B5-jcm-08-02039],[@B6-jcm-08-02039],[@B7-jcm-08-02039],[@B8-jcm-08-02039],[@B9-jcm-08-02039],[@B10-jcm-08-02039]\]. In addition, there have been very few direct comparisons of prophylactic LMWH dose regimens, and therefore indirect evidence could provide a 'second best' estimate of benefits and harms.
There is no generally accepted definition of different prophylactic LMWH dose categories, which is why we previously categorized LMWH thrombosis prophylaxis regimens as either 'low-dose' or 'intermediate-dose', based on different registered doses in SPCs worldwide \[[@B11-jcm-08-02039]\]. Using this approach in a previous meta-analysis, we found that intermediate-dose LMWH, compared with placebo or no treatment, was associated with a significant decrease in symptomatic VTE, at the cost of an increase in major bleeding \[[@B11-jcm-08-02039]\]. The main objective of the current study was to perform a systematic review with meta-analysis and trial sequential analysis (TSA) comparing benefits and harms of low-dose LMWH versus placebo or no treatment for thrombosis prophylaxis in all types of patients at risk of VTE \[[@B12-jcm-08-02039]\].
2. Materials and Methods {#sec2-jcm-08-02039}
========================
We conducted this systematic review according to a pre-published protocol on PROSPERO (<https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/prospero/display_record.php?ID=CRD42019124722>) following the methodology suggested by Jakobsen et al, the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions, the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) statement, and the GRADE (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation) recommendations \[[@B12-jcm-08-02039],[@B13-jcm-08-02039],[@B14-jcm-08-02039],[@B15-jcm-08-02039]\].
2.1. Study Selection {#sec2dot1-jcm-08-02039}
--------------------
### 2.1.1. Patients {#sec2dot1dot1-jcm-08-02039}
Studies were considered for inclusion irrespective of language, blinding, publication status, or sample size. We included RCTs with adult patients allocated to receive thrombosis prophylaxis using either low-dose LMWH, placebo, or no treatment, regardless of their underlying disease or whether they were admitted to the hospital or visited the outpatient clinic.
### 2.1.2. Interventions {#sec2dot1dot2-jcm-08-02039}
The experimental intervention was low-dose LMWH, irrespective of LMWH type or duration of treatment. We a priori defined 'low dose' in our protocol according to the SPCs as approved by the US Food and Drug Administration, the European Medicines Agency, and several national authorities ([Table 1](#jcm-08-02039-t001){ref-type="table"}). If different LMWHs or (weight-adjusted) doses were used in one trial, we classified the dose according to what was used most frequently. We included trials evaluating ultra-low-molecular-weight heparins and LMWHs not listed in [Table 1](#jcm-08-02039-t001){ref-type="table"} (e.g., LMWHs we were unable to classify into a specific dose) in a sensitivity analysis. The control intervention was placebo or no treatment. Co-interventions such as mechanical compression devices were allowed if they were applied in both treatment groups.
### 2.1.3. Outcomes {#sec2dot1dot3-jcm-08-02039}
Predefined co-primary outcomes were all-cause mortality, symptomatic VTE, and major bleeding. Secondary outcomes were serious adverse events (SAE), clinically relevant non-major bleeding, and any VTE (including both symptomatic and asymptomatic events). All outcomes were assessed at maximum follow-up. VTE was defined as deep vein thrombosis or pulmonary embolism, and the diagnosis was accepted when objectified by an imaging technique or autopsy. We made no distinction between distal or proximal, or lower versus upper extremity thrombosis. Major bleeding and clinically relevant non-major bleeding were defined according to trial criteria. SAE were defined according to the International Conference on Harmonisation of Good Clinical Practice definitions (ICH-GCP) \[[@B16-jcm-08-02039]\].
2.2. Data Sources and Searches {#sec2dot2-jcm-08-02039}
------------------------------
We searched the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL) in The Cochrane Library, PubMed/MEDLINE, EMBASE and Web of Science ([Table S1](#app1-jcm-08-02039){ref-type="app"}). References of identified studies were screened to identify further relevant trials. Finally, we searched the World Health Organization's International Clinical Trials Registry and ClinicalTrials.gov for ongoing trials ([Table S2](#app1-jcm-08-02039){ref-type="app"}). The search was last updated on 10 June 2019.
2.3. Data Extraction and Quality Assessment {#sec2dot3-jcm-08-02039}
-------------------------------------------
Two authors (RJE, WB) independently identified trials for inclusion. Trials excluded on the basis of full text were listed with reasons for exclusion. We extracted information on characteristics (year of publication, country, numbers of sites and patients enrolled), participants (age, sex, eligibility criteria), interventions (type, dose, and duration of LMWH treatment), and outcomes. We resolved differences in opinion through discussion. Two authors (R.J.E., W.B.) independently assessed risks of bias of the included trials according to the revised Cochrane risk of bias tool version 2 \[[@B17-jcm-08-02039]\] in the following five domains: "Bias arising from the randomization process'', "Bias due to deviations from intended interventions'', "Bias due to missing outcome data'', "Bias in measurement of the outcome'', "Bias in selection of the reported result''. RCTs were classified as 'overall low risk of bias' when all bias domains were judged as 'low risk'. Conversely, trials were classified as 'overall high risk of bias' when 'some concerns' or 'high risk' was judged in one or more domains \[[@B18-jcm-08-02039]\]. Publication bias was assessed by inspecting funnel plots for signs of asymmetry when 10 or more trials were included in the analyses \[[@B12-jcm-08-02039],[@B14-jcm-08-02039]\].
2.4. Data Synthesis and Analysis {#sec2dot4-jcm-08-02039}
--------------------------------
We calculated relative risk (RR) with both conventional 95% confidence intervals (CIs) and TSA-adjusted CI if there were two or more trials for each outcome.
### 2.4.1. Assessment of Significance {#sec2dot4dot1-jcm-08-02039}
We used adjusted thresholds for statistical significance to correct for multiplicity issues due to repeated testing. An alpha of 0.025 was used for the co-primary and secondary outcomes to keep the family-wise error rate at a maximum of 5% \[[@B14-jcm-08-02039]\]. In case of statistically significant RR, we calculated numbers needed to treat (NNT) or numbers needed to harm (NNH) with 97.5% CI.
### 2.4.2. Meta-Analysis {#sec2dot4dot2-jcm-08-02039}
Data were pooled using both a fixed-effect and a random-effects model. In case of discrepancy between the models, we emphasized the most conservative estimate. Analyses were performed on an intention-to-treat basis whenever possible or otherwise using an 'available-case analysis'.
### 2.4.3. Trial Sequential Analysis {#sec2dot4dot3-jcm-08-02039}
Conventional meta-analyses may result in type-I errors due to risks of random error when few data have been collected or due to repeated significance testing when a meta-analysis is updated with new trials \[[@B19-jcm-08-02039],[@B20-jcm-08-02039],[@B21-jcm-08-02039],[@B22-jcm-08-02039],[@B23-jcm-08-02039]\]. TSA is a sequential meta-analysis method that combines required information size estimation (i.e., the number of patients needed to detect an a priori specified relative risk reduction) with an adjusted threshold for statistical significance \[[@B21-jcm-08-02039],[@B22-jcm-08-02039]\]. This adjusted threshold is more conservative when data are sparse and becomes progressively more lenient as the accumulated sample size approaches the required information size. Accordingly, the TSA-adjusted CI is initially wider than the conventional 95% CI, but when the required information size has been reached, they become identical. The required information size is calculated on the basis of the unweighted event proportion in the control group, the assumption of a plausible relative risk reduction/increase (RRR/RRI), and the anticipated heterogeneity variance (D^2^) of the meta-analysis. We applied TSA to all outcomes, using the control event proportion from the actual meta-analyses; D^2^ as suggested by the meta-analysis; alpha of 2.5%; beta of 90%; and an anticipated RRR/RRI of 20%.
### 2.4.4. Assessment of Heterogeneity {#sec2dot4dot4-jcm-08-02039}
Statistical heterogeneity I^2^ was explored by the chi-squared test with significance set at a *p*-value of 0.10. The quantity of heterogeneity was also measured by D^2^ \[[@B24-jcm-08-02039]\]. Clinical heterogeneity was explored by conducting explorative subgroup analyses.
### 2.4.5. Subgroup Analysis {#sec2dot4dot5-jcm-08-02039}
We performed subgroup analyses according to overall risk of bias (low vs. high), type of patients, LMWH type, duration of the intervention (less vs. more than 30 days), and length of follow-up (less vs. more than 30 days). Statistically significant subgroup differences (test of interaction *p* \< 0.05) provided evidence of an intervention effect pending the subgroup.
### 2.4.6. Sensitivity Analysis {#sec2dot4dot6-jcm-08-02039}
All analyses were re-conducted including trials that evaluated LMWH types not covered by [Table 1](#jcm-08-02039-t001){ref-type="table"}. In addition, sensitivity TSAs were conducted using an RRR as suggested by the overall low-risk-of-bias studies and using a D^2^ of 25% if the actual D^2^ was 0%. In case of rare events (\<2% in the control group), TSA was also performed using Peto's odds ratio.
SAE are often inconsistently reported and, in addition to assessing SAE according to trial reporting, we estimated the number of patients with one or more SAE using two methods: (1) the highest proportion of either reported mortality, symptomatic VTE, or major bleeding in each trial and (2) all mortality, SAE, symptomatic VTE, and major bleeding events cumulated in each trial. The idea is that the 'true proportion' of SAE should lie between these two extremes. Finally, to assess the impact of attrition bias on the primary outcomes, we imputed missing outcome data in best-/worst-case and worst-/best-case scenarios \[[@B14-jcm-08-02039]\].
2.5. GRADE {#sec2dot5-jcm-08-02039}
----------
We used GRADE to assess the quality of the body of evidence associated with each outcome \[[@B15-jcm-08-02039]\].
3. Results {#sec3-jcm-08-02039}
==========
Our search strategy identified 10,374 records. After removal of duplicates and selections based on titles and abstracts, 312 records remained. A total of 271 reports were excluded on the basis of full text, and 41 records reporting 44 RCTs with a total of 22,579 patients were included ([Figure 1](#jcm-08-02039-f001){ref-type="fig"}).
3.1. Characteristics of the Included Studies {#sec3dot1-jcm-08-02039}
--------------------------------------------
Detailed characteristics of the 44 included trials are presented in [Table S3](#app1-jcm-08-02039){ref-type="app"}. The year of publication ranged from 1988 to 2018. Forty trials were in English, two in German, one in French, and one in Chinese. Three trials were published as abstracts only, and the Chinese trial was assessed as abstract only due to lacking translation capacity. There were 24 single-center and 20 multicenter trials. Nine different types of LMWH preparations were used, and several types of patients were evaluated: orthopedic or immobilized patients (16 trials), surgical patients (13 trials), ambulatory cancer patients (8 trials), acutely ill medical patients (4 trials), and neurological patients (3 trials).
3.2. Bias Risk Assessment {#sec3dot2-jcm-08-02039}
-------------------------
Six trials including 8172 patients were considered at overall low risk of bias ([Table S4](#app1-jcm-08-02039){ref-type="app"}). Thirty-eight trials were classified as overall high risk of bias. We did not suspect publication bias except for the outcome any VTE, in which asymmetry in the funnel plot was observed ([Figures S1--S4](#app1-jcm-08-02039){ref-type="app"}). Sensitivity analyses of imputed missing data suggested potential for attrition bias in all primary outcomes, since the imputed effect estimates in the best/worse and worse/best scenario's suggested benefit and harm, respectively ([Table S5](#app1-jcm-08-02039){ref-type="app"}). Results of a post-hoc sensitivity analysis excluding trials published before 2005 were comparable to those of the main analyses ([Table S6](#app1-jcm-08-02039){ref-type="app"}).
3.3. Co-Primary Outcomes {#sec3dot3-jcm-08-02039}
------------------------
### 3.3.1. All-Cause Mortality {#sec3dot3dot1-jcm-08-02039}
Twenty-three trials with 15,487 patients reported data on all-cause mortality, including five trials with 4960 patients at overall low risk of bias. Mortality proportions were 8.0% in the LMWH group and 6.2% in the control group ([Figure 2](#jcm-08-02039-f002){ref-type="fig"}). Meta-analysis of low-risk-of-bias trials showed no statistically significant effect on all-cause mortality (RR 1.03; 95%CI 0.92 to 1.16; *p* = 0.60; *I^2^* = 0%; TSA-adjusted CI 0.88 to 1.20; [Table 2](#jcm-08-02039-t002){ref-type="table"}). When assessing all trials, the conventional meta-analysis results remained similar, while TSA suggested futility, rejecting a 20% RRR or RRI in mortality. All sensitivity analyses were consistent with the primary analysis ([Table 2](#jcm-08-02039-t002){ref-type="table"}, [Table S7](#app1-jcm-08-02039){ref-type="app"}). Subgroup analyses showed no statistically significant tests of interaction ([Table S8](#app1-jcm-08-02039){ref-type="app"}). The overall level of certainty of the evidence was low ([Table 2](#jcm-08-02039-t002){ref-type="table"}).
### 3.3.2. Symptomatic Venous Thromboembolism {#sec3dot3dot2-jcm-08-02039}
Twenty-five trials with 15,920 patients reported data on symptomatic VTE, including five trials with 4878 patients at overall low risk of bias. Symptomatic VTE proportions were 1.1% in the LMWH group and 1.8% in the control group ([Figure 3](#jcm-08-02039-f003){ref-type="fig"} and [Figure 4](#jcm-08-02039-f004){ref-type="fig"}). Meta-analysis of low-risk-of-bias trials showed a statistically significant beneficial effect on symptomatic VTE, which was not confirmed by TSA (RR 0.65; 95%CI 0.45 to 0.94; *p* = 0.02; *I^2^* = 0%; TSA-adjusted CI 0.15 to 3.05; [Table 2](#jcm-08-02039-t002){ref-type="table"}). When including all trials, both conventional meta-analysis and TSA showed a beneficial intervention effect (RR 0.62; 95%CI 0.48 to 0.81; *p* = 0.0006; *I^2^* = 0%; TSA-adjusted CI 0.44 to 0.89; NNT 137; 97.5%CI 87 to 330; [Table 2](#jcm-08-02039-t002){ref-type="table"}; [Figure 3](#jcm-08-02039-f003){ref-type="fig"} and [Figure 4](#jcm-08-02039-f004){ref-type="fig"}). The primary analysis results were confirmed by three out of four sensitivity analyses ([Table 2](#jcm-08-02039-t002){ref-type="table"}, [Table S7](#app1-jcm-08-02039){ref-type="app"}). The direction of the intervention effect consistently suggested benefit in all subgroups, and there were no statistically significant tests of interaction ([Table S8](#app1-jcm-08-02039){ref-type="app"}). The overall level of certainty of the evidence was moderate ([Table 2](#jcm-08-02039-t002){ref-type="table"}).
### 3.3.3. Major Bleeding {#sec3dot3dot3-jcm-08-02039}
Thirty-three trials with 13,091 patients reported data on major bleeding, including five trials with 4960 patients at overall low risk of bias. Major bleeding proportions were 0.9% in the LMWH group and 0.8% in the control group ([Figure 5](#jcm-08-02039-f005){ref-type="fig"}). Meta-analysis of low-risk-of-bias trials showed a non-statistically significant increase in major bleeding (RR 1.70; 95%CI 0.77 to 3.74; *p* = 0.19; *I^2^* = 0%; [Table 2](#jcm-08-02039-t002){ref-type="table"}). TSA could not be conducted, since less than 5% of the required information size was accrued. When including all trials, both conventional meta-analysis and TSA showed no statistically significant effect (RR 1.07; 95%CI RR 0.72 to 1.59; *p* = 0.74; *I ^2^*= 0%; TSA-adjusted CI 0.18 to 5.73; [Table 2](#jcm-08-02039-t002){ref-type="table"}). Sensitivity analyses were consistent with the primary analyses ([Table 2](#jcm-08-02039-t002){ref-type="table"}, [Table S7](#app1-jcm-08-02039){ref-type="app"}). Subgroup analyses showed that low-dose LMWH for more than 30 days was associated with higher risk of major bleeding as compared to shorter treatments (RR 2.20; 95% CI 1.00 to 4.82 vs RR 0.84; 95%CI 0.53 to 1.32, *p* = 0.04 for test of interaction; [Table S8](#app1-jcm-08-02039){ref-type="app"}). The overall level of certainty of the evidence was low to moderate ([Table 2](#jcm-08-02039-t002){ref-type="table"}).
3.4. Secondary Outcomes {#sec3dot4-jcm-08-02039}
-----------------------
### 3.4.1. Serious Adverse Events {#sec3dot4dot1-jcm-08-02039}
Eight trials with 5180 patients reported data on SAE, although events were generally not defined according to ICH-GCP. SAE proportions were 5.4% in the LMWH group and 3.8% in the control group ([Supplement Figure S5](#app1-jcm-08-02039){ref-type="app"}). The one trial at overall low risk of bias, including 1150 patients, showed no statistically significant intervention effect on SAE (RR 0.89; 95%CI 0.68 to 1.17; *p* = 0.42; TSA-adjusted CI 0.41 to 1.96; [Table 2](#jcm-08-02039-t002){ref-type="table"}). This result was confirmed in both conventional meta-analysis and TSA of all trials regardless of bias risk (RR 0.98; 95% CI 0.78 to 1.25; *p* = 0.89; *I^2^* = 0%; TSA-adjusted CI 0.37 to 2.58; [Table 2](#jcm-08-02039-t002){ref-type="table"}). As predefined sensitivity analysis, we categorized mortality, symptomatic VTE, and major bleeding events from 37 trials as SAE and used these data to estimate the proportion of patients with one or more SAEs: the results were consistent with those of the primary analysis ([Table S9](#app1-jcm-08-02039){ref-type="app"}). Subgroup analyses showed no statistically significant tests of interaction. The overall level of certainty of the evidence was very low to low ([Table 2](#jcm-08-02039-t002){ref-type="table"}).
### 3.4.2. Clinically Relevant Non-Major Bleeding {#sec3dot4dot2-jcm-08-02039}
Five trials with 3372 patients reported data on clinically relevant non-major bleeding. Clinically relevant non-major bleeding proportions were 1.0% in the LMWH group and 0.7% in the control group ([Figure S6](#app1-jcm-08-02039){ref-type="app"}). No trials were at overall low risk of bias. Meta-analysis of all trials showed no statistically significant intervention effect on clinically relevant non-major bleeding (RR 1.50; 95%CI 0.72 to 3.12; *p* = 0.28; *I^2^* = 0%; [Table 2](#jcm-08-02039-t002){ref-type="table"}), and TSA could not be conducted, since less than 5% of the required information size was accrued. Sensitivity analyses were consistent with the primary analysis ([Table 2](#jcm-08-02039-t002){ref-type="table"}, [Table S7](#app1-jcm-08-02039){ref-type="app"}). Subgroup analyses showed no statistically significant tests of interaction. The overall level of certainty of the evidence was very low ([Table 2](#jcm-08-02039-t002){ref-type="table"}).
### 3.4.3. Any Venous Thromboembolism {#sec3dot4dot3-jcm-08-02039}
Thirty trials with 5849 patients reported data on any VTE, including three trials with 1254 patients at overall low risk of bias. Proportions of any VTE were 10.7% in the LMWH group and 17.6% in the control group ([Figure S7](#app1-jcm-08-02039){ref-type="app"}). Meta-analysis of the low risk of bias trials showed a statistically significant beneficial effect on any VTE, which was not confirmed by TSA (RR 0.57; 95%CI 0.38 to 0.84; *p* = 0.005; *I^2^* = 0%; TSA-adjusted CI 0.11 to 2.82; [Table 2](#jcm-08-02039-t002){ref-type="table"}). When including all trials, both conventional meta-analysis and TSA showed a beneficial intervention effect (RR 0.61; 95%CI 0.50 to 0.75; *p* \< 0.00001; *I^2^* = 47%; TSA-adjusted CI 0.49 to 0.82; NNT 15; 97.5%CI 11 to 21; [Table 2](#jcm-08-02039-t002){ref-type="table"}). The primary analysis results were confirmed by all sensitivity analyses ([Table 2](#jcm-08-02039-t002){ref-type="table"}, [Table S7](#app1-jcm-08-02039){ref-type="app"}). Subgroup analyses showed no statistically significant tests of interaction. The overall level of certainty of the evidence was low to moderate ([Table 2](#jcm-08-02039-t002){ref-type="table"}).
4. Discussion {#sec4-jcm-08-02039}
=============
In this systematic review on low-dose LMWH versus placebo or no treatment, LMWH was not associated with a statistically significant intervention effect on mortality, major bleeding, clinically relevant non-major bleeding, or SAE. Conversely, we found a large beneficial intervention effect on both symptomatic VTE and on any VTE which included asymptomatic events detected through screening. These effects were consistent among subgroup and sensitivity analyses, but the effect size varied per patient type, and the quality of the evidence was moderate. In the TSAs of mortality, symptomatic VTE, and any VTE, the adjusted monitoring boundaries were crossed (respectively, for futility and for benefit), indicating a low risk of random error. The intervention effects of low-dose LMWH on SAE and bleeding events remain inconclusive, as TSA monitoring boundaries were not crossed, and quality of evidence was low. There was a suggestion of publication bias in the reporting of any VTE, and attrition bias may have influenced the primary outcomes.
4.1. Considerations on the Optimal Prophylactic Dose {#sec4dot1-jcm-08-02039}
----------------------------------------------------
Previous systematic reviews did not observe a mortality benefit for patients receiving LMWH thrombosis prophylaxis compared to patients receiving placebo or no treatment, which is confirmed by our results including TSA. Although it was previously thought that LMWHs might improve survival in cancer patients, later systematic reviews found no survival benefit in cancer patients receiving different prophylactic doses of LMWH \[[@B6-jcm-08-02039],[@B9-jcm-08-02039]\]. Additionally, we detected no beneficial effect on mortality in any patient category in a previous meta-analysis on intermediate-dose LMWH \[[@B11-jcm-08-02039]\]. Nevertheless, we cannot exclude the possibility of a smaller intervention effect than 20% RRR/RRI on mortality; this would require many more randomized patients, as we used a 20% RRR for calculating the required information size in TSA.
In line with previous literature, we found a consistent beneficial intervention effect on VTE in subgroup analyses according to patient type, although effect sizes varied among subgroups. The overall incidence of symptomatic VTE was low, resulting in an NNT of 137. Effect estimates were rather similar regardless of bias risk (low risk RCTs estimated an RRR of 35%, while all RCTs combined estimated an RRR of 41%), suggesting we may base our conclusions on the more accurate estimates derived from the meta-analyses of all trials. Previous systematic reviews on thrombosis prophylaxis have found larger relative risk reductions \[[@B6-jcm-08-02039],[@B7-jcm-08-02039],[@B10-jcm-08-02039],[@B25-jcm-08-02039]\]. This could indicate that low-dose LMWH may be slightly less effective for the prevention of VTE than more frequently used higher doses. However, this indirect comparison should be viewed with caution, as differences between reviews regarding study selection criteria could also explain the difference. A direct comparison in a homogeneous patient population is required for strong inferences about the efficacy of low-dose LMWH compared to higher doses.
Finally, evidence on adverse events remains inconclusive. The point-estimate of the low-risk-of-bias trials suggested a 70% RRI in major bleeding which was not statistically significant, while the estimate including all trials was neutral. This difference may relate to bias risk but could also be explained by trial characteristics: cancer and treatment duration are risk factors for major bleeding, and three out of five low-risk-of-bias trials included oncological patients who were generally treated for a longer duration \[[@B26-jcm-08-02039]\]. The increased risk of major bleeding in the subgroup of oncological patients was comparable to that reported in previous systematic reviews for this patient category \[[@B6-jcm-08-02039],[@B7-jcm-08-02039]\]. Conversely, the risk of major bleeding for other patient types was low compared to that indicated in other systematic reviews \[[@B10-jcm-08-02039],[@B11-jcm-08-02039],[@B25-jcm-08-02039]\]. This may be explained by the low LMWH dose but also by differences in included patients or co-interventions. Data on clinically relevant non-major bleeding were reported by only a few trials, and analyses were inconclusive. There was no apparent effect on SAE, confirmed by sensitivity analyses in which we incorporated data from nearly all available trials. Assessment of these two outcomes was hampered by wide variations in definitions and reporting between trials, resulting in low- to very low quality evidence and limiting inferences on the harms of low-dose LMWH.
4.2. Implications for Clinical Practice {#sec4dot2-jcm-08-02039}
---------------------------------------
In general, clinicians will not prescribe thrombosis prophylaxis without considering both effectiveness and harms. This balance may differ depending on patients' characteristics such as disease type, severity of illness, or surgery. In prespecified subgroup analyses according to patient type, we found that, in surgical patients, low-dose LMWH reduced both symptomatic and any VTE, without evidence for increased major bleeding. In orthopedic patients, there was a statistically significant reduction in any, but not in symptomatic, VTE, with no evidence for increased major bleeding events. Although not statistically significant, there was a 39% RRR in symptomatic VTE, and the discrepancy may be explained by low power. In oncological patients, a beneficial effect on symptomatic VTE, but not on any VTE, was found. Additionally, the direction of the intervention effect suggested an increase in major bleeding. There were no statistically significant beneficial or harmful effects in acutely ill medical patients, suggesting either that there was a very small intervention effect with concurrent high numbers needed to treat or that a low LMWH dose is insufficient for this type of patient. Recent guidelines have recommended an individualized approach towards thrombosis prophylaxis in acutely ill medical patients \[[@B2-jcm-08-02039]\]. On the basis of our results, one could hypothesize that medical patients deemed at high risk of VTE will mainly benefit from higher doses of thrombosis prophylaxis. Finally, only very few neurological patients were included, limiting inferences for this subgroup.
This systematic review provides a general overview of the effects of low-dose LMWH: although there are differences between patient subgroups, there also are many similarities in the direction of effects. Overall, we found that low-dose LMWH was most effective in surgical, orthopedic, and oncological patients, while the estimated RRI for bleeding events was low in most prespecified patient subgroups, except for oncological patients. These results should be viewed in the perspective of the limited quality of the evidence and the inherent limited power of subgroup analyses. In cases where physicians are in doubt whether a patient should receive thrombosis prophylaxis or no prophylaxis at all or when a higher prophylactic dose is deemed inappropriate with respect to bleeding risk, clinicians may consider a low-dose LMWH for thrombosis prophylaxis, especially in surgical and orthopedic patients.
4.3. Strengths and Limitations {#sec4dot3-jcm-08-02039}
------------------------------
Strengths of this review include its systematic and transparent methodology according to recommendations by the Cochrane Handbook, the PRISMA statement, and the GRADE working group. We used a prespecified protocol, a comprehensive search strategy without language restrictions, although we did assess one Chinese article as abstract only, independent data extraction and bias assessment by two authors, and incorporation of bias risk assessment in the results and conclusions. Finally, we applied TSA to all outcomes to assess the risks of random error and to estimate the required information size.
Nevertheless, several important limitations apply. Our main goal was to make general inferences on the efficacy and safety of low-dose LMWH, using all available evidence. Consequently, there was a high amount of clinical heterogeneity between trials. The balance between thrombosis and bleeding may vary depending on patient subgroup characteristics: relying on overall effect estimates could obscure more subtle associations or lead to wrong inferences about a subpopulation. However, the distinction between different patient populations is somewhat arbitrary in any systematic review, and we attempted to account for clinical heterogeneity by conducting several preplanned subgroup analyses. This approach offers the benefit of increased power of the meta-analysis, and we found the direction of the intervention effects was equal in most subgroups.
A second limitation concerns the inclusion of trials comparing low-dose LMWH to an inactive comparator, which led to the selection of mainly older trials or trials assessing LMWH in specific patient types or countries, limiting the generalizability of our results. In a post-hoc sensitivity analysis excluding trials published before 2005, the results remained comparable, although no inferences could be made for subgroups due to the very limited sample size.
Third, to estimate the effect of low-dose LMWH on SAEs we conducted a sensitivity analysis to estimate the proportion of patients having one or more SAEs. For this purpose, we categorized mortality, symptomatic VTE, SAE, and major bleeding events from 37 trials as SAE. In reality, not all symptomatic VTE and major bleeding events are SAEs by definition (i.e., a distal leg thrombosis may be classified as adverse event, while pulmonary embolism can be a serious adverse event), but making this distinction was impossible on the basis of insufficiently detailed trial reports. Last, the best-/worst- and worst-/best-case analyses we performed to explore the influence of missing outcome data were probably overpowered to detect potential attrition bias, since the incidence of lost to follow-up was higher than the incidence of the primary outcomes.
5. Conclusions {#sec5-jcm-08-02039}
==============
In a wide variety of patients at risk of VTE, there was very low to moderate-quality evidence that low-dose LMWH for thrombosis prophylaxis did not decrease all-cause mortality but reduced the incidence of symptomatic and asymptomatic VTE, while results on the intervention effects on major bleeding, clinically relevant non-major bleeding, and SAE remain inconclusive.
We would like to thank S. van der Werf, medical information specialist, for her assistance with the development and execution of the search strategy.
######
Click here for additional data file.
The following are available online at <https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/8/12/2039/s1>, Figure S1: Forest plot of SAE, stratified for patient type; Figure S2: Forest plot of clinically relevant non-major bleeding, stratified for patient type; Figure S3: Forest plot of any VTE, stratified for patient type; Figure S4: Funnel plot of all-cause mortality; Figure S5: Funnel plot of symptomatic VTE; Figure S6: Funnel plot of major bleeding; Figure S7: Funnel plot of any VTE; Table S1: Search strategy; Table S2: Characteristics of included randomized trials, stratified by patient type; Table S3: Ongoing trials; Table S4: Risk of bias assessment; Table S5: Sensitivity analysis: best-worse and worst-best case scenario's; Table S6: Sensitivity analysis: trials with publication year ≥ 2005; Table S7: Sensitivity analysis: including LMWH types not a priori defined; Table S8: Subgroup analysis: co-primary outcomes; Table S9: Sensitivity analysis: proportion of SAE and cumulative SAE.
F.K. developed the original idea for this study. R.J.E., W.B., J.W., R.O.B.G., K.M., I.C.C.v.d.H., and F.K. contributed to the design of the study including the development of the protocol. R.J.E. and W.B. acquired the data. R.J.E. and F.K. performed the statistical analysis. R.J.E., W.B., J.W., R.O.B.G., K.M., I.C.C.v.d.H., and F.K contributed to interpretation of the data. R.J.E. drafted the first version of the manuscript, and all authors contributed critically to subsequent versions. R.J.E., W.B., J.W., R.O.B.G., K.M., I.C.C.v.d.H., and F.K approved the final manuscript. The corresponding author attests that all listed authors meet authorship criteria and that no others meeting the criteria have been omitted.
RJE is supported by a personal grant from the 'Groninger AGIKO programme', funded by the University of Groningen. This program supports young clinicians who combine medical specialist training with obtaining a PhD degree. The university had no role in the design or conduct of the study, analysis or interpretation of the data, review or approval of the manuscript, or the decision to submit the manuscript for publication.
KM reports grants from Bayer, Sanquin, and Pfizer; speaker fees from Bayer, Sanquin, Boehringer Ingelheim, BMS, and Aspen; travel support from Bayer, and consulting fees from Uniqure outside the submitted work; JW is a member of the task force at the Copenhagen Trial Unit to develop theory and software of Trial Sequential Analysis; other authors have disclosed no potential conflicts of interest.
{#jcm-08-02039-f001}
{#jcm-08-02039-f002}
{#jcm-08-02039-f003}
{#jcm-08-02039-f004}
{#jcm-08-02039-f005}
jcm-08-02039-t001_Table 1
######
LMWH dose definitions.
LMWH Type A Priori Defined as Low-Dose LMWH Dose Used in Included Trials
------------ ----------------------------------- ------------------------------
Bemiparin \<3500 IU 2500 IU
Certoparin \<5000 IU 3000 IU
Dalteparin \<5000 IU 2500 IU ^a^
Enoxaparin \<40 mg 20 mg
Nadroparin \<5700 IU 2850--3800 IU ^b,c^
Parnaparin \<4250 IU 3200 IU
Reviparin \<3436 IU 1750 IU
Tinzaparin \<4500 IU 3500 IU ^d^
IU: International Units; LMWH: low-molecular-weight heparin; mg: milligrams; ^a^ Sandset et al. used weight-dependent doses of 3000--5500 IU; ^b^ Fraisse et al. used weight-dependent doses of 3800--5700 IU; ^b^ Yoo et al. used weight-dependent doses of 2850--5700 IU; ^c^ Xiao-Li et al. used weight-dependent doses of 41--62 IU/kg; ^d^ Sorensen et al. and Lassen et al. used weight-dependent doses: 50 IU/kg.
jcm-08-02039-t002_Table 2
######
Conventional meta-analysis and trial sequential analysis outcomes.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Outcome Included Trials Trials (Patients) Conventional Meta-Analysis ^a^ Primary TSA ^a^\ Sensitivity TSA ^a^\ Sensitivity TSA ^a^\ Certainty of Evidence
α 2.5%; ß 90%; RRR 20%;\ α 2.5%; ß 90%; RRR Based on Low Risk Trials; D^2^ Model Variance Based α 2.5%; ß 90%; RRR 20%; D^2^ 25%
D^2^ Model Variance Based
---------------------------------------- ----------------- ------------------------ --------------------------------- --------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ---------------------------------- --------------------------
Mortality Low bias risk 5 (4.960) RR 1.03 (0.92 to 1.16) RR 1.03 (0.88 to 1.20) Insufficient data (\<5% of DIS) RR 1.03 (0.86 to 1.23) Low ^d,\ e,\ f^
All 23 (15.487) RR 0.99 (0.85 to 1.14) RR 1.02 (0.89 to 1.16) ^b^ Insufficient data (\<5% of DIS) RR 1.02 (0.90 to 1.15) Low ^d,\ g^
Symptomatic VTE Low bias risk 5 (4.878) RR 0.65 (0.45 to 0.94) RR 0.67 (0.15 to 3.05) RR 0.67 (0.32 to 1.38) 0.67 (0.15 to 3.05) Moderate ^e^
All 25 (15.920) RR 0.62 (0.48 to 0.81) RR 0.62 (0.44 to 0.89) ^c^ RR 0.62 (0.42 to 0.92) RR 0.62 (0.20 to 1.95) Moderate ^g^
Major bleeding Low bias risk 5 (4.960) RR 1.70 (0.77 to 3.74) Insufficient data (\<5% of DIS) Insufficient data (\<5% of DIS) Insufficient data (\<5% of DIS) Moderate ^f^
All 33 (13.091) RR 1.07 (0.72 to 1.59) RR 1.01 (0.18 to 5.73) ^c^ RR 1.01 (0.52 to 1.93) RR 1.09 (0.75 to 1.60) Low ^e,\ f,\ g^
SAE Low bias risk 1 (1.150) RR 0.89 (0.68 to 1.17) RR 0.89 (0.41 to 1.96) RR 0.89 (0.27 to 2.96) RR 0.89 (0.36 to 2.23) Low ^e,\ f,\ h^
All 8 (5.180) RR 0.98 (0.78 to 1.25) RR 0.98 (0.37 to 2.58) Insufficient data (\<5% of DIS) RR 0.98 (0.77 to 1.24) Very low ^d,\ e,\ f,\ g^
Clinically relevant non-major bleeding Low bias risk 0 (0) \- \- \- \- \-
All 5 (3.372) RR 1.50 (0.72 to 3.12) Insufficient data (\<5% of DIS) Insufficient data (\<5% of DIS) Insufficient data (\<5% of DIS) Very low ^d,\ e,\ f,\ g^
Any VTE Low bias risk 3 (1.254) RR 0.57 (0.38 to 0.84) RR 0.57 (0.11 to 2.82) RR 0.57 (0.32 to 1.01) Not performed (D^2^ \>25%) Moderate ^e,\ i,\ k^
All 30 (5.849) RR 0.61 (0.50 to 0.75) RR 0.63 (0.49 to 0.82) RR 0.63 (0.50 to 0.80) Not performed (D^2^ \>25%) Low ^e,\ i,\ j,\ k^
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
^a^ Small discrepancies of the intervention effect estimates between traditional RevMan meta-analyses and the TSA-adjusted results may occur due to different pooling methods (for example the inclusion of zero-event trials in TSA analyses); ^b^ TSA monitoring boundary for futility crossed; ^c^ sensitivity analysis using Peto's odds ratio showed similar results; ^d^ downgraded for inconsistency, since point estimates varied widely; ^e^ downgraded for imprecision, since TSA-adjusted confidence interval crossed '1'; ^f^ downgraded for imprecision, since conventional confidence interval crossed '1'; ^g^ downgraded for risk of bias, since (some) included trials were at high risk of bias; ^h^ downgraded for indirectness, since only one trial was included under assessment; ^i^ downgraded for risk of publication bias, since there was important asymmetry in the funnel plot; ^j^ downgraded for inconsistency, since point estimates varied widely and there was moderate statistical heterogeneity; ^k^ upgraded, since there was a strong association. α: two-sided significance level, ß: power; D^2^: diversity; DIS: diversity-adjusted information size; OR: odds ratio; RR: relative risk; RRR: relative risk reduction; SAE: serious adverse events; TSA: trial sequential analysis; VTE: venous thromboembolism.
| {
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Central"
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Jesús Cintora
Jesús Ángel Cintora Pérez (born 27 January 1977 in Ágreda, Soria) is a Spanish journalist and television presenter.
Training and career
Cintora studied Journalism, in the field of Audiovisual Communication. He received his BA degree from University of Navarra in 1999. He has been Associate Professor at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. His first works were developed on the radio station Cadena SER of Soria, Pamplona and Zaragoza. He also worked for TVE Navarra, El Mundo, Marca, and Canal+ (Spanish satellite broadcasting company). Between 2002 and 2006 he was the coordinator of Hoy por hoy.
Radio
From 1996 to 2000, his first works in this area were developed on the radio station Cadena SER of Soria, Pamplona, Zaragoza and Madrid.
In 2000 he was a member of the team that started digital broadcasts in Radio Marca.
In 2000 he returned to Cadena SER Madrid. Between 2002 and 2006 he was the coordinator of the program Hoy por hoy, directed first by Iñaki Gabilondo and then Carles Francino since 2005.
He then joined Hora 14 and Hora 25, fin de semana until March 2011, when he began to present the morning program of Cadena SER.
On 11 November, the same year he was fired in a new restructuring of information services of this radio network. Days later, Cintora himself confirmed it by Twitter.
Television
His first works were for Televisión Española of Navarra, Navarra-Canal 4, and Canal Satélite Digital.
Between 2011 and 2013 Cintora participated as a political analyst on several television shows in Spain, such as The debate de la 1 on TVE (Televisión Española) (2012-2013), La noche del Canal 24 horas on TVE (2012-2013), El programa de Ana Rosa (2011-2013) and El gran debate (2012-2013) on Telecinco, De hoy a mañana (2012-2013) and El cascabel (2013) on 13TV, Alto y claro in Telemadrid and La vuelta al mundo (2009-2011) on Veo7, and Una mirada al mundo (2012) on Discovery MAX.
Since 6 May 2013, Cintora replaced Marta Fernández presenting the morning TV program Las mañanas de Cuatro in Cuatro.
The first edition of the program hosted by Cintora, in 2013 was attended by Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón, Pablo Iglesias Turrión, Albert Rivera, Alberto Garzón and Pablo Casado Blanco, all of them before reaching a decisive role in the so-called new politics in Spain.
Between 24 November and 8 December 2013, he hosted the new informative called The Wall (in English).
On 19 June 2014, he was part of the Mediaset Spain coverage on the occasion of the proclamation of the King Felipe VI of Spain, along with journalists Ana Rosa Quintana and Pedro Piqueras.
On 27 March 2015 Mediaset Spain announced his resignation as presenter of Las mañanas de Cuatro. An official statement claimed 'Mediaset has the clear objective to inform, not form, audience through a pluralism which give voice to absolutely all political opinions and with presenters who treat information objectively'. Cintora however continued on other projects with Mediaset. Numerous sources reported that Mediaset had received political pressure from the government of the Partido Popular to dismiss Cintora for his usual criticism of the government, something which Cintora himself defended.
In November 2015 Las mañanas de Cuatro received the important Premio Ondas [Ondas Award] 'for opening a stable time band in television today, for the evolution that its successive directors and conductors have contributed and the politrld of evictions and vulture funds and also cutbacks in Health and Education.
In 2016 he leads Cintora al pie de calle.
Press
He got his break in the media with Diario de Soria and El Mundo. Between 2011 and 2012 he worked for with the Spanish edition of Rolling Stone. Between 2011 and 2013 he collaborated with Interviú.
Since 2015 he has written a weekly opinion piece on eldiario.es, an online newspaper edited by Ignacio Escolar.
Books
On 14 April 2015, Jesús Cintora published in Editorial Espasa-Calpe La hora de la verdad [The Moment of Truth]. It is the first time that leaders of the new generation in politics, like Pedro Sánchez Pérez-Castejón, Pablo Iglesias Turrión, Albert Rivera, Alberto Garzón or Pablo Casado Blanco were interviewed for a book. Some of the characters that the journalist signed for television, such as Miguel Ángel Revilla, Sor Lucía Caram and Pedro J. Ramírez also participated. The foreword is by Iñaki Gabilondo, who describes the author in this way: 'Jesús Cintora, a young journalist of Soria whom I met on Cadena SER. His personality and flair were obvious. His informality, his brazenness and expressive simplicity fits like a glove with the newly released demands of transparency, freshness and audacity'.
References
External links
Program Matinal SER in la Cadena Ser
Program Hoy por Hoy in la Cadena Ser
Jesús Cintora in Ruta Quetzal
Interview Jesús Cintora
Category:Spanish journalists
Category:Spanish essayists
Category:People from Soria
Category:1977 births
Category:Living people | {
"pile_set_name": "Wikipedia (en)"
} |
Hungarian Socialist Party
The Hungarian Socialist Party (), known mostly by its acronym MSZP, is a social-democratic political party in Hungary.
It was founded on 7 October 1989 as a post-communist evolution and one of two legal successors of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (MSZMP). Along with its conservative rival Fidesz, MSZP was one of the two most dominant parties in Hungarian politics until 2010; however, the party lost much of its popular support as a result of the Őszöd speech, the consequent 2006 protests, and then the 2008 financial crisis. Following the 2010 election, MSZP became the largest opposition party in parliament, a position it held until 2018, when it was overtaken by the far-right Jobbik.
History
The MSZP evolved from the communist Hungarian Socialist Workers' Party (or MSZMP), which ruled Hungary between 1956 and 1989. By the summer of 1989, the MSZMP was no longer a Marxist–Leninist party, and had been taken over by a faction of radical reformers who favoured jettisoning the Communist system in favour of a market economy. One of its leaders, Rezső Nyers, the architect of the New Economic Mechanism in the 1960s and 1970s, was elected as chairman of a four-man collective presidency that replaced the old MSZMP Politburo. Although General Secretary Károly Grósz, who had succeeded longtime leader János Kádár a year earlier, was elected to this body, Nyers now outranked him–and was thus now the de facto leader of Hungary.
At a party congress on 7 October 1989, the MSZMP dissolved and refounded itself as the MSZP, with Nyers as its first president. A marginal "Communist" faction led by Grósz broke away to form a revived Hungarian Communist Workers' Party, now known as the Hungarian Workers' Party, the other successor of the MSZMP.
The decision to declare the MSZP a successor of the MSZMP was controversial, and still carries repercussions for both the MSZP and Hungary. Another source of controversy is that some members of the former communist elite maintained political influence in the MSZP. Indeed, many key MSZP politicians were active members or held leadership positions within the MSZMP (like Gyula Horn and László Kovács).
On economic issues, the Socialists have often been greater advocates of liberal, free market policies than the conservative opposition, which has tended to favor more state interventionism in the economy through economic and price regulations, as well as through state ownership of key economic enterprises. The MSZP, in contrast, implemented a strong package of market reforms, austerity and privatization in 1995–96, called the Bokros package, when Hungary faced an economic and financial crisis. According to researchers, the elites of the Hungarian 'left' (MSZP and SZDSZ) have been differentiated from the 'right' by being more supportive of the classical neo-liberal economic policies, while the 'right' (especially extreme right) has advocated more interventionist policies. In contrast, issues like church and state and former communists show alignment along the traditional left-right spectrum. It is also noteworthy that, according to research, the MSZP elite's positions used to be closer to voters of the SZDSZ than to their own.
Besides a more liberal approach to the economy overall, the MSZP differentiated itself from the conservative opposition through its more recent focus on transforming state social policy from a collection of measures that benefit the entire population, such as subsidies available to all citizens, to one based on financial and social need.
Besides Gyula Horn, the MSZP's most internationally recognized politicians were Ferenc Gyurcsány and László Kovács, a former member of the European Commission, responsible for taxation.
Electoral history
The MSZP faced the voters for the first time at the 1990 elections, the first free elections held in Hungary in 44 years. It was knocked down to fourth place with only 33 seats.
Nyers handed the leadership to Horn, Hungary's last Communist foreign minister. Horn led the MSZP to an outright majority at the 1994 parliamentary election. Although the MSZP could have governed alone, he opted to form a coalition with the liberal Alliance of Free Democrats (SZDSZ). He not only wanted to allay concerns inside and outside Hungary of a former Communist party holding a majority, but needed the Free Democrats' votes to get economic reforms (what became the Bokros package) past his own party's left wing. Thus the post-communist party was released from a so-called "political quarantine" (by being the former state party the socialists were in a quarantine by the other democratic parties).
After being turned out of office in 1998, the party was able to form a renewed centre-left coalition with the Free Democrats in 2002.
At the 2006 elections, MSZP won with 43.2% of party list votes, which gave it 190 representatives out of 386 in the Parliament. The MSZP was therefore able to retain its coalition government from the previous term. In earlier elections, the MSZP polled 10.89% (1990), 32.98% (1994), 32.92% (1998) and 42.05% (2002).
After the successful fees abolishment referendum, MSZP formed the first minority government of Hungary, following the SZDSZ's backing out of the coalition with a deadline of May 1, 2008.
2010s decline
On 21 March 2009 Gyurcsány announced his resignation as Prime Minister due to failure management of the economic crisis. Gordon Bajnai became the nominee of MSZP for the post of prime minister in March 2009 and he became Prime Minister on 14 April. Gyurcsány also resigned from his position of party chairman, which he had occupied since 2007.
MSZP has lost half of its supporters during the European Parliament election in 2009, when the party received only 17,37% of the votes and gained four seats, compared to the previous nine seats. This electoral defeat marked the end of the de facto two-party system in Hungary, which had lasted since 1998.
The Hungarian Socialist Party suffered a heavy defeat in the 2010 election (won by Fidesz with a ⅔ majority), gaining only 19,3% of the votes, and 59 seats in the parliament. Following the resignation of Ildikó Lendvai, the party's prime minister candidate Attila Mesterházy was elected Chairman of the Socialist Party. Nevertheless, MSZP became the biggest opposition party in Hungary.
The left-wing fragmented after the 2010 election; at first Katalin Szili left the MSZP to form Social Union (SZU), following the similarly significant defeated local elections in October 2010, nevertheless Gyurcsány's detachment was a much worse disaster for the Socialists. Initially, the former PM wanted to reform the party, but his goals remained in the minority. As a result, Gyurcsány, along with nine other members of the parliamentary group, left MSZP and established Democratic Coalition (DK). Thus MSZP's number of MPs reduced to 48.
The Socialist Party entered into an alliance with four other parties in January 2014 to contest the April parliamentary election. Mesterházy was elected candidate for the Prime Minister position, but the Unity alliance failed to win. After that the electoral coalition disestablished. On the 2014 European Parliament election, MSZP suffered the largest defeat since the 1990 parliamentary election, gaining third place and only 10% of the votes. After the obvious failure, Mesterházy and the entire presidium of the Socialist Party resigned.
József Tóbiás was elected leader of the Socialist Party on 19 July 2014 following the resignation of Mesterházy. He also became leader of the parliamentary group in September 2014. During his leadership, the Socialist Party won a parliamentary by-election (2014) and an important mayoral by-election (Salgótarján), however the party itself was permanently pushed back to the third place by far-right Jobbik according to the opinion polls. Tóbiás did not support the full cooperation and unification of the left-wing opposition parties against Viktor Orbán. During the MSZP party congress in June 2016, he was defeated by Gyula Molnár, a former Socialist MP and mayor, who succeeded him as party chairman. In February 2016, the party decided to sell its headquarters at Jókai Street for financial reasons. In June 2018, Bertalan Tóth was elected president in the MSZP, shortly after the party suffered its worst electoral defeat since 1990.
The party further declined in the 2019 European election, only scoring 6,61% of votes and being overtaken by the Democratic Coalition and Momentum.
Ideology
In political terms, the MSZP differentiates itself from its conservative opponents mainly in its rejection of Hungarian nationalism. The party is a member of the Progressive Alliance, the Socialist International, and the Party of European Socialists (PES), and it holds a chairmanship and several vice-chairmanships in committees at the European Parliament.
Election results
National Assembly
1As part of the Unity alliance; MSZP ran together with Together 2014 (E14), Democratic Coalition (DK), Dialogue for Hungary (PM) and Hungarian Liberal Party (MLP).
2 In an electoral alliance with Dialogue for Hungary
Single Member Constituencies voting consistently for MSZP
The image shows Single Member Constituencies (or SMCs) voting for MSZP in 1998, 2002, 2006 in dark red, while showing SMCs voting for MSZP in 2002 and 2006 in red. The dark red districts are considered the strongest positions of the party. Most if not all districts shown in dark red and red also voted for MSZP in 1994, a landslide victory for the party. So actually, dark red districts have an even longer uninterrupted voting history of supporting MSZP.
European Parliament
1 In an electoral alliance with Dialogue for Hungary
Party leaders
See also
Politics of Hungary
Hungarian Communist Party
References
External links
Official website
The Evolution and Development of the Hungarian Socialist Party. Dr Kate Hudson
Category:Political parties in Hungary
Category:Social democratic parties in Europe | {
"pile_set_name": "Wikipedia (en)"
} |
Posterior only versus combined anterior and posterior approaches to lumbar scoliosis in adults: a radiographic analysis.
Retrospective study. To compare the radiographic lumbar curve correction between a posterior only and combined anterior-posterior approach in patients with adult spinal deformity. In adolescent idiopathic scoliosis correction, posterior only has been compared with the combined anterior-posterior approach; however, there have been no corollary studies in adult scoliosis. Traditionally, rigid lumbar curves have been treated with a combined anterior and posterior approach; however, the absolute indications for this approach are unclear. A total of 180 patients with degenerative or adult idiopathic spinal deformity and curves measuring between 40 degrees and 70 degrees who underwent reconstructive spinal fusion. The minimum follow-up period was 28 months and average follow-up was 53 months. Of the 155 patients who underwent surgery, 80 underwent posterior only (35 with idiopathic and 45 with degenerative scoliosis) while 75 patients (30 with idiopathic and 35 with degenerative scoliosis) underwent combined anterior-posterior surgery. The groups were compared by age at operation, preoperative deformity, levels operated and postoperative correction and balance. There were no significant differences in sagittal and coronal plane curve and balance correction between the posterior only and the combined anterior-posterior groups. When the patients were subdivided into degenerative adult scoliosis and idiopathic adult scoliosis, there were again no significant differences in the sagittal and coronal curves or balance between the posterior only and combined anterior and posterior approaches. While the posterior only group and the same-day anterior and posterior surgery group had a similar major complication rate of 24% and 23%, respectively, patients who underwent staged anterior and posterior surgery had a major complication rate of 45%. When combined with extensive posterior releases, posterior only approach is just as effective as combined anterior and posterior surgery for adult lumbar scoliosis measuring between 40 degrees and 70 degrees . | {
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Abstracts"
} |
liTest run started
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| {
"pile_set_name": "Github"
} |
Q:
store wget link into a database (php)
I'm trying to find a solution to download automatically .flv link everyday from a website using wget and to store all the links into a database to stream them in my website. (all in php)
How to do that? I don't need to store the files only links into the database.
Best regards,
A:
I don't know why you would need wget.
You could use curl to go to the website and get the new link. After you have the link, just store the information in the database and your done.
You are basically scrapping other sites for content.
This article looks like it is promising:
http://www.merchantos.com/makebeta/php/scraping-links-with-php/
You could also try to search google. I used the term:
scrapping site php curl
Have fun.
Regards.
| {
"pile_set_name": "StackExchange"
} |
United States Court of Appeals
FOR THE EIGHTH CIRCUIT
__________
No. 02-3035
__________
Dan McCarthy, as Parent and as Next *
Friend of his Minor Daughter, *
*
Plaintiff - Appellant, *
* Appeal from the United States
v. * District Court for the Western
* District of Arkansas.
Ozark School District; Faye Boozman, *
in his Official Capacity as Director, *
State of Arkansas Department of Health; *
John Doe, 1 through 20, in their Official *
Capacities as Agents, Servants, *
Employees or Officials of the State of *
Arkansas, Department of Health, *
*
Defendants - Appellees. *
___________
No. 02-3094
___________
Shannon Law, as Parent and Legal *
Guardian of her Minor Children Joey *
Law, Rob Law, and Claire Law; *
*
Plaintiff, *
*
Susan Brock, as Parent and Legal *
Guardian of her Minor Children Harley *
Brock, Mason Brock, Kathrine Brock *
and Michael Jarrell, *
*
Plaintiff - Appellant, *
* Appeal from the United States
v. * District Court for the Eastern
* District of Arkansas.
*
Fay W. Boozman, in his Official *
Capacity as Director of the Arkansas *
Department of Health; Cutter Morning *
Star School District; Lake Hamilton *
School District; Raymond Simon, in his *
Official Capacity as Director of the *
Arkansas Department of Education, *
*
Defendants - Appellees. *
__________
No. 02-3104
__________
Cynthia Boone, Individually and as *
Next Friend of Ashley Boone, *
*
Plaintiff - Appellant, *
* Appeal from the United States
v. * District Court for the Eastern
* District of Arkansas.
Cabot School District; Fay Boozman, in *
his Official Capacity as the Director of *
the Arkansas Department of Health; *
John Doe, 1 through 20, in their Official *
Capacities as Agents, Servants, *
-2-
Employees or Officials of the State of *
Arkansas, Department of Health, *
*
Defendants - Appellees. *
___________
No. 02-3195
___________
Shannon Law, as Parent and Legal *
Guardian of her Minor Children Joey *
Law, Rob Law, and Claire Law, *
*
Plaintiff, *
*
Susan Brock, as Parent and Legal *
Guardian of her Minor Children Harley *
Brock, Mason Brock, Kathrine Brock, * Appeal from the United States
and Michael Jarrell, * District Court for the Eastern
* District of Arkansas
Plaintiff - Appellee *
*
v. *
*
Fay W. Boozman, in his Official *
Capacity as Director of the Arkansas *
Department of Health, *
*
Defendant, *
*
Cutter Morning Star School District; *
Lake Hamilton School District, *
*
Defendants - Appellants, *
*
Raymond Simon, in his Official *
-3-
Capacity as Director of the Arkansas *
Department of Education, *
*
Defendant. *
___________
Submitted: March 10, 2003
Filed: March 8, 2004
___________
Before HANSEN1, Chief Judge, RILEY and MELLOY, Circuit Judges.
___________
MELLOY, Circuit Judge.
These consolidated appeals involve the application of an Arkansas statute that
requires the immunization of Arkansas schoolchildren against Hepatitis B. Ark. Code
Ann. § 6-18-702(a).2 The district courts3 held that the statute's religious beliefs
1
The Honorable David R. Hansen stepped down as Chief Judge of the United
States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit at the close of business on March 31,
2003. He has been succeeded by the Honorable James B. Loken.
2
Ark. Code Ann. § 6-18-702 (2002), as in effect at the time of the district
courts’ decisions, provided:
(a) Except as otherwise provided by law, no infant or child shall be
admitted to a public or private school or child care facility of this state
who has not been age appropriately immunized from poliomyelitis,
diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, red (rubeola) measles, rubella, and other
diseases as designated by the State Board of Health, as evidenced by a
certificate of a licensed physician or a public health department
acknowledging the immunization.
....
(d)(2) The provisions of this section shall not apply if the parents or
legal guardian of that child object thereto on the grounds that
-4-
exemption violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment because the
exemption applied only to the “religious tenets and practices of a recognized church
or religious denomination.” Ark. Code Ann. § 6-18-702(d)(2) (2000) (emphasis
added). The district courts then determined that the exemption was severable from
the remainder of the statute. Construing the statute without the exemption, the district
courts held that the underlying immunization requirement survived Due Process,
Equal Protection, Free-Exercise, and Hybrid Rights challenges. On appeal, we do not
reach the merits of the claims raised below because the Arkansas legislature rendered
these issues moot when it broadened the exemption to encompass philosophical as
well as religious objections. See Ark. Code Ann. § 6-18-702(d)(4)(A) (2003).
Instead, we set forth the general history of these matters, explain the changes in
Arkansas law, and address the issue of mootness as discussed by the parties in their
supplemental, post-argument briefs.
I. Background
Because the issues in this case do not turn on the specific facts that differentiate
each individual party, we forgo a detailed discussion of the individual parties and the
specific facts that gave rise to their actions. Instead, we describe the parties generally
immunization conflicts with the religious tenets and practices of a
recognized church or religious denomination of which the parent or
guardian is an adherent or member.
(Emphasis added). The State Board of Health, in cooperation with the Board of
Education, on July 27, 2000, promulgated regulations that listed Hepatitis B as one
of the designated diseases under Ark. Code Ann. § 6-18-702(a).
3
The Honorable Robert T. Dawson, United States District Judge for the
Western District of Arkansas (Case No. 02-3035), and the Honorable Susan Webber
Wright, United States District Judge for the Eastern District of Arkansas (Case Nos.
02-3094, 02-3104, and 02-3195).
-5-
by their respective roles. The first group of parties consists of Arkansas
schoolchildren who were excluded from school or threatened with exclusion from
school for failure to receive immunization treatments for Hepatitis B. This group also
includes the parents of the schoolchildren (collectively, the “Schoolchildren”). The
second group consists of the Arkansas Departments of Health and Education and
various officials from these two departments, including Fay W. Boozman, the
Director of the Arkansas Department of Health (collectively, the “Officials”). The
final group consists of various individual Arkansas school districts (collectively, the
“School Districts”). In each case, the Schoolchildren brought suit against the School
Districts and/or the Officials.
The Schoolchildren in each case alleged that they held sincere religious beliefs
that prevented each child from being immunized for Hepatitis B. The Schoolchildren
did not belong to any recognized religion that had as one of its tenets opposition to
immunization for Hepatitis B. We, like the district courts, assume for the purposes
of our analysis that the Schoolchildren held sincere religious beliefs against Hepatitis
B vaccination.
In Case No. 02-3035 the Schoolchildren argued that the religious beliefs
exemption violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment by permitting
exemptions only for beliefs associated with a recognized religion. They also argued
that the underlying immunization requirement violated their Equal Protection and
Due Process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. The district court accepted the
Schoolchildren's arguments regarding the Establishment Clause challenge, but held
the religious beliefs exemption severable. The district court then rejected the
Schoolchildren’s Equal Protection and Due Process challenges to the underlying
immunization requirement, finding that the Supreme Court had repeatedly ruled such
requirements permissible. See Zucht v. King, 260 U.S. 174, 176-77 (1922); Jacobson
v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11, 27-29 (1905). Accordingly, the district court
preserved the immunization requirement but severed the exemption.
-6-
Noting the hollow nature of the Schoolchildren's victory, the district court
stated:
Our holding does not afford relief of any real value to the Plaintiff
because his daughter remains subject to receiving the required shots as
a condition of attending school within the state of Arkansas. This
decision will also be of understandable concern to those who previously
enjoyed the immunization exemption as adherents or members of a
recognized church or religious denomination. However, the recourse of
both groups is to communicate their concerns to the Arkansas
Legislature, for it is within the province of the legislature and not this
Court to enact a religious exemption provision that comes within
constitutional boundaries.
In Case No. 02-3104, the Schoolchildren brought suit against the Officials and
School Districts. The district court adopted the analysis of the earlier opinion and,
in addition, set forth a separate analysis to conclude that the religious beliefs
exemption was unconstitutional and severable. The district court rejected the
Schoolchildren's argument that the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause
demanded a compelling interest analysis of the compulsory immunization
requirement. Instead, the district court found that the statute was a neutral statute of
general applicability that did not target religious beliefs. The district court also
rejected the argument that other constitutional rights, such as, inter alia, a parent's
right to control a child's education, reinforced the underlying Free Exercise Rights
challenge and mandated the application of compelling interest review under a Hybrid
Rights analysis. See, e.g., Employment Div., Oregon Dep’t of Human Res. v. Smith,
494 U.S. 872, 881 (1990) (discussing the application of compelling interest review
in cases that involve alleged First Amendment violations in combination with other
alleged constitutional violations). Finally, the district court rejected a Substantive
Due Process challenge under the Fourteenth Amendment in which the Schoolchildren
alleged that the right to refuse medical treatment was a fundamental liberty interest
that mandated compelling interest review of the compulsory immunization statute.
-7-
In Case No. 02-3094, the Schoolchildren brought suit against the Officials and
the School Districts and argued issues similar to those described above. In addition,
the Schoolchildren argued that because the compulsory immunization statute
provided individualized exemptions for secular purposes, such as medical exigencies,
a general religious exemption was necessary to avoid a Free Exercise violation. The
district court rejected these arguments.
Finally, Case No. 02-3195 involves a cross-appeal from two of the School
Districts, the Morningstar and Lake Hamilton School Districts. The Morningstar and
Lake Hamilton School Districts moved for dismissal arguing that they were involved
in no justiciable case or controversy with the Schoolchildren. Pointing to the fact that
the relevant Arkansas statutes and rules provide for criminal sanctions against school
officials who fail to enforce the immunization requirements, the Morningstar and
Lake Hamilton School Districts characterized themselves as disinterested bystanders
caught in the crossfire between the Schoolchildren and the Officials. See Ark. Code
Ann. § 6-18-702(c)(2)(B) (2000) (“Any school official, parent, or guardian violating
the regulations shall be subject to the penalties imposed herein.”); Id. § 6-18-702(e)
(2000) (“any person found guilty of violating the provisions of this section or the
regulations promulgated by the State Board of Education or the division for the
enforcement hereof shall be guilty of a misdemeanor.”). The district court rejected
the motion to dismiss, finding that the Lake Hamilton and Morningstar School
Districts were proper parties to the litigation.
After obtaining jurisdiction, we entered a temporary stay to permit the non-
immunized Schoolchildren to attend school pending resolution of their appeals. After
oral arguments, we noted that the Schoolchildren had followed the district court’s
suggestion and communicated their concerns to the Arkansas legislature. As a result,
the Arkansas legislature had amended the exemption portion of the statute to omit
reference to “recognized” religions and to provide broader exemptions based on
-8-
“religious or philosophical beliefs.” Id. § 6-18-702 (d)(4)(A) (2003).4 It appeared,
4
Ark. Code Ann. § 6-18-702 (d)(4) provides:
(A) The provisions of this section shall not apply if the parents or legal
guardian of that child object thereto on the grounds that immunization
conflicts with the religious or philosophical beliefs of the parent or
guardian.
(B) The parents or legal guardian of the child shall complete an annual
application process developed in the rules and regulations of the
Department of Health for medical, religious, and philosophical
exemptions.
(C) The rules and regulations developed by the Department of Health for
medical, religious, and philosophical exemptions shall include, but not
be limited to:
(i) A notarized statement requesting a religious, philosophical, or
medical exemption from the Department of Health by the parents or
legal guardian of the child regarding the objection;
(ii) Completion of an educational component developed by the
Department of Health that includes information on the risks and
benefits of vaccination;
(iii) An informed consent from the parents or guardian that shall
include a signed statement of refusal to vaccinate based on the
Department of Health’s refusal-to-vaccinate form; and
(iv) A signed statement of understanding that:
(a) At the discretion of the Department of Health, the
unimmunized child or individual may be removed from day care
or school during an outbreak if the child or individual is not fully
vaccinated; and
-9-
however, that the broadened exemption was not yet in force because the Arkansas
Department of Health had not passed necessary implementing regulations and the
amended statute specifically prohibited the granting of exemptions prior to passage
of the implementing regulations. See Id. § 6-18-702 (d)(4)(D). Accordingly, it was
not clear whether any Schoolchildren would be excluded from school in the absence
of our temporary stay.
We directed the parties to submit supplemental briefs to address whether the
anticipated availability of a broadened exemption mooted the underlying challenges
to the immunization requirement. Subsequently, the Arkansas Department of Health
passed the necessary implementing regulations.5 No claims under the newly amended
exemption are before the court at this time, and no Schoolchildren claim to have been
(b) The child or individual shall not return to school until the
outbreak has been resolved and the Department of Health
approves the return to school.
(D) No exemptions may be granted under this subdivision (d)(4) until
the application process has been implemented by the Department of
Health and completed by the applicant.
5
Rules and Regulations Pertaining to Immunization Requirements, § IV(A), (C)
and (D), slip at 4-5, at http://www.healthyarkansas.com/rules_regs/immunization
_requirements_2003.pdf (promulgated in part under the authority of Ark. Code Ann.
§ 6-18-702, signed by Governor Mike Huckabee on July 31, 2003). The relevant
provisions of the new exemption requirement require religious and philosophical
objectors to complete an annual application, sign a notorized statement claiming
conflict with religious or philosophical beliefs, complete an educational component
regarding the risks and benefits of vaccination, and sign a statement of informed
consent for the exclusion of a non-immunized child from school in the event of an
outbreak.
-10-
denied the benefit of the new exemption under the amended statute and the new,
implementing regulations.
II. Analysis
We first address the basic question of any mootness analysis: whether the
plaintiffs still hold a personal interest in the outcome of the action or whether
changed circumstances already provide the requested relief and eliminate the need for
court action. Next we address exceptions to the mootness doctrine, namely, whether
the controversy of the present cases is one that is likely to recur but evades review
and whether the Arkansas legislature’s amendment of the statute is merely a voluntary
cessation of challenged conduct that is insufficient to protect the Schoolchildren on
an ongoing basis. Finally, we do not address the Schoolchildren’s newly raised
challenges to certain procedural requirements of the new statute and regulations
because such challenges are not ripe for review.
A. Mootness
“Under Article III of the Constitution, federal courts ‘may adjudicate only
actual, ongoing cases or controversies.’” National Right to Life Political Action
Comm. v. Connor, 323 F.3d 684, 689 (8th Cir. 2003) (quoting Lewis v. Continental
Bank Corp., 494 U.S. 472, 477 (1990)). Various doctrines, including the doctrine of
mootness, provide the tools used to determine whether a plaintiff presents a
justiciable case or controversy. Our court has stated:
The Supreme Court has repeatedly described the mootness doctrine as
“the doctrine of standing set in a time frame: The requisite personal
interest that must exist at the commencement of the litigation (standing)
must continue throughout its existence (mootness).” Friends of the
Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Envtl. Servs. (TOC), Inc., 538 U.S. 167, 189
(2000) (citations omitted). Thus, “[w]e do not have jurisdiction over
-11-
cases in which ‘due to the passage of time or a change in circumstances,
the issues presented . . . will no longer be ‘live’ or the parties will no
longer have a legally cognizable interest in the outcome of the
litigation.’” Van Bergen v. Minnesota, 59 F.3d 1541, 1546 (8th Cir.
1995) (quoting Arkansas AFL-CIO v. FCC, 11 F.3d 1430, 1435 (8th
Cir. 1993) (en banc)).
National Right to Life Political Action Comm., 323 F.3d at 691. The first question
we address, then, is whether the current litigation still presents to the Schoolchildren
an opportunity for redress or whether the Schoolchildren have received the entirety
of their requested relief from the Arkansas legislature and, therefore, no longer
possess a personal interest in the litigation.
In each of the appealed cases, the Schoolchildren sought an exemption to allow
them to attend public school in Arkansas without receiving immunization against
Hepatitis B. Review of the amended immunization statute and its implementing
regulations make clear that the statutory exemption now available to all the individual
Schoolchildren provides precisely this relief. The Schoolchildren point to no other
relief that they requested in the lower courts. Instead, they argue that an exception
to the mootness doctrine applies and that we must address the merits of their cases to
eliminate the risk that Arkansas might later repeal the newly enacted exemption
provision. Further, they argue that the new exemption provision itself is
unconstitutional because it discriminates against religious objectors and imposes
undue burdens through the exemption application process.6 These arguments,
however, do not speak to the underlying issue of mootness. Looking, as we must, at
the relief requested and the scope of the relief made available by the Arkansas
6
The Schoolchildren also argued against mootness on the grounds that, at the
time of supplemental briefing, the implementing regulations were open for comment
and, therefore, not yet effective. This argument, however, was transitory and became
irrelevant on July 31, 2003 when the governor of Arkansas signed the implementing
regulations.
-12-
legislature, and finding no further relief that might be appropriate or available, it is
clear that the Schoolchildren no longer present a live case or controversy. Their
claims are moot.
B. Exceptions to Mootness
Notwithstanding this finding of mootness, we may still decide a case on its
merits if the controversy in the case is “capable of repetition yet evad[es] review.”
Arkansas AFL-CIO v. F.C.C., 11 F.3d 1430, 1435 (8th Cir. 1993) (en banc). One
condition that must exist before this exception applies is “a reasonable expectation
that the same complaining party will be subject to the same action again.” Van
Bergen v. Minnesota, 59 F.3d 1541, 1547 (8th Cir. 1995). The Schoolchildren argue
that this exception applies because Arkansas voluntarily ceased the challenged action
when it amended the immunization statute, and, therefore, might repeal the new
exemption provision at any time if not prohibited from doing so by court order. In
advancing this argument, however, the Schoolchildren speculate as to a mere
theoretical possibility. A speculative possibility is not a basis for retaining
jurisdiction over a moot case. Id. (“The party need not show with certainty that the
situation will recur, but a mere physical or theoretical possibility is insufficient to
overcome the jurisdictional hurdle of mootness.”).
Review of the facts makes clear the speculative nature of the Schoolchildren’s
argument. The Arkansas legislature promptly acted to provide a broadened
exemption for philosophical and religious objectors as well as objectors who claimed
medical necessity. The legislature took this action even though the outstanding
district court decisions held the existing statute constitutional even without a religious
exemption. The legislature took this action not only to protect the Schoolchildren,
but also to protect additional children not involved in this litigation who had received
exemptions under the earlier, unconstitutional exemption provision. These additional
children, like the Schoolchildren, would have been subject to exclusion from school
-13-
under the district courts’ decisions. Simply put, the legislature acted quickly for the
benefit of the Schoolchildren and other citizens of Arkansas to replace the stricken
exemption provision with an exemption it believed would pass constitutional muster.
In providing relief for philosophical objectors as well as eliminating the requirement
that religious objectors belong to a “recognized religion,” the legislature provided
relief greater than that requested in the present litigation.
The Department of Health also acted quickly by passing regulations before the
start of a new school year. In sum, we find nothing to suggest a likelihood that
Arkansas might repeal its exemption or that Arkansas voluntarily ceased the
challenged behavior merely to thwart our jurisdiction. With no “reasonable
expectation” that the Schoolchildren will again face forced immunization for
Hepatitis B without the possibility of exemption, the exception to the mootness
doctrine does not apply.
The Schoolchildren argue not only that the general mootness exception applies,
but also that, because the state voluntarily altered its own laws, the specialized
exception for voluntary cessation applies. City of Mesquite v. Aladdin’s Castle, Inc.,
455 U.S. 283, 289 (1982) (“It is well settled that a defendant’s voluntary cessation of
a challenged practice does not deprive a federal court of its power to determine the
legality of the practice.”). This exception, however, is merely a specialized form of
the general exception discussed above and provides no basis for retaining jurisdiction
in the present case. “[T]he standard we have announced for determining whether a
case has been mooted by the defendant’s voluntary conduct is stringent: ‘a case
might become moot if subsequent events made it absolutely clear that the allegedly
wrongful behavior could not reasonably be expected to recur.’” Young v. Hayes, 218
F.3d 850, 852 (8th Cir. 2000) (quoting United States v. Concentrated Phosphate
Export Ass’n, 393 U.S. 199, 203 (1968)). As explained above, there is no basis on
which to conclude that the challenged behavior–mandatory immunization against
Hepatitis B without the availability of an exemption–might reasonably be expected
to recur.
-14-
Finally, we reject the Schoolchildren’s new challenges to the procedural
requirements of the amended legislation and the accompanying implementing
regulations. These requirements include an annual exemption application,
submission of a notorized statement to request the exemption, completion of an
educational component that “includes information on the risks and benefits of
vaccination,” submission of a signed informed consent statement regarding refusal
to vaccinate, and submission of a signed statement authorizing the Department of
Health to exclude non-immunized children from school during the presence of an
outbreak of a covered disease. See Ark.Code Ann. §6-18-702(4)(A) (2003). The
Schoolchildren conceded during the course of these proceedings that a state may
exercise its police power to exclude non-immunized children from public schools
during an actual emergency, such as an outbreak. Further, none of the procedural
requirements of the amended statute and new regulations empowers Officials to
assess the merits of the Schoolchildren’s beliefs, and the requirements for religious
objectors mirror those for philosophical objectors. Finally, the basis of their
challenges to the educational components and application requirements are not
entirely clear as these requirements apply equally to philosophical objectors as well
as religious objectors.
We need not resolve these challenges, however, because any challenges to the
procedural requirements are not yet ripe. To the extent the Schoolchildren challenge
the educational component or other aspects of the application process under the new
exemption, their claims are speculative and involve no concrete injury–no
Schoolchildren have applied for nor been denied exemption under the new statute.
The purpose of the ripeness doctrine is “to prevent the courts, through avoidance of
premature adjudication, from entangling themselves in abstract disagreements over
administrative policies, and also to protect the agencies from judicial interference
until an administrative decision has been formalized and its effects felt in a concrete
way by the challenging parties.” Abbot Labs. v. Gardner, 387 U.S. 136, 148-49
(1967). Were we to address the newly enacted exemption statute and regulations
before first giving the Department of Health the opportunity to work with the
-15-
Schoolchildren, we would inappropriately and prematurely entangle the court in an
abstract disagreement.
In Case Nos. 02-3035, 02-3094, 02-3104, and 02-3195 we dismiss all pending
claims as moot and all newly raised challenges as unripe for review.
______________________________
-16-
| {
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INTRODUCTION {#sec1-1}
============
Bonding of composite resin to dentin has always been a challenge for the clinicians. Although there is an improvement in handling and bonding characteristics of the newer dental materials,\[[@ref1][@ref2]\] the collagen structure and stability of the dentin bond strength are still a challenge. Studies have proved that collagen in the hybrid layer is affected by enzymatic degradation, leading to bond failure over time.\[[@ref3][@ref4]\]
Collagen fibrils in tissue are stabilized by lysyl oxidase-mediated covalent intermolecular cross-linking.\[[@ref5]\] The biomechanical properties of type I collagen can be improved by introducing more cross-links within and/or between the fibrils with the treatment of specific chemical agents.
Grape seed extract, which is a naturally occurring cross-linker, mainly composed of proanthocyanidins (PAs), could be a good candidate to fulfill such role. It is a natural plant metabolite and showed to possess low toxicity and ability to induce exogenous cross-links.\[[@ref6]\] PA-based compounds can improve dentin collagen physical properties.\[[@ref7][@ref8]\] Another such important agent is ascorbic acid. It is an essentially required component in the synthesis of hydroxyproline and hydroxylysine in collagen. Hydroxyproline serves to stabilize the collagen triple helix. Hydroxylysine is necessary for the formation of the intermolecular crosslinks in collagen. It is believed that ascorbate modulates collagen production through its effect on prolyl hydroxylation.\[[@ref9]\] Hence, we can employ it as an effective chairside procedure to overcome the disadvantage of reduced bond strength of composite resin to dentin.
The present study was carried out to evaluate if collagen cross-linking agents such as PA and sodium ascorbate can affect the shear bond strength of composite resin bonded to the dentinal surfaces of the teeth.
The null hypothesis was that "there was no difference in shear bond strength of resin composite with dentin with or without treated with collagen cross-linking agent PA and sodium ascorbate."
SUBJECTS AND METHODS {#sec1-2}
====================
One hundred freshly extracted human permanent molars were used in this study with the following exclusion/inclusion criteria.
Inclusion criteria {#sec2-1}
------------------
Permanent molars with intact crownAll teeth should be free of caries, any visible discoloration, or crack and without any restoration.
Exclusion criteria {#sec2-2}
------------------
Teeth which did not meet our inclusion criteria were excluded from the study.
The roots of the specimens were mounted in self-cure acrylic resin, with occlusal surface parallel to the floor and extending 4 mm above the surface. Dentin surface was prepared with the help of slow-speed sectioning diamond disc under copious water supply and remove complete enamel portion and exposing the dentinal surface, then the surface of dentin was finished with wet 600 grit silicon carbide paper under running water to produce a standardized smear layer. After that, the dentinal surfaces of the specimens were acid etched with 35% phosphoric acid (SwissTec, COLTENE, Switzerland) as per manufacturers\' recommendation.
The specimens were randomly divided into three groups based on the surface treatment of dentin as follows:
Group I (*n* = 20) -- No dentin pretreatment was doneGroup II (*n* = 40) -- 10% sodium ascorbate pretreatment. This group was further divided into two subgroups based on the pretreatment time as follows:Subgroup IIa (*n* = 20) -- The etched dentin surface was treated with 10% sodium ascorbate solution for 5 min and rinsed with water, after which they were blot dried leaving a moist dentinal surface for bondingSubgroup IIb (*n* = 20) -- The etched dentin surface was treated with 10% sodium ascorbate solution for 10 min and rinsed with water, after which they were blot dried leaving a moist dentinal surface for bonding.Group III (*n* = 40) -- 6.5% PA pretreatment. This group was further subdivided into subgroups based on pretreatment time as follows:Subgroup IIIa (*n* = 20) -- The etched dentin surface was treated with 6.5% PA solution for 5 min and rinsed with water, after which they were blot dried leaving a moist dentinal surface for bondingSubgroup IIIb (*n* = 20) -- The etched dentin surface was treated with 6.5% PA solution for 10 min and rinsed with water, after which they were blot dried leaving a moist dentinal surface for bonding.
Bonding for composite resin build-up {#sec2-3}
------------------------------------
Before application of bonding agent, a transparent plastic tube (3 mm in diameter and 5 mm height) was placed on the prepared occlusal surface, and the outer diameter was delineated with lead pencil as a reference mark for the application of the bonding agent. Then, plastic tube was removed, and bonding agent (One Coat Bond SL, SwissTec, COLTENE, Switzerland) was applied according to the manufacturer\'s instructions. Then, it was cured with light-emitting diode light (Woodpecker, Guilin Woodpecker Medical Instruments Co., Ltd., China) for 30 s (according to manufacturer\'s instruction).
Composite resin buildup {#sec2-4}
-----------------------
Transparent plastic tube was then fixed manually on the prepared surface of each tooth. A microhybrid composite resin (SwisTec, COLTENE, Switzerland) was applied in five 1 mm layers, and each layer was photopolymerized for 40 s, reaching 5 mm in total height, during which the light was moved around the tube to assure curing of the entire composite resin cylinder. The plastic tube was then removed, and excess composite resin was removed using a polishing disc (Sof-Lex™; 3M Espe, St. Paul, MN, USA). The samples were then stored in distilled water at 37°C for 48 h.
Thermocycling and shear bond strength testing {#sec2-5}
---------------------------------------------
After 48 h, samples were transferred from distilled water to normal water at 37°C for 24 h and then thermocycled for 500 cycles between 5°C and 55°C with a dwell time of 30 s each and transfer time between two baths was 5 and 10 s.
After thermocycling, shear bond strength tests were performed on a universal testing machine (Unitek, 9450 PC, FIE, India) at a cross-head speed of 1 mm/min until the composite cylinder was dislodged from the tooth. Shear bond strength was calculated as the ratio of fracture load and bonding area, expressed in megapascals (MPa). The results were tabulated and subjected to statistical analysis.
RESULTS {#sec1-3}
=======
Obtained data analyzed and expressed in mean ± standard deviation (SD). Mean was compared by one-way analysis of variance and Tukey *post hoc* test *P* = 0.05 was taken as statistically significant.
The results obtained through statistical analysis depicted that dentin pretreatment significantly increases the shear bond strength of the composite resin with dentin; duration of application of pretreatment materials on dentin also plays a significant role \[Tables [1](#T1){ref-type="table"}-[3](#T3){ref-type="table"}\].
######
Shear bond strength in different groups irrespective of time of treatment
######
Shear bond strength in different groups taking time of treatment into consideration
######
Shear bond strength comparison between group/subgroup (Tukey\'s HSD test)
Mean difference was found to be maximum between Groups I and IIb and minimum between Groups IIIa and IIIb. All the between-group comparisons except between Groups IIIa and IIIb were significant statistically \[[Table 3](#T3){ref-type="table"}\]. On the basis of above evaluation, the following order of shear bond strength was observed in different groups/subgroups:
IIb \> IIa \> IIIb \~ IIIa \> I" with "IIb \> IIa \> IIIb \> IIIa \> I".
It was observed that shear bond strength values in Group I was of lower order, whereas shear bond strength values in Group II were of higher order. Shear bond strength values in Group III were of middle order.
In Group I, shear bond strength ranged from 13.14 to 17.00 MPa with a mean value of 15.36 and a SD of 1.16 MPa. In Group IIa, shear bond strength ranged from 16.31 to 23.07 MPa with a mean value of 20.09 and a SD of 1.87 MPa. In Group IIb, shear bond strength ranged from 18.74 to 29.99 MPa, with a mean value of 22.55 and a SD of 2.51 MPa. In Group IIIa, shear bond strength ranged from 12.36 to 20.26 MPa, with a mean value of 17.01 and a SD of 2.10 MPa. In Group IIIb, shear bond strength ranged from 17.11 to 20.66 MPa, with a mean value of 18.46 and a SD of 0.97 MPa \[[Table 2](#T2){ref-type="table"}\].
DISCUSSION {#sec1-4}
==========
The results obtained through statistical analysis depicted that sodium ascorbate and PA application before bonding significantly improve the bond strength of composite with dentin \[[Table 1](#T1){ref-type="table"}\]. The increase in bond strength in the present study may be attributed to improve dentin collagen stability, due to the higher number of collagen cross-links.
Matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) are such class of enzymes that are known to degrade collagen. These proteins are found in the dentin but more abundant on enamel--dentin junction and in the predentin.\[[@ref10]\] The MMPs converted from Pro-MMP which are trapped or bound in the dentin during its formation by lowering the pH to 4.5 or below.\[[@ref11][@ref12]\]
Application of self-etching adhesives (acidic resins) to dentin increases 14-fold in MMP enzyme activity.\[[@ref13]\]
Thus, adjunctive collagen pretreatment strategies have been proposed to improve dentin adhesion, through the use of agents that maintain the stability of collagen toward enzymatic degradation.\[[@ref14]\] These agents include the use of substances that are considered to be inhibitors of MMPs and cysteine cathepsins. Thus, pretreatment with collagen cross-linking agents can promise improvement in the bonding mechanism preserving the integrity of collagen hybrid layer.
Various natural as well as synthetic cross-linking agents such as glutaraldehyde, tannic acid, PA, genipin, and cocoa seed extract have been used to strengthen the hybrid layer and have shown positive results in improving the bond strength to significant levels.\[[@ref15][@ref16][@ref17]\]
Results of this study show that sodium ascorbate application significantly improves bond strength compared with control and PA application \[[Table 3](#T3){ref-type="table"}\].
In Group IIa (10% sodium ascorbate for 5 min), shear bond strength ranged from 16.31 to 23.07 MPa, with a mean value of 20.09 Mpa and a SD of 1.87 MPa.
In Group IIb (10% sodium ascorbate for 10 min), shear bond strength ranged from 18.74 to 29.99 MPa, with a mean value of 22.55 MPa and a SD of 2.51 MPa.
These results for the sodium ascorbate in the present study were found to be time dependent (*P* \< 0.001), whereas for PA difference was found to be insignificant (*P* = 0.096) \[Table [1](#T1){ref-type="table"} and [2](#T2){ref-type="table"}\].
The major action of the sodium ascorbate is in the stabilization of the collagen, as a cofactor of hydroxylation of proline and lysine.\[[@ref18]\] A study based on energy dispersive spectroscopy analysis has shown that calcium ion concentration after demineralization dropped from the 28.62 to 12.77% and increased to 15.99% after sodium ascorbate treatment for 10 min, With this may due to chemical interaction of sodium ascorbate with collagen fibres in dentine.\[[@ref19]\] However, shear bond strength of composite to deep dentin after treatment with 6.5% PA and 10% sodium ascorbate found the statistically significant better results with PA than the sodium ascorbate.\[[@ref20]\]
PAs, which form a complex subgroup of the flavonoid compounds, have been found in a wide variety of fruits, vegetables, flowers, nuts, seeds, and bark. PA from grape seed extract has been shown to safely and effectively cross-link collagen in both *in vitro* and *in vivo* models and also inhibit MMP activity.\[[@ref21][@ref22]\] Considering its wide spectrum of benefits and high biocompatibility, we have selected this agent for this study.
Studies done by Han *et al*. (2003) and Bedran-Russo *et al*. and found the improvement in ultimate tensile strength and shear bond strength, respectively, after pretreatment with PA.\[[@ref7][@ref8]\] These findings also corroborate with the results of these studies. A statistically significant improvement was seen after pretreatment with PA (*P* \< 0.001) \[[Table 1](#T1){ref-type="table"}\].
The proposed mechanisms for interaction between PA and proteins include covalent, ionic, hydrogen bonding, and hydrophobic interactions.\[[@ref7][@ref23]\]
In the present study, molars were selected since they are most commonly restored, due to high incidence of caries.
Therefore, validation and extension of our results await further investigations. The results of the *ex vivo* assays may not be directly comparable with the *in vivo* conditions, where all other parameters are to be considered. *In vivo* research is must to assess the clinical outcome and analysis of these agents so as to make out most of the benefits to the clinical adhesive dentistry.
CONCLUSIONS {#sec1-5}
===========
We can conclude that the treatment of dentinal surfaces with collagen cross-linking agent increases the shear bond strengths. Results for sodium ascorbate were found to be time dependent, whereas for PA, differences were nonsignificant.
Financial support and sponsorship {#sec2-6}
---------------------------------
Nil.
Conflicts of interest {#sec2-7}
---------------------
There are no conflicts of interest.
| {
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Central"
} |
Introduction
============
Sickle cell disease (SCD) is a genetic disorder in which polymerization of deoxygenated sickle hemoglobin (HbS) leads to decreased deformability of the normally flexible erythrocytes. These rigid sickle-shaped red blood cells (RBC) can occlude the microvasculature leading to the sudden onset of painful vaso-occlusive episodes (VOC).^[@b1-1050083],[@b2-1050083]^ After HbS deoxygenates in the capillaries, it takes some time (seconds) for HbS polymerization and the subsequent flexible-to-rigid transformation. If the transit time of RBC through the microvasculature is longer than the polymerization time, sickled RBC will lodge in the microvasculature.^[@b3-1050083]^ Any trigger that decreases microvascular blood flow will prolong the transit time, promoting the entrapment of sickled RBC, resulting in vaso-occlusion. This physiology of SCD, described decades ago,^[@b4-1050083],[@b5-1050083]^ is fundamental to understanding the triggering of VOC. Patients report that stress, cold, and pain itself can trigger the onset of VOC^[@b6-1050083]^ but the frequency of VOC is highly variable. To date, the mechanism of how such events might trigger regional vaso-occlusion has not been fully elucidated.
Psychological stress is an exacerbating factor in many chronic illnesses, such as SCD,^[@b7-1050083]--[@b10-1050083]^ coronary artery disease and myocardial ischemia.^[@b11-1050083],[@b12-1050083]^ Stress is significantly associated with increased pain intensity, reductions in social and physical activities and greater health care utilization.^[@b8-1050083],[@b13-1050083],[@b14-1050083]^ Day-to-day stressors have been associated with onset of pain and the course of VOC in SCD.^[@b9-1050083],[@b10-1050083]^ Stress is well-known to modulate autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity which in turn plays a major role in the regulation of regional blood flow.^[@b15-1050083]^ Interestingly, SCD children with greater mental-stress-induced autonomic reactivity had more severe clinical disease.^[@b16-1050083],[@b17-1050083]^ SCD subjects also have augmented ANS-mediated vasoconstriction in response to sighing, hypoxia, and pain.^[@b18-1050083]--[@b20-1050083]^ Therefore, autonomic dysregulation in SCD represents a plausible physiological link between mental stress and sickle RBC retention in the microvasculature.^[@b16-1050083],[@b18-1050083]--[@b21-1050083]^ Further understanding of this proposed mechanism of VOC triggering would not only help to predict disease manifestations, but would also open up opportunities for therapeutic intervention in disorders such as SCD in which preservation of microvascular blood flow is important.^[@b22-1050083]^
To address the role of mental stress in the physiology of SCD, we objectively quantified microvascular blood flow, measured by photoplethysmography, in response to standardized mental stress tasks in subjects with SCD and in controls. We also assessed cardiac ANS balance by analysis of heart rate variability in response to mental stress. We correlated photoplethysmogram-derived physiological indices with subjective indices of perceived stress assessed from standardized anxiety questionnaires. The aim of this study was to determine the relationship of peripheral and cardiac ANS responses with mental stress in SCD.
Methods
=======
The study was conducted under an institutional review board-approved protocol at the Children's Hospital Los Angeles with approved consent/assent. Twenty SCD subjects with Hb SS, S-β^0^, S-β^+^ or SC genotype and 16 age- and race-matched controls from the patients' family and friends were recruited.
Experimental setup and study protocol
-------------------------------------
All studies were performed in an ANS laboratory under strictly controlled settings.^[@b18-1050083]^ Neuropsychological stress was assessed at baseline using the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) questionnaire.^[@b23-1050083]^ The STAI Y-1 and Y-2 evaluate "anxiety at this moment, aka *state anxiety*" and "how people generally feel, aka *trait anxiety*", respectively.
Following 5 minutes of baseline recording, the stress induction protocol was presented through psychological software (E-prime 2.0, Psychology Software Tools, USA). The protocol consisted of a memory task (N-back)^[@b24-1050083]^ and a conflict test (Stroop),^[@b25-1050083],[@b26-1050083]^ presented in a randomized order, followed by a pain anticipation (PA) test ([Figure 1](#f1-1050083){ref-type="fig"}). During the N-back task, the subjects were asked to respond when the current letter matched the letter from n steps (n=zero, one, two, or three back) earlier in the sequence. During the Stroop task, the participants were asked to identify the font color of a word, not the written name of the word. We measured state anxiety between tasks. During the PA task, subjects read the following sentence on their computer screen: "You will receive a maximum pain stimulus in one minute. When you cannot tolerate the pain any longer, say STOP and the device will cool down to normal level immediately". However, no pain stimulus was actually applied.
{#f1-1050083}
Physiological measurements and analysis parameters
--------------------------------------------------
All the physiological monitoring sensors were attached to the subjects' left arm. Microvascular blood flow was measured using photoplethysmography (Nonin Medical Inc., USA) and laser Doppler flowmetry (Perimed, Sweden). Respiration (thoracic and abdominal bands, zRip DuraBelt, Philips), the electrocardiogram and continuous blood pressure (Nexfin, Amsterdam) were recorded.
Recorded data from all devices were exported for processing and analysis in MATLAB. The photoplethysmogram amplitude was normalized to its own 95^th^ percentile value during the full study. The average microvascular blood flow was calculated over the 5 min baseline period, the N-back, Stroop and PA tasks. The percent decrease in the amplitude of the photoplethysmogram or microvascular perfusion waveforms ([Figure 2](#f2-1050083){ref-type="fig"}; 2^nd^ and 3^rd^ signals, respectively) from the baseline mean was interpreted as a vasoconstriction response.^[@b18-1050083],[@b27-1050083]^
{#f2-1050083}
Cardiac autonomic balance was assessed by analysis of the R-to-R interval and heart rate variability^[@b19-1050083],[@b28-1050083],[@b29-1050083]^ during baseline and mental stress tasks. The following power spectral indices were calculated: low frequency power, reflecting a combination of cardiac sympathetic and parasympathetic activity; high frequency power, reflecting parasympathetic activity;^[@b29-1050083],[@b30-1050083]^ and the ratio of low frequency power to high frequency power, reflecting sympathovagal balance.^[@b30-1050083]^
Percent changes in mean microvascular blood flow and mean spectral indices from baseline to tasks were calculated. The Student *t*-test (or Wilcoxon sign rank) or χ^2^ test was used to test baseline group differences and task differences. Robust regression was used to correlate vasoconstriction response and state anxiety during the PA task. Repeated measures analysis of variance was used to test differences in N-back and Stroop sublevels and accuracy scores. All statistical analyses were performed using STATA/IC 14.1 (StataCorp LP, TX, USA) with nominal significance set at *P*≤0.05.
The methods are described in detail in the *Online Supplementary Methods S1*.
Results
=======
Data from a total of 20 SCD patients and 16 controls were analyzed. Transfused and non-transfused subjects with SCD were grouped together and healthy and sickle cell trait subjects (controls) were combined after it had been demonstrated that these factors were not statistically significant in the analyses. The percentage of HbS (HbS%) was considered to be zero in patients with sickle cell trait as the cellular distribution of HbS differs in sickle cell trait and does not contribute to sickling under the conditions of the experiments in this study, making the HbS% in sickle cell trait not comparable to that in transfused or non-trait sickle phenotypes. The subjects' characteristics are summarized in [Table 1](#t1-1050083){ref-type="table"}. Nine (45%) SCD subjects were on chronic transfusion, nine (45%) were being treated with hydroxyurea and two (10%) were not receiving either treatment. The characteristics of both groups were balanced except for hemoglobin concentration on the study day. Sixty-one percent of subjects had a level of education equivalent to high school or superior. Seventy-two percent reported that they had a high level of competitiveness on the visit screening questionnaire.
######
Population characteristics.
Vasoconstriction due to mental stress
-------------------------------------
As determined from the photoplethysmogram, there was a significant drop in microvascular blood flow during both cognitive tasks (N-back and Stroop, *P*\<0.0001) and the PA task (*P*\<0.0001) ([Figure 3](#f3-1050083){ref-type="fig"}). [Figure 2](#f2-1050083){ref-type="fig"} (signal 2) shows a typical response of vasoconstriction in one subject. The drop in microvascular blood flow from baseline was greater during the PA task than during the cognitive tasks. A similar vasoconstriction response was observed when the microvascular blood flow was assessed by laser-Doppler flowmetry. Subjects had higher anxiety scores immediately after completing the tasks than at baseline (STAI Y-1, mean difference=6; *P*=0.0007). Eighty-five percent of patients with SCD and 75% of controls showed vasoconstriction compared to baseline during at least one cognitive task. Eighty-five percent of SCD patients and 87.5% of controls had decreases in mean blood flow during the PA task. There was no difference in the magnitude of responses between individuals with SCD and controls. Demographic variables such as age, gender, race, number of days from last menstruation, and laboratory values were not associated with the magnitude of the vasoconstriction response.
{#f3-1050083}
The Stroop test caused greater vasoconstriction than the N-back task, irrespective of the order in which the tests were presented (*P*=0.019) ([Figure 3](#f3-1050083){ref-type="fig"}). Subjects who were randomized to perform the Stroop task first had greater anxiety responses than did the subjects who performed the N-back task first (mean difference=10; *P*=0.03). Overall the accuracy score was significantly lower for the Stroop task than for the N-back task in all subjects (mean score difference=25, *P*\<0.001).
The accuracy score for the Stroop and N-back tasks decreased as the difficulty increased from zero-back to three-back in the N-back task and from level one to level three in the Stroop task (*P*\<0.0001) ([Figure 4](#f4-1050083){ref-type="fig"}) but there was no further change in blood flow with increasing difficulty. Once the subjects manifested vasoconstriction, in comparison with baseline vascular tone, the vasoconstriction remained throughout the whole task regardless of the difficulty of the tasks.
{#f4-1050083}
Vasoconstriction response to perceived anxiety during pain anticipation
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
On robust regression, the effect of state anxiety on blood flow response was greater in SCD patients than in controls (*P*=0.03 for the interaction), suggesting that higher anxiety at baseline (STAI Y-1) in SCD subjects is associated with less change in blood flow (coefficient = −1.85, *P*=0.002) in response to pain anticipation ([Figure 5](#f5-1050083){ref-type="fig"}). State anxiety had no effect on change in blood flow in control subjects. To understand why SCD subjects would have less response with high anxiety, we looked at the baseline blood flow. We found that highly anxious subjects tended to have a lower mean baseline blood flow (*Online Supplementary Figure S1*), meaning they were already vasoconstricted at baseline, limiting them from further vasoconstriction. This trend was not seen among controls. (*Online Supplementary Figure S2A*, *B*: high-anxiety SCD responder and low-anxiety SCD responder).
{#f5-1050083}
Cardiac autonomic response
--------------------------
Since the ANS regulates blood flow and SCD subjects have dysautonomia,^[@b15-1050083],[@b28-1050083],[@b31-1050083],[@b32-1050083]^ we explored the effect of mental stress responses on cardiac autonomic balance. In com parison to the value at baseline, there was a significant decrease in R-to-R interval, signifying an increase in heart rate, during all tasks (*P*\<0.0001) ([Figure 6A](#f6-1050083){ref-type="fig"}). As for the microvascular blood flow response, the R-to-R interval was less during the Stroop task than during the N-back task (*P*=0.002).
![Autonomic nervous system responses to mental stress. (A) R-to-R interval (sec) and (B) high frequency power (sec^[@b2-1050083]^/Hz, shown on a log scale) in response to the N-Back and Stroop tasks in all subjects. There is a significant decrease in R-to-R interval and parasympathetic withdrawal during mental stress tasks compared to baseline. SE: standard error of mean; HFP: high frequency power.](10583.fig6){#f6-1050083}
There was significant parasympathetic withdrawal during the N-back and Stroop tasks as reflected by the drop in high frequency power (*P*=0.002 and *P*\<0.0001, respectively) ([Figure 6B](#f6-1050083){ref-type="fig"}) The Stroop task caused stronger parasympathetic withdrawal than the N-back task (*P*\<0.0001). There was more sympathetic activation during the Stroop test (low-to-high power ratio: *P*=0.03), but not during the N-back task. We did not analyze autonomic reactivity during the PA task because the 1-minute test period was not long enough to derive spectral indices.^[@b29-1050083]^
Discussion
==========
VOC is a significant complication of SCD and a major cause of morbidity and mortality.^[@b33-1050083]^ The frequency of VOC is related in part to hemoglobin-F content, white blood cell count, inflammatory status and other factors.^[@b34-1050083]--[@b36-1050083]^ However, there is still significant variability in crisis frequency among SCD subjects with otherwise similar hematologic status. Pain crises can be promoted by preceding dehydration, infection, injury, exposure to cold or emotional stress.^[@b37-1050083],[@b38-1050083]^ Much of the research in past decades has focused on adhesion and processes attributed to occlusion in the post-capillary venule, and to decreased flow due to nitric oxide depletion.^[@b39-1050083]^ While stress and cold are often mentioned, very little attention has been paid to decreased flow due to neurally induced vasoconstriction.^[@b32-1050083],[@b40-1050083]^ SCD patients undergo a tremendous amount of stress not only due to environmental challenges but also the illness-related stress of painful episodes, repeated medical procedures and life-threatening complications. Stress causes ANS hyperreactivity by enhancing the sympathetic nervous system and dampening the parasympathetic system in SCD subjects compared to non-SCD individuals.^[@b16-1050083],[@b17-1050083]^ Sympathetic and parasympathetic responses have been related to clinical vaso-occlusion in SCD, through ANS modulation of regional blood flow.^[@b15-1050083],[@b17-1050083]^ SCD is probably the best example of a disorder in which decreased microvascular perfusion can be directly related to the pathology of the disorder, because the increase in transit time from decreased blood flow promotes entrapment of rigid red cells in small vessels.^[@b3-1050083],[@b5-1050083]^ To our knowledge, this is the first study to quantify regional blood flow modulated by ANS reactivity under mental stress in SCD.
Our data show that experimental mental stress caused a decrease in regional blood flow in all participants. While we thought that SCD subjects would exhibit stronger vasoconstriction because of their hyperresponsiveness to sympathetically induced stimuli, such as sighing,^[@b28-1050083]^ we did not detect a difference in stress-induced vasoconstriction between SCD patients and controls. We did find a significantly higher anxiety response score (*P*=0.03) in subjects who were exposed to the more difficult mental stress test first (Stroop). We also found that the degree of vasoconstriction was proportional to the magnitude of the stress. Subjects reported that overall the Stroop task was more stressful: accuracy scores were lower and there was also a greater decrease in blood flow with this cognitive stressor task. However, different sublevels of difficulty within a task type did not correlate with levels of vasoconstriction. This finding suggests that consecutive stressful events could make SCD patients more vulnerable to vaso-occlusion. We think that variability in the vasoconstriction response to stress may account in part for differences in clinical severity among SCD patients who have the same hemoglobin phenotype. The frequency of VOC and intensity of pain are higher among patients found to have high anxiety and stress scores on standard psychological assessments.^[@b8-1050083],[@b41-1050083],[@b42-1050083]^ We tried to correlate the vasoconstrictive response with clinical severity. As our SCD patients were either on chronic transfusion or hydroxyurea, the number of VOC was too low to detect differences in this current relatively small sample.
Along with a strong vasoconstriction response, significant autonomic reactivity was seen in all subjects. The Stroop test was consistently more stressful, and induced greater vasoconstriction as well as greater autonomic reactivity. There was both sympathetic activation as well as parasympathetic withdrawal during this cognitive task. Mental stressors are known to influence autonomic function by sympathetic or parasympathetic tone alterations. Higher anxiety induces atherosclerosis via enhanced sympathetic modulation, increasing the risk of cardiovascular disease.^[@b43-1050083]^ In addition, mental stress and anxiety have been linked to impaired endothelial function via autonomic dysfunction.^[@b43-1050083]--[@b45-1050083]^ Endothelial function, quantified by flow mediated dilation, decreases as a result of mental stress tasks.^[@b46-1050083]^ Similarly, in SCD, a synergistic interaction between impaired local vascular function and the exaggerated neurally mediated vasoconstrictive response could further reduce peripheral blood flow, setting the stage for VOC.
Consistent with the findings of our previous study,^[@b18-1050083]^ anticipation of pain caused significant vasoconstriction and this response was quantitatively greater than that of the calibrated experimental stress tasks ([Figure 3](#f3-1050083){ref-type="fig"}). We do not have strong evidence to conclude that the presence of SCD alone influences mental stress-induced vasoconstriction but anxiety seems to be a modifying factor. Interestingly unlike control subjects, SCD subjects who were highly anxious had less vasoconstriction during the PA task and *vice versa*. We think that this pattern of response occurred because highly anxious subjects were already vasoconstricted at baseline and this limited the magnitude of further vasoconstriction. So the fact that SCD subjects have less change in the vasoconstriction response to the stressors than controls actually reflects their chronically vasoconstricted state. Although not statistically significant, the trend of lower baseline blood flow with high anxiety in SCD can be seen in *Online Supplementary Figure S1*, which also shows the significant variability in baseline measures. Photoplethysmogram and microvascular perfusion signals from Perimed do not have absolute units, so measurements made as percent changes from baseline are more reliable, basically correcting for baseline variability and allowing detection of the differences seen in [Figure 5](#f5-1050083){ref-type="fig"}. These findings may be related to pain catastrophization and increased psychophysical pain sensitivity due to frequent pain episodes.^[@b7-1050083],[@b47-1050083],[@b48-1050083]^ Over the years, pain catastrophization may increase the frequency of pain and severity of pain crises.^[@b47-1050083],[@b49-1050083]^ From a standpoint of neural physiology, repeated acute pain creates a central neural pathological pain connectome^[@b50-1050083]^ that leads to baseline chronic pain and chronic vasoconstriction. Although baseline blood flow was not statistically significantly lower, probably due to insufficient study power, we suspect that the above-described phenomenon is the explanation for our findings and warrants further study.
We showed that neurally mediated vasoconstriction is a biophysical marker of mental stress in SCD patients and controls. Mental stress has been identified as a trigger for pain crises in SCD and its connection with a decrease in microvascular perfusion seems to make a causal link to VOC. The probability of vaso-occlusion is predicted to be related to the relation between time to polymerization of deoxy HbS and microvascular flow.^[@b3-1050083],[@b5-1050083]^ Obviously, HbS is the major pathology in SCD. However, neurally mediated changes in microvascular flow certainly play a significant and unappreciated role. Individual variation in patterns of vasoconstriction with different ANS reactivity may offer a possible biological explanation for the variability in the frequency of VOC in SCD patients with similar hemoglobin phenotype. Identifying the high-risk individuals who show a phenotype of chronic vasoconstriction and repeated pain crises, and targeting them with neuro-modulatory cognitive-based therapies may improve vascular and neural physiology in SCD. In the primary stage of a crisis, implementing these learned cognitive-based therapies or distraction and relaxation techniques will help to improve the prognosis during acute pain. Microvascular flow in response to stress may also serve as an important surrogate endpoint for therapy in SCD and other diseases in which small vessel blood flow and reactivity are important.
Some limitations of this study should be acknowledged. One limitation was that the small sample size did not allow us to detect a difference in the magnitude of vasoconstriction between groups and correlate it with a clinical outcome such as VOC. Since the concept that mental stress causes vasoconstriction has not been studied in SCD, prior effect size was not known to permit sample size calculation. Another reason for lack of difference between groups is that over 90% of our patients are on hydroxyurea or chronic transfusion and thus clinical crises are relatively uncommon. Any real magnitude differences would be more likely to emerge in studies with larger samples and untreated patients. However, the primary aim of this study was to understand the changes in peripheral and cardiac responses to mental stress. The fundamental study design presented here was able to detect changes in physiological signals with millisecond accuracy and clearly showed vasoconstriction responses and ANS reactivity due to mental stress in all subjects. We think that the consequences of these findings are mechanistically related to the pathophysiology of sickle cell vaso-occlusion.
This work was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (U01 HL117718). The authors thank Justin Abbott for his contribution to the data collection.
Check the online version for the most updated information on this article, online supplements, and information on authorship & disclosures: [www.haematologica.org/content/105/1/83](http://www.haematologica.org/content/105/1/83)
| {
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Central"
} |
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Branding
Expand your own brand. There are many ways to start building your online presence. You can start by engaging more in social media, create a blog, give out tips and advice for free, and freely communicate with patients who reach out to you online. | {
"pile_set_name": "Pile-CC"
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One of the consequences of getting poisoned by a Basilisk is having to make a Valour roll of TN 14 to shake the Poison off after combat.
Heart of the Wild wrote:If the roll succeeds, the poison wears off. Otherwise, the character is permanently frozen and will wither and die within a few months (Elrond Halfelven, the master of Rivendell, is said to know of an antidote).
How do you guys go about the being frozen part? Would a person poisoned by a Basilisk be petrified and unable to do anything or would that person still have some control over its body? Because how do you get to Elrond when frozen and unable to move? Also, how would you make being frozen interesting for a player, especially when one is not able to do anything?
The one time my players encountered a basilisk, they managed not to get frozen. I would say that if a frozen character needed to get healing from Elrond, there would be a couple of options. The rest of the company could carry him there, or he could be left in a safe place (in the care of a patron or friendly NPC) and the rest of the company could make a rushed journey to Rivendell and back.
To keep things interesting for the player...
Hmm, he might not be frozen all at once. I would start by increasing the TN of all physical skills. Or he could also lose skill levels while frozen. So walking might take an athletics test at TN 16 the first week, TN 18 the second week. If the player has an Athletics skill of 3, it might temporarily drop to 2 when poisoned, then to 1 as the freezing kicks in, and eventually to a 0.
The cure is oddly specific. If the characters are in a Wilderland campaign and had never crossed over into Eriador, how would they know that Elrond has the cure? It could be managed, of course, but depending on how narrative arc, I might substitute Elrond with someone local, like Radagast.
Even Radagast isn't that local, given that the Wyrmholt is some 250 miles from Rhosgobel (Rivendell is strictly speaking closer though this requires crossing the Misty Mountains). It does mention Elrond in Rivendell specifically, but he need not be the only one who knows a cure. When my players past through the Wyrmholt on a diplomatic mission to the northern hillmen, the fought a nest of basilisk and one of them was poisoned and failed his Valour check.
He wanted the party to abandon the mission and return to Rhosgobel to have him cured, but a couple members of the Company argued (rightly, to my mind) that if there were locals in the area, they were likely to have a cure, or else they wouldn't be living near the Wyrmholt for very long... and it just so happens that Mab the Spinner lives at the edge of the Wyrmholt...
Mab seemed to me to be a prime person to know the cure and well placed besides, though with more enigmatic and less altruistic motives. I had her cure the character, though that character then reneged on the payment he had promised... but that's a story for another time... | {
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Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Jayam Subramanian and PG Distributed
Proofreaders
THE
POETICAL WORKS
OF
JOHNSON, PARNELL, GRAY,
AND
SMOLLETT.
With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and
Explanatory Notes
BY THE
REV. GEORGE GILFILLAN.
EDINBURGH
M.DCCC.LV.
CONTENTS.
JOHNSON'S POEMS.
The Life of Samuel Johnson
London: a Poem in imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal, 1738
The Vanity of Human Wishes. In imitation of the Tenth Satire of
Juvenal
PROLOGUES:--
Prologue Spoken by Mr Garrick, at the Opening of the Theatre-Royal,
Drury-Lane, 1747
Prologue Spoken by Mr Garrick before the 'Masque of Comus', acted
for the benefit of Milton's Grand-daughter
Prologue to Goldsmith's Comedy of 'The Good-Natured Man', 1769
Prologue to the Comedy of 'A Word to the Wise,' spoken by Mr Hull
ODES:--
Spring
Midsummer
Autumn
Winter
MISCELLANEOUS:--
The Winter's Walk
To Miss ***** on her giving the Author a Gold and Silk Network
Purse of her own Weaving
Epigram on George II. and Colley Cibber, Esq.
Stella in Mourning
To Stella
Verses Written at the Request of a Gentleman to whom a Lady had
given a Sprig of Myrtle
To Lady Firebrace, at Bury Assizes
To Lyce, an Elderly Lady
On the Death of Mr Robert Levett, a Practiser in Physic
Epitaph on Claude Phillips, an Itinerant Musician
Epitaph on Sir Thomas Hanmer, Bart.
On the Death of Stephen Grey, F.R.S., the Electrician
To Miss Hickman, Playing on the Spinnet
Paraphrase of Proverbs, chap. iv. verses 6-11
Horace, Lib. iv. Ode vii. Translated
On Seeing a Bust of Mrs Montague
Anacreon, Ode Ninth
Lines Written in Ridicule of certain Poems published in 1777
Parody of a Translation from the 'Medea' of Euripides
Burlesque on the Modern Versification of Ancient Legendary Tales:
an Impromptu
Epitaph for Mr Hogarth
Translation of the Two First Stanzas of the Song 'Rio Verde,
Rio Verde', printed in Bishop Percy's 'Reliques of Ancient
English Poetry': an Impromptu
To Mrs Thrale, on her Completing her Thirty-Fifth Year: a
Impromptu
Impromptu Translation of an Air in the 'Clemenza de Tito' of
Metastasia, beginning 'Deh! se Piacermi Vuoi'
Lines Written under a Print representing Persons Skaiting
Translation of a Speech of Aquileio in the 'Adriano' of Metastasio,
beginning, 'Tu Che in Corte Invecchiasti'
Impromptu on Hearing Miss Thrale Consulting with a Friend about a
Gown and Hat she was inclined to Wear
Translation of Virgil, Pastoral I
Translation of Horace, Book i. Ode xxii.
Translation of Horace, Book ii. Ode ix.
Translation of part of the Dialogue between Hector and
Andromache.--From the Sixth Book of Homer's Iliad
To Miss * * * * on her Playing upon a Harpsichord in a Room hung
with Flower-Pieces of her own Painting
Evening: an Ode. To Stella
To the Same
To a Friend
To a Young Lady, on her Birthday
Epilogue intended to have been Spoken by a Lady who was to
personate 'The Ghost of Hermione'
The Young Author
Friendship: an Ode. Printed in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1743
Imitation of the Style of Percy
One and Twenty
PARNELL'S POEMS.
The Life and Poetry of Thomas Parnell
Hesiod; or, the Rise of Woman
Song
Song
Song
Anacreontic
Anacreontic
A Fairy Tale, in the Ancient English Style
To Mr Pope
Health: an Eclogue
The Flies: an Eclogue
An Elegy to an Old Beauty
The Book-Worm
An Allegory on Man
An Imitation of some French Verses
A Night-Piece on Death
A Hymn to Contentment
The Hermit
GRAY'S POEMS.
The Life and Poetry of Thomas Gray
ODES:--
I. On the Spring
II. On the Death of a Favorite Cat
III. On a distant Prospect of Eton College
IV. To Adversity
V. The Progress of Poesy
VI. The Bard
VII. The Fatal Sisters
VIII. The Descent of Odin
IX. The Death of Hoel
X. The Triumph of Owen
XI. For Music
MISCELLANEOUS:--
A Long Story
Elegy written in a Country Churchyard
Epitaph on Mrs Jane Clarke
Stanzas, suggested by a View of the Seat and Ruins at Kingsgate,
in Kent, 1766
Translation from Statius
Gray on himself
SMOLLETT'S POEMS.
The Life of Tobias Smollett
Advice: a Satire
Reproof: a Satire
The Tears of Scotland. Written in the year 1746
Verses on a Young Lady playing on a Harpsichord and Singing
Love Elegy, in imitation of Tibullus
Burlesque Ode
Ode to Mirth
Ode to Sleep
Ode to Leven Water
Ode to Blue-Eyed Ann
Ode to Independence
Songs
THE POETICAL WORKS
OF
SAMUEL JOHNSON.
THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON.
We feel considerable trepidation in beginning a life of Johnson, not
so much on account of the magnitude of the man--for in Milton, and one
or two others, we have already met his match--but on account of the
fact that the field has been so thoroughly exhausted by former
writers. It is in the shadow of Boswell, the best of all biographers,
and not in that of Johnson, that we feel ourselves at present
cowering. Yet we must try to give a rapid account of the leading
incidents in Johnson's life, as well as a short estimate of his vast,
rugged genius.
Samuel Johnson was born at Lichfield, Staffordshire, on the 18th of
September 1709, and was baptized the same day. His father was Michael
Johnson, a bookseller and stationer, and his mother, Sarah Ford.
Samuel was the first-born of the family. Nathaniel, who died in his
twenty-fifth year, was the second and the last. Johnson very early
began to manifest both his peculiar prejudices and his peculiar
powers. When a mere child, we see him in Lichfield Cathedral, perched
on his father's shoulders, gazing at Sacheverel, the famous Tory
preacher. We hear him, about the same time, roaring to his mother, who
had given him, a minute before, a collect in the Common Prayer-Book to
get by heart as his day's task,--"Mother, I can say it already!" His
first teacher, Dame Oliver, a widow, thought him, as she well might,
the best scholar she ever had. From her he passed into the hands of
one Tom Brown, an original, who once published a spelling-book, and
dedicated it "to the Universe!"--without permission, we presume. He
began to learn Latin first with a Mr Hawkins, and then with a Mr
Hunter, head-master of Lichfield,--a petty tyrant, although a good
scholar, under whom, to use Gay's language, Johnson was
"Lash'd into Latin by the tingling rod."
At the age of fifteen, he was transferred to Stourbridge school, and
to the care of a Mr Wentworth, who "taught him a great deal." There
he remained twelve months, at the close of which he returned home, and
for two years lived in his father's house, in comparative idleness,
loitering in the fields, and reading much, but desultorily. In 1728,
being flattered with some promises of aid from a Shropshire gentleman,
named Corbet, which were never fulfilled, he went to Oxford, and was
entered as a commoner in Pembroke College. His father accompanied and
introduced him to Dr Adams, and to Jorden, who became his tutor,
recommending his son as a good scholar and a poet. Under Jorden's
care, however, he did little except translate Pope's "Messiah" into
Latin verse,--a task which he performed with great rapidity, and so
well, that Pope warmly commended it when he saw it printed in a
miscellany of poems. About this time, the hypochondriac affection,
which rendered Johnson's long life a long disease, began to manifest
itself. In the vacation of 1729, he was seized with the darkest
despondency, which he tried to alleviate by violent exercise and other
means, but in vain. It seems to have left him during a fit of
indignation at Dr Swinfen (a physician at Lichfield, who, struck by
the elegant Latinity of an account of his malady, which the sufferer
had put into his hands, showed it in all directions), but continued to
recur at frequent intervals till the close of his life. His malady was
undoubtedly of a maniacal cast, resembling Cowper's, but subdued by
superior strength of will--a Bucephalus, which it required all the
power of a Johnson to back and bridle. In his early days, he had been
piously inclined, but after his ninth year, fell into a state of
indifference to religion. This continued till he met, at Oxford, Law's
"Serious Call," which, he says, "overmatched" and compelled him to
consider the subject with earnestness. And whatever, in after years,
were the errors of his life, he never, from that hour, ceased to have
a solemn sense of the verities of the Christian religion.
At Oxford, he paid little attention to his regular tasks, but read, or
rather devoured, all the books he could lay his hands on, and began to
display his unrivalled conversational powers, being often seen
"lounging about the college gates, with a circle of young students
around him, whom he was entertaining with wit, keeping from their
studies, and sometimes rousing to rebellion against the college
discipline." He was, at this time, so miserably poor, that his shoes
were worn to tatters, and his feet appeared through them, to the
scandal of the Christ-Church men, when he occasionally visited their
college. Some compassionate individual laid a new pair at his door,
which he tossed away with indignation. At last,--his debts increasing,
his supplies diminishing, and his father becoming bankrupt,--he was,
in autumn 1731, compelled to leave college without a degree. In the
December of the same year his father died.
Perhaps there was not now in broad Britain a person apparently more
helpless and hopeless than this tall, half-blind, half-mad, and wholly
miserable lad, with ragged shoes, and no degree, left suddenly
fatherless in Lichfield. But he had a number of warm friends in his
native place, such as Captain Garrick, father of the actor, and
Gilbert Walmsley, Registrar of the Ecclesiastical Court, who would not
suffer him to starve outright. He had learning and genius; and he had,
moreover, under all his indolence and all his melancholy, an
indomitable resolution, which needed only to be roused to make all
obstacles melt before it. He knew that he was great and strong, and
would yet struggle into recognition. At first, however, nothing
offered save the post of usher in a school at Market-Bosworth, which
he occupied long enough to learn to loathe the occupation with all his
heart and soul, and mind and strength, but which he soon resigned, and
was again idle. He was invited next to spend some time with Mr
Hector, an early friend, who was residing in Birmingham. Here he
became acquainted with one Porter, a mercer, whose widow he afterwards
married. Here, too, he executed his first literary work,--a
translation of Lobo's "Voyage to Abyssinia," which was published in
1735, and for which he received the munificent sum of five guineas! He
had previously, without success, issued proposals for an edition of
the Latin poems of Politian; and, with a similar result, offered the
service of his pen to Edward Cave, the editor and publisher of the
_Gentleman's Magazine_, to which he afterwards became a leading
contributor.
Shortly after this, Porter dying, Johnson married the widow--a lady
more distinguished for sense, and particularly for _the_ sense to
appreciate his talents, than for personal charms, and who was twice
her husband's age. It does not seem to have been a very happy match,
although, probably, both parties loved each other better than they
imagined. He was now assisted by his wife's portion, which amounted to
L800, and opened a private academy at Echal, near Lichfield, but
obtained only three pupils,--a Mr Offely, who died early, the
celebrated David Garrick, and his brother George. At the end of a year
and a half, disgusted alike with the duties of the office, and with
his want of success in their discharge, Johnson left for London, with
David Garrick for his companion, and reached it with one letter of
introduction from Gilbert Walmsley, three acts of the tragedy of
"Irene," and (according to his fellow-traveller) threepence-halfpenny
in his pocket!
To London he had probably looked as to the great mart of genius, but
at first he met with mortifying disappointment. He made one
influential friend, however, in an officer named Henry Hervey, of whom
he said, "He was a vicious man, but very kind to me; were you to call
a dog Hervey, I shall love him." In summer he came back to Lichfield,
where he stayed three months, and finished his tragedy. He returned to
London in autumn, along with his wife, and tried, but in vain, to get
"Irene" presented on the stage. This did not happen till 1749, when
his old pupil David Garrick had become manager of Drury Lane Theatre.
In March 1738, he began to contribute to the _Gentleman's Magazine_, a
magazine he had long admired, and the original printing-place of
which--St John's Gate--he "beheld with reverence" when he first passed
it. Amidst the variety of his contributions, the most remarkable were
his "Debates in the Senate of Lilliput"--vigorous paraphrases of the
parliamentary discussions--of which Johnson finding the mere skeleton
given him by the reporters, was at the pains of clothing it with the
flesh and blood of his own powerful diction. In May of the same year
appeared his noble imitation of Juvenal, "London," which at once made
him famous. After it had been rejected by several publishers, it was
bought by Dodsley for ten guineas. It came out the same morning with
Pope's satire, entitled "1738," and excited a much greater sensation.
The buzzing question ran, "What great unknown genius can this be?" The
poem went to a second edition in a week; and Pope himself, who had
read it with pleasure, when told that its author was an obscure man
named Johnson, replied, "He will soon be _deterre_."
Famous as he had now become, he continued poor; and tired to death of
slaving for the booksellers, he applied, through the influence of Pope
and Lord Gower, to procure a degree from Dublin, that it might aid him
in his application for a school at Appleby, in Leicestershire. In
this, however, he failed, and had to persevere for many years more in
the ill-paid drudgery of authorship--meditating a translation of
"Father Paul's History," which was never executed--writing in the
_Gentleman's Magazine_ lives of Boeerhaave and Father Paul, &c., &c.,
&c.--and published separately "Marmor Norfolciense," a disguised
invective against Sir Robert Walpole, the obnoxious premier of the
day. About this time he became intimate with the notorious Richard
Savage, and with him spent too many of his private hours. Both were
poor, both proud, both patriotic, both at that time lovers of
pleasure, and they became for a season inseparable; often
perambulating the streets all night, engaged now, we fear, in low
revels, and now in high talk, and sometimes determined to stand by
their country when they could stand by nothing else. Yet, if Savage
for a season corrupted Johnson, he also communicated to him much
information, and at last left himself in legacy, as one of the best
subjects to one of the greatest masters of moral anatomy. In 1744,
Johnson rolled off from his powerful pen, with as much ease as a thick
oak a thunder-shower, the sounding sentences which compose the "Life
of Savage," and which shall for ever perpetuate the memory and the
tale of that "unlucky rascal." It is a wasp preserved in the richest
amber. The whole reads like one sentence, and is generally read at one
sitting. Sir Joshua Reynolds, meeting it in a country inn, began to
read it while standing with his arm leaning on a chimney-piece, and
was not able to lay it aside till he had finished it, when he found
his arm totally benumbed. In 1745, Johnson issued proposals for a new
edition of Shakspeare, but laid them aside for a time, owing to the
great expectations entertained of the edition then promised by
Warburton.
For several years, except a few trifles in the _Gentleman's Magazine_,
and his famous "Prologue delivered at the Opening of Drury Lane
Theatre," he seems to have written nothing. But in 1745 appeared the
prospectus of his most laborious undertaking, the "English
Dictionary." This continued his principal occupation for some years,
and, as Boswell truly observes, "served to relieve his constitutional
melancholy by the steady, yet not oppressive, employment it secured
him." In its unity, too, and gigantic size, the task seemed fitted for
the powers of so strong a man; and although he says he dismissed it at
last with "frigid tranquillity," he had no doubt felt its influence
during the time to be at once that of a protecting guardian and of an
inspiring genius. In 1749, he published his "Vanity of Human Wishes,"
for which he received the sum of fifteen guineas,--a miserable
recompense for a poem which Byron pronounces "sublime," and which is
as true as it is magnificent in thought, and terse in language. In the
same year, Garrick had "Irene" acted, but it was "damned" the first
night, although it dragged on heavily for eight nights more. When the
author was asked how he felt at its ill-success, he replied, "Like the
Monument!" How different from Addison, walking restlessly, and
perspiring with anxiety behind the scenes, while the fate of "Cato"
was hanging in the balance!
In 1750 he began his "Rambler," and carried it on with only tolerable
success till 1752. The world has long ago made up its mind on the
merits and defects of this periodical, its masculine thought and
energetic diction, alternating with disguised common-place and (as he
would have said himself) "turgescent tameness"--its critical and
fictitious papers, often so rich in fancy, and felicitous in
expression, mixed with others which exhibit "bulk without spirit
vast," and are chiefly remarkable for their bold, bad innovations on
that English tongue of which the author was piling up the standard
Dictionary. Many have dwelt severely on Johnson's inequalities,
without attending to their cause; that was unquestionably the "body of
death" which hung so heavily upon his system, and rendered writing at
times a positive torment. Let his fastidious critics remember that he
never spent a single day, of which he could say that he was entirely
well, and free from pain, and that his spirits were often so
depressed, that he was more than once seen on his knees, praying God
to preserve his understanding.
A great calamity now visited his household. This was the death of his
wife. She expired on the 17th of March 1752. She had been married to
him sixteen years; and notwithstanding the difference of age, and
other causes of disagreement, he seems to have loved her with
sincerity, and to have lamented her death with deep and long-continued
sorrow. He relaxed not, however, an instant in his literary labours,
continued the preparation of his Dictionary, and contributed a few
lively and vigorous papers to the "Adventurer"--a paper, edited by Dr
Hawkesworth, a writer of some talent, who did his best to tower up to
the measure and stature of the "Rambler."
During this time Johnson was filling his house with a colony of poor
dependants,--such as Mrs Anna Williams, a soured female poetaster; and
Levet, a tenth-rate medical peripatetic, who, as well as Hodge, the
great lexicographer's cat, and Francis Barber, his black servant, now
share in his immortality,--besides becoming acquainted with such men
of eminence as Reynolds, the inimitable painter; Bennet Langton, the
amiable and excellent country-gentleman; and Beauclerk, the smart and
witty "man about town." In 1755 (exactly a hundred years ago), Johnson
chastised Lord Chesterfield for his mean, finessing conduct to him
about his Dictionary, in a letter unparalleled, unless in "Junius,"
for its noble and condensed scorn,--a scorn which "burns frore," cold
performing the effect of fire--and which reached that callous Lord,
under the sevenfold shield of his conceit and conventionalism; visited
Oxford, and was presented by acclamation with that degree of M.A.
which he had left twenty-four years before without receiving; and, in
fine, issued his Dictionary, the work of eight years, and which,
undoubtedly, is the truest monument of his talent, industry, and
general capacity, if not of the richness of his invention, or of the
strength of his genius. He had obtained for it only the sum of L1575,
which was all spent in the progress of the work; and he was compelled
again to become a contributor to the periodical press, writing
copiously and characteristically to the _Gentleman's Magazine_, the
_Universal Visitor_, and the _Literary Magazine_. In 1756, he was
arrested for a debt of L5, 18s., but was relieved by Richardson, the
novelist. In the same year he resumed his intention of an edition of
Shakspeare, of which he issued proposals, and which he promised to
finish in little more than a year, although nine years were to elapse
ere it saw the light. In 1758, he began the "Idler," which reached the
103d No., and was considered lighter and more agreeable than the
"Rambler." He has seldom written anything so powerful as his fable of
"The Vultures." In 1759, his mother died, at the age of ninety,--an
event which deeply affected him. Soon after this, and to defray the
expenses of her funeral, he wrote his brilliant tale of "Rasselas," in
the evenings of a single week,--a rare feat of readiness and rapid
power, reminding one of Byron writing the "Corsair" in a fortnight,
and of Sir Walter Scott finishing "Guy Mannering" in three weeks.
There are perhaps more invention and more fancy in "Rasselas" than in
any of his works, although a gloom, partly the shadow of his mother's
death, and partly springing from his own temperament, rests too
heavily on its pages. He received one hundred guineas for the
copyright. In 1762, the Earl of Bute, both as a reward for past
services, and as a prepayment of future, bestowed on him a pension of
L300 for life. This raised a clamour against him, which he treated
with silent contempt.
In 1763 occurred what was really a most important event in Johnson's
life,--his acquaintance with Boswell,--who attached himself to him
with a devotion reminding one more of the canine species than of man,
sacrificed to him much of his time, his feelings, his very
individuality, and became qualified to write a biography, in which
fulness, interest, minute detail, and dramatic skill have never been
equalled or approached. In 1764, Johnson founded the celebrated
"Literary Club,"--perhaps the most remarkable cluster of distinguished
men that ever existed; and in 1765 he was created LL.D. by Trinity
College, Dublin. In 1765, too, he published his "Shakspeare;" and he
became intimate with the Thrales,--the husband being a great brewer in
Southwark; the wife, a lady of literary tastes, better known as Madame
Piozzi, the author of "Anecdotes of Dr Johnson;" both distinguished
for their attachment to him. He was often domesticated in their house
for months together. In 1767 he had an interview with George III., in
the library of the Queen's house; which, because Johnson preserved his
self-possession, and talked with his usual precision and power, has
been recounted by Boswell as if it had been a conversation with an
apostle or an angel. In 1770 he did some work for his pension in a
pamphlet entitled the "False Alarm," defending the conduct of the
Ministry in the case of the Middlesex election. In 1771 he wrote
another political pamphlet, entitled "Thoughts on the late
Transactions respecting Falklands' Islands;" and five years later
appeared "Taxation no Tyranny,"--an elaborate defence of the American
war. Johnson was too dogmatic, and too fiercely passionate for a good
political writer; and these productions added nothing to his fame, and
increased the number of his enemies.
In 1773 he fulfilled his long-cherished purpose of visiting Scotland
and the Hebrides, the story of which trip he told afterwards in his
usual rotund and massive style, and which was recounted with far more
liveliness and verisimilitude by Boswell. In 1774 he lost Goldsmith,
who had long been his friend, whom he had counselled, rebuked,
assisted, loved, and laughed at, and at whose death he was deeply
grieved. In 1775, the publication of his "Tour to the Hebrides"
brought him in collision with the _perfervidum ingenium Scotorum_, and
especially with James Macpherson, to whom Johnson sent a letter which
crushed him like a catapult. Macpherson, as well as Rob Roy, was only
strong on his native heath, and off it was no match for old Sam, whose
prejudices, passions, and gigantic powers, combined to make him
altogether irresistible in a literary duel. The same year, the
University of Oxford conferred on him the degree of Doctor of Laws;
and in the close of it, he paid a visit, along with the Thrales,
to Paris.
In 1776 nothing remarkable occurred in his history, unless it were the
interview which Boswell so admirably manoeuvred to bring about between
him and Jack Wilkes. Everybody remembers how well the bear and the
monkey for the time agreed, and how both turned round to snub the
spaniel, who had been the medium of their introduction to each other.
In 1777 he was requested by the London booksellers to prefix prefaces
to the "English Poets," part of which was issued the next year, and
the rest in 1780 and 1781, as the "Lives of English Poets." This work
has generally been regarded as Johnson's masterpiece. It nowhere,
indeed, displays so much of the creative, the inventive, the poetical,
as his "Rasselas," and many of his smaller tales and fictions. Its
judgments, too, have been often and justly controverted. The book is,
undoubtedly, a storehouse of his prejudices, as well as of his wisdom.
Its treatment of Milton, the man, for instance, is insufferably
insolent, although ample justice is done to Milton, the poet of the
"Paradise Lost." Some poetasters he has overpraised, and some true but
minor poets he has thrust down too far in the scale. But the work, as
a whole, is full of inextinguishable life, and has passages verging on
the eloquence and power of genius. A piece of stern, sober, yet broad
and animated composition, rather careless in dates, and rather cursory
in many of its criticisms, it displays unequalled force of thought,
and pointed vigour of style, and when taken in connexion with the age
of the author (seventy), is altogether marvellous. Truly there were
"giants in those days," and this was a Briareus.
For the details of his later life, his conversations, growing
weakness, little journeys, unconquerable love of literature, &c., we
must refer our readers to Boswell's teeming narrative. In 1783, he had
a stroke of palsy, which deprived him for a time of speech. That
returned to him, however, but a complication of complaints, including
asthma, sciatica, and dropsy, began gradually to undermine his
powerful frame. He continued to the last to cherish the prospect of a
tour to Italy, but never accomplished his purpose. Death had all along
been his great object of dread, and its fast approaches were regarded
with unmitigated terror. "Cut deeper," he cried to the physicians who
were operating on his limbs; "cut deeper; I don't care for pain, but I
fear death." He fixed all his dying hope upon the Cross, and
recommended Clarke's Sermons as fullest on the doctrine of a
Propitiation. He spoke of the Bible and of the Sabbath with the
warmest feelings of belief and respect. At last, on the 13th day of
December 1784, in the seventy-fifth year of his age, this great, good
man, whose fears had subsided, and who had become as a little child,
fell asleep in Jesus. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, on Monday,
December 20th, and his funeral was attended by the most distinguished
men of the day.
Perhaps no literary man ever exerted, during his lifetime, the same
personal influence as Samuel Johnson. Shelley used to call Byron the
"Byronic Energy," from a sense of his exceeding power. The author of
"Rasselas" was the "Johnsonian Energy;" and the demon within him, if
not so ethereal and terrible as Byron's, was far more massive, equally
strong, and in conversation, at least, much more ready to do his work.
First-rate conversation generally springs from a desire to shine, or
from the effort of a full mind to relieve itself, or from exuberant
animal spirits, or from deep-seated misery. In Johnson it sprang from
a combination of all these causes. He went to conversation as to an
arena--his mind was richly-stored, even to overflowing--in company his
spirits uniformly rose--and yet there was always at his heart a burden
of wretchedness, seeking solace, not in silence, but in speech. Hence,
with the exception of Burke, no one ever matched him in talk; and
Burke, we imagine, although profounder in thought, more varied in
learning, and more brilliant in imagination, seldom fairly pitted
himself against Johnson. He was a younger man, and held the sage in
too much reverence to encounter him often with any deliberate and
determined purpose of contest. He frequently touched the shield of the
general challenger, not with the sharp, but with the butt-end of his
lance. He said, on one occasion, when asked why he had not talked more
in Johnson's company, "Oh! it is enough for me to have rung the
bell to him!"
In all Johnson's works you see the traces of the triumphant
conversationalist--of one who has met with few to contradict, and
scarcely one to rival him. Hence the dogmatic strength and certainty,
and hence, too, the one-sidedness and limitation of much of his
writings. He does not "allow for the wind." He seems to anticipate no
reply, and to defy all criticism. One is tempted to quote the words of
Solomon, "He that is first in his own cause seemeth just, but his
neighbour cometh and searcheth him." No such searching seems ever to
have entered into Johnson's apprehensions. His sentences roll forth
like the laws of the Medes and Persians; his praise alights with the
authoritativeness of a sun-burst on a mountain; summit; and when he
blames, he seems to add, like an ancient doomster, the words, "I
pronounce for doom." With Burke, it was very different. Accustomed to
parliamentary debate in its vicissitudes and interchange--gifted, too,
with a prophetic insight into coming objections, which "cast their
shadows before," and with an almost diseased subtlety of thinking, he
binds up his answers to opponents with every thesis he propounds; and
his paragraphs sometimes remind you of the plan of generals in great
emergencies, putting foot soldiers on the same saddles with
cavalry--they seem to _ride double_.
This is not the place, nor have we room, to dilate on Johnson's
obvious merits and faults--his straight-forward sincerity--his strong
manly sense--the masterly force with which he grasps all his
subjects--the measured fervour of his style--the precision and
vivacity of his shorter sentences--the grand swell and sonorousness of
his longer; on his frequent monotony--his _sesguipedalia verba_--the
"timorous meaning" which sometimes lurks under his "boldest words;" or
on the deep _chiaroscuro_ which discolours all his pictures of man,
nature, society, and human life. We have now only to speak of his
poetry. That is, unfortunately, small in amount, although its quality
is so excellent as to excite keen regret that he had not, as he once
intended, written many more pieces in the style of "London," and the
"Vanity of Human Wishes." In these, the model of his mere manner is
Pope, although by Juvenal, his Latin original; but the matter
and spirit are intensely his own. In "London," satire seems swelling
out of itself into something stronger and statelier--it is the
apotheosis of that kind of poetry. You see in it a mind purer and
sterner than Dryden's, or Pope's, or Churchill's, or even Juvenal's;
"doing well to be angry" with a degenerate age, and a false, cowardly
country, of which he deems himself unworthy to be a citizen. If there
is rather too much of the _saeva indignatio_, which Swift speaks of as
lacerating his heart, it is a nobler and less selfish ire than his,
and the language and verse which it inspires are full of the very soul
of dignity. In the "Vanity of Human Wishes," he becomes one of those
"hunters whose game is man" (to use the language of Soame Jenyns, in
that essay on "The Origin of Evil," which Johnson, in the _Literary
Review_, so mercilessly lashed); and from assailing premiers,
parliaments, and the vices of London and England, he passes, in a very
solemn spirit, to expose the vain hopes, wishes, and efforts of
humanity at large. Parts of this poem are written more in sorrow than
in anger, and parts more in anger than in sorrow. The portraits of
Wolsey, Bacon, and Charles the Twelfth, are admirable in their
execution, and in their adaptation to the argument of the piece; and
the last paragraph, for truth and masculine energy is unsurpassed, we
believe, in the whole compass of ethical poetry. We are far from
assenting to the statement we once heard ably and elaborately
advocated, "that there had been no _strong_ poetry in Britain since
the two satires of Johnson;" and we are still further from classing
their author with the Shakspeares, Miltons, Wordsworths, and
Coleridges of song; but we are nevertheless prepared, not only for the
sake of these two satires, of his prologue, and of some other pieces
in verse, but on account of the general spirit of much of his prose,
to pronounce him potentially, if not actually, a great poet.
* * * * *
JOHNSON'S POEMS.
LONDON:
A POEM IN IMITATION OF THE THIRD SATIRE OF JUVENAL, 1738.
"--Quis ineptae
Tam patiens urbis, tam ferreus ut teneat se?"
--JUVENAL.
Though grief and fondness in my breast rebel
When injured Thales[1] bids the town farewell,
Yet still my calmer thoughts his choice commend;
I praise the hermit, but regret the friend;
Resolved, at length, from vice and London far,
To breathe in distant fields a purer air,
And, fix'd on Cambria's solitary shore,
Give to St David one true Briton more.
For who would leave, unbribed, Hibernia's land,
Or change the rocks of Scotland for the Strand? 10
There none are swept by sudden fate away,
But all whom hunger spares, with age decay:
Here malice, rapine, accident, conspire,
And now a rabble rages, now a fire;
Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay,
And here the fell attorney prowls for prey;
Here falling houses thunder on your head,
And here a female atheist talks you dead.
While Thales waits the wherry that contains
Of dissipated wealth the small remains, 20
On Thames's bank in silent thought we stood,
Where Greenwich smiles upon the silver flood;
Struck with the seat that gave Eliza[2] birth,
We kneel and kiss the consecrated earth;
In pleasing dreams the blissful age renew,
And call Britannia's glories back to view;
Behold her cross triumphant on the main,
The guard of commerce, and the dread of Spain;
Ere masquerades debauch'd, excise oppress'd,
Or English honour grew a standing jest. 30
A transient calm the happy scenes bestow,
And for a moment lull the sense of woe.
At length awaking, with contemptuous frown,
Indignant Thales eyes the neighbouring town.
Since worth, he cries, in these degenerate days,
Wants e'en the cheap reward of empty praise;
In those cursed walls, devote to vice and gain,
Since unrewarded science toils in vain;
Since hope but soothes to double my distress,
And every moment leaves my little less; 40
While yet my steady steps no staff sustains,
And life, still vigorous, revels in my veins,
Grant me, kind Heaven! to find some happier place,
Where honesty and sense are no disgrace;
Some pleasing bank, where verdant osiers play,
Some peaceful vale, with Nature's paintings gay,
Where once the harass'd Briton found repose,
And, safe in poverty, defied his foes:
Some secret cell, ye Powers indulgent! give;
Let--live here, for--has learn'd to live. 50
Here let those reign whom pensions can incite
To vote a patriot black, a courtier white;
Explain their country's dear-bought rights away,
And plead for pirates[3] in the face of day;
With slavish tenets taint our poison'd youth,
And lend a lie the confidence of truth.
Let such raise palaces, and manors buy,
Collect a tax, or farm a lottery;
With warbling eunuchs fill our silenced stage,
And lull to servitude a thoughtless age. 60
Heroes, proceed! what bounds your pride shall hold?
What check restrain your thirst of power and gold?
Behold rebellious virtue quite o'erthrown;
Behold our fame, our wealth, our lives your own!
To such the plunder of a land is given,
When public crimes inflame the wrath of Heaven.
But what, my friend, what hope remains for me,
Who start at theft, and blush at perjury,
Who scarce forbear, though Britain's court he sing,
To pluck a titled poet's borrow'd wing; 70
A statesman's logic unconvinced can hear,
And dare to slumber o'er the Gazetteer;[4]
Despise a fool in half his pension dress'd,
And strive in vain to laugh at Clodio's jest?
Others, with softer smiles, and subtler art,
Can sap the principles, or taint the heart;
With more address a lover's note convey,
Or bribe a virgin's innocence away.
Well may they rise, while I, whose rustic tongue
Ne'er knew to puzzle right, or varnish wrong, 80
Spurn'd as a beggar, dreaded as a spy,
Live unregarded, unlamented die.
For what but social guilt the friend endears?
Who shares Orgilio's crimes, his fortune shares.
But thou, should tempting villany present
All Marlborough hoarded, or all Villiers spent,
Turn from the glittering bribe thy scornful eye,
Nor sell for gold what gold could never buy--
The peaceful slumber, self-approving day,
Unsullied fame, and conscience ever gay. 90
The cheated nation's happy favourites see!
Mark whom the great caress, who frown on me!
London, the needy villain's general home,
The common-sewer of Paris and of Rome,
With eager thirst, by folly or by fate,
Sucks in the dregs of each corrupted state.
Forgive my transports on a theme like this--
I cannot bear a French metropolis.
Illustrious Edward! from the realms of day,
The land of heroes and of saints survey; 100
Nor hope the British lineaments to trace,
The rustic grandeur, or the surly grace;
But lost in thoughtless ease and empty show,
Behold the warrior dwindled to a beau;
Sense, freedom, piety, refin'd away,
Of France the mimic, and of Spain the prey!
All that at home no more can beg or steal,
Or like a gibbet better than a wheel;
Hiss'd from the stage, or hooted from the court,
Their air, their dress, their politics import; 110
Obsequious, artful, voluble, and gay,
On Britain's fond credulity they prey.
No gainful trade their industry can 'scape.
They sing, they dance, clean shoes, or cure a clap:
All sciences a fasting Monsieur knows,
And bid him go to hell, to hell he goes.
Ah! what avails it that, from slavery far,
I drew the breath of life in English air;
Was early taught a Briton's right to prize,
And lisp the tale of Henry's victories; 120
If the gull'd conqueror receives the chain,
And flattery prevails, when arms are vain?
Studious to please, and ready to submit,
The supple Gaul was born a parasite:
Still to his interest true where'er he goes,
Wit, bravery, worth, his lavish tongue bestows;
In every face a thousand graces shine,
From every tongue flows harmony divine.
These arts in vain our rugged natives try,
Strain out, with faltering diffidence, a lie, 130
And get a kick for awkward flattery.
Besides, with justice, this discerning age
Admires their wondrous talents for the stage:
Well may they venture on the mimic's art,
Who play from morn to night a borrow'd part;
Practised their master's notions to embrace,
Repeat his maxims, and reflect his face;
With every wild absurdity comply,
And view its object with another's eye;
To shake with laughter ere the jest they hear, 140
To pour at will the counterfeited tear;
And as their patron hints the cold or heat,
To shake in dog-days, in December sweat.
How, when competitors like these contend,
Can surly Virtue hope to fix a friend?
Slaves that with serious impudence beguile,
And lie without a blush, without a smile,
Exalt each trifle, every vice adore,
Your taste in snuff, your judgment in a whore,
Can Balbo's eloquence applaud, and swear 150
He gropes his breeches with a monarch's air.
For arts like these preferr'd, admired, caress'd,
They first invade your table, then your breast;
Explore your secrets with insidious art,
Watch the weak hour, and ransack all the heart;
Then soon your ill-placed confidence repay,
Commence your lords, and govern or betray.
By numbers here from shame and censure free,
All crimes are safe, but hated poverty.
This, only this, the rigid law pursues, 160
This, only this, provokes the snarling Muse;
The sober trader, at a tatter'd cloak,
Wakes from his dream, and labours for a joke;
With brisker air the silken courtiers gaze,
And turn the various taunt a thousand ways.
Of all the griefs that harass the distress'd,
Sure the most bitter is a scornful jest;
Fate never wounds more deep the generous heart,
Than when a blockhead's insult points the dart.
Has Heaven reserved, in pity to the poor, 170
No pathless waste or undiscover'd shore;
No secret island in the boundless main;
No peaceful desert yet unclaim'd by Spain?[5]
Quick let us rise, the happy seats explore,
And bear Oppression's insolence no more.
This mournful truth is every where confess'd,
SLOW RISES WORTH, BY POVERTY DEPRESS'D:
But here more slow, where all are slaves to gold,
Where looks are merchandise, and smiles are sold;
Where, won by bribes, by flatteries implored, 180
The groom retails the favours of his lord.
But hark! the affrighted crowd's tumultuous cries
Roll through the streets, and thunder to the skies:
Raised from some pleasing dream of wealth and power,
Some pompous palace, or some blissful bower,
Aghast you start, and scarce with aching sight
Sustain the approaching fire's tremendous light;
Swift from pursuing horrors take your way,
And leave your little ALL to flames a prey;
Then through the world a wretched vagrant roam, 190
For where can starving merit find a home?
In vain your mournful narrative disclose,
While all neglect, and most insult your woes.
Should Heaven's just bolts Orgilio's wealth confound,
And spread his flaming palace on the ground,
Swift o'er the land the dismal rumour flies,
And public mournings pacify the skies;
The laureate tribe in venal verse relate,
How Virtue wars with persecuting Fate;
With well-feign'd gratitude the pension'd band 200
Refund the plunder of the beggar'd land.
See! while he builds, the gaudy vassals come,
And crowd with sudden wealth the rising dome;
The price of boroughs and of souls restore,
And raise his treasures higher than before:
Now bless'd with all the baubles of the great,
The polish'd marble, and the shining plate,
Orgilio sees the golden pile aspire,
And hopes from angry Heaven another fire.
Could'st thou resign the park and play, content, 210
For the fair banks of Severn or of Trent,
There might'st thou find some elegant retreat,
Some hireling senator's deserted seat;
And stretch thy prospects o'er the smiling land,
For less than rent the dungeons of the Strand;
There prune thy walks, support thy drooping flowers,
Direct thy rivulets, and twine thy bowers;
And, while thy grounds a cheap repast afford,
Despise the dainties of a venal lord:
There every bush with Nature's music rings, 220
There every breeze bears health upon its wings;
On all thy hours Security shall smile,
And bless thine evening walk and morning toil.
Prepare for death, if here at night you roam,
And sign your will before you sup from home.
Some fiery <DW2>, with new commission vain,
Who sleeps on brambles till he kills his man;
Some frolic drunkard, reeling from a feast,
Provokes a broil, and stabs you for a jest.
Yet e'en these heroes, mischievously gay, 230
Lords of the street, and terrors of the way;
Flush'd as they are with folly, youth, and wine,
Their prudent insults to the poor confine;
Afar they mark the flambeaux's bright approach,
And shun the shining train, and golden coach.
In vain, these dangers past, your doors you close,
And hope the balmy blessings of repose:
Cruel with guilt, and daring with despair,
The midnight murderer bursts the faithless bar;
Invades the sacred hour of silent rest, 240
And leaves, unseen, a dagger in your breast.
Scarce can our fields, such crowds at Tyburn die,
With hemp the gallows and the fleet supply.
Propose your schemes, ye senatorian band!
Whose ways and means support the sinking land,
Lest ropes be wanting in the tempting spring
To rig another convoy for the king.[6]
A single jail, in Alfred's golden reign,
Could half the nation's criminals contain;
Fair Justice then, without constraint adored, 250
Held high the steady scale, but sheathed the sword;
No spies were paid, no special juries known,
Blest age! but, ah! how different from our own!
Much could I add--but see the boat at hand,
The tide retiring, calls me from the land:
Farewell!--When, youth, and health, and fortune spent
Thou fliest for refuge to the wilds of Kent;
And, tired like me with follies and with crimes,
In angry numbers warn'st succeeding times,
Then shall thy friend, nor thou refuse his aid, 260
Still foe to vice, forsake his Cambrian shade;
In Virtue's cause once more exert his rage,
Thy satire point, and animate thy page.
[Footnote 1: 'Thales:' supposed to refer to Savage, who intended to
retire to Wales about this time, and who accomplished his purpose
soon after.]
[Footnote 2: 'Eliza:' Queen Elizabeth.]
[Footnote 3: 'Pirates:' the piracies of the Spaniards were openly
defended in Parliament.]
[Footnote 4: 'Gazetteer:' the then ministerial paper.]
[Footnote 5: 'Unclaimed by Spain:' Spain was said then to be claiming
some of our American provinces.]
[Footnote 6: 'The king:' the nation was discontented at the visits
made by the king to Hanover.]
* * * * *
THE VANITY OF HUMAN WISHES.
IN IMITATION OF THE TENTH SATIRE OF JUVENAL.
Let Observation, with extensive view,
Survey mankind from China to Peru;
Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife,
And watch the busy scenes of crowded life;
Then say how hope and fear, desire and hate,
O'erspread with snares the clouded maze of fate,
Where wavering man, betray'd by venturous pride,
To tread the dreary paths without a guide,
As treacherous phantoms in the mist delude,
Shuns fancied ills, or chases airy good; 10
How rarely Reason guides the stubborn choice,
Rules the bold hand, or prompts the suppliant voice;
How nations sink, by darling schemes oppress'd,
When Vengeance listens to the fool's request;
Fate wings with every wish the afflictive dart,
Each gift of Nature, and each grace of Art,
With fatal heat impetuous courage glows,
With fatal sweetness elocution flows,
Impeachment stops the speaker's powerful breath,
And restless fire precipitates on death! 20
But, scarce observed, the knowing and the bold
Fall in the general massacre of gold;
Wide-wasting pest! that rages unconfined,
And crowds with crimes the records of mankind
For gold his sword the hireling ruffian draws,
For gold the hireling judge distorts the laws;
Wealth heap'd on wealth, nor truth, nor safety buys,
The dangers gather as the treasures rise.
Let history tell, where rival kings command,
And dubious title shakes the madded land, 30
When statutes glean the refuse of the sword,
How much more safe the vassal than the lord:
Low skulks the hind beneath the reach of power,
And leaves the wealthy traitor in the Tower;
Untouch'd his cottage, and his slumbers sound,
Though Confiscation's vultures hover round.
The needy traveller, serene and gay,
Walks the wild heath, and sings his toil away.
Does envy seize thee? Crush the upbraiding joy,
Increase his riches, and his peace destroy-- 40
Now fears in dire vicissitude invade,
The rustling brake alarms, and quivering shade;
Nor light nor darkness brings his pain relief,
One shows the plunder, and one hides the thief.
Yet still one general cry the sky assails,
And gain and grandeur load the tainted gales;
Few know the toiling statesman's fear or care,
The insidious rival, and the gaping heir.
Once more, Democritus! arise on earth,
With cheerful wisdom and instructive mirth; 50
See motley life in modern trappings dress'd,
And feed with varied fools the eternal jest:
Thou who could'st laugh where want enchain'd caprice,
Toil crush'd conceit, and man was of a piece:
Where wealth, unloved, without a mourner died;
And scarce a sycophant was fed by pride;
Where ne'er was known the form of mock debate,
Or seen a new-made mayor's unwieldy state;
Where change of favourites made no change of laws,
And senates heard before they judged a cause; 60
How wouldst thou shake at Britain's modish tribe,
Dart the quick taunt, and edge the piercing gibe!
Attentive, truth and nature to descry,
And pierce each scene with philosophic eye,
To thee were solemn toys or empty show
The robes of pleasure, and the veils of woe:
All aid the farce, and all thy mirth maintain,
Whose joys are causeless, or whose griefs are vain.
Such was the scorn that fill'd the sage's mind,
Renew'd at every glance on human kind. 70
How just that scorn, e'er yet thy voice declare,
Search every state, and canvass every prayer.
Unnumber'd suppliants crowd Preferment's gate,
Athirst for wealth, and burning to be great;
Delusive Fortune hears the incessant call,
They mount, they shine, evaporate, and fall.
On every stage the foes of peace attend,
Hate dogs their flight, and insult mocks their end.
Love ends with hope, the sinking statesman's door
Pours in the morning worshipper no more; 80
For growing names the weekly scribbler lies,
To growing wealth the dedicator flies;
From every room descends the painted face,
That hung the bright Palladium of the place;
And smoked in kitchens, or in auctions sold,
To better features yields the frame of gold;
For now no more we trace in every line
Heroic worth, benevolence divine:
The form distorted justifies the fall,
And detestation rids the indignant wall. 90
But will not Britain hear the last appeal,
Sign her foes' doom, or guard her favourites' zeal?
Through Freedom's sons no more remonstrance rings,
Degrading nobles, and controlling kings;
Our supple tribes repress their patriot throats,
And ask no questions, but the price of votes;
With weekly libels and septennial ale,
Their wish is full to riot and to rail.
In full-blown dignity see Wolsey stand,
Law in his voice, and fortune in his hand! 100
To him the church, the realm, their powers consign,
Through him the rays of regal bounty shine;
Turn'd by his nod, the stream of honour flows,
His smile alone security bestows:
Still to new heights his restless wishes tower;
Claim leads to claim, and power advances power;
Till conquest unresisted ceased to please,
And rights submitted, left him none to seize.
At length his sovereign frowns--the train of state
Mark the keen glance, and watch the sign to hate; 110
Where'er he turns, he meets a stranger's eye,
His suppliants scorn him, and his followers fly;
Now drops at once the pride of awful state,
The golden canopy, the glittering plate,
The regal palace, the luxurious board,
The liveried army, and the menial lord.
With age, with cares, with maladies oppress'd,
He seeks the refuge of monastic rest.
Grief aids disease, remember'd folly stings,
And his last sighs reproach the faith of kings. 120
Speak thou, whose thoughts at humble peace repine,
Shall Wolsey's wealth, with Wolsey's end, be thine?
Or liv'st thou now, with safer pride content,
The wisest justice on the banks of Trent?
For why did Wolsey, near the steeps of Fate,
On weak foundations raise the enormous weight?
Why but to sink beneath Misfortune's blow,
With louder ruin, to the gulphs below!
What gave great Villiers to the assassin's knife,
And fix'd disease on Harley's closing life? 130
What murder'd Wentworth, and what exiled Hyde,
By kings protected, and to kings allied?
What but their wish indulged, in courts to shine,
And power too great to keep, or to resign!
When first the college rolls receive his name,
The young enthusiast quits his ease for fame;
Resistless burns the fever of renown,
Caught from the strong contagion of the gown:
O'er Bodley's dome his future labours spread,
And Bacon's[1] mansion trembles o'er his head. 140
Are these thy views? Proceed, illustrious youth,
And Virtue guard thee to the throne of Truth!
Yet, should thy soul indulge the generous heat,
Till captive Science yields her last retreat;
Should Reason guide thee with her brightest ray,
And pour on misty Doubt resistless day;
Should no false kindness lure to loose delight,
Nor praise relax, nor difficulty fright;
Should tempting Novelty thy cell refrain,
And Sloth effuse her opiate fumes in vain; 150
Should Beauty blunt on <DW2>s her fatal dart,
Nor claim the triumph of a letter'd heart;
Should no disease thy torpid veins invade,
Nor Melancholy's phantoms haunt thy shade;
Yet hope not life from grief or danger free,
Nor think the doom of man reversed for thee:
Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes,
And pause a while from learning, to be wise;
There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail. 160
See nations, slowly wise, and meanly just,
To buried merit raise the tardy bust.
If dreams yet flatter, once again attend,
Hear Lydiat's[2] life, and Galileo's end.
Nor deem, when Learning her last prize bestows,
The glittering eminence exempt from foes;
See, when the vulgar 'scapes, despised or awed,
Rebellion's vengeful talons seize on Laud.
From meaner minds though smaller fines content,
The plunder'd palace, or sequester'd rent, 170
Mark'd out by dangerous parts he meets the shock,
And fatal Learning leads him to the block:
Around his tomb let Art and Genius weep,
But hear his death, ye blockheads! hear and sleep.
The festal blazes, the triumphal show,
The ravish'd standard, and the captive foe,
The senate's thanks, the Gazette's pompous tale,
With force resistless o'er the brave prevail.
Such bribes the rapid Greek o'er Asia whirl'd;
For such the steady Romans shook the world; 180
For such in distant lands the Britons shine,
And stain with blood the Danube or the Rhine;
This power has praise, that virtue scarce can warm,
Till Fame supplies the universal charm.
Yet Reason frowns on War's unequal game,
Where wasted nations raise a single name,
And mortgaged 'states their grandsires' wreaths regret,
From age to age in everlasting debt;
Wreaths which at last the dear-bought right convey
To rust on medals, or on stones decay. 190
On what foundation stands the warrior's pride,
How just his hopes, let Swedish Charles decide;
A frame of adamant, a soul of fire,
No dangers fright him, and no labours tire;
O'er love, o'er fear, extends his wide domain,
Unconquer'd lord of pleasure and of pain;
No joys to him pacific sceptres yield,
War sounds the trump, he rushes to the field;
Behold surrounding kings their powers combine,
And one capitulate, and one resign; 200
Peace courts his hand, but spreads her charms in vain:
'Think nothing gain'd,' he cries, 'till nought remain,
On Moscow's walls till Gothic standards fly,
And all be mine beneath the polar sky.'
The march begins in military state,
And nations on his eye suspended wait;
Stern Famine guards the solitary coast,
And Winter barricades the realms of Frost;
He comes, nor want nor cold his course delay;
Hide, blushing Glory! hide Pultowa's day: 210
The vanquish'd hero leaves his broken bands,
And shows his miseries in distant lands;
Condemn'd a needy supplicant to wait,
While ladies interpose, and slaves debate.
But did not Chance at length her error mend?
Did no subverted empire mark his end?
Did rival monarchs give the fatal wound,
Or hostile millions press him to the ground?
His fall was destined to a barren strand,
A petty fortress, and a dubious hand; 220
He left the name at which the world grew pale,
To point a moral, or adorn a tale.
All times their scenes of pompous woe afford,
From Persia's tyrant to Bavaria's lord.
In gay hostility, and barbarous pride,
With half mankind embattled at his side,
Great Xerxes comes to seize the certain prey,
And starves exhausted regions in his way;
Attendant Flattery counts his myriads o'er,
Till counted myriads soothe his pride no more; 230
Fresh praise is tried, till madness fires his mind,
The waves he lashes, and enchains the wind;
New powers are claim'd, new powers are still bestow'd,
Till rude resistance lops the spreading god;
The daring Greeks deride the martial show,
And heap their valleys with the gaudy foe;
The insulted sea with humbler thoughts he gains,
A single skiff to speed his flight remains;
The encumber'd oar scarce leaves the dreaded coast
Through purple billows and a floating host. 240
The bold Bavarian,[3] in a luckless hour,
Tries the dread summits of Caesarean power,
With unexpected legions bursts away,
And sees defenceless realms receive his sway:
Short sway! fair Austria spreads her mournful charms,
The Queen, the Beauty, sets the world in arms;
From hill to hill the beacon's rousing blaze
Spreads wide the hope of plunder and of praise;
The fierce Croatian, and the wild Hussar,
With all the sons of ravage, crowd the war; 250
The baffled prince, in Honour's flattering bloom,
Of hasty greatness finds the fatal doom,
His foes' derision, and his subjects' blame,
And steals to death from anguish and from shame.
Enlarge my life with multitude of days,--
In health, in sickness, thus the suppliant prays,
Hides from himself his state, and shuns to know
That life protracted is protracted woe.
Time hovers o'er, impatient to destroy,
And shuts up all the passages of joy: 260
In vain their gifts the bounteous seasons pour,
The fruit autumnal, and the vernal flower;
With listless eyes the dotard views the store--
He views, and wonders that they please no more.
Now pall the tasteless meats and joyless wines,
And Luxury with sighs her slave resigns.
Approach, ye minstrels! try the soothing strain,
Diffuse the tuneful lenitives of pain:
No sounds, alas! would touch the impervious ear,
Though dancing mountains witness'd Orpheus near: 270
Nor lute nor lyre his feeble powers attend,
Nor sweeter music of a virtuous friend;
But everlasting dictates crowd his tongue,
Perversely grave, or positively wrong;
The still returning tale, and lingering jest,
Perplex the fawning niece and pamper'd guest;
While growing hopes scarce awe the gathering sneer,
And scarce a legacy can bribe to hear;
The watchful guests still hint the last offence,
The daughter's petulance, the son's expense, 280
Improve his heady rage with treacherous skill,
And mould his passions till they make his will.
Unnumber'd maladies his joints invade,
Lay siege to life, and press the dire blockade;
But unextinguish'd Avarice still remains,
And dreaded losses aggravate his pains;
He turns, with anxious heart and crippled hands,
His bonds of debt, and mortgages of lands;
Or views his coffers with suspicious eyes,
Unlocks his gold, and counts it till he dies. 290
But grant, the virtues of a temperate prime
Bless with an age exempt from scorn or crime--
An age that melts with unperceived decay,
And glides in modest innocence away,
Whose peaceful day Benevolence endears,
Whose night congratulating Conscience cheers;
The general favourite as the general friend:
Such age there is, and who shall wish its end?
Yet e'en on this her load Misfortune flings,
To press the weary minutes' flagging wings; 300
New sorrow rises as the day returns,
A sister sickens, or a daughter mourns.
Now kindred Merit fills the sable bier,
Now lacerated Friendship claims a tear;
Year chases year, decay pursues decay,
Still drops some joy from withering life away;
New forms arise, and different views engage,
Superfluous lags the veteran on the stage,
Till pitying Nature signs the last release,
And bids afflicted worth retire to peace. 310
But few there are whom hours like these await,
Who set unclouded in the gulphs of Fate.
From Lydia's monarch[4] should the search descend,
By Solon caution'd to regard his end,
In life's last scene what prodigies surprise,
Fears of the brave, and follies of the wise!
From Marlborough's eyes the streams of dotage flow,
And Swift expires a driveller and a show.
The teeming mother, anxious for her race,
Begs for each birth the fortune of a face: 320
Yet Vane[5] could tell what ills from beauty spring;
And Sedley[6] cursed the form that pleased a king.
Ye nymphs of rosy lips and radiant eyes,
Whom pleasure keeps too busy to be wise,
Whom joys with soft varieties invite,
By day the frolic, and the dance by night,
Who frown with vanity, who smile with art,
And ask the latest fashion of the heart;
What care, what rules your heedless charms shall save,
Each nymph your rival, and each youth your slave?
The rival batters, and the lover mines.
With distant voice neglected Virtue calls,
Less heard and less, the faint remonstrance falls;
Tired with contempt, she quits the slippery reign,
And Pride and Prudence take her seat in vain;
In crowd at once, where none the pass defend,
The harmless freedom and the private friend.
The guardians yield, by force superior plied--
To Interest, Prudence; and to Flattery, Pride. 340
Here Beauty falls betray'd, despised, distress'd,
And hissing Infamy proclaims the rest.
Where, then, shall Hope and Fear their objects find?
Must dull suspense corrupt the stagnant mind?
Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate,
Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?
Must no dislike alarm, no wishes rise,
No cries invoke the mercies of the skies?
Inquirer, cease! petitions yet remain,
Which Heaven may hear, nor deem Religion vain. 350
Still raise for good the supplicating voice,
But leave to Heaven the measure and the choice;
Safe in His power, whose eyes discern afar
The secret ambush of a specious prayer,
Implore His aid, in His decisions rest,
Secure whate'er He gives, He gives the best.
Yet when the sense of sacred presence fires,
And strong devotion to the skies aspires,
Pour forth thy fervours for a healthful mind,
Obedient passions, and a will resign'd; 360
For love, which scarce collective man can fill;
For patience, sovereign o'er transmuted ill;
For faith, that, panting for a happier seat,
Counts death kind Nature's signal of retreat:
These goods for man the laws of Heaven ordain,
These goods He grants, who grants the power to gain;
With these celestial Wisdom calms the mind,
And makes the happiness she does not find.
[Footnote 1: 'Bacon:' Friar, whose study was to fall when a wiser man
than he entered it]
[Footnote 2: 'Lydiat:' a learned divine, who spent many of his days in
prison for debt; he lived in Charles the First's time.]
[Footnote 3: 'Bavarian:' Charles Albert, who aspired to the empire of
Austria against Maria Theresa--but was baffled.]
[Footnote 4: 'Lydia's monarch:' Croesus.]
[Footnote 5: Vane: 'Lady Vane, a celebrated courtezan; her memoirs are
in 'Peregrine Pickle.']
[Footnote 6: 'Sedley:' mistress of James II.]
* * * * *
PROLOGUE
SPOKEN BY MR GARRICK, AT THE OPENING OF THE
THEATRE-ROYAL DRURY-LANE, 1747.
When Learning's triumph o'er her barbarous foes
First rear'd the stage, immortal Shakspeare rose;
Each change of many-colour'd life he drew,
Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new:
Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign,
And panting Time toil'd after him in vain;
His powerful strokes presiding Truth impress'd,
And unresisted Passion storm'd the breast.
Then Jonson came, instructed from the school,
To please in method, and invent by rule; 10
His studious patience and laborious art,
By regular approach essay'd the heart:
Cold Approbation gave the lingering bays,
For those who durst not censure, scarce could praise;
A mortal born, he met the general doom,
But left, like Egypt's kings, a lasting tomb.
The wits of Charles found easier ways to fame,
Nor wish'd for Jonson's art, or Shakspeare's flame.
Themselves they studied; as they felt, they writ:
Intrigue was plot, obscenity was wit. 20
Vice always found a sympathetic friend;
They pleased their age, and did not aim to mend.
Yet bards like these aspired to lasting praise,
And proudly hoped to pimp in future days.
Their cause was general, their supports were strong;
Their slaves were willing, and their reign was long:
Till Shame regain'd the post that Sense betray'd,
And Virtue call'd Oblivion to her aid.
Then crush'd by rules, and weaken'd as refined,
For years the power of Tragedy declined; 30
From bard to bard the frigid caution crept,
Till Declamation roar'd, whilst Passion slept;
Yet still did Virtue deign the stage to tread,
Philosophy remain'd though Nature fled.
But forced, at length, her ancient reign to quit,
She saw great Faustus lay the ghost of Wit;
Exulting Folly hail'd the joyous day,
And Pantomime and Song confirm'd her sway.
But who the coming changes can presage,
And mark the future periods of the Stage? 40
Perhaps if skill could distant times explore,
New Behns,[1] new Durfeys, yet remain in store;
Perhaps where Lear has raved, and Hamlet died,
On flying cars new sorcerers may ride;
Perhaps (for who can guess the effects of chance?)
Here Hunt[2] may box, or Mahomet[3] may dance.
Hard is his lot that, here by Fortune placed,
Must watch the wild vicissitudes of Taste;
With every meteor of Caprice must play,
And chase the new-blown bubbles of the day. 50
Ah! let not Censure term our fate our choice,
The Stage but echoes back the public voice;
The drama's laws, the drama's patrons give,
For we that live to please, must please to live.
Then prompt no more the follies you decry,
As tyrants doom their tools of guilt to die;
'Tis yours, this night, to bid the reign commence
Of rescued Nature, and reviving Sense;
To chase the charms of Sound, the pomp of Show,
For useful Mirth and salutary Woe; 60
Bid scenic Virtue form the rising age,
And Truth diffuse her radiance from Stage.
[Footnote 1: 'Behn:' Afra, a popular but obscure novelist and
play-wright.]
[Footnote 2: 'Hunt:' a famous stage-boxer.]
[Footnote 3: 'Mahomet:' a rope-dancer.]
* * * * *
PROLOGUE
SPOKEN BY MR GARRICK BEFORE THE 'MASQUE OF COMUS,'
ACTED FOR THE BENEFIT OF MILTON'S GRANDDAUGHTER.
Ye patriot crowds, who burn for England's fame!
Ye nymphs, whose bosoms beat at Milton's name,
Whose generous zeal, unbought by flattering rhymes,
Shames the mean pensions of Augustan times!
Immortal patrons of succeeding days,
Attend this prelude of perpetual praise;
Let Wit, condemn'd the feeble war to wage
With close Malevolence, or Public Rage;
Let Study, worn with virtue's fruitless lore,
Behold this theatre, and grieve no more. 10
This night, distinguish'd by your smiles, shall tell
That never Briton can in vain excel:
The slightest arts futurity shall trust,
And rising ages hasten to be just.
At length our mighty bard's victorious lays
Fill the loud voice of universal praise;
And baffled Spite, with hopeless anguish dumb,
Yields to Renown the centuries to come;
With ardent haste each candidate of fame,
Ambitious, catches at his towering name; 20
He sees, and pitying sees, vain wealth bestow
Those pageant honours which he scorn'd below.
While crowds aloft the laureate bust behold,
Or trace his form on circulating gold,
Unknown--unheeded, long his offspring lay,
And Want hung threatening o'er her slow decay.
What though she shine with no Miltonian fire,
No favouring Muse her morning dreams inspire?
Yet softer claims the melting heart engage,
Her youth laborious, and her blameless age; 30
Hers the mild merits of domestic life,
The patient sufferer, and the faithful wife.
Thus graced with humble Virtue's native charms,
Her grandsire leaves her in Britannia's arms;
Secure with peace, with competence to dwell,
While tutelary nations guard her cell.
Yours is the charge, ye fair! ye wise! ye brave!
'Tis yours to crown desert--beyond the grave.
* * * * *
PROLOGUE
TO GOLDSMITH'S COMEDY OF 'THE GOOD-NATURED MAN,' 1769.
Press'd by the load of life, the weary mind
Surveys the general toil of human kind;
With cool submission joins the labouring train,
And social sorrow loses half its pain.
Our anxious bard without complaint may share
This bustling season's epidemic care;
Like Caesar's pilot, dignified by Fate,
Toss'd in one common storm with all the great;
Distress'd alike the statesman and the wit,
When one the borough courts, and one the pit. 10
The busy candidates for power and fame
Have hopes, and fears, and wishes just the same;
Disabled both to combat, or to fly,
Must hear all taunts, and hear without reply.
Unchecked, on both loud rabbles vent their rage,
As mongrels bay the lion in a cage.
The offended burgess hoards his angry tale,
For that blest year when all that vote may rail.
Their schemes of spite the poet's foes dismiss,
Till that glad night when all that hate may hiss. 20
'This day the powder'd curls and golden coat,'
Says swelling Crispin, 'begg'd a cobbler's vote;'
'This night our wit,' the pert apprentice cries,
'Lies at my feet; I hiss him, and he dies.'
The great, 'tis true, can charm the electing tribe,
The bard may supplicate, but cannot bribe.
Yet, judged by those whose voices ne'er were sold,
He feels no want of ill-persuading gold;
But confident of praise, if praise be due,
Trusts without fear to merit and to you. 30
* * * * *
PROLOGUE
TO THE COMEDY OF 'A WORD TO THE WISE,' SPOKEN BY
MR HULL.
This night presents a play which public rage,
Or right, or wrong, once hooted from the stage;
From zeal or malice now no more we dread,
For English vengeance wars not with the dead.
A generous foe regards with pitying eye
The man whom Fate has laid--where all must lie.
To Wit, reviving from its author's dust,
Be kind, ye judges! or at least be just.
For no renew'd hostilities invade
The oblivious grave's inviolable shade. 10
Let one great payment every claim appease,
And him who cannot hurt, allow to please;
To please by scenes unconscious of offence,
By harmless merriment, or useful sense.
Where aught of bright or fair the piece displays,
Approve it only--'tis too late to praise.
If want of skill, or want of care appear,
Forbear to hiss--the poet cannot hear.
By all like him must praise and blame be found,
At best a fleeting dream, or empty sound. 20
Yet then shall calm Reflection bless the night
When liberal Pity dignified delight;
When Pleasure fired her torch at Virtue's flame,
And Mirth was Bounty with an humbler name.
* * * * *
SPRING.
1 Stern Winter now, by Spring repress'd,
Forbears the long-continued strife;
And Nature, on her naked breast,
Delights to catch the gales of life.
2 Now o'er the rural kingdom roves
Soft Pleasure with her laughing train;
Love warbles in the vocal groves,
And Vegetation paints the plain.
3 Unhappy! whom to beds of pain
Arthritic tyranny consigns;
Whom smiling Nature courts in vain,
Though Rapture sings, and Beauty shines.
4 Yet though my limbs disease invades,
Her wings Imagination tries,
And bears me to the peaceful shades
Where ----'s humble turrets rise.
5 Here stop, my soul, thy rapid flight,
Nor from the pleasing groves depart,
Where first great Nature charm'd my sight,
Where Wisdom first inform'd my heart.
6 Here let me through the vales pursue
A guide--a father--and a friend;
Once more great Nature's works renew,
Once more on Wisdom's voice attend.
7 From false caresses, causeless strife,
Wild hope, vain fear, alike removed,
Here let me learn the use of life,
When best enjoy'd--when most improved.
8 Teach me, thou venerable bower!
Cool Meditation's quiet seat,
The generous scorn of venal power,
The silent grandeur of retreat.
9 When pride by guilt to greatness climbs,
Or raging factions rush to war,
Here let me learn to shun the crimes
I can't prevent, and will not share.
10 But lest I fall by subtler foes,
Bright Wisdom, teach me Curio's art,
The swelling passions to compose,
And quell the rebels of the heart!
* * * * *
MIDSUMMER.
1 O Phoebus! down the western sky,
Far hence diffuse thy burning ray;
Thy light to distant worlds supply,
And wake them to the cares of day.
2 Come, gentle Eve! the friend of Care,
Come, Cynthia, lovely queen of night!
Refresh me with a cooling breeze,
And cheer me with a lambent light.
3 Lay me where, o'er the verdant ground,
Her living carpet Nature spreads;
Where the green bower, with roses crown'd,
In showers its fragrant foliage sheds.
4 Improve the peaceful hour with wine;
Let music die along the grove;
Around the bowl let myrtles twine,
And every strain be tuned to love.
5 Come, Stella, queen of all my heart!
Come, born to fill its vast desires!
Thy looks perpetual joys impart,
Thy voice perpetual love inspires.
6 While, all my wish and thine complete,
By turns we languish and we burn,
Let sighing gales our sighs repeat,
Our murmurs, murmuring brooks return.
7 Let me, when Nature calls to rest,
And blushing skies the morn foretell,
Sink on the down of Stella's breast,
And bid the waking world farewell.
* * * * *
AUTUMN.
1 Alas! with swift and silent pace,
Impatient Time rolls on the year;
The seasons change, and Nature's face
Now sweetly smiles, now frowns severe.
2 'Twas Spring, 'twas Summer, all was gay;
Now Autumn bends a cloudy brow;
The flowers of Spring are swept away,
And Summer fruits desert the bough.
3 The verdant leaves that play'd on high,
And wanton'd on the western breeze,
Now trod in dust neglected lie,
As Boreas strips the bending trees.
4 The fields, that waved with golden grain,
As russet heaths are wild and bare;
Not moist with dew, but drench'd in rain,
Nor Health, nor Pleasure wanders there.
5 No more, while through the midnight shade,
Beneath the moon's pale orb I stray,
Soft pleasing woes my heart invade,
As Progne[1] pours the melting lay.
6 From this capricious clime she soars,
Oh! would some god but wings supply!
To where each morn the Spring restores,
Companion of her flight, I'd fly.
7 Vain wish! me Fate compels to bear
The downward season's iron reign,
Compels to breathe polluted air,
And shiver on a blasted plain.
8 What bliss to life can Autumn yield,
If glooms, and showers, and storms prevail,
And Ceres flies the naked field,
And flowers, and fruits, and Phoebus fail?
9 Oh! what remains, what lingers yet,
To cheer me in the darkening hour?
The grape remains! the friend of wit,
In love and mirth of mighty power.
10 Haste--press the clusters, fill the bowl;
Apollo! shoot thy parting ray:
This gives the sunshine of the soul,
This god of health, and verse, and day.
11 Still, still the jocund strain shall flow,
The pulse with vigorous rapture beat;
My Stella with new charms shall glow,
And every bliss in wine shall meet.
[Footnote 1: 'Progne:' the nightingale.]
* * * * *
EPIGRAM
ON GEORGE II. AND COLLEY CIBBER, ESQ.
Augustus still survives in Maro's strain,
And Spenser's verse prolongs Eliza's reign;
Great George's acts let tuneful Cibber sing,
For Nature form'd the poet for the king.
* * * * *
STELLA IN MOURNING.
When lately Stella's form display'd
The beauties of the gay brocade,
The nymphs, who found their power decline,
Proclaim'd her not so fair as fine.
'Fate! snatch away the bright disguise,
And let the goddess trust her eyes.'
Thus blindly pray'd the fretful fair,
And Fate, malicious, heard the prayer;
But brighten'd by the sable dress,
As Virtue rises in distress,
Since Stella still extends her reign,
Ah! how shall Envy soothe her pain?
The adoring Youth and envious Fair,
Henceforth shall form one common prayer;
And Love and Hate alike implore
The skies--that Stella mourn no more.
* * * * *
TO STELLA.
1 Not the soft sighs of vernal gales,
The fragrance of the flowery vales,
The murmurs of the crystal rill,
The vocal grove, the verdant hill;
Not all their charms, though all unite,
Can touch my bosom with delight.
2 Not all the gems on India's shore,
Not all Peru's unbounded store,
Not all the power, nor all the fame,
That heroes, kings, or poets claim;
Nor knowledge, which the learn'd approve,
To form one wish my soul can move.
3 Yet Nature's charms allure my eyes,
And knowledge, wealth, and fame I prize;
Fame, wealth, and knowledge I obtain,
Nor seek I Nature's charms in vain--
In lovely Stella all combine,
And, lovely Stella! thou art mine.
* * * * *
VERSES
WRITTEN AT THE BEQUEST OF A GENTLEMAN TO WHOM A
LADY HAD GIVEN A SPRIG OF MYRTLE.
What hopes, what terrors, does this gift create,
Ambiguous emblem of uncertain fate!
The myrtle (ensign of supreme command,
Consign'd to Venus by Melissa's hand),
Not less capricious than a reigning fair,
Oft favours, oft rejects a lover's prayer.
In myrtle shades oft sings the happy swain,
In myrtle shades despairing ghosts complain.
The myrtle crowns the happy lovers' heads,
The unhappy lovers' graves the myrtle spreads.
Oh! then, the meaning of thy gift impart,
And ease the throbbings of an anxious heart;
Soon must this sprig, as you shall fix its doom,
Adorn Philander's head, or grace his tomb.
* * * * *
TO LADY FIREBRACE,[1]
AT BURY ASSIZES.
At length must Suffolk beauties shine in vain,
So long renown'd in B--n's deathless strain?
Thy charms at least, fair Firebrace! might inspire
Some zealous bard to wake the sleeping lyre;
For such thy beauteous mind and lovely face,
Thou seem'st at once, bright nymph! a Muse and Grace.
[Footnote 1: 'Lady Firebrace:' daughter of P. Bacon, Ipswich, married
three times--to Philip Evers, Esq., to Sir Corbell Firebrace, and to
William Campbell, uncle of the Duke of Argyle.]
* * * * *
TO LYCE,
AN ELDERLY LADY.
1 Ye Nymphs whom starry rays invest,
By flattering poets given,
Who shine, by lavish lovers dress'd,
In all the pomp of Heaven.
2 Engross not all the beams on high,
Which gild a lover's lays,
But, as your sister of the sky,
Let Lyce share the praise.
3 Her silver locks display the moon,
Her brows a cloudy show,
Striped rainbows round her eyes are seen,
And showers from either flow.
4 Her teeth the night with darkness dyes;
She's starr'd with pimples o'er;
Her tongue like nimble lightning plies,
And can with thunder roar,
5 But some Zelinda, while I sing,
Denies my Lyce shines;
And all the pens of Cupid's wing
Attack my gentle lines.
6 Yet, spite of fair Zelinda's eye,
And all her bards express,
My Lyce makes as good a sky,
And I but flatter less.
* * * * *
ON THE DEATH OF MR ROBERT LEVETT,
A PRACTISER IN PHYSIC.
1 Condemned to Hope's delusive mine,
As on we toil from day to day,
By sudden blasts, or slow decline,
Our social comforts drop away.
2 Well tried through many a varying year,
See Levett to the grave descend;
Officious, innocent, sincere,
Of every friendless name the friend.
3 Yet still he fills Affection's eye,
Obscurely wise and coarsely kind;
Nor, letter'd Arrogance, deny
Thy praise to merit unrefined.
4 When fainting Nature call'd for aid,
And hovering Death prepared the blow,
His vigorous remedy display'd
The power of Art without the show.
5 In Misery's darkest cavern known,
His useful care was ever nigh;
Where hopeless Anguish pour'd his groan,
And lonely Want retired to die.
6 No summons, mock'd by chill delay;
No petty gain, disdain'd by pride;
The modest wants of every day,
The toil of every day supplied.
7 His virtues walk'd their narrow round,
Nor made a pause, nor left a void;
And sure the Eternal Master found
The single talent well employ'd,
8 The busy day--the peaceful night,
Unfelt, unclouded, glided by;
His frame was firm--his powers were bright,
Though now his eightieth year was nigh.
9 Then with no fiery, throbbing pain,
No cold gradations of decay,
Death broke at once the vital chain,
And freed his soul the nearest way.
* * * * *
EPITAPH ON CLAUDE PHILLIPS,[1]
AN ITINERANT MUSICIAN.
Phillips! whose touch harmonious could remove
The pangs of guilty power and hapless love,
Rest here; distress'd by poverty no more,
Find here that calm thou gav'st so oft before;
Sleep undisturb'd within this peaceful shrine,
Till angels wake thee with a note like thine.
[Footnote 1: 'Claude Phillips:' a Welsh travelling fiddler, greatly
admired.]
* * * * *
EPITAPH
ON SIR THOMAS HANMER, BART.
Thou who survey'st these walls with curious eye,
Pause at this tomb where Hanmer's ashes lie;
His various worth through varied life attend, 3
And learn his virtues while thou mourn'st his end.
His force of genius burn'd in early youth,
With thirst of knowledge, and with love of truth;
His learning, join'd with each endearing art,
Charm'd every ear, and gain'd on every heart.
Thus early wise, the endanger'd realm to aid,
His country call'd him from the studious shade; 10
In life's first bloom his public toils began,
At once commenced the senator and man.
In business dexterous, weighty in debate,
Thrice ten long years he labour'd for the state;
In every speech persuasive wisdom flow'd,
In every act refulgent virtue glow'd:
Suspended faction ceased from rage and strife,
To hear his eloquence, and praise his life.
Resistless merit fix'd the senate's choice,
Who hail'd him Speaker with united voice. 20
Illustrious age! how bright thy glories shone,
While Hanmer fill'd the chair--and Anne the throne!
Then when dark arts obscured each fierce debate,
When mutual frauds perplex'd the maze of state,
The moderator firmly mild appear'd--
Beheld with love, with veneration heard.
This task perform'd--he sought no gainful post,
Nor wish'd to glitter at his country's cost;
Strict on the right he fix'd his steadfast eye,
With temperate zeal and wise anxiety; 30
Nor e'er from Virtue's paths was lured aside,
To pluck the flowers of pleasure, or of pride;
Her gifts despised, Corruption blush'd and fled,
And Fame pursued him where Conviction led.
Age call'd, at length, his active mind to rest,
With honour sated, and with cares oppress'd:
To letter'd ease retired, and honest mirth.
To rural grandeur, and domestic worth:
Delighted still to please mankind, or mend,
The patriot's fire yet sparkled in the friend. 40
Calm Conscience then his former life survey'd,
And recollected toils endear'd the shade,
Till Nature call'd him to her general doom,
And Virtue's sorrow dignified his tomb.
* * * * *
ON THE DEATH OF STEPHEN GREY, F.R.S.,
THE ELECTRICIAN.
Long hast thou borne the burden of the day;
Thy task is ended, venerable Grey!
No more shall Art thy dexterous hand require,
To break the sleep of elemental fire;
To rouse the power that actuates Nature's frame,
The momentaneous shock, the electric flame;
The flame which first, weak pupil to thy lore,
I saw, condemn'd, alas! to see no more.
Now, hoary sage! pursue thy happy flight;
With swifter motion, haste to purer light, 10
Where Bacon waits, with Newton and with Boyle,
To hail thy genius and applaud thy toil;
Where intuition breathes through time and space,
And mocks Experiment's successive race;
Sees tardy Science toil at Nature's laws,
And wonders how the effect obscures the cause.
Yet not to deep research or happy guess,
Is show'd the life of hope, the death of peace;
Unbless'd the man whom philosophic rage
Shall tempt to lose the Christian in the Sage: 20
Not Art, but Goodness, pour'd the sacred ray
That cheer'd the parting hours of humble Grey.
* * * * *
TO MISS HICKMAN,
PLAYING ON THE SPINNET.
Bright Stella! form'd for universal reign,
Too well you know to keep the slaves you gain:
When in your eyes resistless lightnings play,
Awed into love our conquer'd hearts obey,
And yield reluctant to despotic sway:
But when your music soothes the raging pain,
We bid propitious Heaven prolong your reign,
We bless the tyrant, and we hug the chain.
When old Timotheus struck the vocal string,
Ambition's fury fired the Grecian king: 10
Unbounded projects labouring in his mind,
He pants for room, in one poor world confined.
Thus waked to rage, by Music's dreadful power,
He bids the sword destroy, the flame devour.
Had Stella's gentler touches moved the lyre,
Soon had the monarch felt a nobler fire:
No more delighted with destructive war,
Ambitious only now to please the fair;
Resign'd his thirst of empire to her charms,
And found a thousand worlds in Stella's arms. 20
* * * * *
PARAPHRASE
OF PROVERBS, CHAP. IV. VERSES 6-11.
"Go to the ant, thou sluggard!"
Turn on the prudent ant thy heedless eyes,
Observe her labours, sluggard! and be wise.
No stern command, no monitory voice
Prescribes her duties or directs her choice;
Yet, timely provident, she hastes away,
To snatch the blessings of a plenteous day;
When fruitful Summer loads the teeming plain,
She crops the harvest, and she stores the grain.
How long shall Sloth usurp thy useless hours,
Unnerve thy vigour, and unchain thy powers? 10
While artful shades thy downy couch inclose,
And soft solicitation courts repose,
Amidst the drowsy charms of dull delight,
Year chases year with unremitted flight;
Till Want now following, fraudulent and slow,
Shall spring to seize thee like an ambush'd foe.
* * * * *
HORACE,
LIB. IV. ODE VII. TRANSLATED.
The snow, dissolved, no more is seen,
The fields and woods, behold! are green.
The changing year renews the plain,
The rivers know their banks again;
The sprightly Nymph and naked Grace
The mazy dance together trace;
The changing year's successive plan
Proclaims mortality to man.
Rough Winter's blasts to Spring give way,
Spring yields to Summer's sovereign ray; 10
Then Summer sinks in Autumn's reign,
And Winter chills the world again:
Her losses soon the moon supplies,
But wretched man, when once he lies
Where Priam and his sons are laid,
Is nought but ashes, and a shade.
Who knows if Jove, who counts our score,
Will toss us in a morning more?
What with your friend you nobly share,
At least you rescue from your heir. 20
Not you, Torquatus, boast of Rome,
When Minos once has fix'd your doom,
Or eloquence, or splendid birth,
Or virtue, shall restore to earth.
Hippolytus, unjustly slain,
Diana calls to life in vain;
Nor can the might of Theseus rend
The chains of Hell that hold his friend.
* * * * *
ON SEEING A BUST OF MRS MONTAGUE.
Had this fair figure which this frame displays,
Adorn'd in Roman time the brightest days,
In every dome, in every sacred place,
Her statue would have breathed an added grace,
And on its basis would have been enroll'd,
'This is Minerva, cast in Virtue's mould.'
* * * * *
ANACREON, ODE NINTH.
Lovely courier of the sky!
Whence and whither dost thou fly?
Scattering, as thy pinions play,
Liquid fragrance all the way;
Is it business? is it love?
Tell me, tell me, gentle dove!
Soft Anacreon's vows I bear,
Vows to Myrtale the fair;
Graced with all that charms the heart,
Blushing nature, smiling art. 10
Venus, courted by an ode,
On the bard her dove bestow'd:
Vested with a master's right,
Now Anacreon rules my flight;
His the letters that you see,
Weighty charge, consign'd to me:
Think not yet my service hard,
Joyless task without reward;
Smiling at my master's gates,
Freedom my return awaits; 20
But the liberal grant in vain
Tempts me to be wild again.
Can a prudent dove decline
Blissful bondage such as mine?
Over hills and fields to roam,
Fortune's guest without a home;
Under leaves to hide one's head,
Slightly shelter'd, coarsely fed:
Now my better lot bestows
Sweet repast, and soft repose: 30
Now the generous bowl I sip,
As it leaves Anacreon's lip:
Void of care and free from dread,
From his fingers snatch his bread;
Then with luscious plenty gay,
Round his chamber dance and play;
Or from wine as courage springs,
O'er his face extend my wings;
And when feast and frolic tire,
Drop asleep upon his lyre. 40
This is all, be quick and go,
More than all thou canst not know;
Let me now my pinions ply,
I have chatter'd like a pye.
* * * * *
LINES
WRITTEN IN RIDICULE OF CERTAIN POEMS PUBLISHED
IN 1777.
Wheresoe'er I turn my view,
All is strange, yet nothing new;
Endless labour all along,
Endless labour to be wrong;
Phrase that time has flung away,
Uncouth words in disarray,
Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet,
Ode, and elegy, and sonnet.
* * * * *
PARODY OF A TRANSLATION
FROM THE MEDEA OF EURIPIDES.
1 Err shall they not, who resolute explore
Time's gloomy backward with judicious eyes;
And, scanning right the practices of yore,
Shall deem our hoar progenitors unwise.
2 They to the dome where smoke with curling play
Announced the dinner to the regions round,
Summon'd the singer blithe, and harper gay,
And aided wine with dulcet-streaming sound.
3 The better use of notes, or sweet or shrill,
By quivering string or modulated wind,
Trumpet or lyre--to their harsh bosoms chill,
Admission ne'er had sought, or could not find.
4 Oh! send them to the sullen mansions dun,
Her baleful eyes where Sorrow rolls around;
Where gloom-enamour'd Mischief loves to dwell,
And Murder, all blood-bolter'd, schemes the wound.
5 When cates luxuriant pile the spacious dish,
And purple nectar glads the festive hour;
The guest, without a want, without a wish,
Can yield no room to music's soothing power.
* * * * *
BURLESQUE
ON THE MODERN VERSIFICATION OF ANCIENT LEGENDARY
TALES: AN IMPROMPTU.
The tender infant, meek and mild,
Fell down upon the stone;
The nurse took up the squealing child,
But still the child squeal'd on.
* * * * *
EPITAPH FOR MR HOGARTH.
The hand of him here torpid lies,
That drew the essential form of grace;
Here closed in death the attentive eyes,
That saw the manners in the face.
* * * * *
TRANSLATION
OF THE TWO FIRST STANZAS OF THE SONG 'RIO VERDE, RIO VERDE,' PRINTED
IN BISHOP PERCY'S 'RELIQUES OF ANCIENT ENGLISH POETRY:' AN IMPROMPTU.
Glassy water, glassy water,
Down whose current, clear and strong,
Chiefs confused in mutual slaughter,
Moor and Christian, roll along.
* * * * *
TO MRS THRALE,
ON HER COMPLETING HER THIRTY-FIFTH YEAR. AN IMPROMPTU.
Oft in danger, yet alive,
We are come to thirty-five;
Long may better years arrive,
Better years than thirty-five.
Could philosophers contrive
Life to stop at thirty-five,
Time his hours should never drive
O'er the bounds of thirty-five.
High to soar, and deep to dive,
Nature gives at thirty-five; 10
Ladies, stock and tend your hive,
Trifle not at thirty-five;
For, howe'er we boast and strive,
Life declines from thirty-five;
He that ever hopes to thrive,
Must begin by thirty-five;
And all who wisely wish to wive
Must look on Thrale at thirty-five.
* * * * *
IMPROMPTU TRANSLATION
OF AN AIR IN THE 'CLEMENZA DE TITO' OF METASTASIO, BEGINNING, 'DEH! SE
PIACERMI VUOI.'
Would you hope to gain my heart,
Bid your teasing doubts depart.
He who blindly trusts will find,
Faith from every generous mind;
He who still expects deceit,
Only teaches how to cheat.
* * * * *
LINES
WRITTEN UNDER A PRINT REPRESENTING PERSONS SKAITING.
O'er crackling ice, o'er gulfs profound,
With nimble glide the skaiters play;
O'er treacherous Pleasure's flowery ground
Thus lightly skim, and haste away.
* * * * *
TRANSLATION
OF A SPEECH OF AQUILEIO IN THE 'ADRIANO' OF METASTASIO, BEGINNING, 'TU
CHE IN CORTE INVECCHIASTI.'
Grown old in courts, thou art not surely one
Who keeps the rigid rules of ancient honour:
Well skill'd to soothe a foe with looks of kindness,
To sink the fatal precipice before him,
And then lament his fall with seeming friendship:
Open to all, true only to thyself,
Thou know'st those arts which blast with envious praise,
Which aggravate a fault with feign'd excuses,
And drive discountenanced Virtue from the throne
That leave the blame of rigour to the prince, 10
And of his every gift usurp the merit;
That hide in seeming zeal a wicked purpose,
And only build upon each other's ruin.
* * * * *
IMPROMPTU
ON HEARING MISS THRALE CONSULTING WITH A FRIEND ABOUT A GOWN AND HAT
SHE WAS INCLINED TO WEAR.
Wear the gown, and wear the hat,
Snatch thy pleasures while they last;
Hadst thou nine lives, like a cat,
Soon those nine lives would be past.
* * * * *
TRANSLATION OF VIRGIL.
PASTORAL I.
_Mileboeus_. Now, Tityrus, you supine and careless laid,
Play on your pipe beneath yon beechen shade;
While wretched we about the world must roam,
And leave our pleasing fields, and native home;
Here at your ease you sing your amorous flame,
And the wood rings with Amaryllis' name.
_Tityrus_. Those blessings, friend, a deity bestow'd,
For I shall never think him less than god;
Oft on his altars shall my firstlings lie,
Their blood the consecrated stones shall dye: 10
He gave my flocks to graze the flowery meads,
And me to tune at ease the unequal reeds.
_Mileboeus._ My admiration only I express'd,
(No spark of envy harbours in my breast),
That when confusion o'er the country reigns,
To you alone this happy state remains.
Here I, though faint myself, must drive my goats,
Far from their ancient fields and humble cots.
This scarce I lead, who left on yonder rock
Two tender kids, the hopes of all the flock. 20
Had we not been perverse and careless grown,
This dire event by omens was foreshown;
Our trees were blasted by the thunder stroke,
And left-hand crows, from an old hollow oak,
Foretold the coming evil by their dismal croak.
* * * * *
TRANSLATION OF HORACE.
BOOK I. ODE XXII.
1 The man, my friend, whose conscious heart
With virtue's sacred ardour glows,
Nor taints with death the envenom'd dart,
Nor needs the guard of Moorish bows:
2 Though Scythia's icy cliffs he treads,
Or horrid Afric's faithless sands;
Or where the famed Hydaspes spreads
His liquid wealth o'er barbarous lands.
3 For while, by Chloee's image charm'd,
Too far in Sabine woods I stray'd;
Me singing, careless and unarm'd,
A grisly wolf surprised, and fled.
4 No savage more portentous stain'd
Apulia's spacious wilds with gore;
None fiercer Juba's thirsty land,
Dire nurse of raging lions, bore.
5 Place me where no soft summer gale
Among the quivering branches sighs;
Where clouds condensed for ever veil
With horrid gloom the frowning skies:
6 Place me beneath the burning line,
A clime denied to human race;
I'll sing of Chloee's charms divine,
Her heavenly voice, and beauteous face.
* * * * *
TRANSLATION OF HORACE.
BOOK II. ODE IX.
1 Clouds do not always veil the skies,
Nor showers immerse the verdant plain;
Nor do the billows always rise,
Or storms afflict the ruffled main.
2 Nor, Valgius, on the Armenian shores
Do the chain'd waters always freeze;
Not always furious Boreas roars,
Or bends with violent force the trees.
3 But you are ever drown'd in tears,
For Mystes dead you ever mourn;
No setting Sol can ease your cares,
But finds you sad at his return.
4 The wise, experienced Grecian sage
Mourn'd not Antilochus so long;
Nor did King Priam's hoary age
So much lament his slaughter'd son.
5 Leave off, at length, these woman's sighs,
Augustus' numerous trophies sing;
Repeat that prince's victories,
To whom all nations tribute bring.
6 Niphates rolls an humbler wave,
At length the undaunted Scythian yields,
Content to live the Romans' slave,
And scarce forsakes his native fields.
* * * * *
TRANSLATION
OF PART OF THE DIALOGUE BETWEEN HECTOR AND ANDROMACHE.--FROM THE SIXTH
BOOK OF HOMER'S ILIAD.
She ceased: then godlike Hector answer'd kind,
(His various plumage sporting in the wind):
That post, and all the rest, shall be my care;
But shall I then forsake the unfinish'd war?
How would the Trojans brand great Hector's name,
And one base action sully all my fame,
Acquired by wounds and battles bravely fought!
Oh! how my soul abhors so mean a thought!
Long have I learn'd to slight this fleeting breath,
And view with cheerful eyes approaching death. 10
The inexorable Sisters have decreed
That Priam's house and Priam's self shall bleed:
The day shall come, in which proud Troy shall yield,
And spread its smoking ruins o'er the field;
Yet Hecuba's, nor Priam's hoary age,
Whose blood shall quench some Grecian's thirsty rage,
Nor my brave brothers that have bit the ground,
Their souls dismiss'd through many a ghastly wound,
Can in my bosom half that grief create,
As the sad thought of your impending fate; 20
When some proud Grecian dame shall tasks impose,
Mimic your tears, and ridicule your woes:
Beneath Hyperia's waters shall you sweat,
And, fainting, scarce support the liquid weight:
Then shall some Argive loud insulting cry,
Behold the wife of Hector, guard of Troy!
Tears, at my name, shall drown those beauteous eyes,
And that fair bosom heave with rising sighs:
Before that day, by some brave hero's hand,
May I lie slain, and spurn the bloody sand! 30
* * * * *
TO MISS * * * *
ON HER PLAYING UPON A HARPSICHORD IN A ROOM HUNG WITH FLOWER-PIECES OF
HER OWN PAINTING.
When Stella strikes the tuneful string,
In scenes of imitated Spring,
Where beauty lavishes her powers
On beds of never-fading flowers,
And pleasure propagates around
Each charm of modulated sound;
Ah! think not, in the dangerous hour,
The nymph fictitious as the flower,
But shun, rash youth! the gay alcove,
Nor tempt the snares of wily love. 10
When charms thus press on every sense,
What thought of flight or of defence?
Deceitful hope or vain desire,
For ever flutter o'er her lyre,
Delighting, as the youth draws nigh,
To point the glances of her eye,
And forming, with unerring art,
New chains to hold the captive heart.
But on those regions of delight
Might truth intrude with daring flight, 20
Could Stella, sprightly, fair, and young,
One moment hear the moral song,
Instruction with her flowers might spring,
And wisdom warble from her string.
Mark, when, from thousand mingled dyes,
Thou seest one pleasing form arise,
How active light and thoughtful shade
In greater scenes each other aid;
Mark, when the different notes agree
In friendly contrariety, 30
How passion's well accorded strife,
Gives all the harmony of life:
Thy pictures shall thy conduct frame,
Consistent still, though not the same;
Thy music teach the nobler art,
To tune the regulated heart.
* * * * *
EVENING: AN ODE.
TO STELLA.
Evening now, from purple wings,
Sheds the grateful gifts she brings;
Brilliant drops bedeck the mead,
Cooling breezes shake the reed--
Shake the reed, and curl the stream,
Silver'd o'er with Cynthia's beam;
Near, the chequer'd, lonely grove,
Hears, and keeps thy secrets, Love.
Stella, thither let us stray
Lightly o'er the dewy way! 10
Phoebus drives his burning car,
Hence, my lovely Stella, far;
In his stead, the Queen of Night
Round us pours a lambent light;
Light that seems but just to show
Breasts that beat, and cheeks that glow;
Let us now, in whisper'd joy,
Evening's silent hours employ,
Silence best, and conscious shades,
Please the hearts that love invades; 20
Other pleasures give them pain,
Lovers all but love disdain.
* * * * *
TO THE SAME.
Whether Stella's eyes are found
Fix'd on earth, or glancing round,
If her face with pleasure glow,
If she sigh at others' woe,
If her easy air express
Conscious worth or soft distress,
Stella's eyes, and air, and face,
Charm with undiminish'd grace.
If on her we see display'd
Pendent gems, and rich brocade, 10
If her chintz with less expense
Flows in easy negligence;
Still she lights the conscious flame,
Still her charms appear the same;
If she strikes the vocal strings,
If she's silent, speaks, or sings,
If she sit, or if she move,
Still we love, and still approve.
Vain the casual transient glance,
Which alone can please by chance-- 20
Beauty, which depends on art,
Changing with the changing heart,
Which demands the toilet's aid,
Pendent gems, and rich brocade.
I those charms alone can prize
Which from constant Nature rise,
Which nor circumstance, nor dress,
E'er can make, or more, or less.
* * * * *
TO A FRIEND.
No more thus brooding o'er yon heap,
With Avarice painful vigils keep;
Still unenjoy'd the present store,
Still endless sighs are breathed for more.
Oh! quit the shadow, catch the prize,
Which not all India's treasure buys!
To purchase Heaven, has gold the power?
Can gold remove the mortal hour?
In life, can love be bought with gold?
Are friendship's pleasures to be sold? 10
No; all that's worth a wish--a thought,
Fair Virtue gives unbribed, unbought.
Cease, then, on trash thy hopes to bind,
Let nobler views engage thy mind.
With Science tread the wondrous way,
Or learn the Muse's moral lay;
In social hours indulge thy soul,
Where Mirth and Temperance mix the bowl;
To virtuous love resign thy breast,
And be, by blessing beauty, blest. 20
Thus taste the feast by Nature spread,
Ere youth and all its joys are fled;
Come, taste with me the balm of life,
Secure from pomp, and wealth, and strife!
I boast whate'er for man was meant,
In health, in Stella, and content;
And scorn, oh! let that scorn be thine,
Mere things of clay, that dig the mine!
* * * * *
TO A YOUNG LADY,
ON HER BIRTHDAY.
This tributary verse receive, my fair,
Warm with an ardent lover's fondest prayer.
May this returning day for ever find
Thy form more lovely, more adorn'd thy mind;
All pains, all cares, may favouring Heaven remove,
All but the sweet solicitudes of love!
May powerful Nature join with grateful Art,
To point each glance, and force it to the heart!
Oh then, when conquer'd crowds confess thy sway,
When even proud Wealth and prouder Wit obey, 10
My fair, be mindful of the mighty trust,
Alas! 'tis hard for beauty to be just!
Those sovereign charms with strictest care employ;
Nor give the generous pain, the worthless joy:
With his own form acquaint the forward fool,
Shown in the faithful glass of Ridicule;
Teach mimic Censure her own faults to find,
No more let coquettes to themselves be blind,
So shall Belinda's charms improve mankind.
* * * * *
EPILOGUE
INTENDED TO HAVE BEEN SPOKEN BY A LADY WHO WAS TO PERSONATE 'THE GHOST
OF HERMIONE.'
Ye blooming train, who give despair or joy,
Bless with a smile, or with a frown destroy;
In whose fair cheeks destructive Cupids wait,
And with unerring shafts distribute fate;
Whose snowy breasts, whose animated eyes,
Each youth admires, though each admirer dies;
Whilst you deride their pangs in barbarous play,
Unpitying see them weep, and hear them pray,
And unrelenting sport ten thousand lives away:
For you, ye fair! I quit the gloomy plains, 10
Where sable Night in all her horror reigns;
No fragrant bowers, no delightful glades,
Receive the unhappy ghosts of scornful maids.
For kind, for tender nymphs, the myrtle blooms,
And weaves her bending boughs in pleasing glooms;
Perennial roses deck each purple vale,
And scents ambrosial breathe in every gale;
Far hence are banish'd vapours, spleen, and tears,
Tea, scandal, ivory teeth, and languid airs;
No pug, nor favourite Cupid there enjoys 20
The balmy kiss for which poor Thyrsis dies;
Form'd to delight, they use no foreign arms,
No torturing whalebones pinch them into charms;
No conscious blushes there their cheeks inflame,
For those who feel no guilt can know no shame;
Unfaded still their former charms they show,
Around them pleasures wait, and joys for ever new.
But cruel virgins meet severer fates;
Expell'd and exiled from the blissful seats,
To dismal realms, and regions void of peace, 30
Where furies ever howl, and serpents hiss,
O'er the sad plains perpetual tempests sigh,
And poisonous vapours, blackening all the sky,
With livid hue the fairest face o'ercast,
And every beauty withers at the blast:
Where'er they fly, their lovers' ghosts pursue,
Inflicting all those ills which once they knew;
Vexation, fury, jealousy, despair,
Vex every eye, and every bosom tear;
Their foul deformities by all descried, 40
No maid to flatter, and no paint to hide.
Then melt, ye fair, while crowds around you sigh,
Nor let disdain sit lowering in your eye;
With pity soften every awful grace,
And beauty smile auspicious in each face
To ease their pain exert your milder power;
So shall you guiltless reign, and all mankind adore.
* * * * *
THE YOUNG AUTHOR.
When first the peasant, long inclined to roam,
Forsakes his rural sports and peaceful home,
Pleased with the scene the smiling ocean yields,
He scorns the verdant meads and flowery fields:
Then dances jocund o'er the watery way,
While the breeze whispers, and the streamers play:
Unbounded prospects in his bosom roll,
And future millions lift his rising soul;
In blissful dreams he digs the golden mine,
And raptured sees the new-found ruby shine. 10
Joys insincere! thick clouds invade the skies,
Loud roar the billows, high the waves arise;
Sickening with fear, he longs to view the shore,
And vows to trust the faithless deep no more.
So the young author, panting after fame,
And the long honours of a lasting name,
Intrusts his happiness to human kind,
More false, more cruel than the seas or wind!
Toil on, dull crowd! in ecstasies he cries,
For wealth or title, perishable prize; 20
While I those transitory blessings scorn,
Secure of praise from ages yet unborn.
This thought once form'd, all counsel comes too late,
He flies to press, and hurries on his fate;
Swiftly he sees the imagined laurels spread,
And feels the unfading wreath surround his head.
Warn'd by another's fate, vain youth be wise,
Those dreams were Settle's[1] once, and Ogilby's![2]
The pamphlet spreads, incessant hisses rise,
To some retreat the baffled writer flies, 30
Where no sour critics snarl, no sneers molest,
Safe from the tart lampoon, and stinging jest;
There begs of Heaven a less distinguish'd lot--
Glad to be hid, and proud to be forgot.
[Footnote 1: 'Settle;' see Life of Dryden.]
[Footnote 2: 'Ogilby:' a poor translator.]
* * * * *
FRIENDSHIP: AN ODE.
PRINTED IN THE GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE, 1743.
1 Friendship, peculiar boon of Heaven,
The noble mind's delight and pride--
To men and angels only given,
To all the lower world denied!
2 While love, unknown among the blest,
Parent of thousand wild desires,
The savage and the human breast
Torments alike with raging fires;
3 With bright, but oft destructive gleam,
Alike o'er all his lightnings fly;
Thy lambent glories only beam
Around the favourites of the sky.
4 Thy gentle flows of guiltless joys,
On fools and villains ne'er descend;
In vain for thee the tyrant sighs,
And hugs a flatterer for a friend.
5 Directress of the brave and just,
Oh, guide us through life's darksome way!
And let the tortures of mistrust
On selfish bosoms only prey.
6 Nor shall thine ardours cease to glow,
When souls to peaceful climes remove:
What raised our virtue here below,
Shall aid our happiness above.
* * * * *
IMITATION OF THE STYLE OF[1] * * *
1 Hermit hoar, in solemn cell
Wearing out life's evening gray,
Strike thy bosom, sage, and tell
What is bliss, and which the way.
2 Thus I spoke, and speaking sigh'd,
Scarce repress'd the starting tear,
When the hoary sage replied,
'Come, my lad, and drink some beer.'
* * * * *
ONE AND TWENTY.
1 Long-expected one-and-twenty,
Lingering year, at length is flown:
Pride and pleasure, pomp and plenty,
Great * * *, are now your own.
2 Loosen'd from the minor's tether,
Free to mortgage or to sell,
Wild as wind, and light as feather,
Bid the sons of thrift farewell.
3 Call the Betsies, Kates, and Jennies,
All the names that banish care;
Lavish of your grandsire's guineas,
Show the spirit of an heir.
4 All that prey on vice and folly
Joy to see their quarry fly:
There the gamester, light and jolly;
There the lender, grave and sly.
5 Wealth, my lad, was made to wander,
Let it wander as it will;
Call the jockey, call the pander,
Bid them come and take their fill.
6 When the bonny blade carouses,
Pockets full, and spirits high--
What are acres? what are houses?
Only dirt, or wet, or dry.
7 Should the guardian friend or mother
Tell the woes of wilful waste:
Scorn their counsel, scorn their pother,
You can hang or drown at last.
[Footnote 1: Supposed to be Percy.]
* * * * *
END OF JOHNSON'S POEMS.
* * * * *
THE POETICAL WORKS
OF
THOMAS PARNELL.
TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE
ROBERT EARL OF OXFORD AND EARL MORTIMER.
Such were the notes thy once-loved poet sung,
Till Death untimely stopp'd his tuneful tongue.
Oh, just beheld, and lost! admired, and mourn'd!
With softest manners, gentlest arts adorn'd,
Blest in each science, blest in every strain,
Dear to the Muse, to Harley dear--in vain!
For him, thou oft hast bid the world attend,
Fond to forget the statesman in the friend;
For Swift and him, despised the farce of state,
The sober follies of the wise and great;
Dexterous the craving, fawning crowd to quit,
And pleased to 'scape from flattery to wit.
Absent or dead, still let a friend be dear,
(A sigh the absent claims--the dead, a tear)
Recall those nights that closed thy toilsome days,
Still hear thy Parnell in his living lays:
Who careless, now, of interest, fame, or fate,
Perhaps forgets that Oxford e'er was great;
Or deeming meanest what we greatest call,
Beholds thee glorious only in thy fall.
And sure if ought below the seats divine
Can touch immortals, 'tis a soul like thine:
A soul supreme, in each hard instance tried,
Above all pain, all anger, and all pride,
The rage of power, the blast of public breath,
The lust of lucre, and the dread of death.
In vain to deserts thy retreat is made;
The Muse attends thee to the silent shade:
'Tis hers, the brave man's latest steps to trace,
Re-judge his acts, and dignify disgrace.
When Interest calls off all her sneaking train,
When all the obliged desert, and all the vain,
She waits; or, to the scaffold, or the cell,
When the last lingering friend has bid farewell.
Even now she shades thy evening walk with bays,
(No hireling she, no prostitute to praise)
Even now, observant of the parting ray,
Eyes the calm sunset of thy various day,
Through fortune's cloud one truly great can see,
Nor fears to tell that MORTIMER is he.
_September_ 25, 1721. A. POPE.
THE LIFE AND POETRY OF THOMAS PARNELL.
Parnell is the third in a trio of poetical clergymen whose names have
immediately succeeded each other in this edition. Bowles, Churchill,
and Parnell were all clergymen, and all poets; but in other respects
differed materially from each other. In Bowles, the clerical and the
poetical characters were on the whole well attuned and harmonised. In
Churchill, they came to an open rupture. In Parnell, they were neither
ruptured nor reconciled, but maintained an ambiguous relation, till
his premature death settled the moot point for ever.
The life of this poet has been written by Goldsmith, by Johnson, by
the Rev. John Mitford, and others; but, after all, very little is
known about him. Thomas Parnell was the descendant of an ancient
family, which had been settled for some hundreds of years at
Congleton, Cheshire. His father, whose name also was Thomas, took the
side of the Commonwealth, and at the Restoration went over to Ireland,
where he purchased a considerable property. This, along with his
estate in Cheshire, devolved to the poet. His father had a second son,
John, whose descendants were created baronets. The late Sir Henry
Parnell, for some years the respected member of Parliament for the
town of Dundee, where we now write, was the great-great-grandson of
the poet's father. Parnell was born in Dublin, in the year 1679. He
was sent to a school taught by one Dr Jones. Here he is said to have
distinguished himself by the readiness and retentiveness of his
memory; often performing the task allotted for days in a few hours,
and being able to repeat forty lines in any book of poems, after the
first reading. It is a proof of the prematurity of his powers, that he
entered Trinity College, Dublin, at the age of thirteen, where his
compositions attracted attention from the extent of classical lore
which they discovered. He took the degree of M.A. in 1700; and the
same year (through a dispensation on account of being under age) was
ordained deacon by the Bishop of Deny. Three years after, he was
ordained priest; and in 1705, he was made Archdeacon of Clogher, by
Sir George Ashe, bishop of that see. So soon as he received the
archdeanery, he married Miss Ann Minchin, who is described as a young
lady of great beauty, and of an amiable character, by whom he had two
sons, who died young, and a daughter, who long survived both
her parents.
Up to the triumph of the Tories, at the end of Queen Anne's reign,
Parnell appears to have been, like his father, a keen Whig. He was at
that time, however, induced, for motives which his biographers call
obscure, but which to us seem obvious enough, on the well-known
principle of the popularity of the rising sun, to change his party;
and he was hailed by the Tories as a valuable accession to their
ranks. This proves that his talents were even then known; a fact
corroborated by Johnson's statement, that while he was waiting in the
outer-room at Lord Oxford's levee, the prime minister, when told he
was there, went out, at the persuasion of Swift, with his treasurer's
staff in his hand, and saluted him in the most flattering manner. He
became, either before or immediately after this, intimate with Pope,
Swift, Gay, and the rest of that brilliant set, who all appear to have
loved him for his social qualities, to have admired his genius, and to
have pitied his infirmities. He was a member of the Scriblerus Club,
and contributed some trifles to their transactions. He was, at the
same time, intimate with Addison and Steele, and wrote a few papers in
the "Spectator." To Pope, he was of essential service, assisting him
in his notes to the "Iliad," being, what Pope was not, a good Greek
scholar. He wrote a life of Homer, which was prefixed to the
Translation, although stiff in style, and fabulous in statement. He
gratified Pope's malicious spirit still more by writing, under the
guise of a "Life of Zoilus," a bitter attack on Dennis--the great
object of the poet's fear and mortal abhorrence. For these and other
services, Pope rewarded him, after his usual manner, with large
offerings of that sweet and suffocating incense, by which he
delighted, now to gain his enemies, and now to gratify his friends.
With Gay, also, Parnell was intimate; and the latter, himself
independent by his fortune, is said to have bestowed on this needy and
improvident genius the price of the copyright of his works.
Parnell first visited London in 1706; and from that period till his
death, scarcely a year elapsed without his spending some time in the
metropolis. He seems to have had as intense a relish of London life as
Johnson and Boswell exhibited in the next age. So soon as he had
collected his rents, he hied to the capital, and there enjoyed himself
to the top of his bent. He jested with the Scriblerus Club. He quaffed
now and then with Lord Oxford. He varied his round of amusements by
occasional professional exhibitions in the pulpits of Southwark and
elsewhere,--made, we fear, more from a desire to display himself, than
to benefit his hearers. Still his sermons were popular; and he
entertained at one time the hope,--a hope blasted by the death of
Queen Anne,--of being preferred to a city charge. So soon as each
London furlough was expired, he returned to Ireland, jaded and
dispirited, and there took delight in nursing his melancholy; in
pining for the amusements of the metropolis; in shunning and sneering
at the society around him; and in abusing his native bogs and his
fellow-countrymen in verse. This was not manly, far less Christian
conduct. He ought to have drowned his recollections of London in
active duty, or in diligent study; and if he found society coarse or
corrupt, he should have set himself to refine and to purify it. But he
seems to have been a lazy, luxurious person--his life a round of
selfish rapture and selfish anguish,--in fact, ruined by his
independent fortune. Had he been a poorer, he had probably been a
happier man. He was not, moreover, of that self-contained cast of
character, which can live on its own resources, create its own world,
and say, "My mind to me a kingdom is."
In 1712 he lost his wife, with whom he appears to have lived as
happily as his morbid temperament and mortified feelings would permit.
This blow deepened his melancholy, and drove him, it is said, to an
excessive and habitual use of wine. In the same year we find him in
London, brought out once more under the "special patronage" of Dean
Swift, who had quite a penchant for Parnell, and who wished, through
his side, to mortify certain persons in Ireland, who did not
appreciate, he says, the Archdeacon; and who, we suspect, besides, did
not thoroughly appreciate the Dean. Swift, partly in pity for the
"poor lad," as he calls him, whom he saw to be in such imminent danger
of losing caste and character, and partly in the true patronising
spirit, introduced Parnell to Lord Bolingbroke, who received him
kindly, entertained him at dinner, and encouraged him in his poetical
studies. The Dean's patronage, however, was of little avail in this
matter to the protege; Bolingbroke, a man of many promises, and few
performances, did nothing for him. The consequences of dissipation
began, at this time, too, to appear in Parnell's constitution; and we
find Swift saying of him, "His head is out of order, like mine, but
more constant, poor boy." It was perhaps to this period that Pope
referred, when he told Spence, "Parnell is a great follower of drams,
and strangely open and scandalous in his debaucheries." If so, his bad
habits seem to have sprung as much from disappointment and discontent
as from taste.
Yet Swift continued his friend, and it was at his instance that, in
1713, Archbishop King presented Parnell with a prebend. In 1714, his
hope of London promotion died with Queen Anne; but in 1716, the same
generous Archbishop bestowed on him the vicarage of Finglass, in the
diocese of Dublin, worth L400 a-year. This preferment, however, the
poet did not live long to enjoy,--dying at Chester, in July
1717, on his way to Ireland, aged thirty-eight years. His estates
passed to his nephew, Sir John Parnell. He had, in the course of his
life, composed a great deal of poetry; much of it, indeed, _invita_
Minerva. After his death, Pope collected the best pieces, and
published them, with a dedication to Lord Oxford. Goldsmith, in his
edition, added two or three; and other editors, a good many poems, of
which we have only inserted one, deeming the rest unworthy of his
memory. In 1788 a volume was published, entitled, "The Posthumous
Works of Dr T. Parnell, containing poems moral and divine." These,
however, attracted little attention, being mostly rubbish. Johnson
says of them, "I know not whence they came, nor have ever inquired
whither they are going." It is said that the present representative of
the Parnell family preserves a mass of unpublished poems from the pen
of his relative. We trust that he will long and religiously refrain
from disturbing their MS. slumbers.
The whole tenor of Parnell's history convinces us that he was an
easy-tempered, kind-hearted, yet querulous and self-indulgent man, who
had no higher motive or object than to gratify himself. His very
ambition aspired not to very lofty altitudes. His utmost wish was to
attain a metropolitan pulpit, where he could have added the reputation
of a popular preacher to that of being the _protege_ of Swift, and the
pet of the Scriblerus Club. The character of his poetry is in keeping
with the temperament of the man. It is slipshod, easy, and pleasing.
If the distinguishing quality of poetry be to give pleasure, then
Parnell is a poet. You never thrill under his power, but you read him
with a quiet, constant, subdued gratification. If never eminently
original, he has the art of enunciating common-places with felicity and
grace. The stories he relates are almost all old, but his manner of
telling them is new. His thoughts and images are mostly selected from
his common-place book; but he utters them with such a natural ease of
manner, that you are tempted to think them his own. He knows the
compass of his poetical powers, and never attempts anything very lofty
or arduous. His "Allegory on Man,"--pronounced by Johnson his
best,--seems rather a laborious than a fortunate effusion. His "Hymn
to Contentment" is animated, as the subject required, by a kind of
sober rapture. His "Faery Tale" is a good imitation of that old style
of composition. His "Hesiod" catches the classical tone and spirit
with considerable success. His "Flies," and "Elegy to the Old Beauty,"
are ingenious trifles. His "Nightpiece on Death" has fine touches, but
is slight for such a theme, and must not be named beside Blair's
"Grave," and Gray's "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard." His
translations we have, in accordance with the plan of this edition,
omitted--and, indeed, they are little loss. His "Bookworm," &c., are
adaptations from Beza and other foreign authors. By far his most
popular poem is the "Hermit." In it he tells a tale that had been told
in Arabic, French, and English, for the tenth time; and in that tenth
edition tells it so well, that the public have thanked him for it as
for an original work. Of course, the story not being Parnell's, it is
not his fault that it casts no light upon the dread problems of
Providence it professed to explain. But the incidents are recorded
with ease and liveliness; the characters are rapidly depicted, and
strikingly contrasted; and many touches of true poetry occur.
How vivid this couplet, for instance--
"Slow creaking turns the door with jealous care,
And half he welcomes in the shivering pair!"
How picturesque the following--
"A fresher green the smiling leaves display,
And, _glittering as they tremble_, cheer the day!"
The description of the unveiled angel approaches the
sublime--
"Fair rounds of radiant points invest his hair;
Celestial odours breathe through purpled air;
And wings, whose colours glitter'd on the day,
Wide at his back, their gradual plumes display.
The form ethereal bursts upon his sight,
And moves in all the majesty of light."
A passage of similar brilliance occurs in "Piety, or the
Vision"--
"A sudden splendour seem'd to kindle day;
A breeze came breathing in; a sweet perfume,
_Blown from eternal gardens_, fill'd the room,
And in a void of blue, that clouds invest,
Appear'd a daughter of the realms of rest."
Such passages themselves are enough to prove Parnell a
true poet.
* * * * *
PARNELL'S POEMS.
HESIOD; OR, THE RISE OF WOMAN.
What ancient times, those times we fancy wise,
Have left on long record of woman's rise,
What morals teach it, and what fables hide,
What author wrote it, how that author died,--
All these I sing. In Greece they framed the tale;
(In Greece, 'twas thought a woman might be frail);
Ye modern beauties! where the poet drew
His softest pencil, think he dreamt of you;
And warn'd by him, ye wanton pens, beware
How Heaven's concern'd to vindicate the fair. 10
The case was Hesiod's; he the fable writ--
Some think with meaning--some, with idle wit:
Perhaps 'tis either, as the ladies please;
I waive the contest, and commence the lays.
In days of yore, no matter where or when,
'Twas ere the low creation swarm'd with men,
That one Prometheus, sprung of heavenly birth
(Our author's song can witness), lived on earth.
He carved the turf to mould a manly frame,
And stole from Jove his animating flame. 20
The sly contrivance o'er Olympus ran,
When thus the Monarch of the Stars began:
'Oh versed in arts! whose daring thoughts aspire
To kindle clay with never-dying fire!
Enjoy thy glory past, that gift was thine;
The next thy creature meets, be fairly mine:
And such a gift, a vengeance so design'd,
As suits the counsel of a God to find;
A pleasing bosom cheat, a specious ill,
Which, felt, they curse, yet covet still to feel.' 30
He said, and Vulcan straight the sire commands
To temper mortar with ethereal hands;
In such a shape to mould a rising fair,
As virgin-goddesses are proud to wear;
To make her eyes with diamond-water shine,
And form her organs for a voice divine.
'Twas thus the sire ordain'd; the power obey'd;
And work'd, and wonder'd at the work he made;
The fairest, softest, sweetest frame beneath,
Now made to seem, now more than seem, to breathe. 40
As Vulcan ends, the cheerful queen of charms
Clasp'd the new-panting creature in her arms;
From that embrace a fine complexion spread,
Where mingled whiteness glow'd with softer red.
Then in a kiss she breathed her various arts,
Of trifling prettily with wounded hearts;
A mind for love, but still a changing mind;
The lisp affected, and the glance design'd;
The sweet confusing blush, the secret wink,
The gentle-swimming walk, the courteous sink, 50
The stare for strangeness fit, for scorn the frown,
For decent yielding, looks declining down,
The practised languish, where well-feign'd desire
Would own its melting in a mutual fire;
Gay smiles to comfort; April showers to move;
And all the nature, all the art, of love.
Gold-sceptred Juno next exalts the fair;
Her touch endows her with imperious air,
Self-valuing fancy, highly-crested pride,
Strong sovereign will, and some desire to chide: 60
For which an eloquence, that aims to vex,
With native tropes of anger arms the sex.
Minerva, skilful goddess, train'd the maid
To twirl the spindle by the twisting thread,
To fix the loom, instruct the reeds to part,
Cross the long weft, and close the web with art:
An useful gift; but what profuse expense,
What world of fashions, took its rise from hence!
Young Hermes next, a close-contriving god,
Her brows encircled with his serpent rod; 70
Then plots, and fair excuses, fill'd her brain,
The views of breaking amorous vows for gain,
The price of favours, the designing arts
That aim at riches in contempt of hearts;
And for a comfort in the marriage life,
The little, pilfering temper of a wife.
Full on the fair his beams Apollo flung,
And fond persuasion tipp'd her easy tongue;
He gave her words, where oily flattery lays
The pleasing colours of the art of praise; 80
And wit, to scandal exquisitely prone,
Which frets another's spleen to cure its own.
Those sacred virgins whom the bards revere,
Tuned all her voice, and shed a sweetness there,
To make her sense with double charms abound,
Or make her lively nonsense please by sound.
To dress the maid, the decent Graces brought
A robe in all the dyes of beauty wrought,
And placed their boxes o'er a rich brocade
Where pictured loves on every cover play'd; 90
Then spread those implements that Vulcan's art
Had framed to merit Cytherea's heart;
The wire to curl, the close-indented comb,
To call the locks that lightly wander, home;
And chief, the mirror, where the ravish'd maid
Beholds and loves her own reflected shade.
Fair Flora lent her stores, the purpled hours
Confined her tresses with a wreath of flowers;
Within the wreath arose a radiant crown;
A veil pellucid hung depending down; 100
Back roll'd her azure veil with serpent fold,
The purfled border deck'd the flower with gold.
Her robe (which, closely by the girdle braced,
Reveal'd the beauties of a slender waist)
Flow'd to the feet; to copy Venus' air,
When Venus' statues have a robe to wear.
The new-sprung creature finish'd thus for harms,
Adjusts her habit, practises her charms,
With blushes glows, or shines with lively smiles,
Confirms her will, or recollects her wiles: 110
Then conscious of her worth, with easy pace
Glides by the glass, and, turning, views her face.
A finer flax than what they wrought before,
Through Time's deep cave the sister Fates explore,
Then fix the loom, their fingers nimbly weave,
And thus their toil prophetic songs deceive:
'Flow from the rock, my flax! and swiftly flow,
Pursue thy thread, the spindle runs below.
A creature fond and changing, fair and vain,
The creature Woman, rises now to reign. 120
New beauty blooms, a beauty form'd to fly;
New love begins, a love produced to die;
New parts distress the troubled scenes of life,
The fondling mistress, and the ruling wife.
Men, born to labour, all with pains provide;
Women have time to sacrifice to pride:
They want the care of man, their want they know,
And dress to please with heart-alluring show,
The show prevailing, for the sway contend,
And make a servant where they meet a friend. 130
Thus in a thousand wax-erected forts
A loitering race the painful bee supports,
From sun to sun, from bank to bank he flies,
With honey loads his bag, with wax his thighs,
Fly where he will, at home the race remain,
Prune the silk dress, and murmuring eat the gain.
Yet here and there we grant a gentle bride,
Whose temper betters by the father's side;
Unlike the rest, that double human care,
Fond to relieve, or resolute to share: 140
Happy the man whom thus his stars advance!
The curse is general, but the blessing chance.'
Thus sung the Sisters, while the gods admire
Their beauteous creature, made for man, in ire;
The young Pandora she, whom all contend
To make too perfect not to gain her end:
Then bid the winds that fly to breathe the spring,
Return to bear her on a gentle wing;
With wafting airs the winds obsequious blow,
And land the shining vengeance safe below. 150
A golden coffer in her hand she bore,
(The present treacherous, but the bearer more)
'Twas fraught with pangs; for Jove ordain'd above,
That gold should aid, and pangs attend on love.
Her gay descent the man perceived afar,
Wondering he ran to catch the falling star;
But so surprised, as none but he can tell,
Who loved so quickly, and who loved so well.
O'er all his veins the wandering passion burns,
He calls her nymph, and every nymph by turns. 160
Her form to lovely Venus he prefers,
Or swears that Venus must be such as hers.
She, proud to rule, yet strangely framed to tease,
Neglects his offers while her airs she plays,
Shoots scornful glances from the bended frown,
In brisk disorder trips it up and down,
Then hums a careless tune to lay the storm,
And sits and blushes, smiles, and yields in form.
'Now take what Jove design'd, (she softly cried,)
This box thy portion, and myself thy bride:' 170
Fired with the prospect of the double charms,
He snatch'd the box, and bride, with eager arms.
Unhappy man! to whom so bright she shone,
The fatal gift, her tempting self, unknown!
The winds were silent, all the waves asleep,
And heaven was traced upon the flattering deep;
But whilst he looks, unmindful of a storm,
And thinks the water wears a stable form,
What dreadful din around his ears shall rise!
What frowns confuse his picture of the skies! 180
At first the creature Man was framed alone,
Lord of himself, and all the world his own.
For him the Nymphs in green forsook the woods,
For him the Nymphs in blue forsook the floods;
In vain the Satyrs rage, the Tritons rave;
They bore him heroes in the secret cave.
No care destroy'd, no sick disorder prey'd,
No bending age his sprightly form decay'd,
No wars were known, no females heard to rage,
And poets tell us, 'twas a golden age. 190
When woman came, those ills the box confined
Burst furious out, and poison'd all the wind,
From point to point, from pole to pole they flew,
Spread as they went, and in the progress grew:
The Nymphs, regretting, left the mortal race,
And, altering Nature, wore a sickly face:
New terms of folly rose, new states of care;
New plagues to suffer, and to please, the fair!
The days of whining, and of wild intrigues,
Commenced, or finish'd, with the breach of leagues; 200
The mean designs of well-dissembled love;
The sordid matches never join'd above;
Abroad, the labour, and at home the noise,
(Man's double sufferings for domestic joys)
The curse of jealousy; expense, and strife;
Divorce, the public brand of shameful life;
The rival's sword; the qualm that takes the fair;
Disdain for passion, passion in despair--
These, and a thousand yet unnamed, we find;
Ah, fear the thousand yet unnamed behind! 210
Thus on Parnassus tuneful Hesiod sung,
The mountain echoed, and the valley rung,
The sacred groves a fix'd attention show,
The crystal Helicon forbore to flow,
The sky grew bright, and (if his verse be true)
The Muses came to give the laurel too.
But what avail'd the verdant prize of wit,
If Love swore vengeance for the tales he writ?
Ye fair offended, hear your friend relate
What heavy judgment proved the writer's fate, 220
Though when it happen'd, no relation clears;
'Tis thought in five, or five and twenty years.
Where, dark and silent, with a twisted shade
The neighbouring woods a native arbour made,
There oft a tender pair for amorous play
Retiring, toy'd the ravish'd hours away;
A Locrian youth, the gentle Troilus he,
A fair Milesian, kind Evanthe she:
But swelling Nature, in a fatal hour,
Betray'd the secrets of the conscious bower; 230
The dire disgrace her brothers count their own,
And track her steps, to make its author known.
It chanced one evening, ('twas the lover's day)
Conceal'd in brakes the jealous kindred lay;
When Hesiod, wandering, mused along the plain,
And fix'd his seat where Love had fix'd the scene:
A strong suspicion straight possess'd their mind,
(For poets ever were a gentle kind.)
But when Evanthe near the passage stood,
Flung back a doubtful look, and shot the wood, 240
'Now take (at once they cry) thy due reward!'
And, urged with erring rage, assault the bard.
His corpse the sea received. The dolphins bore
('Twas all the gods would do) the corpse to shore.
Methinks I view the dead with pitying eyes,
And see the dreams of ancient wisdom rise;
I see the Muses round the body cry,
But hear a Cupid loudly laughing by;
He wheels his arrow with insulting hand,
And thus inscribes the moral on the sand: 250
'Here Hesiod lies: ye future bards beware
How far your moral tales incense the fair:
Unloved, unloving, 'twas his fate to bleed;
Without his quiver Cupid caused the deed:
He judged this turn of malice justly due,
And Hesiod died for joys he never knew.'
* * * * *
SONG.
1 When thy beauty appears,
In its graces and airs,
All bright as an angel new dropt from the sky;
At distance I gaze, and am awed by my fears,
So strangely you dazzle my eye!
2 But when without art,
Your kind thoughts you impart,
When your love runs in blushes through every vein;
When it darts from your eyes, when it pants in your heart,
Then I know you're a woman again.
3 There's a passion and pride
In our sex (she replied),
And thus (might I gratify both) I would do:
Still an angel appear to each lover beside,
But still be a woman to you.
* * * * *
SONG.
1 Thyrsis, a young and amorous swain,
Saw two, the beauties of the plain;
Who both his heart subdue:
Gay Caelia's eyes were dazzling fair,
Sabina's easy shape and air
With softer magic drew.
2 He haunts the stream, he haunts the grove,
Lives in a fond romance of love,
And seems for each to die;
Till each, a little spiteful grown,
Sabina Caelia's shape ran down,
And she Sabina's eye.
3 Their envy made the shepherd find
Those eyes, which love could only blind;
So set the lover free:
No more he haunts the grove or stream,
Or with a true-love knot and name
Engraves a wounded tree.
4 Ah, Caelia! (sly Sabina cried)
Though neither love, we're both denied;
Now, to support the sex's pride,
Let either fix the dart.
Poor girl! (says Caelia) say no more;
For should the swain but one adore,
That spite which broke his chains before,
Would break the other's heart.
* * * * *
SONG.
1 My days have been so wondrous free,
The little birds that fly
With careless ease from tree to tree,
Were but as bless'd as I.
2 Ask gliding waters, if a tear
Of mine increased their stream?
Or ask the flying gales, if e'er
I lent one sigh to them?
3 But now my former days retire,
And I'm by beauty caught,
The tender chains of sweet desire
Are fix'd upon my thought.
4 Ye nightingales! ye twisting pines!
Ye swains that haunt the grove!
Ye gentle echoes! breezy winds!
Ye close retreats of lore!
5 With all of Nature, all of Art,
Assist the dear design;
Oh teach a young, unpractised heart
To make my Nancy mine.
6 The very thought of change I hate,
As much as of despair;
Nor ever covet to be great,
Unless it be for her.
7 'Tis true, the passion in my mind
Is mix'd with soft distress;
Yet while the fair I love is kind,
I cannot wish it less.
* * * * *
ANACREONTIC.
When Spring came on with fresh delight,
To cheer the soul, and charm the sight,
While easy breezes, softer rain,
And warmer suns salute the plain;
'Twas then, in yonder piny grove,
That Nature went to meet with Love.
Green was her robe, and green her wreath,
Where'er she trod, 'twas green beneath;
Where'er she turn'd, the pulses beat
With new recruits of genial heat; 10
And in her train the birds appear,
To match for all the coming year.
Raised on a bank, where daisies grew,
And violets intermix'd a blue,
She finds the boy she went to find;
A thousand pleasures wait behind,
Aside a thousand arrows lie,
But all, unfeather'd, wait to fly.
When they met, the dame and boy,
Dancing graces, idle joy, 20
Wanton smiles, and airy play,
Conspired to make the scene be gay;
Love pair'd the birds through all the grove,
And Nature bid them sing to Love,
Sitting, hopping, fluttering sing,
And pay their tribute from the wing,
To fledge the shafts that idly lie,
And, yet unfeather'd, wait to fly.
'Tis thus, when Spring renews the blood,
They meet in every trembling wood, 30
And thrice they make the plumes agree,
And every dart they mount with three,
And every dart can boast a kind,
Which suits each proper turn of mind.
From the towering eagle's plume
The generous hearts accept their doom;
Shot by the peacock's painted eye
The vain and airy lovers die:
For careful dames and frugal men,
The shafts are speckled by the hen: 40
The pies and parrots deck the darts,
When prattling wins the panting hearts:
When from the voice the passions spring,
The warbling finch affords a wing:
Together, by the sparrow stung,
Down fall the wanton and the young:
And fledged by geese the weapons fly,
When others love they know not why.
All this (as late I chanced to rove)
I learn'd in yonder waving grove. 50
And see, says Love, who call'd me near,
How much I deal with Nature here;
How both support a proper part,
She gives the feather, I the dart:
Then cease for souls averse to sigh,
If Nature cross ye, so do I;
My weapon there unfeather'd flies,
And shakes and shuffles through the skies.
But if the mutual charms I find
By which she links you, mind to mind, 60
They wing my shafts, I poise the darts,
And strike from both, through both your hearts.
* * * * *
ANACREONTIC.
1 Gay Bacchus liking Estcourt's[1] wine,
A noble meal bespoke us;
And for the guests that were to dine,
Brought Comus, Love, and Jocus.
2 The god near Cupid drew his chair,
Near Comus, Jocus placed;
For wine makes Love forget its care,
And Mirth exalts a feast.
3 The more to please the sprightly god,
Each sweet engaging Grace
Put on some clothes to come abroad,
And took a waiter's place.
4 Then Cupid named at every glass
A lady of the sky;
While Bacchus swore he'd drink the lass,
And did it bumper-high.
5 Fat Comus toss'd his brimmers o'er,
And always got the most;
Jocus took care to fill him more,
Whene'er he miss'd the toast.
6 They call'd, and drank at every touch;
He fill'd, and drank again;
And if the gods can take too much,
'Tis said they did so then.
7 Gay Bacchus little Cupid stung,
By reckoning his deceits;
And Cupid mock'd his stammering tongue,
With all his staggering gaits:
8 And Jocus droll'd on Comus' ways,
And tales without a jest;
While Comus call'd his witty plays
But waggeries at best.
9 Such talk soon set 'em all at odds;
And, had I Homer's pen,
I'd sing ye, how they drank like gods,
And how they fought like men.
10 To part the fray, the Graces fly,
Who make 'em soon agree;
Nay, had the Furies selves been nigh,
They still were three to three.
11 Bacchus appeased, raised Cupid up,
And gave him back his bow;
But kept some darts to stir the cup
Where sack and sugar flow.
12 Jocus took Comus' rosy crown,
And gaily wore the prize,
And thrice, in mirth, he push'd him down,
As thrice he strove to rise.
13 Then Cupid sought the myrtle grove,
Where Venus did recline;
And Venus close embracing Love,
They join'd to rail at wine.
14 And Comus loudly cursing wit,
Roll'd off to some retreat,
Where boon companions gravely sit
In fat unwieldy state.
15 Bacchus and Jocus, still behind,
For one fresh glass prepare;
They kiss, and are exceeding kind,
And vow to be sincere.
16 But part in time, whoever hear
This our instructive song;
For though such friendships may be dear,
They can't continue long.
[Footnote 1: 'Estcourt:' Dick, a comedian and keeper of the Bumper
Tavern--a companion of Addison, Steele, and the rest.]
* * * * *
A FAIRY TALE,
IN THE ANCIENT ENGLISH STYLE.
1 In Britain's isle and Arthur's days,
When midnight Faeries danced the maze,
Lived Edwin of the green;
Edwin, I wis, a gentle youth,
Endow'd with courage, sense, and truth,
Though badly shaped he been.
2 His mountain back mote well be said
To measure heighth against his head,
And lift itself above:
Yet spite of all that Nature did
To make his uncouth form forbid,
This creature dared to love.
3 He felt the charms of Edith's eyes,
Nor wanted hope to gain the prize,
Could ladies look within;
But one Sir Topaz dress'd with art,
And, if a shape could win a heart,
He had a shape to win.
4 Edwin (if right I read my song)
With slighted passion paced along,
All in the moony light:
'Twas near an old enchanted court,
Where sportive Faeries made resort
To revel out the night.
5 His heart was drear, his hope was cross'd,
'Twas late, 'twas farr, the path was lost
That reach'd the neighbour-town;
With weary steps he quits the shades,
Resolved, the darkling dome he treads,
And drops his limbs adown.
6 But scant he lays him on the floor,
When hollow winds remove the door,
A trembling rocks the ground:
And (well I ween to count aright)
At once an hundred tapers light
On all the walls around.
7 Now sounding tongues assail his ear,
Now sounding feet approachen near,
And now the sounds increase:
And from the corner where he lay
He sees a train, profusely gay,
Come prankling o'er the place.
8 But trust me, gentles! never yet
Was dight a masquing half so neat,
Or half so rich before;
The country lent the sweet perfumes,
The sea the pearl, the sky the plumes,
The town its silken store.
9 Now whilst he gazed, a gallant dress'd
In flaunting robes above the rest,
With awful accent cried:
What mortal of a wretched mind,
Whose sighs infect the balmy wind,
Has here presumed to hide?
10 At this the swain, whose venturous soul
No fears of magic art control,
Advanced in open sight:
Nor have I cause of dread, he said,
Who view, by no presumption led,
Your revels of the night.
11 'Twas grief, for scorn of faithful love,
Which made my steps unweeting rove
Amid the nightly dew.
'Tis well, the gallant cries again,
We Faeries never injure men
Who dare to tell us true.
12 Exalt thy love-dejected heart,
Be mine the task, or e'er we part,
To make thee grief resign;
Now take the pleasure of thy chaunce;
Whilst I with Mab my partner daunce,
Be little Mable thine.
13 He spoke, and all a-sudden there
Light music floats in wanton air;
The monarch leads the queen:
The rest their Faerie partners found,
And Mable trimly tripp'd the ground
With Edwin of the green.
14 The dauncing past, the board was laid,
And siker such a feast was made
As heart and lip desire;
Withouten hands the dishes fly,
The glasses--with a wish come nigh,
And with a wish retire.
15 But now, to please the Faerie King,
Full every deal, they laugh and sing,
And antic feats devise;
Some wind and tumble like an ape,
And other some transmute their shape
In Edwin's wondering eyes.
16 Till one at last that Robin bight,
(Renown'd for pinching maids by night)
Has hent him up aloof;
And full against the beam he flung,
Where by the back the youth he hung
To spraul unneath the roof.
17 From thence, Reverse my charm, he cries,
And let it fairly now suffice
The gambol has been shown.
But Oberon answers with a smile,
Content thee, Edwin, for a while,
The vantage is thine own.
18 Here ended all the phantom-play;
They smelt the fresh approach of day,
And heard a cock to crow;
The whirling wind that bore the crowd
Has clapp'd the door, and whistled loud,
To warn them all to go.
19 Then screaming all at once they fly,
And all at once the tapers die,
Poor Edwin falls to floor;
Forlorn his state, and dark the place,
Was never wight in sike a case
Through all the land before.
20 But soon as Dan Apollo rose,
Full jolly creature home he goes,
He feels his back the less;
His honest tongue and steady mind
Had rid him of the lump behind
Which made him want success.
21 With lusty livelyhed he talks,
He seems a-dauncing as he walks,
His story soon took wind;
And beauteous Edith sees the youth,
Endow'd with courage, sense, and truth,
Without a bunch behind.
22 The story told, Sir Topaz moved,
The youth of Edith erst approved,
To see the revel scene:
At close of eve he leaves his home,
And wends to find the ruin'd dome
All on the gloomy plain.
23 As there he bides, it so befell,
The wind came rustling down a dell,
A shaking seized the wall:
Up spring the tapers as before,
The Faeries bragly foot the floor,
And music fills the hall.
24 But, certes, sorely sunk with woe
Sir Topaz sees the elfin show,
His spirits in him die:
When Oberon cries, A man is near,
A mortal passion, cleeped fear,
Hang's flagging in the sky.
25 With that Sir Topaz, hapless youth!
In accents faltering aye for ruth,
Entreats them pity graunt;
For als he been a mister wight
Betray'd by wandering in the night
To tread the circled haunt.
26 Ah, losel vile! (at once they roar)
And little skill'd of Faerie lore,
Thy cause to come we know:
Now has thy kestrel courage fell;
And Faeries, since a lie you tell,
Are free to work thee woe.
27 Then Will, who bears the wispy fire,
To trail the swains among the mire,
The caitiff upward flung;
There like a tortoise in a shop
He dangled from the chamber-top,
Where whilom Edwin hung.
28 The revel now proceeds apace,
Deftly they frisk it o'er the place,
They sit, they drink, and eat;
The time with frolic mirth beguile,
And poor Sir Topaz hangs the while,
Till all the rout retreat.
29 By this the stars began to wink,
They shriek, they fly, the tapers sink,
And down ydrops the knight.
For never spell by Faerie laid
With strong enchantment bound a glade
Beyond the length of night.
30 Chill, dark, alone, adreed he lay,
Till up the welkin rose the day,
Then deem'd the dole was o'er;
But wot ye well his harder lot?
His seely back the bunch has got
Which Edwin lost afore.
31 This tale a Sybil-nurse aread;
She softly stroked my youngling head,
And when the tale was done,
Thus some are born, my son, (she cries,)
With base impediments to rise,
And some are born with none.
32 But virtue can itself advaunce
To what the favourite fools of chaunce
By fortune seem'd design'd;
Virtue can gain the odds of Fate,
And from itself shake off the weight
Upon the unworthy mind.
* * * * *
TO MR POPE.
To praise, yet still with due respect to praise,
A bard triumphant in immortal bays,
The learn'd to show, the sensible commend,
Yet still preserve the province of the friend,
What life, what vigour, must the lines require,
What music tune them, what affection fire!
Oh! might thy genius in my bosom shine,
Thou shouldst not fail of numbers worthy thine;
The brightest ancients might at once agree
To sing within my lays, and sing of thee. 10
Horace himself would own thou dost excel
In candid arts, to play the critic well.
Ovid himself might wish to sing the dame
Whom Windsor Forest sees a gliding stream;
On silver feet, with annual osier crown'd,
She runs for ever through poetic ground.
How flame the glories of Belinda's hair,
Made by thy Muse the envy of the fair!
Less shone the tresses Egypt's princess[1] wore,
Which sweet Callimachus so sung before; 20
Here courtly trifles set the world at odds,
Belles war with beaux, and whims descend for gods,
The new machines in names of ridicule,
Mock the grave frenzy of the chymic fool.
But know, ye fair, a point conceal'd with art,
The Sylphs and Gnomes are but a woman's heart:
The Graces stand in sight; a Satyr train
Peep o'er their heads, and laugh behind the scene.
In Fame's fair temple, o'er the boldest wits
Enshrined on high the sacred Virgil sits, 30
And sits in measures, such as Virgil's Muse
To place thee near him might be fond to choose.
How might he tune the alternate reed with thee,
Perhaps a Strephon thou, a Daphnis he,
While some old Damon, o'er the vulgar wise,
Thinks he deserves, and thou deserv'st the prize!
Rapt with the thought, my fancy seeks the plains,
And turns me shepherd while I hear the strains.
Indulgent nurse of every tender gale,
Parent of flowerets, old Arcadia, hail! 40
Here in the cool my limbs at ease I spread,
Here let thy poplars whisper o'er my head,
Still slide thy waters soft among the trees,
Thy aspens quiver in a breathing breeze,
Smile all thy valleys in eternal spring,
Be hush'd, ye winds! while Pope and Virgil sing.
In English lays, and all sublimely great,
Thy Homer warms with all his ancient heat;
He shines in council, thunders in the fight,
And flames with every sense of great delight. 50
Long has that poet reign'd, and long unknown,
Like monarchs sparkling on a distant throne,
In all the majesty of Greek retired,
Himself unknown, his mighty name admired;
His language failing, wrapp'd him round with night,
Thine, raised by thee, recalls the work to light.
So wealthy mines, that ages long before
Fed the large realms around with golden ore,
When choked by sinking banks, no more appear,
And shepherds only say, The mines were here: 60
Should some rich youth (if Nature warm his heart,
And all his projects stand inform'd with Art)
Here clear the caves, there ope the leading vein;
The mines, detected, flame with gold again.
How vast, how copious are thy new designs!
How every music varies in thy lines!
Still as I read, I feel my bosom beat,
And rise in raptures by another's heat.
Thus in the wood, when summer dress'd the days,
When Windsor lent us tuneful hours of ease, 70
Our ears the lark, the thrush, the turtle blest,
And Philomela sweetest o'er the rest:
The shades resound with song--oh softly tread!
While a whole season warbles round my head.
This to my friend--and when a friend inspires,
My silent harp its master's hand requires,
Shakes off the dust, and makes these rocks resound;
For fortune placed me in unfertile ground,
Far from the joys that with my soul agree,
From wit, from learning--far, oh far from thee! 80
Here moss-grown trees expand the smallest leaf,
Here half an acre's corn is half a sheaf;
Here hills with naked heads the tempest meet,
Rocks at their side, and torrents at their feet,
Or lazy lakes, unconscious of a flood,
Whose dull brown Naiads ever sleep in mud.
Yet here Content can dwell, and Learned Ease,
A friend delight me, and an author please;
Even here I sing, while Pope supplies the theme,
Show my own love, though not increase his fame. 90
[Footnote 1: 'Egypt's princess:' Cleopatra.]
* * * * *
HEALTH: AN ECLOGUE.
Now early shepherds o'er the meadow pass,
And print long footsteps in the glittering grass,
The cows neglectful of their pasture stand,
By turns obsequious to the milker's hand,
When Damon softly trode the shaven lawn,
Damon a youth from city cares withdrawn;
Long was the pleasing walk he wander'd through,
A cover'd arbour closed the distant view;
There rests the youth, and while the feather'd throng
Raise their wild music, thus contrives a song. 10
Here wafted o'er by mild Etesian air,
Thou country Goddess, beauteous Health, repair!
Here let my breast through quivering trees inhale
Thy rosy blessings with the morning gale.
What are the fields, or flowers, or all I see?
Ah! tasteless all, if not enjoy'd with thee.
Joy to my soul! I feel the Goddess nigh,
The face of Nature cheers as well as I;
O'er the flat green refreshing breezes run,
The smiling daisies blow beneath the sun, 20
The brooks run purling down with silver waves,
The planted lanes rejoice with dancing leaves,
The chirping birds from all the compass rove
To tempt the tuneful echoes of the grove:
High sunny summits, deeply shaded dales,
Thick mossy banks, and flowery winding vales,
With various prospect gratify the sight,
And scatter fix'd attention in delight.
Come, country Goddess, come! nor thou suffice,
But bring thy mountain sister, Exercise! 30
Call'd by thy lovely voice, she turns her pace,
Her winding horn proclaims the finish'd chase;
She mounts the rocks, she skims the level plain,
Dogs, hawks, and horses crowd her early train;
Her hardy face repels the tanning wind,
And lines and meshes loosely float behind.
All these as means of toil the feeble see,
But these are helps to pleasure join'd with thee.
Let Sloth lie softening till high noon in down,
Or lolling fan her in the sultry town, 40
Unnerved with rest, and turn her own disease,
Or foster others in luxurious ease:
I mount the courser, call the deep-mouth'd hounds;
The fox unkennell'd, flies to covert grounds;
I lead where stags through tangled thickets tread,
And shake the saplings with their branching head;
I make the falcons wing their airy way,
And soar to seize, or stooping strike their prey:
To snare the fish I fix the luring bait;
To wound the fowl I load the gun with fate. 50
'Tis thus through change of exercise I range,
And strength and pleasure rise from every change.
Here beauteous for all the year remain;
When the next comes, I'll charm thee thus again.
Oh come, thou Goddess of my rural song,
And bring thy daughter, calm Content, along!
Dame of the ruddy cheek and laughing eye,
From whose bright presence clouds of sorrow fly:
For her I mow my walks, I plait my bowers,
Clip my low hedges, and support my flowers; 60
To welcome her, this summer seat I dress'd,
And here I court her when she comes to rest;
When she from exercise to learned ease
Shall change again, and teach the change to please.
Now friends conversing my soft hours refine,
And Tully's Tusculum revives in mine:
Now to grave books I bid the mind retreat,
And such as make me rather good than great;
Or o'er the works of easy Fancy rove,
Where flutes and innocence amuse the grove: 70
The native bard that on Sicilian plains
First sung the lowly manners of the swains;
Or Maro's Muse, that in the fairest light
Paints rural prospects and the charms of sight;
These soft amusements bring Content along,
And Fancy, void of sorrow, turns to song.
Here beauteous Health for all the year remain;
When the next comes, I'll charm thee thus again.
* * * * *
THE FLIES: AN ECLOGUE.
When the river cows for coolness stand.
And sheep for breezes seek the lofty land,
A youth whom AEsop taught that every tree,
Each bird and insect, spoke as well as he,
Walk'd calmly musing in a shaded way,
Where flowering hawthorn broke the sunny ray,
And thus instructs his moral pen to draw
A scene that obvious in the field he saw.
Near a low ditch, where shallow waters meet,
Which never learn'd to glide with liquid feet, 10
Whose Naiads never prattle as they play,
But screen'd with hedges slumber out the day,
There stands a slender fern's aspiring shade,
Whose answering branches, regularly laid,
Put forth their answering boughs, and proudly rise
Three storeys upward in the nether skies.
For shelter here, to shun the noonday heat,
An airy nation of the flies retreat;
Some in soft air their silken pinions ply,
And some from bough to bough delighted fly, 20
Some rise, and circling light to perch again;
A pleasing murmur hums along the plain.
So, when a stage invites to pageant shows,
(If great and small are like) appear the beaux;
In boxes some with spruce pretension sit,
Some change from seat to seat within the pit,
Some roam the scenes, or turning cease to roam;
Preluding music fills the lofty dome.
When thus a fly (if what a fly can say
Deserves attention) raised the rural lay:
Where late Amintor made a nymph a bride, 30
Joyful I flew by young Favonia's side,
Who, mindless of the feasting, went to sip
The balmy pleasure of the shepherd's lip;
I saw the wanton where I stoop'd to sup,
And half resolved to drown me in the cup;
Till, brush'd by careless hands, she soar'd above:
Cease, beauty, cease to vex a tender love!
Thus ends the youth, the buzzing meadow rung,
And thus the rival of his music sung: 40
When suns by thousands shone in orbs of dew,
I, wafted soft, with Zephyretta flew;
Saw the clean pail, and sought the milky cheer,
While little Daphne seized my roving dear.
Wretch that I was! I might have warn'd the dame,
Yet sate indulging as the danger came,
But the kind huntress left her free to soar:
Ah! guard, ye lovers, guard a mistress more!
Thus from the fern, whose high projecting arms,
The fleeting nation bent with dusky swarms, 50
The swains their love in easy music breathe,
When tongues and tumult stun the field beneath,
Black ants in teams come darkening all the road;
Some call to march, and some to lift the load;
They strain, they labour with incessant pains,
Press'd by the cumbrous weight of single grains.
The flies, struck silent, gaze with wonder down:
The busy burghers reach their earthy town,
Where lay the burdens of a wintry store,
And thence, unwearied, part in search of more. 60
Yet one grave sage a moment's space attends,
And the small city's loftiest point ascends,
Wipes the salt dew that trickles down his face,
And thus harangues them with the gravest grace
Ye foolish nurslings of the summer air!
These gentle tunes and whining songs forbear,
Your trees and whispering breeze, your grove and love,
Your Cupid's quiver, and his mother's dove;
Let bards to business bend their vigorous wing,
And sing but seldom, if they love to sing: 70
Else, when the flowerets of the season fail,
And this your ferny shade forsakes the vale,
Though one would save ye, not one grain of wheat
Should pay such songster's idling at my gate.
He ceased: the flies, incorrigibly vain,
Heard the mayor's speech, and fell to sing again.
* * * * *
AN ELEGY TO AN OLD BEAUTY.
In vain, poor nymph, to please our youthful sight
You sleep in cream and frontlets all the night,
Your face with patches soil, with paint repair,
Dress with gay gowns, and shade with foreign hair.
If truth in spite of manners must be told,
Why, really, fifty-five is something old.
Once you were young; or one, whose life's so long,
She might have borne my mother, tells me wrong.
And once, (since Envy's dead before you die)
The women own, you play'd a sparkling eye, 10
Taught the light foot a modish little trip,
And pouted with the prettiest purple lip.
To some new charmer are the roses fled,
Which blew, to damask all thy cheek with red;
Youth calls the graces there to fix their reign,
And airs by thousands fill their easy train.
So parting Summer bids her flowery prime
Attend the Sun to dress some foreign clime,
While withering seasons in succession, here,
Strip the gay gardens, and deform the Year. 20
But thou (since Nature bids) the world resign,
'Tis now thy daughter's daughter's time to shine.
With more address, (or such as pleases more)
She runs her female exercises o'er,
Unfurls or closes, raps or turns the fan,
And smiles, or blushes at the creature Man.
With quicker life, as gilded coaches pass,
In sideling courtesy she drops the glass.
With better strength, on visit-days she bears
To mount her fifty flights of ample stairs. 30
Her mien, her shape, her temper, eyes and tongue,
Are sure to conquer--for the rogue is young;
And all that's madly wild, or oddly gay,
We call it only pretty Fanny's way.
Let Time that makes you homely, make you sage,
The sphere of wisdom is the sphere of age.
'Tis true, when beauty dawns with early fire,
And hears the flattering tongues of soft desire,
If not from virtue, from its gravest ways
The soul with pleasing avocation strays. 40
But beauty gone, 'tis easier to be wise;
As harpers better by the loss of eyes.
Henceforth retire, reduce your roving airs,
Haunt less the plays, and more the public prayers,
Reject the Mechlin head, and gold brocade,
Go pray, in sober Norwich crape array'd.
Thy pendant diamonds let thy Fanny take,
Their trembling lustre shows how much you shake;
Or bid her wear thy necklace row'd with pearl,
You'll find your Fanny an obedient girl. 50
So, for the rest, with less incumbrance hung,
You walk through life, unmingled with the young;
And view the shade and substance as you pass
With joint endeavour trifling at the glass,
Or Folly dress'd, and rambling all her days,
To meet her counterpart, and grow by praise:
Yet still sedate yourself, and gravely plain,
You neither fret, nor envy at the vain.
'Twas thus, if man with woman we compare,
The wise Athenian cross'd a glittering fair; 60
Unmoved by tongues and sights, he walk'd the place,
Through tape, toys, tinsel, gimp, perfume, and lace;
Then bends from Mars's hill his awful eyes,
And 'What a world I never want!' he cries;
But cries unheard: for Folly will be free.
So parts the buzzing gaudy crowd, and he:
As careless he for them, as they for him;
He wrapt in wisdom, and they whirl'd by whim
* * * * *
THE BOOK-WORM.
Come hither, boy, we'll hunt to-day
The book-worm, ravening beast of prey!
Produced by parent Earth, at odds
(As Fame reports it) with the gods.
Him frantic Hunger wildly drives
Against a thousand authors' lives:
Through all the fields of Wit he flies;
Dreadful his head with clustering eyes,
With horns without, and tusks within,
And scales to serve him for a skin. 10
Observe him nearly, lest he climb
To wound the bards of ancient time,
Or down the vale of Fancy go,
To tear some modern wretch below:
On every corner fix thine eye,
Or, ten to one, he slips thee by.
See where his teeth a passage eat:
We'll rouse him from the deep retreat.
But who the shelter's forced to give?
'Tis sacred Virgil, as I live! 20
From leaf to leaf, from song to song,
He draws the tadpole form along,
He mounts the gilded edge before,
He's up, he scuds the cover o'er,
He turns, he doubles, there he pass'd,
And here we have him, caught at last.
Insatiate brute, whose teeth abuse
The sweetest servants of the Muse!
--Nay, never offer to deny,
I took thee in the act to fly-- 30
His roses nipp'd in every page,
My poor Anacreon mourns thy rage.
By thee my Ovid wounded lies;
By thee my Lesbia's sparrow dies:
Thy rabid teeth have half destroy'd
The work of love in Biddy Floyd;
They rent Belinda's locks away,
And spoil'd the Blouzelind of Gay.
For all, for every single deed,
Relentless Justice bids thee bleed. 40
Then fall a victim to the Nine,
Myself the priest, my desk the shrine.
Bring Homer, Virgil, Tasso near,
To pile a sacred altar here;
Hold, boy, thy hand outruns thy wit,
You reach'd the plays that Dennis writ;
You reach'd me Philips' rustic strain;
Pray take your mortal bards again.
Come, bind the victim,--there he lies,
And here between his numerous eyes 50
This venerable dust I lay,
From manuscripts just swept away.
The goblet in my hand I take
(For the libation's yet to make),
A health to poets! all their days
May they have bread, as well as praise;
Sense may they seek, and less engage
In papers fill'd with party rage.
But if their riches spoil their vein,
Ye Muses! make them poor again. 60
Now bring the weapon, yonder blade,
With which my tuneful pens are made.
I strike the scales that arm thee round,
And twice and thrice I print the wound;
The sacred altar floats with red;
And now he dies, and now he's dead.
How like the son of Jove I stand,
This Hydra stretch'd beneath my hand!
Lay bare the monster's entrails here,
To see what dangers threat the year: 70
Ye gods! what sonnets on a wench!
What lean translations out of French!
'Tis plain, this lobe is so unsound,
S-- prints before the months go round.
But hold, before I close the scene,
The sacred altar should be clean.
Oh, had I Shadwell's[1] second bays,
Or, Tate![2] thy pert and humble lays!
(Ye pair, forgive me, when I vow
I never miss'd your works till now)
I'd tear the leaves to wipe the shrine, 80
(That only way you please the Nine)
But since I chance to want these two,
I'll make the songs of Durfey[3] do.
Rent from the corpse, on yonder pin
I hang the scales that braced it in;
I hang my studious morning gown,
And write my own inscription down.
'This trophy from the Python won,
This robe, in which the deed was done, 90
These, Parnell glorying in the feat,
Hung on these shelves, the Muses' seat.
Here Ignorance and Hunger found
Large realms of wit to ravage round;
Here Ignorance and Hunger fell--
Two foes in one I sent to hell.
Ye poets, who my labours see,
Come share the triumph all with me!
Ye critics, born to vex the Muse,
Go mourn the grand ally you lose!' 100
[Footnote 1: 'Shadwell:' Dryden's rival.]
[Footnote 2: 'Tate:' Nahum. See Life of Dryden.]
[Footnote 3: 'Durfey:' the well-known wit of the time.]
* * * * *
AN ALLEGORY ON MAN.
A thoughtful being, long and spare,
Our race of mortals call him Care;
(Were Homer living, well he knew
What name the gods have call'd him too)
With fine mechanic genius wrought,
And loved to work, though no one bought.
This being, by a model bred
In Jove's eternal sable head,
Contrived a shape, empower'd to breathe,
And be the worldling here beneath. 10
The Man rose staring, like a stake,
Wondering to see himself awake!
Then look'd so wise, before he knew
The business he was made to do,
That, pleased to see with what a grace
He gravely show'd his forward face,
Jove talk'd of breeding him on high,
An under-something of the sky.
But e'er he gave the mighty nod,
Which ever binds a poet's god, 20
(For which his curls ambrosial shake,
And mother Earth's obliged to quake:)
He saw old mother Earth arise,
She stood confess'd before his eyes;
But not with what we read she wore,
A castle for a crown, before;
Nor with long streets and longer roads
Dangling behind her, like commodes:
As yet with wreaths alone she dress'd,
And trail'd a landscape-painted vest. 30
Then thrice she raised, (as Ovid said)
And thrice she bow'd her weighty head.
Her honours made, Great Jove, she cried,
This thing was fashion'd from my side;
His hands, his heart, his head are mine;
Then what hast thou to call him thine?
Nay, rather ask, the monarch said,
What boots his hand, his heart, his head?
Were what I gave removed away,
Thy parts an idle shape of clay. 40
Halves, more than halves! cried honest Care;
Your pleas would make your titles fair,
You claim the body, you the soul,
But I who join'd them, claim the whole.
Thus with the gods debate began,
On such a trivial cause as Man.
And can celestial tempers rage?
(Quoth Virgil in a later age.)
As thus they wrangled, Time came by;
(There's none that paint him such as I, 50
For what the fabling ancients sung
Makes Saturn old, when Time was young.)
As yet his winters had not shed
Their silver honours on his head;
He just had got his pinions free
From his old sire Eternity.
A serpent girdled round he wore,
The tail within the mouth before;
By which our almanacs are clear
That learned Egypt meant the year. 60
A staff he carried, where on high
A glass was fix'd to measure by,
As amber boxes made a show
For heads of canes an age ago.
His vest, for day and night, was pied,
A bending sickle arm'd his side,
And Spring's new months his train adorn;
The other Seasons were unborn.
Known by the gods, as near he draws,
They make him umpire of the cause. 70
O'er a low trunk his arm he laid,
(Where since his Hours a dial made;)
Then, leaning, heard the nice debate,
And thus pronounced the words of Fate:
Since Body from the parent Earth,
And Soul from Jove received a birth,
Return they where they first began;
But since their union makes the Man,
Till Jove and Earth shall part these two,
To Care, who join'd them, Man is due. 80
He said, and sprung with swift career
To trace a circle for the year,
Where ever since the Seasons wheel,
And tread on one another's heel.
'Tis well, said Jove, and for consent
Thundering he shook the firmament;
Our umpire Time shall have his way,
With Care I let the creature stay:
Let business vex him, avarice blind,
Let doubt and knowledge rack his mind, 90
Let error act, opinion speak,
And want afflict, and sickness break,
And anger burn, dejection chill,
And joy distract, and sorrow kill,
Till, arm'd by Care, and taught to mow,
Time draws the long destructive blow;
And wasted Man, whose quick decay,
Comes hurrying on before his day,
Shall only find, by this decree,
The Soul flies sooner back to me. 100
* * * * *
AN IMITATION OF SOME FRENCH VERSES.
Relentless Time! destroying power
Whom stone and brass obey,
Who giv'st to every flying hour
To work some new decay;
Unheard, unheeded, and unseen,
Thy secret saps prevail,
And ruin Man, a nice machine
By Nature form'd to fail.
My change arrives; the change I meet,
Before I thought it nigh. 10
My spring, my years of pleasure fleet,
And all their beauties die.
In age I search, and only find
A poor unfruitful gain,
Grave Wisdom stalking slow behind,
Oppress'd with loads of pain.
My ignorance could once beguile,
And fancied joys inspire;
My errors cherish'd hope to smile
On newly-born desire. 20
But now experience shows the bliss,
For which I fondly sought,
Not worth the long impatient wish,
And ardour of the thought.
My youth met Fortune fair array'd;
In all her pomp she shone,
And might perhaps have well essay'd
To make her gifts my own:
But when I saw the blessings shower
On some unworthy mind, 30
I left the chase, and own'd the power
Was justly painted blind.
I pass'd the glories which adorn
The splendid courts of kings,
And while the persons moved my scorn.
I rose to scorn the things.
My manhood felt a vigorous fire,
By love increased the more;
But years with coming years conspire
To break the chains I wore. 40
In weakness safe, the sex I see
With idle lustre shine;
For what are all their joys to me,
Which cannot now be mine?
But hold--I feel my gout decrease,
My troubles laid to rest,
And truths which would disturb my peace,
Are painful truths at best.
Vainly the time I have to roll
In sad reflection flies; 50
Ye fondling passions of my soul!
Ye sweet deceits! arise.
I wisely change the scene within,
To things that used to please;
In pain, philosophy is spleen,
In health, 'tis only ease.
* * * * *
A NIGHT-PIECE ON DEATH.
By the blue taper's trembling light,
No more I waste the wakeful night,
Intent with endless view to pore
The schoolmen and the sages o'er:
Their books from wisdom widely stray,
Or point at best the longest way.
I'll seek a readier path, and go
Where wisdom's surely taught below.
How deep yon azure dyes the sky,
Where orbs of gold unnumber'd lie, 10
While through their ranks in silver pride
The nether crescent seems to glide!
The slumbering breeze forgets to breathe,
The lake is smooth and clear beneath,
Where once again the spangled show
Descends to meet our eyes below.
The grounds which on the right aspire,
In dimness from the view retire:
The left presents a place of graves,
Whose wall the silent water laves. 20
That steeple guides thy doubtful sight,
Among the livid gleams of night.
There pass, with melancholy state,
By all the solemn heaps of fate,
And think, as softly-sad you tread
Above the venerable dead,
'Time was, like thee they life possess'd,
And time shall be, that thou shalt rest.'
Those graves, with bending osier bound,
That nameless heave the crumbled ground, 30
Quick to the glancing thought disclose
Where Toil and Poverty repose.
The flat smooth stones that bear a name,
The chisel's slender help to fame,
Which, e'er our set of friends decay,
Their frequent steps may wear away,
A middle race of mortals own,
Men half-ambitious, all unknown.
The marble tombs that rise on high,
Whose dead in vaulted arches lie, 40
Whose pillars swell with sculptured stones,
Arms, angels, epitaphs, and bones;--
These (all the poor remains of state)
Adorn the rich, or praise the great;
Who while on earth in fame they live,
Are senseless of the fame they give.
Ha! while I gaze, pale Cynthia fades,
The bursting earth unveils the shades!
All slow, and wan, and wrapp'd with shrouds,
They rise in visionary crowds, 50
And all with sober accent cry,
'Think, mortal, what it is to die!'
Now from yon black and funeral yew,
That bathes the charnal-house with dew,
Methinks I hear a voice begin;
(Ye ravens, cease your croaking din,
Ye tolling clocks, no time resound
O'er the long lake and midnight ground!)
It sends a peal of hollow groans,
Thus speaking from among the bones: 60
'When men my scythe and darts supply,
How great a king of fears am I!
They view me like the last of things:
They make, and then they dread, my stings.
Fools! if you less provoked your fears,
No more my spectre-form appears.
Death's but a path that must be trod,
If man would ever pass to God:
A port of calms, a state of ease
From the rough rage of swelling seas. 70
Why, then, thy flowing sable stoles,
Deep pendent cypress, mourning poles,
Loose scarfs to fall athwart thy weeds,
Long palls, drawn hearses, cover'd steeds,
And plumes of black, that, as they tread,
Nod o'er the 'scutcheons of the dead?
Nor can the parted body know,
Nor wants the soul these forms of woe:
As men who long in prison dwell,
With lamps that glimmer round the cell, 80
Whene'er their suffering years are run,
Spring forth to greet the glittering sun:
Such joy, though far transcending sense,
Have pious souls at parting hence.
On earth, and in the body placed,
A few, and evil years, they waste:
But when their chains are cast aside,
See the glad scene unfolding wide,
Clap the glad wing and tower away,
And mingle with the blaze of day!' 90
* * * * *
A HYMN TO CONTENTMENT.
Lovely, lasting peace of mind!
Sweet delight of human kind!
Heavenly born, and bred on high,
To crown the favourites of the sky
With more of happiness below,
Than victors in a triumph know!
Whither, oh! whither art thou fled,
To lay thy meek, contented head?
What happy region dost thou please
To make the seat of calm and ease? 10
Ambition searches all its sphere
Of pomp and state, to meet thee there.
Increasing Avarice would find
Thy presence in its gold enshrined.
The bold adventurer ploughs his way,
Through rocks amidst the foaming sea,
To gain thy love; and then perceives
Thou wert not in the rocks and waves.
The silent heart which grief assails,
Treads soft and lonesome o'er the vales, 20
Sees daisies open, rivers run,
And seeks (as I have vainly done)
Amusing thought; but learns to know
That Solitude's the nurse of Woe.
No real happiness is found
In trailing purple o'er the ground;
Or in a soul exalted high,
To range the circuit of the sky,
Converse with stars above, and know
All Nature in its forms below; 30
The rest it seeks, in seeking dies,
And doubts at last for knowledge rise.
Lovely, lasting peace appear!
This world itself, if thou art here,
Is once again with Eden bless'd,
And Man contains it in his breast.
'Twas thus, as under shade I stood,
I sung my wishes to the wood,
And, lost in thought, no more perceived
The branches whisper as they waved: 40
It seem'd as all the quiet place
Confess'd the presence of the Grace,
When thus she spoke:--'Go, rule thy will;
Bid thy wild passions all be still;
Know God--and bring thy heart to know
The joys which from Religion flow:
Then every Grace shall prove its guest,
And I'll be there to crown the rest.'
Oh! by yonder mossy seat,
In my hours of sweet retreat; 50
Might I thus my soul employ,
With sense of gratitude and joy!
Raised as ancient prophets were,
In heavenly vision, praise, and prayer;
Pleasing all men, hurting none,
Pleased and bless'd with God alone:
Then, while the gardens take my sight
With all the colours of delight;
While silver waters glide along,
To please my ear, and court my song: 60
I'll lift my voice, and tune my string,
And Thee, Great Source of Nature! sing.
The sun, that walks his airy way,
To light the world, and give the day;
The moon, that shines with borrow'd light;
The stars, that gild the gloomy night;
The seas, that roll unnumber'd waves;
The wood, that spreads its shady leaves;
The field, whose ears conceal the grain,
The yellow treasure of the plain;-- 70
All of these, and all I see,
Should be sung, and sung by me:
They speak their Maker as they can,
But want, and ask, the tongue of man.
Go, search among your idle dreams,
Your busy, or your vain extremes;
And find a life of equal bliss,
Or own the next begun in this!
* * * * *
THE HERMIT.
Far in a wild, unknown to public view,
From youth to age a reverend hermit grew;
The moss his bed, the cave his humble cell,
His food the fruits, his drink the crystal well:
Remote from man, with God he pass'd the days,
Prayer all his business, all his pleasure praise.
A life so sacred, such serene repose,
Seem'd heaven itself, till one suggestion rose:
That vice should triumph, virtue vice obey,
This sprung some doubt of Providence's sway; 10
His hopes no more a certain prospect boast,
And all the tenor of his soul is lost:
So when a smooth expanse receives impress'd
Calm Nature's image on its watery breast,
Down bend the banks, the trees depending grow,
And skies beneath with answering colours glow:
But if a stone the gentle scene divide,
Swift ruffling circles curl on every side,
And glimmering fragments of a broken sun,
Banks, trees, and skies, in thick disorder run. 20
To clear this doubt, to know the world by sight,
To find if books or swains report it right,
(For yet by swains alone the world he knew,
Whose feet came wandering o'er the nightly dew)
He quits his cell; the pilgrim-staff he bore,
And fix'd the scallop in his hat before;
Then with the sun a rising journey went,
Sedate to think, and watching each event.
The morn was wasted in the pathless grass,
And long and lonesome was the wild to pass; 30
But when the southern sun had warm'd the day,
A youth came posting o'er a crossing way;
His raiment decent, his complexion fair,
And soft in graceful ringlets waved his hair.
Then near approaching, 'Father, hail!' he cried,
'And hail, my Son!' the reverend sire replied;
Words follow'd words, from question answer flow'd,
And talk of various kind deceived the road.
Till each with other pleased, and loth to part,
While in their age they differ, join in heart: 40
Thus stands an aged elm in ivy bound,
Thus youthful ivy clasps an elm around.
Now sunk the sun; the closing hour of day
Came onward, mantled o'er with sober gray;
Nature in silence bid the world repose;
When near the road a stately palace rose:
There by the moon through ranks of trees they pass,
Whose verdure crown'd their sloping sides of grass.
It chanced the noble master of the dome,
Still made his house the wandering stranger's home: 50
Yet still the kindness, from a thirst of praise,
Proved the vain flourish of expensive ease.
The pair arrive: the liveried servants wait;
Their lord receives them at the pompous gate;
The table groans with costly piles of food,
And all is more than hospitably good;
Then led to rest, the day's long toil they drown,
Deep sunk in sleep, and silk, and heaps of down.
At length 'tis morn, and at the dawn of day,
Along the wide canals the Zephyrs play; 60
Fresh o'er the gay parterres the breezes creep,
And shake the neighbouring wood to banish sleep.
Up rise the guests, obedient to the call;
An early banquet deck'd the splendid hall;
Rich luscious wine a golden goblet graced,
Which the kind master forced the guests to taste.
Then pleased and thankful, from the porch they go,
And, but the landlord, none had cause of woe;
His cup was vanish'd--for in secret guise
The younger guest purloin'd the glittering prize. 70
As one who spies a serpent in his way,
Glistening and basking in the summer ray,
Disorder'd stops to shun the danger near,
Then walks with faintness on, and looks with fear:
So seem'd the sire, when, far upon the road,
The shining spoil his wily partner show'd.
He stopp'd with silence, walk'd with trembling heart,
And much he wish'd, but durst not ask to part:
Murmuring he lifts his eyes, and thinks it hard,
That generous actions meet a base reward. 80
While thus they pass, the sun his glory shrouds,
The changing skies hang out their sable clouds;
A sound in air presaged approaching rain,
And beasts to cover scud across the plain.
Warn'd by the signs, the wandering pair retreat,
To seek for shelter at a neighbouring seat.
'Twas built with turrets, on a rising ground,
And strong, and large, and unimproved around;
Its owner's temper, timorous and severe,
Unkind and griping, caused a desert there. 90
As near the miser's heavy doors they drew,
Fierce rising gusts with sudden fury blew;
The nimble lightning, mix'd with showers, began,
And o'er their heads loud-rolling thunder ran.
Here long they knock, but knock or call in vain,
Driven by the wind, and batter'd by the rain.
At length some pity warm'd the master's breast,
('Twas then his threshold first received a guest)
Slow creaking turns the door with jealous care,
And half he welcomes in the shivering pair; 100
One frugal <DW19> lights the naked walls,
And Nature's fervour through their limbs recalls:
Bread of the coarsest sort, with eager[1] wine,
(Each hardly granted) served them both to dine;
And when the tempest first appear'd to cease,
A ready warning bid them part in peace.
With still remark the pondering hermit view'd,
In one so rich, a life so poor and rude;
And why should such, (within himself he cried,)
Lock the lost wealth a thousand want beside? 110
But what new marks of wonder soon took place,
In every settling feature of his face,
When from his vest the young companion bore
That cup, the generous landlord own'd before,
And paid profusely with the precious bowl
The stinted kindness of this churlish soul!
But now the clouds in airy tumult fly,
The sun emerging opes an azure sky;
A fresher green the smelling leaves display,
And glittering as they tremble, cheer the day: 120
The weather courts them from the poor retreat,
And the glad master bolts the wary gate.
While hence they walk, the pilgrim's bosom wrought
With all the travail of uncertain thought;
His partner's acts without their cause appear,
'Twas there a vice, and seem'd a madness here:
Detesting that, and pitying this, he goes,
Lost and confounded with the various shows.
Now night's dim shades again involve the sky;
Again the wanderers want a place to lie, 130
Again they search, and find a lodging nigh.
The soil improved around, the mansion neat,
And neither poorly low, nor idly great:
It seem'd to speak its master's turn of mind,
Content, and not for praise, but virtue kind.
Hither the walkers turn with weary feet,
Then bliss the mansion, and the master greet:
Their greeting fair bestow'd, with modest guise,
The courteous master hears, and thus replies:
'Without a vain, without a grudging heart, 140
To Him who gives us all, I yield a part;
From Him you come, for Him accept it here,
A frank and sober, more than costly cheer.'
He spoke, and bid the welcome table spread,
Then talk'd of virtue till the time of bed,
When the grave household round his hall repair,
Warn'd by a bell, and close the hours with prayer.
At length the world, renew'd by calm repose,
Was strong for toil, the dappled morn arose;
Before the pilgrims part, the younger crept, 150
Near the closed cradle where an infant slept,
And writhed his neck: the landlord's little pride--
Oh, strange return!--grew black, and gasp'd, and died.
Horror of horrors! what! his only son!
How look'd our hermit when the fact was done?
Not hell, though hell's black jaws in sunder part,
And breathe blue fire, could more assault his heart.
Confused, and struck with silence at the deed,
He flies, but, trembling, fails to fly with speed.
His steps the youth pursues; the country lay 160
Perplex'd with roads, a servant show'd the way:
A river cross'd the path; the passage o'er
Was nice to find; the servant trode before;
Long arms of oaks an open bridge supplied,
And deep the waves beneath the bending glide.
The youth, who seem'd to watch a time to sin,
Approach'd the careless guide, and thrust him in;
Plunging he falls, and rising lifts his head,
Then flashing turns, and sinks among the dead.
Wild sparkling rage inflames the father's eyes, 170
He bursts the bands of fear, and madly cries:
'Detested wretch!'--But scarce his speech began,
When the strange partner seem'd no longer man:
His youthful face grew more serenely sweet;
His robe turn'd white, and flow'd upon his feet;
Fair rounds of radiant points invest his hair;
Celestial odours breathe through purpled air;
And wings, whose colours glitter'd on the day,
Wide at his back their gradual plumes display;
The form ethereal bursts upon his sight, 180
And moves in all the majesty of light.
Though loud at first the pilgrim's passion grew,
Sudden he gazed, and wist not what to do;
Surprise in secret chains his word suspends,
And in a calm his settling temper ends.
But silence here the beauteous angel broke,
The voice of music ravish'd as he spoke:
'Thy prayer, thy praise, thy life to vice unknown,
In sweet memorial rise before the throne:
These charms, success in our bright region find, 190
And force an angel down, to calm thy mind;
For this commission'd, I forsook the sky--
Nay, cease to kneel--thy fellow-servant I!
'Then know the truth of government divine,
And let these scruples be no longer thine.
'The Maker justly claims that world He made,
In this the right of Providence is laid;
Its sacred majesty through all depends
On using second means to work His ends:
'Tis thus, withdrawn in state from human eye, 200
The power exerts His attributes on high,
Your actions uses, not controls your will,
And bids the doubting sons of men "be still!"
'What strange events can strike with more surprise,
Than those which lately struck thy wondering eyes?
Yet, taught by these, confess the Almighty just,
And where you can't unriddle, learn to trust!
'The great, vain man, who fared on costly food,
Whose life was too luxurious to be good;
Who made his ivory stands with goblets shine, 210
And forced his guests to morning draughts of wine,
Has, with the cup, the graceless custom lost,
And still he welcomes, but with less of cost.
'The mean, suspicious wretch, whose bolted door,
Ne'er moved in duty to the wandering poor;
With him I left the cup, to teach his mind
That Heaven can bless, if mortals will be kind.
Conscious of wanting worth, he views the bowl,
And feels compassion touch his grateful soul.
Thus artists melt the sullen ore of lead, 220
With heaping coals of fire upon its head;
In the kind warmth the metal learns to glow,
And, loose from dross, the silver runs below.
'Long had our pious friend in virtue trod,
But now the child half-wean'd his heart from God;
Child of his age, for him he lived in pain,
And measured back his steps to earth again.
To what excesses had his dotage run?
But God, to save the father, took the son.
To all but thee, in fits he seem'd to go, 230
And 'twas my ministry to deal the blow.
The poor fond parent, humbled in the dust,
Now owns in tears the punishment was just.
'But how had all his fortune felt a wrack,
Had that false servant sped in safety back?
This night his treasured heaps he meant to steal,
And what a fund of charity would fail!
'Thus Heaven instructs thy mind: this trial o'er,
Depart in peace, resign'd, and sin no more.'
On sounding pinions here the youth withdrew 240
The sage stood wondering as the seraph flew.
Thus look'd Elisha, when, to mount on high,
His master took the chariot of the sky;
The fiery pomp ascending left the view;
The prophet gazed, and wish'd to follow too.
The bending hermit here a prayer begun,
'Lord! as in heaven, on earth Thy will be done.'
Then gladly turning, sought his ancient place,
And pass'd a life of piety and peace.
[Footnote 1: 'Eager:' i. e., sharp and sour.]
* * * * *
END OF PARNELL'S POEMS.
* * * * *
THE LIFE AND POEMS
OF
THOMAS GRAY.
How dearly, at one time, and how cheaply at another, does Genius
purchase immortal fame! Here a Milton
"Scorns delights, and lives laborious days,"
that he may, through sufferings, sorrows, and the strainings of a long
life, pile up a large and lofty poem;--and there a Gray, in the
intervals of other studies, produces a few short but exquisite verses,
which become instantly and for ever popular, and render his name as
dear to many, if not dearer, than that of the sublimer bard; for there
are probably thousands who would prefer to have written the "Elegy
written in a Country Churchyard," instead of the "Paradise Lost."
Thomas Gray was born in Cornhill, London, on the 26th December 1716.
His father was Mr Philip Gray, a respectable scrivener, and his
mother's name was Dorothy Antrobus. Gray was the fifth of twelve
children, and the only one that survived. His life was saved in
infancy by his mother, who, during a paroxysm which attacked her son,
opened a vein with her own hand. This, and many other acts of maternal
tenderness, rendered her memory unspeakably dear to the poet, who
seldom mentioned her, after her death, "without a sigh." He was sent
to study at Eton College, the happy days spent in which he has so
beautifully commemorated in his "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton
College." It added to his comfort here that his maternal uncle, Mr
Antrobus, was an assistant-teacher. From Eton he passed to Pembroke
College, Cambridge, where he was admitted as a pensioner in 1734, in
the nineteenth year of his age. He had at Eton become intimate with
Horace Walpole and with Richard West, a young man of high promise, who
died early. It is worth noticing that, during his residence both at
Eton and Cambridge, he was supported entirely out of the separate
industry of his mother, his father refusing him all aid.
At Cambridge, Gray studied very hard, attending less to mathematics
than to classical literature, modern languages, history, and poetry.
He aspired to be a universally accomplished as well as a minutely
learned man. His compositions, from 1734 to 1738, were translations
from Italian into Latin and English, and one or two small pieces of
original verse. In September 1738, he returned to his father's house,
and remained there for six months, doing little except carrying on a
correspondence he had begun at Cambridge with West and other friends.
Correspondence, from the first and to the last, was the best OUTCOME
of Gray's mind--he felt himself most at home in it; and, next to
Cowper's, his letters are the most delightful in the English language.
He had intended to study law, but was diverted from his purpose by
Horace Walpole, who invited him to take in his Company the "grand
tour." To no Briton, since Milton, could travel have been more
congenial or more instructive than to Gray. He that would travel to
advantage must first have travelled in mind all the countries he
visits, and must be learned in their literature, their politics, their
scenery, and their antiquities, ere ever he sets a foot upon their
shores. To Italy and France, Gray went as to favourite studies, not as
to relaxations; and spent his time in observing their famous scenes
with the eye of a poet--cataloguing their paintings in the spirit of a
connoisseur--perfecting his knowledge of their languages--examining
minutely the principles of their architecture and music--comparing
their present aspect with the old classical descriptions; and writing
home an elegant epistolary account of all his sights, and all
his speculations. He saw Paris--visited Geneva--passed to
Florence--hurried to Rome on the tidings of Pope Clement XII's death,
to see the installation of his successor--stood beside the cataracts
of Tivoli and Terni, and might have seen in both, emblems of his own
genius, which, like them, was beautiful and powerful, but
artificial--took a rapid run to Naples, and was charmed beyond
expression with its bay, its climate, and its fruitage--and was one of
the first English travellers to visit Herculaneum, discovered only the
year before (1739), and to wonder at that strange and solemn rehearsal
of the resurrection exhibited in its streets. From Naples he returned
to Florence, where he continued eleven months, and began a Latin poem,
"De Principiis Cogitandi." He then, on the 24th of April 1741, set off
with Walpole for Bologna and Reggio. At this latter place occurred the
celebrated quarrel between the two travellers. The causes and
circumstances of this are involved in considerable obscurity.
Dissimilarity of tastes and habits was probably at the bottom of it.
Gray was an enthusiastic scholar; Walpole was then a gay and giddy
voluptuary, although predestined to sour down into the most
cold-blooded and cynical of gossips. They parted at Reggio, to meet
only once afterwards at Strawberry Hill, where Gray long after visited
Walpole at his own invitation, but told him frankly he never could be
on the same terms of friendship again. Left now to pursue his journey
alone, he went to Venice, and thence came back through Padua and Milan
to France. On his way between Turin and Lyons, he turned aside to see
again the noble mountainous scenery surrounding the Grande Chartreuse
in Dauphine; and in the album kept by the fathers wrote his Alcaic
Ode, testifying to his admiration of a scene where, he says, "every
precipice and cliff was pregnant, with religion and poetry."
Two months after his return to England, his father died, somewhat
impoverished by improvidence. Gray, thinking himself too poor to study
the law, sent his mother and a maiden sister to reside at Stoke, near
Windsor, and retired to Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he resumed his
classical and poetical pursuits. To West, who by this time was
declining in health, he sent part of "Agrippina," a tragedy he had
commenced. West objected to the length and prosiness of Agrippina's
speeches. These were afterwards altered by Mason, in accordance with
West's suggestions; but Gray was discouraged, and has left "Agrippina"
a Torso. The subject was unpleasing. To have treated adequately the
character of Nero, would have required more than the genius of Gray;
and the language of the fragment is distinguished rather by rhetorical
burnish than by poetical spirit and heat. We have not thought it
necessary to reprint it, nor several besides of the fragmentary and
inferior productions of this poet, which Mason, too, thought proper
to omit.
Gray now plunged into the _mare magnum_ of classical literature. With
greater energy and exclusiveness than before, he read Thucydides,
Theocritus, and Anacreon; he translated parts of Propertius, and he
wrote a heroic epistle in Latin, after the manner of Ovid, and a Greek
epigram. This last he communicated to West, who was now in
Hertfordshire, waiting the approach of the Angel of Death. To the same
dear friend he sent his "Ode to Spring," which he had written under
his mother's roof at Stoke. He was too late. West was dead before it
arrived. This amiable and gifted person, who was thought by many
superior in natural genius to his friend, and whose name is for ever
connected with that of Gray, expired on the 1st of June 1742, and now
reposes in the chancel of Hatfield Church. We strongly suspect that it
was he whom Gray had in his eye in the close of his "Elegy."
Autumn has often been thought propitious to genius, especially when
its tender sun-light is still further sweetened and saddened by the
joy of grief. In the autumn of this year, Gray, who was peculiarly
susceptible to skiey influences, wrote some of his best poetry--his
"Hymn to Adversity," his "Distant Prospect of Eton College," and
commenced his "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard." A Sonnet in
English, and the Apostrophe which opens the fourth book of his "De
Principiis Cogitandi," bore testimony to his esteem for the character
and his regret for the premature loss of Richard West.
To Cambridge Gray seems to have had little attachment; but partly from
the smallness of his income, and partly from the access he had to its
libraries, he was found there to the last, constantly complaining, and
always continuing, like the _statue_ of a murmurer. In the winter of
1742 he was admitted Bachelor of Civil Law; and in acknowledgment of
the honour of the admission, began an "Address to Ignorance," which it
is no great loss to his fame that he never finished. Hazlitt completed
what appears to have been Gray's design in that admirable and
searching paper of his, entitled, "The Ignorance of the Learned," in
which he shows how ill mere learning supplies the want of common sense
and practical knowledge, as well as of talent and genius.
In 1744, through the intervention of a lady, the difference between
Walpole and Gray was so far made up, that they resumed their
correspondence, although never their intimacy. About this time he got
acquainted with Mason, then a scholar in St John's College, who became
a minor Boswell to a minor Johnson; although he used liberties with
Gray's correspondence and poetry, such as Boswell never durst have
attempted with his idol. Mason had first introduced himself to Gray by
showing him some MS. poetry. With the famous Dr Conyers Middleton,
too, he became intimate, and lived to lament his death.
In 1747, Dodsley published for him his "Ode to Eton College," the
first of Gray's productions which appeared in print. It excited no
notice whatever. Walpole wished him to publish his poems in
conjunction with the remains of West; but this he declined, on account
of want of materials--perhaps also feeling the great superiority of
his own poetry. At Walpole's request, however, he wrote an ode on the
death of his favourite cat!
Greek became now his constant study. He read its more recondite
authors, such as Pausanias, Athenaeus, Pindar, Lysias, and AEschylus,
with great care, and commenced the preparation of a Table of Greek
Chronology, on a very minute and elaborate scale.
In 1749 he lost his aunt, Mrs Antrobus, and her death, which he felt
as a heavy affliction, led him to complete his "Elegy," which he sent
to Walpole, who handed it about in MS., to the great delight of those
who were privileged to peruse it. When published, it sold rapidly, and
continues still the most popular of his poems.
In March 1753, his beloved and revered mother died, and he erected
over her dust a monument, with an inscription testifying to the
strength of his filial love and sorrow. In 1755 he finished his "Ode
on the Progress of Poetry," and in the same year began his "Bard." All
his poems, however short, were most laboriously composed, written and
rewritten, subjected, in whole or in part, to the criticism of his
friends, and, according to their verdict, either published, or left
fragments, or consigned to the flames. About this time he begins, in
his letters, to complain of depression of spirits, of severe attacks
of the gout, of sleepless nights, feverish mornings, and heavy days.
He was now, and during the rest of his life, to pay the penalty of a
lettered indolence and studious sloth, of a neglected body and an
over-cultivated mind. The accident, it is said, of seeing a blind
Welsh harper performing on a harp, excited him to finish his "Bard,"
which in MS. appears to have divided the opinion of his friends, as it
still does that of the critics.
In 1758 Gray left Peterhouse, owing to some real or imaginary offence,
and removed to Pembroke Hall, where he was surrounded by his old and
intimate friends. The next year he carried his two Odes to London, as
carefully as if they had been two Epics. Walpole says that he
"snatched them out of Dodsley's hands, and made them 'the first-fruits
of his own press at Strawberry Hill,' where a thousand copies were
printed. When published, they attracted much attention, but did not
gain universal applause. Obscurity was the principal charge brought
against them. Their friends, however, including Warburton, Hurd,
Mason, and Garrick, were vehement in their admiration, and loud in
their encomiums. In this year Colley Cibber, the laureate, died, and
the office was offered to Gray, with the peculiar and highly
honourable condition, that he was to hold it as a sinecure. The poet,
however, refused, on the ground, as he tells Mason, that the office
had 'hitherto humbled its possessor.'"
In 1758, he composed, for his amusement, a "Catalogue of the
Antiquities, Houses, &c., in England and Wales," which was, after his
death, printed and distributed by Mason among his friends.
The next year the British Museum was opened (15th January 1759), and
Gray went to London to read and transcribe the MSS. collected there
from the Harleian and Cottoman libraries. During his residence in the
capital, appeared two odes to "Obscurity" and "Oblivion," in ridicule
of his lyrics, from the pens of Colman and Lloyd, full of spirited
satire, which failed, however, to disturb the poet's equanimity. Like
many fastidious writers, he was more afraid of his own taste, and of
the strictures of good-natured friends, than of the attacks of foes.
In 1762 he applied for the Professorship of Modern History, vacant by
the death of Turner; but it was given to Brochet, the tutor of Sir
James Lowther.
In 1765 he took a tour to Scotland, and saw many of its more
interesting points--Stirling, Loch Tay, the Pass of Killierankie, and
Glammis Castle, where he met Beattie. He wrote a very entertaining
account of the journey, in his letters to his friends. He was offered
an LL.D. by the College of Aberdeen; but out of respect to his own
University, declined the honour. In 1767 he added his "Imitations of
Welsh and Norwegian Poetry" to his other productions. Sir Walter Scott
tells us, that when Gray's poems reached the Orkney and Shetland
Isles, and when the "Fatal Sisters" was repeated by a clergyman to
some of the old inhabitants, they remembered having sung it all in its
native language to him years before. In 1768, the Professorship of
Modern History falling again vacant by Mr Brochet's death, the Duke of
Grafton instantly bestowed it on Gray, who, out of gratitude, wrote an
ode on the installation of his patron to the Chancellorship of
Cambridge University. He went from witnessing this ceremony to the
Lakes of Cumberland, and kept an interesting journal of his tour to
that then little known and most enchanting region. In 1770, he visited
Wales; but owing probably to poor health, has left no notes of his
journey. In May the next year, his health became worse, his spirits
more depressed, an incurable cough preyed on his lungs; he resigned
his Professorship, and shortly after removed to London. There he
rallied a little, and returned to Cambridge, where, on the 24th of
July, he was seized with a severe attack of gout in the stomach. Of
this he expired on the 30th, in the 55th year of his age, without any
apparent fear of death. He was buried by the side of his mother, in
the churchyard of Stoke. A monument was erected by Mason to his
memory, in Westminster Abbey.
Gray was a brilliant bookworm. In private he was a quiet, abstracted,
dreaming scholar, although in the company of a few friends he could
become convivial and witty. His heart, however, was always in his
study. His portrait gives you the impression of great fastidiousness,
and almost feminine delicacy of face, as well as of considerable
self-esteem. His face has more of the critic than of the poet. His
learning and accomplishments have been equalled perhaps by no poet
since Milton. He knew the Classics, the Northern Scalds, the Italian
poets and historians, the French novelists, Architecture, Zoology,
Painting, Sculpture, Botany, Music, and Antiquities. But he liked
better, he said, to read than to write. You figure him always lounging
with a volume in his hand, on a sofa, and crying out, "Be mine to read
eternal novels of Marivaux and Crebillon." Against his moral character
there exists no imputation; and notwithstanding a sneering hint of
Walpole's, his religious creed seems to have been orthodox.
With all his learning and genius, he has done little. His letters and
poems remind you of a few scattered leaves, surviving the
conflagration of the Alexandrian library. The very popularity of the
scraps which such a writer leaves, secures the torments of Tantalus to
his numerous admirers in all after ages. His letters, in their grace,
freedom, minuteness of detail, occasional playfulness, delicious
_asides_ of gossip, and easy vigour of description, are more worthy of
his powers, as a whole, than his poetry. The poetic fragments he has
left are rarely of such merit as to excite any wish that they had been
finished. His genius, although true and exquisite, was limited in its
range, and hidebound in its movements. You see his genius, like a
child, always casting a look of terror round on its older companion
and guardian--his taste. Like Campbell, "he often spreads his wings
grandly, but shrinks back timidly to his perch again, and seems afraid
of the shadow of his own fame." Within his own range, however, he is
as strong as he is delicate and refined. His two principal Odes have,
as we hinted, divided much the opinion of critics. Dr Johnson has
assailed them in his worst style of captious and word-catching
criticism. Now, that there is much smoke around their fire, we grant.
But we argue that there is genuine fire amidst their smoke,--first,
from the fact that so many of their lines, such as,
"The bloom of young Desire, and purple light of Love;"
"The terror of his beak, and lightnings of his eye;"
"Their feather-cinctured chiefs, and dusky loves;"
"Sailing with supreme dominion
Through the azure deep of air;"
"Beneath the good how far, but far above the great"
"High-born Hoel's harp, and soft Llewellyn's lay,"
are so often and admiringly quoted; and because, secondly, we can
trace the influence of the "Progress of Poetry," and of the "Bard," on
much of the higher song that has succeeded,--on the poetry of Bowles,
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Campbell, and Shelley. Gray was not a sun
shining in his strength, but he was the morning star, prognosticating
the coming of a warmer and brighter poetic day.
He that can see no merit in the "Ode on the Distant Prospect of Eton
College," can surely never have been a boy. The boy's heart beats in
its every line, and yet all the experiences of boyhood are seen and
shown in the sober light of those
"Years which bring the philosophic mind."
Here lies the complex charm of the poem. The unthinking gaiety of
boyhood, its light sports, its airy gladness, its springy motions, the
"tears forgot as soon as shed," the "sunshine of the breast" of that
delightful period--are contrasted with the still and often sombre
reflection, the grave joys, the carking cares, the stern concentred
passions, the serious pastimes, the spare but sullen and burning
tears, the sad smiles of manhood; and contrasted by one who is
realising both with equal vividness and intensity--because he is in
age a man, and in memory and imagination an Eton schoolboy still. The
breezes of boyhood return and blow on a head on which gray hairs are
beginning "here and there" to whiten; and he cries--
"I feel the gales that from ye blow
A momentary bliss bestow,
As, waving fresh their gladsome wing,
My weary soul they seem to soothe,
And redolent of joy and youth,
To breathe a second spring."
Dr Johnson makes a peculiarly poor and unworthy objection to the next
stanza of the poem. Speaking of the address to the Thames--
"Say, Father Thames, for thou hast seen
Full many a sprightly race;"
he says, "Father Thames has no better means of knowing than himself."
He should have left this objection to those wretched _mechanical_
critics who abound in the present day. He forgot that in his own
"Rasselas" he had invoked the Nile, as the great "Father of waters,"
to tell, if, in any of the provinces through which he rolled, he did
not hear the language of distress. Critics, like liars, should have
good memories.
His remark that the "Prospect of Eton College" suggests nothing to
Gray which every beholder does not equally think and feel, is, in
reality, a compliment to the simplicity and naturalness of the strain.
Common thought and feeling crystalised, is the staple of much of our
best poetry. Gray says in a poetical way, what every one might have
thought and felt, but no one but he could have so beautifully
expressed. To the spirited translations from the Norse and Welsh, the
only objection urged by Dr Johnson is, that their "language is unlike
the language of other poets"--an objection which would tell still more
powerfully against Milton, Collins, and Young, not to speak of the
"chartered libertines" of our more modern song. But a running growl of
prejudice is heard in every sentence of Gray's Life by Johnson, and
tends far more to injure the critic than the poet.
In his "Elegy written in a Country Churchyard," Gray has caught,
concentred, and turned into a fine essence, the substance of a
thousand meditations among the tombs. One of its highest points of
merit, conceded by Dr Johnson, is essentially the same with which he
had found fault in the "Ode to Eton College." "The poem abounds with
images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which
every bosom returns an echo." Everything is in intense keeping. The
images are few, but striking; the language is severely simple; the
thought is at once obvious and original, at once clear and profound,
and many of the couplets seem carefully and consciously chiselled for
immortality, to become mottoes for every churchyard in the kingdom,
and to "teach the rustic moralist to die," while the country remains
beautiful, and while death continues to inspire fear. And with what
daring felicity of genius does the author introduce, ere the close, a
living but anonymous figure amidst the company of the silent dead, and
contrive to unite the interest of a personal story, the charm of a
mystery, and the solemnity of a moral meditation, into one fine whole!
We know of but one objection of much weight to this exquisite elegy.
There is scarcely the faintest or most faltering allusion to the
doctrine of the resurrection. Death has it all his own way in this
citadel of his power. The poet never points his finger to the distant
horizon, where life and immortality are beginning to colour the clouds
with the promise of the eternal morning. The elegy might almost have
been written by a Pagan. In this point, Beattie, in his "Hermit," has
much the advantage of his friend Gray; for _his_ eye is anointed to
behold a blessed vision, and his voice is strengthened thus to sing--
"On the pale cheek of Death smiles and roses are blending,
And Beauty immortal awakes from the tomb."
Nevertheless, had Gray been known, not for his scholarship, not for
his taste, not for his letters and minor poems, not for his reputed
powers and unrivalled accomplishments, but solely for this elegy--had
only it and his mere name survived, it alone would have entitled him
to rank with Britain's best poets.
* * * * *
GRAY'S POEMS.
ODES.
I.--ON THE SPRING.
1. Lo! where the rosy-bosom'd Hours,
Fair Venus' train, appear,
Disclose the long-expecting flowers,
And wake the purple year!
The Attic warbler pours her throat
Responsive to the cuckoo's note,
The untaught harmony of Spring:
While, whispering pleasure as they fly,
Cool Zephyrs through the clear blue sky
Their gather'd fragrance fling.
2. Where'er the oak's thick branches stretch
A broader, browner shade.
Where'er the rude and moss-grown beech
O'ercanopies the glade,
Beside some water's rushy brink
With me the Muse shall sit, and think
(At ease reclined in rustic state)
How vain the ardour of the crowd,
How low, how little, are the proud,
How indigent the great!
3. Still is the toiling hand of Care;
The panting herds repose:
Yet hark! how through the peopled air
The busy murmur glows!
The insect youth are on the wing,
Eager to taste the honied spring,
And float amid the liquid noon;
Some lightly o'er the current skim,
Some show their gaily gilded trim,
Quick glancing to the sun.
4. To Contemplation's sober eye,
Such is the race of Man,
And they that creep, and they that fly,
Shall end where they began.
Alike the busy and the gay
But flutter through life's little day,
In Fortune's varying colours dress'd;
Brush'd by the hand of rough Mischance,
Or chill'd by Age, their airy dance
They leave, in dust to rest.
5. Methinks I hear, in accents low,
The sportive kind reply,
Poor Moralist! and what art thou?
A solitary fly!
Thy joys no glittering female meets,
No hive hast thou of hoarded sweets,
No painted plumage to display:
On hasty wings thy youth is flown,
Thy sun is set, thy spring is gone--
We frolic while 'tis May.
* * * * *
II.--ON THE DEATH OF A FAVOURITE CAT,
DROWNED IN A CHINA TUB OF GOLD FISHES.
1. 'Twas on a lofty vase's side,
Where China's gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow,
Demurest of the tabby kind,
The pensive Selima, reclined,
Gazed on the lake below.
2. Her conscious tail her joy declared;
The fair round face, the snowy beard,
The velvet of her paws,
Her coat that with the tortoise vies,
Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,
She saw, and purr'd applause.
3. Still had she gazed, but,' midst the tide,
Two angel forms were seen to glide,
The Genii of the stream;
Their scaly armour's Tyrian hue,
Through richest purple, to the view
Betray'd a golden gleam.
4. The hapless nymph with wonder saw;
A whisker first, and then a claw,
With many an ardent wish,
She stretch'd in vain to reach the prize:
What female heart can gold despise?
What cat's averse to fish?
5. Presumptuous maid! with looks intent,
Again she stretch'd, again she bent,
Nor knew the gulf between:
(Maligant Fate sat by and smiled,)
The slippery verge her feet beguiled;
She tumbled headlong in.
6. Eight times emerging from the flood,
She mew'd to every watery god
Some speedy aid to send.
No Dolphin came, no Nereid stirr'd,
Nor cruel Tom or Susan heard:
A favourite has no friend!
7. From hence, ye beauties! undeceived,
Know one false step is ne'er retrieved,
And be with caution bold:
Not all that tempts your wandering eyes,
And heedless hearts, is lawful prize,
Nor all that glisters gold.
* * * * *
III--ON A DISTANT PROSPECT OF ETON COLLEGE.
[Greek: Anthropos ikanae profasis eis to dustuchein]
MENANDER.
1 Ye distant spires! ye antique towers!
That crown the watery glade
Where grateful Science still adores
Her Henry's (1) holy shade;
And ye that from the stately brow
Of Windsor's heights the expanse below
Of grove, of lawn, of mead survey,
Whose turf, whose shade, whose flowers among
Wanders the hoary Thames along
His silver-winding way:
2 Ah, happy hills! ah, pleasing shade!
Ah, fields beloved in vain!
Where once my careless childhood stray'd,
A stranger yet to pain!
I feel the gales that from ye blow
A momentary bliss bestow,
As, waving fresh their gladsome wing,
My weary soul they seem to soothe,
And, redolent of joy and youth,
To breathe a second spring.
3 Say, father Thames! for thou hast seen
Full many a sprightly race,
Disporting on thy margent green,
The paths of pleasure trace,
Who foremost now delight to cleave
With pliant arm thy glassy wave?
The captive linnet which enthral?
What idle progeny succeed
To chase the rolling circle's speed,
Or urge the flying ball?
4 While some, on earnest business bent,
Their murmuring labours ply,
'Gainst graver hours, that bring constraint,
To sweeten liberty:
Some bold adventurers disdain
The limits of their little reign,
And unknown regions dare descry;
Still as they run they look behind.
They hear a voice in every wind,
And snatch a fearful joy.
5 Gay Hope is theirs, by Fancy fed,
Less pleasing when possess'd;
The tear forgot as soon as shed,
The sunshine of the breast;
Theirs buxom health of rosy hue,
Wild wit, invention ever new,
And lively cheer, of vigour born;
The thoughtless day, the easy night,
The spirits pure, the slumbers light,
That fly the approach of morn.
6 Alas! regardless of their doom,
The little victims play;
No sense have they of ills to come,
Nor care beyond to-day:
Yet see how all around them wait,
The ministers of human fate,
And black Misfortune's baleful train!
Ah! show them where in ambush stand,
To seize their prey, the murderous band!
Ah! tell them they are men!
7 These shall the fury Passions tear,
The vultures of the mind,
Disdainful Anger, pallid Fear,
And Shame that skulks behind;
Or pining Love shall waste their youth,
Or Jealousy, with rankling teeth,
That inly gnaws the secret heart;
And Envy wan, and faded Care,
Grim-visaged, comfortless Despair,
And Sorrow's piercing dart.
8 Ambition this shall tempt to rise,
Then whirl the wretch from high,
To bitter Scorn a sacrifice,
And grinning infamy:
The stings of Falsehood those shall try,
And hard Unkindness' alter'd eye,
That mocks the tear it forced to flow;
And keen Remorse, with blood defiled,
And moody Madness, laughing wild
Amid severest woe.
9 Lo! in the vale of years beneath,
A grisly troop are seen,
The painful family of Death,
More hideous than their queen:
This racks the joints, this fires the veins,
That every labouring sinew strains,
Those in the deeper vitals rage;
Lo! Poverty, to fill the band,
That numbs the soul with icy hand,
And slow-consuming Age.
10 To each his sufferings; all are men
Condemn'd alike to groan;
The tender for another's pain,
The unfeeling for his own.
Yet ah! why should they know their fate,
Since sorrow never comes too late,
And happiness too swiftly flies?
Thought would destroy their paradise--
No more; where ignorance is bliss,
'Tis folly to be wise.
[Footnote: (1) 'Henry:' King Henry VI., founder of the College.]
* * * * *
IV.--HYMN TO ADVERSITY.
[Greek:
Zaena ...
Ton phronein brotous odosanta, to pathei mathos
phenta kurios echein.
AESCH. AG. 167.]
1 Daughter of Jove, relentless Power,
Thou tamer of the human breast,
Whose iron scourge and torturing hour
The bad affright, afflict the best!
Bound in thy adamantine chain,
The proud are taught to taste of pain,
And purple tyrants vainly groan
With pangs unfelt before, unpitied and alone.
2 When first thy Sire to send on earth,
Virtue, his darling child, design'd,
To thee he gave the heavenly birth,
And bade to form her infant mind:
Stern rugged nurse! thy rigid lore
With patience many a year she bore;
What sorrow was thou badest her know,
And from her own she learn'd to melt at others' woe.
3 Scared at thy frown, terrific fly
Self-pleasing Folly's idle brood,
Wild Laughter, Noise, and thoughtless Joy,
And leave us leisure to be good.
Light they disperse; and with them go
The summer friend, the flattering foe;
By vain Prosperity received,
To her they vow their truth, and are again believed.
4 Wisdom, in sable garb array'd,
Immersed in rapturous thought profound,
And Melancholy, silent maid!
With leaden eye, that loves the ground,
Still on thy solemn steps attend;
Warm Charity, the general friend,
With Justice, to herself severe,
And Pity, dropping soft the sadly-pleasing tear.
5 Oh! gently on thy suppliant's head,
Dread Goddess! lay thy chastening hand,
Not in thy Gorgon terrors clad,
Nor circled with the vengeful band:
(As by the impious thou art seen),
With thundering voice and threatening mien,
With screaming Horror's funeral cry,
Despair, and fell Disease, and ghastly Poverty.
6 Thy form benign, O Goddess! wear,
Thy milder influence impart,
Thy philosophic train be there,
To soften, not to wound, my heart:
The generous spark extinct revive;
Teach me to love and to forgive;
Exact my own defects to scan;
What others are to feel, and know myself a Man.
* * * * *
V.--THE PROGRESS OF POESY.
PINDARIC.
ADVERTISEMENT.--When the author first published this and the following
ode, he was advised, even by his friends, to subjoin some few
explanatory notes, but had too much respect for the understanding of
his readers to take that liberty.
[Greek:
Phonanta sunetoisin es
De to pan hermaeneon
Chatizei.--
PINDAR, _Olymp._ ii.]
I.--1.
Awake, Aeolian lyre! awake,
And give to rapture all thy trembling strings;
From Helicon's harmonious springs
A thousand rills their mazy progress take;
The laughing flowers, that round them blow,
Drink life and fragrance as they flow.
Now the rich stream of music winds along,
Deep, majestic, smooth, and strong,
Through verdant vales and Ceres' golden reign;
Now rolling down the steep amain,
Headlong, impetuous, see it pour;
The rocks and nodding groves rebellow to the roar.
I.--2.
Oh! Sovereign of the willing soul,
Parent of sweet and solemn-breathing airs,
Enchanting Shell! the sullen Cares
And frantic Passions hear thy soft control.
On Thracia's hills the Lord of War
Has curb'd the fury of his car,
And dropp'd his thirsty lance at thy command:
Perching on the sceptred hand
Of Jove, thy magic lulls the feather'd king
With ruffled plumes and flagging wing:
Quench'd in dark clouds of slumber lie
The terror of his beak and lightnings of his eye.
I.--3.
Thee the voice, the dance obey,
Temper'd to thy warbled lay:
O'er India's velvet green
The rosy-crowned Loves are seen,
On Cytherea's day,
With antic Sports and blue-eyed Pleasures
Frisking light in frolic measures:
Now pursuing, now retreating,
Now in circling troops they meet;
To brisk notes in cadence beating,
Glance their many-twinkling feet.
Slow-melting strains their Queen's approach declare
Where'er she turns, the Graces homage pay;
With arms sublime, that float upon the air,
In gliding state she wins her easy way:
O'er her warm cheek and rising bosom move
The bloom of young Desire and purple light of Love.
II.--1.
Man's feeble race what life await!
Labour and Penury, the racks of Pain,
Disease, and Sorrow's weeping train,
And Death, sad refuge from the storms of Fate!
The fond complaint, my Song! disprove,
And justify the laws of Jove.
Say, has he given in vain the heavenly Muse?
Night and all her sickly dews,
Her spectres wan, and birds of boding cry,
He gives to range the dreary sky,
Till down the eastern cliffs afar
Hyperion's march they spy, and glittering shafts of war.
II.--2.
In climes beyond the Solar road,
Where shaggy forms o'er ice-built mountains roam,
The Muse has broke the twilight-gloom
To cheer the shivering native's dull abode;
And oft beneath the odorous shade
Of Chili's boundless forests laid,
She deigns to hear the savage youth repeat,
In loose numbers, wildly sweet,
Their feather-cinctured chiefs and dusky loves.
Her track, where'er the Goddess roves,
Glory pursue, and generous Shame,
The unconquerable mind, and freedom's holy flame.
II.--3.
Woods that wave o'er Delphi's steep,
Isles that crown the AEgean deep,
Fields that cool Ilissus laves,
Or where Meander's amber waves
In lingering labyrinths creep, I
How do your tuneful echoes languish,
Mute but to the voice of Anguish?
Where each old poetic mountain
Inspiration breathed around;
Every shade and hallow'd fountain
Murmur'd deep a solemn sound,
Till the sad Nine, in Greece's evil hour,
Left their Parnassus for the Latian plains:
Alike they scorn the pomp of tyrant Power
And coward Vice, that revels in her chains.
When Latium had her lofty spirit lost,
They sought, O Albion! next thy sea-encircled coast.
III.--1.
Far from the sun and summer-gale,
In thy green lap was Nature's darling laid,
What time, where lucid Avon stray'd,
To him the mighty Mother did unveil
Her awful face; the dauntless child
Stretch'd forth his little arms, and smiled.
This pencil take (she said) whose colours clear
Richly paint the vernal year;
Thine, too, these golden keys, immortal Boy!
This can unlock the gates of Joy,
Of Horror that, and thrilling Pears,
Or ope the sacred source of sympathetic Tears.
III.--2.
Nor second He that rode sublime
Upon the seraph-wings of Ecstasy;
The secrets of the abyss to spy,
He pass'd the flaming bounds of place and time:
The living throne, the sapphire-blaze,
Where angels tremble while they gaze,
He saw; but, blasted with excess of light,
Closed his eyes in endless night.
Behold where Dryden's less presumptuous car
Wide o'er the fields of glory bear
Two coursers[1] of ethereal race,
With necks in thunder clothed and long-resounding pace.
III.--3.
Hark! his hands the lyre explore!
Bright-eyed Fancy, hovering o'er,
Scatters from her pictured urn
Thoughts that breathe and words that burn;
But ah! 'tis heard no more.
O lyre divine! what dying spirit[2]
Wakes thee now? though he inherit
Nor the pride nor ample pinion
That the Theban eagle[3] bear,
Sailing with supreme dominion
Through the azure deep of air,
Yet oft before his infant eyes would run
Such forms as glitter in the Muse's ray
With orient hues, unborrow'd of the sun;
Yet shall he mount, and keep his distant way
Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate,
Beneath the good how far--but far above the great.
[Footnote 1: 'Coursers:' the heroic rhymes.]
[Footnote 2: 'Dying spirit:' Cowley.]
[Footnote 3: 'Theban eagle:' Pindar.]
* * * * *
VI--THE BARD.
PINDARIC.
ADVERTISEMENT.--The following ode is founded on a tradition current in
Wales, that Edward I., when he completed the conquest of that country,
ordered all the bards that fell into his hands to be put to death.
I.--1.
'Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!
Confusion on thy banners wait;
Though fann'd by Conquest's crimson wing,
They mock the air with idle state.
Helm nor hauberk's[1] twisted mail,
Nor even thy virtues, Tyrant! shall avail
To save thy secret soul from nightly fears;
From Cambria's curse, from Cambria's tears!'
Such were the sounds that o'er the crested pride
Of the first Edward scatter'd wild dismay,
As down the steep of Snowdon's shaggy side
He wound with toilsome march his long array:
Stout Glo'ster[2] stood aghast in speechless trance:
To arms! cried Mortimer,[3] and couch'd his quivering lance.
I.--2.
On a rock, whose haughty brow
Frowns o'er old Conway's foaming flood,
Robed in the sable garb of woe,
With haggard eyes the poet stood;
(Loose his beard and hoary hair,
Stream'd like a meteor to the troubled air,)
And with a master's hand and prophet's fire
Struck the deep sorrows of his lyre:
'Hark how each giant oak and desert cave
Sighs to the torrent's awful voice beneath!
O'er thee, O King! their hundred arms they wave,
Revenge on thee in hoarser murmurs breathe;
Vocal no more, since Cambria's fatal day,
To high-born Hoel's harp, or soft Llewellyn's lay.
I.--3.
'Cold is Cadwallo's tongue
That hush'd the stormy main;
Brave Urien sleeps upon his craggy bed:
Mountains! ye moan in vain
Modrid, whose magic song
Made huge Plinlimmon bow his cloud-topp'd head.
On dreary Arvon's shore[4] they lie,
Smear'd with gore and ghastly pale;
Far, far aloof the affrighted ravens sail;
The famish'd eagle screams and passes by.
Dear lost companions of my tuneful art!
Dear as the light that visits these sad eyes,
Dear as the ruddy drops that warm my heart,
Ye died amidst your dying country's cries--
No more I weep. They do not sleep:
On yonder cliffs, a grisly band,
I see them sit; they linger yet,
Avengers of their native land:
With me in dreadful harmony they join,
And weave with bloody hands the tissue of thy line.
II.--1.
"Weave the warp and weave the woof,
The winding-sheet of Edward's race:
Give ample room and verge enough
The characters of Hell to trace.
Mark the year and mark the night
When Severn shall re-echo with affright
The shrieks of death through Berkley's roofs that ring,
Shrieks of an agonising king![5]
She-wolf of France,[6] with unrelenting fangs
That tear'st the bowels of thy mangled mate,
From thee[7] be born who o'er thy country hangs
The scourge of Heaven. What terrors round him wait!
Amazement in his van, with Flight combined,
And Sorrow's faded form, and Solitude behind.
II.--2.
"Mighty Victor, mighty Lord,
Low on his funeral couch[8] he lies!
No pitying heart, no eye afford
A tear to grace his obsequies!
Is the sable warrior[9] fled?
Thy son is gone; he rests among the dead.
The swarm that in thy noontide beam were born,
Gone to salute the rising morn:
Fair laughs the morn,[10] and soft the Zephyr blows,
While, proudly riding o'er the azure realm,
In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes,
Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm,
Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway,
That, hush'd in grim repose, expects his evening prey.
II.--3.
"Fill high the sparkling bowl,[11]
The rich repast prepare;
Reft of a crown, he yet may share the feast.
Close by the regal chair
Fell Thirst and Famine scowl
A baleful smile upon the baffled guest.
Heard ye the din of battle bray,[12]
Lance to lance and horse to horse?
Long years of havoc urge their destined course,
And through the kindred squadrons mow their way;
Ye Towers of Julius![13] London's lasting shame,
With many a foul and midnight murder fed,
Revere his consort's[14] faith, his father's[15] fame,
And spare the meek usurper's[16] holy head.
Above, below, the Rose of snow,[17]
Twined with her blushing foe, we spread;
The bristled Boar[18] in infant gore
Wallows beneath the thorny shade;
Now, Brothers! bending o'er the accursed loom,
Stamp we our vengeance deep, and ratify his doom.
III.--I.
"Edward, lo! to sudden fate
(Weave we the woof; the thread is spun:)
Half of thy heart[19] we consecrate;
(The web is wove; the work is done.")
'Stay, oh stay! nor thus forlorn
Leave me unbless'd, unpitied, here to mourn,
In yon bright track, that fires the western skies,
They melt, they vanish from my eyes.
But oh! what solemn scenes on Snowdon's height,
Descending slow, their glittering skirts unroll!
Visions of glory! spare my aching sight!
Ye unborn ages crowd not on my soul!
No more our long-lost Arthur[20] we bewail:
All hail, ye genuine Kings![21] Britannia's issue, hail!
III.--2.
'Girt with many a baron bold,
Sublime their starry fronts they rear;
And gorgeous dames and statesmen old
In bearded majesty appear;
In the midst a form divine,
Her eye proclaims her of the Briton-line,
Her lion-port, her awe-commanding face,[22]
Attemper'd sweet to virgin-grace.
What strings symphonious tremble in the air!
What strains of vocal transport round her play!
Hear from the grave, great Taliessin,[23] hear!
They breathe a soul to animate thy clay.
Bright Rapture calls, and, soaring as she sings,
Waves in the eye of Heaven her many-colour'd wings.
III.--3.
'The verse adorn again,
Fierce War and faithful Love,
And Truth severe, by fairy Fiction dress'd.
In buskin'd measures move
Pale Grief, and pleasing Pain,
With Horror, tyrant of the throbbing breast.
A voice[24] as of the cherub-choir
Gales from blooming Eden bear,
And distant warblings[25] lessen on my ear,
That lost in long futurity expire.
Fond, impious man! think'st thou yon sanguine cloud,
Raised by thy breath, has quench'd the orb of day?
To-morrow he repairs the golden flood,
And warms the nations with redoubled ray.
Enough for me: with joy I see
The different doom our Fates assign;
Be thine despair and sceptred care;
To triumph and to die are mine.'
He spoke, and headlong from the mountain's height,
Deep in the roaring tide, he plunged to endless night.
[Footnote 1: 'Hauberk:' the hauberk was a texture of steel ringlets or
rings interwoven, forming a coat of mail that sat close to the body,
and adapted itself to every motion.]
[Footnote 2: 'Stout Glo'ster:' Gilbert de Clare, surnamed the Red,
Earl of Gloucester and Hertford, son-in-law to King Edward.]
[Footnote 3: 'Mortimer:' Edmond de Mortimer, Lord of Wigmore. They
both were Lords Marchers, whose lands lay on the borders of Wales, and
probably accompanied the King in this expedition.]
[Footnote 4: 'Arvon's shore:' the shores of Caernarvonshire, opposite
to the isle of Anglesey.]
[Footnote 5: 'King:' Edward II., cruelly butchered in Berkley Castle.]
[Footnote 6: 'She-wolf of France:' Isabel of France, Edward II.'s
adulterous queen.]
[Footnote 7: 'From thee:' triumphs of Edward III. in France.]
[Footnote 8: 'Funeral couch:' death of that king, abandoned by his
children, and even robbed in his last moments by his courtiers and his
mistress.]
[Footnote 9: 'Sable warrior:' Edward the Black Prince, dead some time
before his father.]
[Footnote 10: 'Fair laughs the morn:' magnificence of Richard II.'s
reign; see Froissard, and other contemporary writers.]
[Footnote 11: 'Sparkling bowl:' Richard II. was starved to death; the
story of his assassination by Sir Piers of Exon is of much
later date.]
[Footnote 12: 'Battle bray:' ruinous civil wars of York and
Lancaster.]
[Footnote 13: 'Towers of Julius:' Henry VI., George Duke of Clarence,
Edward V., Richard Duke of York, &c., believed to be murdered secretly
in the Tower of London; the oldest part of that structure is vulgarly
attributed to Julius Caesar.]
[Footnote 14: 'Consort:' Margaret of Anjou.]
[Footnote 15: 'Father:' Henry V.]
[Footnote 16: 'Usurper:' Henry VI., very near being canonised; the
line of Lancaster had no right of inheritance to the crown.]
[Footnote 17: 'Rose of snow:' the White and Red Roses, devices of York
and Lancaster.]
[Footnote 18: 'Boar:' the silver Boar was the badge of Richard III.,
whence he was usually known in his own time by the name of The Boar.]
[Footnote 19: 'Half of thy heart:' Eleanor of Castile, Edward's wife,
died a few years after the conquest of Wales.]
[Footnote 20: 'Long-lost Arthur:' it was the common belief of the
Welsh nation, that King Arthur was still alive in Fairyland, and
should return again to reign over Britain.]
[Footnote 21: 'Genuine kings:' both Merlin and Taliessin had
prophesied that the Welsh should regain their sovereignty over this
island, which seemed to be accomplished in the House of Tudor.]
[Footnote 22; 'Awe-commanding face:' Queen Elizabeth.]
[Footnote 23: 'Taliessin:' chief of the Bards, flourished in the sixth
century; his works are still preserved, and his memory held in high
veneration, among his countrymen.]
[Footnote 24: 'A voice:' Milton.]
[Footnote 25: 'Warblings:' the succession of poets after Milton's
time.]
* * * * *
VII.--THE FATAL SISTERS.
FROM THE NORSE TONGUE.[1]
'Vitt er orpit
Fyrir valfalli.'
ADVERTISEMENT.--The author once had thoughts (in concert with a friend)
of giving a history of English poetry. In the introduction to it he
meant to have produced some specimens of the style that reigned in
ancient times among the neighbouring nations, or those who had subdued
the greater part of this island, and were our progenitors: the
following three imitations made a part of them. He afterwards dropped
his design; especially after he had heard that it was already in the
hands of a person[2] well qualified to do it justice both by his taste
and his researches into antiquity.
PREFACE.--In the eleventh century, Sigurd, Earl of the Orkney Islands,
went with a fleet of ships, and a considerable body of troops, into
Ireland, to the assistance of Sigtryg with the Silken Beard, who was
then making war on his father-in-law, Brian, King of Dublin. The Earl
and all his forces were cut to pieces, and Sigtryg was in danger of a
total defeat; but the enemy had a greater loss by the death of Brian,
their king, who fell in the action. On Christmas-day (the day of the
battle) a native of Caithness, in Scotland, saw, at a distance, a
number of persons on horseback riding full speed towards a hill, and
seeming to enter into it. Curiosity led him to follow them, till,
looking through an opening in the rocks, he saw twelve gigantic
figures,[3] resembling women: they were all employed about a loom; and
as they wove they sung the following dreadful song, which, when they
had finished, they tore the web into twelve pieces, and each taking
her portion, galloped six to the north, and as many to the south.
1 Now the storm begins to lower,
(Haste, the loom of Hell prepare!)
Iron-sleet of arrowy shower
Hurtles in the darken'd air.
2 Glittering lances are the loom
Where the dusky warp we strain,
Weaving many a soldier's doom,
Orkney's woe and Randver's bane.
3 See the grisly texture grow,
('Tis of human entrails made,)
And the weights that play below,
Each a gasping warrior's head.
4 Shafts for shuttles, dipp'd in gore,
Shoot the trembling cords along:
Sword, that once a monarch bore,
Keep the tissue close and strong.
5 Mista, black, terrific maid!
Sangrida and Hilda see,
Join the wayward work to aid:
'Tis the woof of victory.
6 Ere the ruddy sun be set,
Pikes must shiver, javelins sing,
Blade with clattering buckler meet,
Hauberk crash, and helmet ring.
7 (Weave the crimson web of war)
Let us go, and let us fly,
Where our friends the conflict share,
Where they triumph, where they die.
8 As the paths of Fate we tread,
Wading through th' ensanguined field,
Gondula and Geira spread
O'er the youthful king your shield.
9 We the reins to Slaughter give,
Ours to kill and ours to spare:
Spite of danger he shall live;
(Weave the crimson web of war.)
10 They whom once the desert beach
Pent within its bleak domain,
Soon their ample sway shall stretch
O'er the plenty of the plain.
11 Low the dauntless earl is laid,
Gored with many a gaping wound:
Fate demands a nobler head;
Soon a king shall bite the ground.
12 Long his loss shall Eirin[4] weep,
Ne'er again his likeness see;
Long her strains in sorrow steep,
Strains of immortality!
13 Horror covers all the heath,
Clouds of carnage blot the sun:
Sisters! weave the web of death:
Sisters! cease; the work is done.
14 Hail the task and hail the hands!
Songs of joy and triumph sing!
Joy to the victorious bands,
Triumph to the younger king!
15 Mortal! thou that hear'st the tale,
Learn the tenor of our song;
Scotland! through each winding vale
Far and wide the notes prolong.
16 Sisters! hence with spurs of speed;
Each her thundering falchion wield;
Each bestride her sable steed:
Hurry, hurry, to the field.
[Footnote 1: 'Norse tongue:' to be found in the Orcades of Thormodus
Torfaeus, Hafniae, 1697, folio; and also in Bartholinus.]
[Footnote 2: 'Person:' Percy, author of 'Reliques of Ancient English
Poetry.']
[Footnote 3: 'Figures:' the Valkyriur were female divinities, servants
of Odin (or Woden) in the Gothic mythology. Their name signifies
'Choosers of the Slain.' They were mounted on swift horses, with drawn
swords in their hands, and in the throng of battle selected such as
were destined to slaughter, and conducted them to Valkalla, (the Hall
of Odin, or Paradise of the Brave), where they attended the banquet,
and served the departed heroes with horns of mead and ale.]
[Footnote 4: 'Eirin:' Ireland.]
* * * * *
VIII.--THE DESCENT OF ODIN.
FROM THE NORSE TONGUE.[1]
'Upreis Odinn
Allda gautr.'
Uprose the King of Men with speed,
And saddled straight his coal-black steed;
Down the yawning steep he rode
That leads to Hela's[2] drear abode.
Him the Dog of Darkness spied;
His shaggy throat he open'd wide,
While from his jaws, with carnage fill'd,
Foam and human gore distill'd:
Hoarse he bays with hideous din,
Eyes that glow and fangs that grin, 10
And long pursues with fruitless yell
The Father of the powerful spell.
Onward still his way he takes,
--The groaning earth beneath him shakes,--
Till full before his fearless eyes
The portals nine of Hell arise.
Right against the eastern gate,
By the moss-grown pile he sate,
Where long of yore to sleep was laid
The dust of the prophetic maid. 20
Facing to the northern clime,
Thrice he traced the Runic rhyme,
Thrice pronounced, in accents dread,
The thrilling verse that wakes the dead,
Till from out the hollow ground
Slowly breathed a sullen sound.
_Proph._ What call unknown, what charms presume
To break the quiet of the tomb?
Who thus afflicts my troubled sprite,
And drags me from the realms of Night? 30
Long on these mouldering bones have beat
The winter's snow, the summer's heat,
The drenching dews and driving rain!
Let me, let me sleep again.
Who is he, with voice unblest,
That calls me from the bed of rest?
_Odin._ A traveller, to thee unknown,
Is he that calls, a warrior's son.
Thou the deeds of light shalt know;
Tell me what is done below, 40
For whom yon glittering board is spread;
Dress'd for whom yon golden bed?
_Proph._ Mantling in the goblet see
The pure beverage of the bee,
O'er it hangs the shield of gold;
'Tis the drink of Balder bold:
Balder's head to death is given;
Pain can reach the sons of Heaven!
Unwilling I my lips unclose;
Leave me, leave me to repose. 50
_Odin._ Once again my call obey:
Prophetess! arise, and say,
What dangers Odin's child await,
Who the author of his fate?
_Proph._ In Hoder's hand the hero's doom;
His brother sends him to the tomb.
Now my weary lips I close;
Leave me, leave me to repose.
_Odin._ Prophetess! my spell obey;
Once again arise, and say, 60
Who the avenger of his guilt,
By whom shall Hoder's blood be spilt?
_Proph._ In the caverns of the west,
By Odin's fierce embrace compress'd,
A wondrous boy shall Rinda bear,
Who ne'er shall comb his raven hair,
Nor wash his visage in the stream,
Nor see the sun's departing beam,
Till he on Hoder's corse shall smile,
Flaming on the funeral pile. 70
Now my weary lips I close;
Leave me, leave me to repose.
_Odin._ Yet a while my call obey:
Prophetess! awake, and say,
What virgins these, in speechless woe,
That bend to earth their solemn brow,
That their flaxen tresses tear,
And snowy veils that float in air?
Tell we whence their sorrows rose,
Then I leave thee to repose. 80
_Proph._ Ha! no traveller art thou;
King of Men, I know thee now;
Mightiest of a mighty line--
_Odin._ No boding maid of skill divine
Art thou, no prophetess of good,
But mother of the giant-brood!
_Proph._ Hie thee hence, and boast at home,
That never shall inquirer come
To break my iron-sleep again,
Till Lok[3] has burst his tenfold chain; 90
Never till substantial Night
Has re-assumed her ancient right;
Till, wrapp'd in flames, in ruin hurl'd,
Sinks the fabric of the world.
[Footnote 1: 'Norse Tongue:' to be found in Bartholinus, De Causis
Contemnendae Mortis: Hafniae, 1689, quarto.]
[Footnote 2: 'Hela:' Niflheimr, the hell of the Gothic nations,
consisted of nine worlds, to which were devoted all such as died of
sickness, old age, or by any other means than in battle: over it
presided Hela, the goddess of Death.]
[Footnote 3: 'Lok:' is the evil being, who continues in chains till
the twilight of the gods approaches, when he shall break his bonds;
the human race, the stars, and sun, shall disappear, the earth sink in
the seas, and fire consume the skies: even Odin himself, and his
kindred deities, shall perish.]
* * * * *
IX.--THE DEATH OF HOEL.[1]
Had I but the torrent's might,
With headlong rage, and wild affright,
Upon Deira's[2] squadrons hurl'd,
To rush and sweep them from the world!
Too, too secure in youthful pride,
By them my friend, my Hoel, died,
Great Cian's son; of Madoc old
He ask'd no heaps of hoarded gold;
Alone in Nature's wealth array'd,
He ask'd and had the lovely maid. 10
To Cattraeth's[3] vale, in glittering row,
Twice two hundred warriors go;
Every warrior's manly neck
Chains of regal honour deck,
Wreath'd in many a golden link:
From the golden cup they drink
Nectar that the bees produce,
Or the grape's ecstatic juice.
Flush'd with mirth and hope they burn:
But none from Cattraeth's vale return, 20
Save Aeron brave and Conan strong,
--Bursting through the bloody throng--
And I, the meanest of them all,
That live to weep and sing their fall.
[Footnote 1: 'Hoel:' from the Welsh of Aneurim, styled 'The Monarch of
the Bards.' He flourished about the time of Taliessin, A.D. 570. This
ode is extracted from the Gododin.]
[Footnote 2: 'Deira:' a kingdom including the five northernmost
counties of England.]
[Footnote 3: 'Cattraeth:' a great battle lost by the ancient Britons.]
* * * * *
X.--THE TRIUMPH OF OWEN:
A FRAGMENT FROM THE WELSH.
ADVERTISEMENT.--Owen succeeded his father Griffin in the Principality
of North Wales, A.D. 1120: this battle was near forty years
afterwards.
Owen's praise demands my song,
Owen swift, and Owen strong,
Fairest flower of Roderick's stem,
Gwyneth's[1] shield and Britain's gem.
He nor heaps his brooded stores,
Nor on all profusely pours;
Lord of every regal art,
Liberal hand and open heart.
Big with hosts of mighty name,
Squadrons three against him came; 10
This the force of Eirin hiding;
Side by side as proudly riding
On her shadow long and gay
Lochlin[2] ploughs the watery way;
There the Norman sails afar
Catch the winds and join the war;
Black and huge, along they sweep,
Burthens of the angry deep.
Dauntless on his native sands
The Dragon son[3] of Mona stands; 20
In glittering arms and glory dress'd,
High he rears his ruby crest;
There the thundering strokes begin,
There the press and there the din:
Talymalfra's rocky shore
Echoing to the battle's roar!
Check'd by the torrent-tide of blood,
Backward Meniai rolls his flood;
While, heap'd his master's feet around,
Prostrate warriors gnaw the ground. 30
Where his glowing eye-balls turn,
Thousand banners round him burn;
Where he points his purple spear,
Hasty, hasty rout is there;
Marking, with indignant eye,
Fear to stop and Shame to fly:
There Confusion, Terror's child,
Conflict fierce, and Ruin wild,
Agony, that pants for breath,
Despair and honourable Death. 40
[Footnote 1: 'Gwyneth:' North Wales.]
[Footnote 2: 'Lochlin:' Denmark.]
[Footnote 3: 'Dragon son:' the Red Dragon is the device of
Cadwalladar, which all his descendants bore on their banners.]
* * * * *
XI.--FOR MUSIC.[1]
I.
'Hence, avaunt! ('tis holy ground,)
Comus and his midnight crew,
And Ignorance, with looks profound,
And dreaming Sloth, of pallid hue,
Mad Sedition's cry profane,
Servitude that hugs her chain,
Nor in these consecrated bowers,
Let painted Flattery hide her serpent-train in flowers;
CHORUS.
Nor Envy base, nor creeping Gain,
Dare the Muse's walk to stain, 10
While bright-eyed Science watches round:
Hence, away! 'tis holy ground.'
II.
From yonder realms of empyrean day
Bursts on my ear the indignant lay;
There sit the sainted sage, the bard divine,
The few whom Genius gave to shine
Through every unborn age and undiscover'd clime.
Rapt in celestial transport they,
Yet hither oft a glance from high
They send of tender sympathy, 20
To bless the place where on their opening soul
First the genuine ardour stole.
'Twas Milton struck the deep-toned shell,
And, as the choral warblings round him swell,
Meek Newton's self bends from his state sublime,
And nods his hoary head, and listens to the rhyme.
III.
Ye brown o'er-arching groves!
That Contemplation loves,
Where willowy Camus lingers with delight;
Oft at the blush of dawn 30
I trod your level lawn,
Oft wooed the gleam of Cynthia, silver-bright,
In cloisters dim, far from the haunts of Folly,
With Freedom by my side, and soft-eyed Melancholy.
IV.
But hark! the portals sound, and pacing forth,
With solemn steps and slow,
High potentates, and dames of royal birth,
And mitred fathers, in long orders go:
Great Edward,[2] with the Lilies on his brow
From haughty Gallia torn, 40
And sad Chatillon,[3] on her bridal morn,
That wept her bleeding love, and princely Clare,[4]
And Anjou's heroine,[5] and the paler Rose,[6]
The rival of her crown, and of her woes,
And either Henry[7] there,
The murder'd saint, and the majestic lord
That broke the bonds of Rome,--
(Their tears, their little triumphs o'er,
Their human passions now no more,
Save Charity, that glows beyond the tomb,) 50
All that on Granta's fruitful plain
Rich streams of regal bounty pour'd,
And bade those awful fanes and turrets rise,
To hail their Fitzroy's festal morning come;
And thus they speak in soft accord
The liquid language of the skies:
V.
'What is grandeur, what is power?
Heavier toil, superior pain,
What the bright reward we gain?
The grateful memory of the good. 60
Sweet is the breath of vernal shower,
The bee's collected treasures sweet,
Sweet Music's melting fall, but sweeter yet
The still small voice of Gratitude.'
VI.
Foremost, and leaning from her golden cloud,
The venerable Margaret[8] see!
'Welcome, my noble son!' she cries aloud,
'To this thy kindred train, and me:
Pleased, in thy lineaments we trace
A Tudor's[9] fire, a Beaufort's grace. 70
Thy liberal heart, thy judging eye,
The flower unheeded shall descry,
And bid it round Heaven's altars shed
The fragrance of its blushing head;
Shall raise from earth the latent gem
To glitter on the diadem.
VII.
'Lo! Granta waits to lead her blooming band;
Not obvious, not obtrusive, she
No vulgar praise, no venal incense flings;
Nor dares with courtly tongue refined 80
Profane thy inborn royalty of mind:
She reveres herself and thee.
With modest pride, to grace thy youthful brow,
The laureate wreath[10] that Cecil wore she brings,
And to thy just, thy gentle hand
Submits the fasces of her sway;
While spirits blest above, and men below,
Join with glad voice the loud symphonious lay.
VIII.
'Through the wild waves, as they roar,
With watchful eye, and dauntless mien, 90
Thy steady course of honour keep,
Nor fear the rock, nor seek the shore:
The Star of Brunswick smiles serene,
And gilds the horrors of the deep.'
[Footnote 1: 'Music:' performed in the Senate-house, Cambridge, July
1, 1769, at the installation of his Grace, Augustus Henry Fitzroy,
Duke of Grafton, Chancellor of the University.]
[Footnote 2: 'Great Edward.' Edward III., who added the Fleur-de-lis
of France to the arms of England. He founded Trinity College.]
[Footnote 3: 'Chatillon:' Mary de Valentia, Countess of Pembroke,
daughter of Guy de Chatillon, Comte de St Paul, in France, who lost
her husband on the day of his marriage. She was the foundress of
Pembroke College or Hall, under the name of Aula Marias de Valentia.]
[Footnote 4; 'Clare:' Elizabeth de Burg, Countess of Clare, was wife
of John de Burg, son and heir of the Earl of Ulster, and daughter of
Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester, by Joan of Acres, daughter of
Edward I.; hence the poet gives her the epithet of 'princely.' She
founded Clare Hall.]
[Footnote 5: 'Anjou's heroine:' Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI.,
foundress of Queen's College.]
[Footnote 6: 'Rose:' Elizabeth Widville, wife of Henry IV. She added
to the foundation of Margaret of Anjou.]
[Footnote 7: 'Either Henry:' Henry VI. and Henry VII., the former the
founder of King's, the latter the greatest benefactor to
Trinity College.]
[Footnote 8: 'Margaret:' Countess of Richmond and Derby, the mother of
Henry VII., foundress of St John's and Christ's Colleges.]
[Footnote 9: 'Tudor:' the Countess was a Beaufort, and married to a
Tudor; hence the application of this line to the Duke of Grafton, who
claimed descent from both these families.]
[Footnote 10: 'Wreath:' Lord Treasurer Burleigh was Chancellor of the
University in the reign of Queen Elizabeth.]
* * * * *
MISCELLANEOUS.
A LONG STORY.
ADVERTISEMENT.--Gray's 'Elegy,' previous to its publication, was
handed about in MS., and had, amongst other admirers, the Lady Cobham,
who resided in the mansion-house at Stoke-Pogeis. The performance
inducing her to wish for the author's acquaintance, Lady Schaub and
Miss Speed, then at her house, undertook to introduce her to it. These
two ladies waited upon the author at his aunt's solitary habitation,
where he at that time resided, and not finding him at home, they left
a card behind them. Mr Gray, surprised at such a compliment, returned
the visit; and as the beginning of this intercourse bore some
appearance of romance, he gave the humorous and lively account of it
which the 'Long Story' contains.
1 In Britain's isle, no matter where,
An ancient pile of building[1] stands:
The Huntingdons and Hattons there
Employ'd the power of fairy hands,
2 To raise the ceiling's fretted height,
Each pannel in achievements clothing,
Rich windows that exclude the light,
And passages that lead to nothing.
3 Full oft within the spacious walls,
When he had fifty winters o'er him,
My grave Lord-Keeper[2] led the brawls:
The seal and maces danced before him.
4 His bushy beard and shoe-strings green,
His high-crown'd hat and satin doublet,
Moved the stout heart of England's Queen,
Though Pope and Spaniard could not trouble it.
5 What, in the very first beginning,
Shame of the versifying tribe!
Your history whither are you spinning?
Can you do nothing but describe?
6 A house there is (and that's enough)
From whence one fatal morning issues
A brace of warriors, not in buff,
But rustling in their silks and tissues.
7 The first came _cap-a-pie_ from France,
Her conquering destiny fulfilling,
Whom meaner beauties eye askance,
And vainly ape her art of killing.
8 The other Amazon kind Heaven
Had arm'd with spirit, wit, and satire;
But Cobham had the polish given,
And tipp'd her arrows with good nature.
9 To celebrate her eyes, her air--
Coarse panegyrics would but tease her;
Melissa is her _nom de guerre;_
Alas! who would not wish to please her!
10 With bonnet blue and capuchine,
And aprons long, they hid their armour;
And veil'd their weapons, bright and keen,
In pity to the country farmer.
11 Fame, in the shape of Mr P--t,
(By this time all the parish know it),
Had told that thereabouts there lurk'd
A wicked imp they call a Poet,
12 Who prowl'd the country far and near,
Bewitch'd the children of the peasants,
Dried up the cows, and lamed the deer,
And suck'd the eggs, and kill'd the pheasants.
13 My Lady heard their joint petition,
Swore by her coronet and ermine,
She'd issue out her high commission
To rid the manor of such vermin.
14 The heroines undertook the task;
Through lanes unknown, o'er stiles they ventured,
Rapp'd at the door, nor stay'd to ask,
But bounce into the parlour enter'd.
15 The trembling family they daunt;
They flirt, they sing, they laugh, they tattle,
Rummage his mother, pinch his aunt,
And up-stairs in a whirlwind rattle.
16 Each hole and cupboard they explore,
Each creek and cranny of his chamber,
Run hurry-scurry round the floor,
And o'er the bed and tester clamber;
17 Into the drawers and china pry,
Papers and books, a huge imbroglio!
Under a tea-cup he might lie,
Or creased like dog's-ears in a folio!
18 On the first marching of the troops,
The Muses, hopeless of his pardon,
Convey'd him underneath their hoops
To a small closet in the garden.
19 So Rumour says; (who will believe?)
But that they left the door a-jar,
Where safe, and laughing in his sleeve,
He heard the distant din of war.
20 Short was his joy: he little knew
The power of magic was no fable;
Out of the window, whisk! they flew,
But left a spell upon the table.
21 The words too eager to unriddle,
The Poet felt a strange disorder;
Transparent birdlime form'd the middle,
And chains invisible the border.
22 So cunning was the apparatus,
The powerful pothooks did so move him,
That will-he, nill-he, to the great house
He went as if the devil drove him.
23 Yet on his way (no sign of grace,
For folks in fear are apt to pray)
To Phoebus he preferr'd his case,
And begg'd his aid that dreadful day.
24 The godhead would have back'd his quarrel:
But with a blush, on recollection,
Own'd that his quiver and his laurel
'Gainst four such eyes were no protection.
25 The court was set, the culprit there;
Forth from their gloomy mansions creeping,
The Lady Janes and Joans repair,
And from the gallery stand peeping:
26 Such as in silence of the night
Come sweep along some winding entry,
(Styack[3] has often seen the sight)
Or at the chapel-door stand sentry;
27 In peaked hoods and mantles tarnish'd,
Sour visages enough to scare ye,
High dames of honour once that garnish'd
The drawing-room of fierce Queen Mary!
28 The peeress comes: the audience stare,
And doff their hats with due submission;
She curtsies, as she takes her chair,
To all the people of condition.
29 The Bard with many an artless fib
Had in imagination fenced him,
Disproved the arguments of Squib,[4]
And all that Grooms[5] could urge against him.
30 But soon his rhetoric forsook him,
When he the solemn hall had seen;
A sudden fit of ague shook him;
He stood as mute as poor Maclean.[6]
31 Yet something he was heard to mutter,
How in the park, beneath an old tree,
(Without design to hurt the butter,
Or any malice to the poultry,)
32 He once or twice had penn'd a sonnet,
Yet hoped that he might save his bacon;
Numbers would give their oaths upon it,
He ne'er was for a conjuror taken.
33 The ghostly prudes, with hagged[7] face,
Already had condemn'd the sinner:
My Lady rose, and with a grace--
She smiled, and bid him come to dinner,
34 'Jesu-Maria! Madam Bridget,
Why, what can the Viscountess mean?'
Cried the square hoods, in woeful fidget;
'The times are alter'd quite and clean!
35 'Decorum's turn'd to mere civility!
Her air and all her manners show it:
Commend me to her affability!
Speak to a commoner and poet!'
[_Here 500 stanzas are lost._]
36 And so God save our noble king,
And guard us from long-winded lubbers,
That to eternity would sing,
And keep my lady from her rubbers.
[Footnote 1: 'Pile of building:' the mansion-house at Stoke-Pogeis,
then in the possession of Viscountess Cobham. The style of building
which we now call Queen Elizabeth's, is here admirably described, both
with regard to its beauties and defects; and the third and fourth
stanzas delineate the fantastic manners of her time with equal truth
and humour. The house formerly belonged to the Earls of Huntingdon and
the family of Hatton.]
[Footnote 2: 'Lord-Keeper:' Sir Christopher Hatton, promoted by Queen
Elizabeth for his graceful person and fine dancing. Brawls were a sort
of a figure-dance then in vogue.]
[Footnote 3: 'Styack:' the house-keeper.]
[Footnote 4: 'Squib:' the steward.']
[Footnote 5: 'Grooms:' of the chamber.]
[Footnote 6: 'Maclean:' a famous highwayman, hanged the week before.]
[Footnote 7: 'Hagged:' i. e., the face of a witch or hag.]
* * * * *
ELEGY WRITTEN IN A COUNTRY CHURCHYARD.
1 The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
2 Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:
3 Save that, from yonder ivy-mantled tower,
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such as, wandering near her secret bower,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.
4 Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
5 The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn,
The swallow twittering from the straw-built shed,
The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.
6 For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her evening care;
No children run to lisp their sire's return,
Or climb his knees, the envied kiss to share.
7 Oft did the harvest to their sickle yield,
Their furrow oft the stubborn glebe has broke;
How jocund did they drive their team afield!
How bow'd the woods beneath their sturdy stroke!
8 Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the poor.
9 The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Await alike the inevitable hour:
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
10 Nor you, ye Proud! impute to these the fault,
If Memory o'er their tomb no trophies raise,
Where, through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault,
The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.
11 Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust,
Or Flattery soothe the dull cold ear of death?
12 Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands that the rod of empire might have sway'd,
Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre.
13 But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page,
Rich with the spoils of Time, did ne'er unroll;
Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.
14 Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
15 Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood,
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country's blood.
16 The applause of listening senates to command,
The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,
And read their history in a nation's eyes,
17 Their lot forbade; nor circumscribed alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined;
Forbade to wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of Mercy on mankind,
18 The struggling pangs of conscious Truth to hide,
To quench the blushes of ingenuous Shame,
Or heap the shrine of Luxury and Pride
With incense kindled at the Muse's flame.
19 Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,[1]
Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
20 Yet e'en these bones, from insult to protect,
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.
21 Their name, their years, spelt by the unletter'd Muse,
The place of fame and elegy supply,
And many a holy text around she strews,
That teach the rustic moralist to die.
22 For who, to dumb Forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing, anxious being e'er resign'd,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind?
23 On some fond breast the parting soul relies,
Some pious drops the closing eye requires;
E'en from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,
E'en in our ashes live their wonted fires.
24 For thee, who, mindful of the unhonour'd dead,
Dost in those lines their artless tale relate,
If chance, by lonely Contemplation led,
Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate,
25 Haply some hoary-headed swain may say,
'Oft have we seen him, at the peep of dawn,
Brushing with hasty steps the dews away,
To meet the sun upon the upland lawn.
26 'There, at the foot of yonder nodding beech,
That wreathes its old fantastic root so high,
His listless length at noontide would he stretch,
And pore upon the brook that babbles by.
27 'Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn,
Muttering his wayward fancies, he would rove;
Now drooping, woeful, wan, like one forlorn,
Or crazed with care, or cross'd in hopeless love.
28 'One morn I miss'd him on the accustom'd hill,
Along the heath, and near his favourite tree;
Another came, nor yet beside the rill,
Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood, was he:
29 'The next, with dirges due, in sad array,
Slow through the churchway-path we saw him borne:
Approach, and read (for thou canst read) the lay
Graved on the stone beneath yon aged thorn:'[2]
THE EPITAPH.
30 Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth,
A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown:
Fair Science frown'd not on his humble birth,
And Melancholy mark'd him for her own.
31 Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere;
Heaven did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to misery all he had--a tear;
He gain'd from Heaven--'twas all he wish'd--a friend.
32 No further seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,
(There they alike in trembling hope repose)
The bosom of his Father and his God.
[Footnote 1: This part of the elegy differs from the first copy. The
following stanza was excluded with the other alterations:--
Hark! how the sacred calm, that breathes around,
Bids every fierce tumultuous passion cease,
In still small accents whispering from the ground
A grateful earnest of eternal peace. ]
[Footnote 2: In early editions, the following stanza occurred:--
There scatter'd oft, the earliest of the year,
By hands unseen, are showers of violets found;
The redbreast loves to build and warble there,
And little footsteps lightly print the ground. ]
* * * * *
EPITAPH ON MRS JANE CLARKE.[1]
Lo! where this silent marble weeps,
A friend, a wife, a mother sleeps;
A heart, within whose sacred cell
The peaceful Virtues loved to dwell:
Affection warm, and faith sincere,
And soft humanity were there.
In agony, in death resign'd,
She felt the wound she left behind.
Her infant image here below
Sits smiling on a father's woe:
Whom what awaits while yet he strays
Along the lonely vale of days?
A pang, to secret sorrow dear,
A sigh, an unavailing tear,
Till time shall every grief remove
With life, with memory, and with love.
[Footnote 1: 'Mrs Jane Clarke' this lady, the wife of Dr Clarke,
physician at Epsom, died April 27, 1757, and is buried in the church
of Beckenham, Kent.]
* * * * *
STANZAS,
SUGGESTED BY A VIEW OF THE SEAT AND RUINS AT
KINGSGATE, IN KENT, 1766.
1 Old, and abandon'd by each venal friend,
Here Holland took the pious resolution,
To smuggle a few years, and strive to mend
A broken character and constitution.
2 On this congenial spot he fix'd his choice;
Earl Goodwin trembled for his neighbouring sand;
Here sea-gulls scream, and cormorants rejoice,
And mariners, though shipwreck'd, fear to land.
3 Here reign the blustering North, and blasting East,
No tree is heard to whisper, bird to sing;
Yet Nature could not furnish out the feast,
Art he invokes new terrors still to bring.
4 Now mouldering fanes and battlements arise,
Turrets and arches nodding to their fall,
Unpeopled monasteries delude our eyes,
And mimic desolation covers all.
5 'Ah!' said the sighing peer, 'had Bute been true,
Nor C--'s, nor B--d's promises been vain,
Far other scenes than this had graced our view,
And realised the horrors which we feign.
6 'Purged by the sword, and purified by fire,
Then had we seen proud London's hated walls:
Owls should have hooted in St Peter's choir,
And foxes stunk and litter'd in St Paul's.'
* * * * *
TRANSLATION FROM STATIUS.
Third in the labours of the disc came on,
With sturdy step and slow, Hippomedon;
Artful and strong he poised the well-known weight,
By Phlegyas warn'd, and fired by Mnestheus' fate,
That to avoid and this to emulate.
His vigorous arm he tried before he flung,
Braced all his nerves, and every sinew strung,
Then with a tempest's whirl and wary eye
Pursued his cast, and hurl'd the orb on high;
The orb on high, tenacious of its course, 10
True to the mighty arm that gave it force,
Far overleaps all bound, and joys to see
Its ancient lord secure of victory:
The theatre's green height and woody wall
Tremble ere it precipitates its fall;
The ponderous mass sinks in the cleaving ground,
While vales and woods and echoing hills rebound.
As when, from Aetna's smoking summit broke,
The eyeless Cyclops heaved the craggy rock,
Where Ocean frets beneath the dashing oar, 20
And parting surges round the vessel roar;
'Twas there he aim'd the meditated harm,
And scarce Ulysses 'scaped his giant arm.
A tiger's pride the victor bore away,
With native spots and artful labour gay,
A shining border round the margin roll'd,
And calm'd the terrors of his claws in gold.
CAMBRIDGE, _May_ 8, 1736.
* * * * *
GRAY ON HIMSELF.
Too poor for a bribe, and too proud to importune,
He had not the method of making a fortune;
Could love and could hate, so was thought something odd;
No very great wit, he believed in a God;
A post or a pension he did not desire,
But left church and state to Charles Townshend and Squire.
* * * * *
END OF GRAY'S POEMS.
* * * * *
THE POETICAL WORKS
OF
TOBIAS SMOLLETT.
THE
LIFE OF TOBIAS SMOLLETT.
The combination of a great writer and a small poet, in one and the
same person, is not uncommon. With not a few, while other, and severer
branches of study are the laborious task of the day, poetry is the
slipshod amusement of the evening. Dr Parr calls Johnson _probabilis
poeta_--words which seem to convey the notion that the author of "The
Rambler," who was great on other fields, was in that of poetry only
respectable. This term is more applicable to Smollett, whose poems
discover only in part those keen, vigorous, and original powers which
enabled him to indite "Roderick Random" and "Humphrey Clinker." Yet
the author of "Independence," and "The Tears of Scotland," must not be
excluded from the list of British poets--an honour to which much even
of his prose has richly entitled him.
The incidents in Smollett's history are not very numerous, and some of
them are narrated, under faint disguises, with inimitable vivacity and
_vraisemblance_ in his own fictions. Tobias George Smollett was born
in Dalquhurn House, near the village of Renton, Dumbartonshire, in
1721. His father, a younger son of Sir James Smollett of Bonhill,
having died early, the education of the poet devolved on his
grandfather. The scenery of his native place was well calculated to
inspire his early genius. It is one of the most beautiful regions in
Scotland. A fine hollow vale, pervaded by the river Leven, and
surrounded by rich woodlands and bold hills, stretches up from
Dumbarton, with its double peaks and ancient castle, to the
magnificent Loch Lomond; and in one of the loops of this winding vale
was the great novelist born and bred. He called his native region, in
"Humphrey Clinker," the "Arcadia of Scotland," and has sung the Leven
in one of his small poems. He was sent to the Grammar School of
Dumbarton, and thence to Glasgow College. He was subsequently placed
apprentice to one M. Gordon, a medical practitioner in Glasgow; and
from thence, according to some of his biographers, he proceeded to
study medicine in Edinburgh. When he was about nineteen years of age,
his grandfather expired, without having made any provision for him;
and he was compelled, in 1739, to repair to London, carrying with him
a tragedy entitled "The Regicide,"--the subject being the
assassination of James the First of Scotland,--which he had written
the year before, and which he in vain sought to get presented at the
theatres. He had letters of introduction to some eminent literary
characters, who, however, either could not or would not do anything
for him; and he found no better situation than that of surgeon's mate
in an eighty-gun ship. He continued in the navy for six or seven
years, and was present at the disastrous siege of Carthagena, in 1741,
which he has described in a Compendium of Voyages he compiled in 1756,
and with still more vigour in "Roderick Random." His long acquaintance
with the sea furnished ample materials for his genius, although it did
not improve his opinion of human nature. Disgusted with the service,
he quitted it in the West Indies, and lived for some time in Jamaica.
Here he became acquainted with Miss Lascelles, a beautiful lady whom
he afterwards married. She sat for the portrait of Narcissa, in
"Roderick Random."
In 1746 he returned to England. He found the country ringing with
indignation at the cruelties inflicted by Cumberland on the Highland
rebels, and he caught and crystalised the prevalent emotion in his
spirited lyric, "The Tears of Scotland." He published the same year
his "Advice,"--a satirical poem upon things in general, and the public
men of the day in particular. He wrote also an opera entitled
"Alceste" for Covent Garden; but owing to a dispute with the manager,
it was neither acted nor printed. In 1747 he produced "Reproof," the
second part of "Advice,"--a poem which breathes the same manly
indignation at the abuses, evils, and public charlatans of the day.
This year also he married Miss Lascelles, by whom he expected a
fortune of three thousand pounds. This sum, however, was never fully
realised; and his generous housekeeping, and the expenses of a
litigation to which he was compelled, in connection with Miss
Lascelles' money, embarrassed his circumstances, and, much to the
advantage of the world, drove him to literature. In 1748, he gave to
the world his novel of "Roderick Random,"--counted by many the
masterpiece of his genius. It brought him in both fame and emolument.
In 1749 he published, by subscription, his unfortunate tragedy, "The
Regicide." In 1750 he went to Paris, and shortly after wrote his
"Adventures of Peregrine Pickle," including the memoirs of the
notorious Lady Vane--the substance of which he got from herself, and
which added greatly to the popularity of the work. Notwithstanding the
success he met with as a novelist, he was anxious to prosecute his
original profession of medicine; and having procured from a foreign
university the degree of M.D., he commenced to practise physic in
Chelsea, but without success. He wrote, however, an essay "On the
External Use of Water," in which he seems to have partly anticipated
the method of the cold-water cure. In 1753 he published his
"Adventures of Count Fathom;" and, two years later, encouraged by a
liberal subscription, he issued a translation of "Don Quixote," in two
quarto volumes. While this work was printing, he went down to
Scotland, visited his old scenes and old companions, and was received
everywhere with enthusiasm. The most striking incident, however, in
this journey was his interview with his mother, then residing in
Scotston, near Peebles. He was introduced to her as a stranger
gentleman from the West Indies; and, in order to retain his incognita,
he endeavoured to maintain a serious and frowning countenance. While
his mother, however, continued to regard him steadfastly, he could not
forbear smiling; and she instantly sprang from her seat, threw her
arms round his neck, and cried out, "Ah, my son, I have found you at
last! Your old roguish smile has betrayed you."
Returning to England, he resumed his literary avocations. He became
the editor of the _Critical Review_--an office, of all others, least
fitted to his testy and irritable temperament. This was in 1756. He
next published the "Compendium of Voyages," in seven volumes, 12mo. In
1757 he wrote a popular afterpiece, entitled "The Reprisals; or, the
Tars of England;" and in 1758 appeared his "Complete History of
England," in four volumes, quarto,--a work said to have been compiled
in the almost incredibly short time of fourteen months. It became
instantly popular, although distinguished by no real historical
quality, except a clear and lively style.
An attack on Admiral Knowles in the _Critical Review_ greatly incensed
the Admiral; and when he prosecuted the journal, Smollett stepped
forward and avowed himself the author. He was sentenced to a fine of
L100, and to three months' imprisonment. During his confinement in
King's Bench, he composed the "Adventures of Sir Lancelot Greaves,"
which appeared first in detached numbers of the _British Magazine_,
and was afterwards published separately in 1762. About this time, his
busy pen was also occupied with histories of France, Italy, Germany,
&c., and a continuation of his English History--all compilations--and
some of them exceedingly unworthy of his genius. He became an ardent
friend and supporter of Lord Bute, and started _The Briton_, a weekly
paper, in his defence; which gave rise to the _North Briton_, by
Wilkes. In our Life of Churchill, we have recounted his quarrel with
that poet, and the chastisement inflicted on Smollett in "The Apology
to the Critical Reviewers."
In 1763 he lost his only daughter, a girl of fifteen. This event threw
him into deep despondency, and seriously affected his health. He went
to France and Italy for two years; and on his return, in 1766,
published two volumes of Travels--full of querulous and captious
remarks--for which Sterne satirised him, under the name of Smelfungus.
The same year he again visited Scotland. In 1767 he published his
"Adventures of an Atom,"--a political romance, displaying, under
Japanese names, the different parties of Great Britain. A recurrence
of ill health drove him back to Italy in 1770. At Monte Nuovo, near
Leghorn, he wrote his delightful "Humphrey Clinker." This was his last
work. He died at Leghorn on the 21st October 1771, in the fifty-first
year of his age. His widow erected a plain monument to his memory,
with an inscription by Dr Armstrong. In 1774 a Tuscan monument was
erected on the banks of the Leven by his cousin, James Smollett, Esq.,
of Bonhill. As his wife was left in poor circumstances, the tragedy of
"Venice Preserved" was acted at Edinburgh for her benefit, and the
money remitted to Italy.
Smollett, for variety of powers, and indefatigable industry, has
seldom been surpassed. He was a politician, a poet, a physician, a
historian, a translator, a writer of travels, a dramatist, a novelist,
a writer on medical subjects, and a miscellaneous author. It is only,
however, as a novelist and a poet that he has any claims to the
admiration of posterity. His history survives solely because it is
usually bound up with Hume's. His translation of "Don Quixote" has
been eclipsed by after and more accurate versions. His "Tour to Italy"
is a succession of asthmatic gasps and groans. His "Regicide", and
other plays, are entirely forgotten. So also are his critical,
medical, political, and miscellaneous effusions.
In fiction he is undoubtedly a great original. He had no model, and
has had no imitator. His qualities as a novel-writer are rapidity of
narrative, variety of incident, ease of style, graphic description,
and an exquisite eye for the humours, peculiarities, and absurdities
of character and life. In language he is generally careless, but
whenever a great occasion occurs, he rises to meet it, and writes with
dignity, correctness, and power. His sea-characters, such as Bowling,
and his characters of low-life, such as Strap, have never been
excelled. His tone of morals is always low, and often offensively
coarse. In wit, constructiveness, and general style, he is inferior to
Fielding; but surpasses him in interest, ease, variety, and humour,
"Roderick Random" is the most popular and bustling of his tales.
"Peregrine Pickle" is the filthiest and least agreeable; its humours
are forced and exaggerated, and the sea-characters seem caricatures of
those in "Roderick Random;" just as Norna of the Fitful Head, and
Magdalene Graeme, are caricatures of Meg Merriless. "Sir Lancelot
Greaves" is a tissue of trash, redeemed only here and there by traits
of humour. "The Adventures of an Atom" we never read. "Humphrey
Clinker" is the most delightful novel, with the exception of the
Waverley series, in the English language. "Ferdinand, Count Fathom,"
contains much that is disgusting, but parts of it surpass all the rest
in originality and profundity. We refer especially to the description
of the pretended English Squire in Paris, who _bubbles_ the great
_bubbler_ of the tale; to Count Fathom's address to Britain, when he
reaches her shores,--a piece of exquisite mock-heroic irony; to the
narrative of the seduction in the west of England; and to the
matchless robber-scene in the forest,--a passage in which one knows
not whether more to admire the thrilling interest of the incidents, or
the eloquence and power of the language. It is a scene which Scott has
never surpassed, nor, except in the cliff-scene in the "Antiquary,"
and, perhaps, the barn-scene in the "Heart of Midlothian,"
ever equalled.
Smollett's poetry need not detain us long. In his twin satires,
"Advice" and "Reproof," you see rather the will to wound than the
power to strike. There are neither the burnished compression, and
polished, pointed malice of Pope, nor the gigantic force and vehement
fury of Churchill. His "Tears of Scotland" is not thoroughly finished,
but has some delicate and beautiful strokes. "Leven Water" is sweet
and murmuring as that stream itself. His "Ode to Independence," as we
have said elsewhere, "should have been written by Burns. How that
poet's lips must have watered, as he repeated the line--
'Lord of the lion-heart and eagle-eye,'
and remembered he was not their author! He said he would
have given ten pounds to have written 'Donochthead'--he
would have given ten times ten, if, poor fellow! he had had
them, to have written the 'Ode to Independence'--although,
in his 'Vision of Liberty,' he has matched Smollett on his
own ground." Grander lines than the one we have quoted above,
and than the following--
"A goddess violated brought thee forth,"
are not to be found in literature. Round this last one, the whole ode
seems to turn as on a pivot, and it alone had been sufficient to stamp
Smollett a man of lofty poetic genius.
SMOLLETT'S POEMS
ADVICE: A SATIRE.
----Sed podice levi
Caeduntur tumidae, medico ridente, mariscae.
O proceres! censore opus est, an haruspice nobis?
JUVENAL.
----Nam quis
Peccandi finem posuit sibi? quando recepit
Ejectum semel atterita de fronte ruborem?
_Ibid._
POET.
Enough, enough; all this we knew before;
'Tis infamous, I grant it, to be poor:
And who, so much to sense and glory lost,
Will hug the curse that not one joy can boast?
From the pale hag, oh! could I once break loose,
Divorced, all hell should not re-tie the noose!
Not with more care shall H-- avoid his wife,
Nor Cope[1] fly swifter, lashing for his life,
Than I to leave the meagre fiend behind.
FRIEND.
Exert your talents; Nature, ever kind, 10
Enough for happiness bestows on all;
'Tis Sloth or Pride that finds her gifts too small.
Why sleeps the Muse?--is there no room for praise,
When such bright constellations blaze?
When sage Newcastle[2], abstinently great,
Neglects his food to cater for the state;
And Grafton[3], towering Atlas of the throne,
So well rewards a genius like his own:
Granville and Bath[4] illustrious, need I name,
For sober dignity, and spotless fame; 20
Or Pitt, the unshaken Abdiel yet unsung:
Thy candour, Chomdeley! and thy truth, O Younge!
POET.
The advice is good; the question only, whether
These names and virtues ever dwelt together?
But what of that? the more the bard shall claim,
Who can create as well as cherish fame.
But one thing more,--how loud must I repeat,
To rouse the engaged attention of the
great,--Amused, perhaps, with C--'s prolific hum[5],
Or rapt amidst the transports of a drum;[6] 30
While the grim porter watches every door,
Stern foe to tradesmen, poets, and the poor,
The Hesperian dragon not more fierce and fell,
Nor the gaunt growling janitor of Hell?
Even Atticus (so wills the voice of Fate)
Enshrines in clouded majesty his state;
Nor to the adoring crowd vouchsafes regard,
Though priests adore, and every priest a bard.
Shall I then follow with the venal tribe,
And on the threshold the base mongrel bribe? 40
Bribe him to feast my mute imploring eye
With some proud lord, who smiles a gracious lie!
A lie to captivate my heedless youth,
Degrade my talents, and debauch my truth;
While, fool'd with hope, revolves my joyless day,
And friends, and fame, and fortune, fleet away;
Till, scandal, indigence, and scorn my lot,
The dreary jail entombs me, where I rot!
Is there, ye varnish'd ruffians of the state!
Not one among the millions whom ye cheat, 50
Who, while he totters on the brink of woe,
Dares, ere he falls, attempt the avenging
blow,--A steady blow, his languid soul to feast,
And rid his country of one curse at least?
FRIEND.
What! turn assassin?
POET.
Let the assassin bleed:
My fearless verse shall justify the deed.
'Tis he who lures the unpractised mind astray,
Then leaves the wretch, to misery a prey;
Perverts the race of Virtue just begun,
And stabs the Public in her ruin'd son. 60
FRIEND.
Heavens! how you rail; the man's consumed by spite!
If Lockman's fate[7] attends you when you write,
Let prudence more propitious arts inspire;
The lower still you crawl, you'll climb the higher.
Go then, with every supple virtue stored,
And thrive, the favour'd valet of my lord.
Is that denied? a boon more humble crave.
And minister to him who serves a slave;
Be sure you fasten on promotion's scale,
Even if you seize some footman by the tail: 70
The ascent is easy, and the prospect clear,
From the smirch'd scullion to the embroider'd peer.
The ambitious drudge preferr'd, postilion rides,
Advanced again, the chair benighted guides;
Here doom'd, if Nature strung his sinewy frame,
The slave, perhaps, of some insatiate dame;
But if, exempted from the Herculean toil,
A fairer field awaits him, rich with spoil,
There shall he shine, with mingling honours bright,
His master's pathic, pimp, and parasite; 80
Then strut a captain, if his wish be war,
And grasp, in hope, a truncheon and a star:
Or if the sweets of peace his soul allure,
Bask at his ease, in some warm sinecure;
His fate in consul, clerk, or agent vary,
Or cross the seas, an envoy's secretary;
Composed of falsehood, ignorance, and pride,
A prostrate sycophant shall rise a Lloyd;
And, won from kennels to the impure embrace,
Accomplish'd Warren triumph o'er disgrace. 90
POET.
Eternal infamy his name surround,
Who planted first that vice on British ground!
A vice that, spite of sense and nature, reigns,
And poisons genial love, and manhood stains!
Pollio! the pride of science and its shame,
The Muse weeps o'er thee, while she brands thy name!
Abhorrent views that prostituted groom,
The indecent grotto, or polluted dome!
There only may the spurious passion glow,
Where not one laurel decks the caitiff's brow, 100
Obscene with crimes avow'd, of every dye,
Corruption, lust, oppression, perjury.
Let Chardin[8], with a chaplet round his head,
The taste of Maro and Anacreon plead,
'Sir, Flaccus knew to live as well as write,
And kept, like me, two boys array'd in white;'
Worthy to feel that appetence of fame
Which rivals Horace only in his shame!
Let Isis[9] wail in murmurs as she runs,
Her tempting fathers, and her yielding sons; 110
While dulness screens the failings of the Church,
Nor leaves one sliding Rabbi in the lurch:
Far other raptures let the breast contain,
Where heaven-born taste and emulation reign.
FRIEND.
Shall not a thousand virtues, then, atone us
In thy strict censure for the breach of one?
If Bubo keeps a catamite or whore,
His bounty feeds the beggar at his door:
And though no mortal credits Curio's word,
A score of lacqueys fatten at his board: 120
To Christian meekness sacrifice thy spleen,
And strive thy neighbour's weaknesses to screen.
POET.
Scorn'd be the bard, and wither'd all his fame,
Who wounds a brother weeping o'er his shame!
But if an impious wretch, with frantic pride,
Throws honour, truth, and decency aside;
If not by reason awed, nor check'd by fears,
He counts his glories from the stains he bears,
The indignant Muse to Virtue's aid shall rise,
And fix the brand of infamy on vice. 130
What if, aroused at his imperious call,
An hundred footsteps echo through his hall,
And, on high columns rear'd, his lofty dome
Proclaims the united art of Greece and Rome.
What though whole hecatombs his crew regale,
And each dependant slumbers o'er his ale,
While the remains, through mouths unnumber'd pass'd,
Indulge the beggar and the dogs at last:
Say, friend, is it benevolence of soul,
Or pompous vanity, that prompts the whole? 140
These sons of sloth, who by profusion thrive,
His pride inveigled from the public hive:
And numbers pine in solitary woe,
Who furnish'd out this phantasy of show.
When silent misery assail'd his eyes,
Did e'er his throbbing bosom sympathise?
Or his extensive charity pervade
To those who languish in the barren shade,
Where oft, by want and modesty suppress'd,
The bootless talent warms the lonely breast? 150
No! petrified by dulness and disdain,
Beyond the feeling of another's pain,
The tear of pity ne'er bedew d his eye,
Nor his lewd bosom felt the social sigh!
FRIEND.
Alike to thee his virtue or his vice,
If his hand liberal owns thy merit's price.
POET.
Sooner in hopeless anguish would I mourn,
Than owe my fortune to the man I scorn!
What new resource?
FRIEND.
A thousand yet remain,
That bloom with honours, or that teem with gain: 160
These arts--are they beneath--beyond thy care?
Devote thy studies to the auspicious fair:
Of truth divested, let thy tongue supply
The hinted slander, and the whisper'd lie;
All merit mock, all qualities depress,
Save those that grace the excelling patroness;
Trophies to her on others' follies raise,
And, heard with joy, by defamation praise;
To this collect each faculty of face,
And every feat perform of sly grimace; 170
Let the grave sneer sarcastic speak thee shrewd;
The smutty joke ridiculously lewd;
And the loud laugh, through all its changes rung,
Applaud the abortive sallies of her tongue;
Enroll'd a member in the sacred list,
Soon shalt thou sharp in company at whist;
Her midnight rites and revels regulate,
Priest of her love, and demon of her hate.
POET.
But say, what recompense for all this waste
Of honour, truth, attention, time, and taste? 180
To shine, confess'd, her zany and her tool,
And fall by what I rose--low ridicule?
Again shall Handel raise his laurell'd brow,
Again shall harmony with rapture glow;
The spells dissolve, the combination breaks,
And Punch no longer Frasi's rival squeaks:
Lo! Russell[10] falls a sacrifice to whim,
And starts amazed, in Newgate, from his dream:
With trembling hands implores their promised aid,
And sees their favour like a vision fade! 190
Is this, ye faithless Syrens!--this the joy
To which your smiles the unwary wretch decoy?
Naked and shackled, on the pavement prone,
His mangled flesh devouring from the bone;
Rage in his heart, distraction in his eye,
Behold, inhuman hags! your minion lie!
Behold his gay career to ruin run,
By you seduced, abandon'd, and undone!
Rather in garret pent, secure from harm,
My Muse with murders shall the town alarm; 200
Or plunge in politics with patriot zeal,
And snarl like Guthrie[11] for the public weal,
Than crawl an insect in a beldame's power,
And dread the crush of caprice every hour!
FRIEND.
'Tis well; enjoy that petulance of style,
And, like the envious adder, lick the file:
What, though success will not attend on all?
Who bravely dares must sometimes risk a fall.
Behold the bounteous board of Fortune spread;
Each weakness, vice, and folly yields thee bread, 210
Would'st thou with prudent condescension strive
On the long settled terms of life to thrive.
POET.
What! join the crew that pilfer one another,
Betray my friend, and persecute my brother;
Turn usurer, o'er cent. per cent. to brood,
Or quack, to feed like fleas on human blood?
FRIEND.
Or if thy soul can brook the gilded curse,
Some changeling heiress steal--
POET.
Why not a purse?
Two things I dread--my conscience and the law.
FRIEND.
How? dread a mumbling bear without a claw? 220
Nor this, nor that, is standard right or wrong,
Till minted by the mercenary tongue;
And what is conscience but a fiend of strife,
That chills the joys, and damps the scenes of life,
The wayward child of Vanity and Fear,
The peevish dam of Poverty and Care?
Unnumber'd woes engender in the breast
That entertains the rude, ungrateful guest.
POET.
Hail, sacred power! my glory and my guide!
Fair source of mental peace, whate'er betide! 230
Safe in thy shelter, let disaster roll
Eternal hurricanes around my soul:
My soul serene amidst the storms shall reign,
And smile to see their fury burst in vain!
FRIEND.
Too coy to flatter, and too proud to serve,
Thine be the joyless dignity to starve.
POET.
No;--thanks to discord, war shall be my friend;
And mortal rage heroic courage lend
To pierce the gleaming squadron of the foe,
And win renown by some distinguish'd blow. 240
FRIEND.
Renown! ay, do--unkennel the whole pack
Of military cowards on thy back.
What difference, say, 'twixt him who bravely stood,
And him who sought the bosom of the wood?[12]
Envenom'd calumny the first shall brand;
The last enjoy a ribbon and command.
POET.
If such be life, its wretches I deplore,
And long to quit the inhospitable shore.
[Footnote 1: 'Cope': a general famous for an expeditious retreat,
though not quite so deliberate as that of the ten thousand Greeks from
Persia; having unfortunately forgot to bring his army along with him.]
[Footnote 2: 'Newcastle:' alluding to the philosophical contempt which
this great personage manifested for the sensual delights of
the stomach.]
[Footnote 3: 'Grafton': this noble peer, remarkable for sublimity of
parts, by virtue of his office (Lord Chamberlain) conferred the
laureate on Colley Cibber, Esq., a delectable bard, whose character
has already employed, together with his own, the greatest pens of
the age.]
[Footnote 4: 'Granville and Bath': two noblemen famous in their day
for nothing more than their fortitude in bearing the scorn and
reproach of their country.]
[Footnote 5: 'Prolific hum': this alludes to a phenomenon, not more
strange than true,--the person here meant having actually laid upwards
of forty eggs, as several physicians and fellows of the Royal Society
can attest: one of whom, we hear, has undertaken the incubation, and
will no doubt favour the world with an account of his success.]
[Footnote 6: 'Drum': this is a riotous assembly of fashionable people,
of both sexes, at a private house, consisting of some hundreds: not
unaptly styled a drum, from the noise and emptiness of the
entertainment. There are also drum-major, rout, tempest, and
hurricane, differing only in degrees of multitude and uproar, as the
significant name of each declares.]
[Footnote 7: 'Lockman's fate': to be little read, and less approved.]
[Footnote 8: 'Chardin': this genial knight wore at his own banquet a
garland of flowers, in imitation of the ancients; and kept two rosy
boys robed in white, for the entertainment of his guests.]
[Footnote 9: 'Isis': in allusion to the unnatural orgies said to be
solemnised on the banks of this river; particularly at one place,
where a much greater sanctity of morals and taste might be expected.]
[Footnote 10: 'Russell:' a famous mimic and singer, ruined by the
patronage of certain ladies of quality.]
[Footnote 11: 'Guthrie:' a scribbler of all work in that age.]
[Footnote 12: 'Bosom of the wood:' this last line relates to the
behaviour of the Hanoverian general in the battle of Dettingen.]
* * * * *
REPROOF: A SATIRE.
POET.
Howe'er I turn, or wheresoe'er I tread,
This giddy world still rattles round my head!
I pant for silence e'en in this retreat--
Good Heaven! what demon thunders at the gate?
FRIEND.
In vain you strive, in this sequester'd nook,
To shroud you from an injured friend's rebuke.
POET.
An injured friend! who challenges the name?
If you, what title justifies the claim?
Did e'er your heart o'er my affliction grieve,
Your interest prop me, or your praise relieve? 10
Or could my wants my soul so far subdue,
That in distress she crawl'd for aid to you?
But let us grant the indulgence e'er so strong;
Display without reserve the imagined wrong:
Among your kindred have I kindled strife,
Deflower'd your daughter, or debauch'd your wife;
Traduced your credit, bubbled you at game;
Or soil'd with infamous reproach your name?
FRIEND.
No: but your cynic vanity (you'll own)
Exposed my private counsel to the town. 20
POET.
Such fair advice 'twere pity sure to lose:
I grant I printed it for public use.
FRIEND.
Yes, season'd with your own remarks between,
Inflamed with so much virulence of spleen
That the mild town (to give the devil his due)
Ascribed the whole performance to a Jew.
POET.
Jews, Turks, or Pagans--hallow'd be the mouth
That teems with moral zeal and dauntless truth!
Prove that my partial strain adopts one lie,
No penitent more mortified than I; 30
Not e'en the wretch in shackles doom'd to groan,
Beneath the inhuman scoffs of Williamson.[1]
FRIEND.
Hold--let us see this boasted self-denial--
The vanquish'd knight[2] has triumph'd in his trial.
POET.
What then?
FRIEND.
Your own sarcastic verse unsay,
That brands him as a trembling runaway.
POET.
With all my soul;--the imputed charge rehearse;
I'll own my error and expunge my verse.
Come, come, howe'er the day was lost or won,
The world allows the race was fairly run. 40
But, lest the truth too naked should appear,
A robe of fable shall the goddess wear:
When sheep were subject to the lion's reign,
E'er man acquired dominion o'er the plain,
Voracious wolves, fierce rushing from the rocks,
Devour'd without control the unguarded flocks;
The sufferers, crowding round the royal cave,
Their monarch's pity and protection crave:
Not that they wanted valour, force, or arms,
To shield their lambs from danger and alarms; 50
A thousand rams, the champions of the fold,
In strength of horn and patriot virtue bold,
Engaged in firm association stood,
Their lives devoted to the public good:
A warlike chieftain was their sole request,
To marshal, guide, instruct, and rule the rest.
Their prayer was heard, and, by consent of all,
A courtier ape appointed general.
He went, he led; arranged the battle stood,
The savage foe came pouring like a flood; 60
Then Pug, aghast, fled swifter than the wind,
Nor deign'd in threescore miles to look behind,
While every band fled orders bleat in vain,
And fall in slaughter'd heaps upon the plain.
The scared baboon, (to cut the matter short)
With all his speed, could not outrun report;
And, to appease the clamours of the nation,
'Twas fit his case should stand examination.
The board was named--each worthy took his place,
All senior members of the horned race; 70
The wedder, goat, ram, elk, and ox were there,
And a grave hoary stag possess'd the chair.
The inquiry past, each in his turn began
The culprit's conduct variously to scan.
At length the sage uprear'd his awful crest,
And, pausing, thus his fellow chiefs address'd:
'If age, that from this head its honours stole,
Hath not impair'd the functions of my soul,
But sacred wisdom, with experience bought,
While this weak frame decays, matures my thought, 80
The important issue of this grand debate
May furnish precedent for your own fate,
Should ever fortune call you to repel
The shaggy foe, so desperate and fell.
'Tis plain, you say, his excellence Sir Ape
From the dire field accomplish'd an escape;
Alas! our fellow subjects ne'er had bled,
If every ram that fell like him had fled;
Certes, those sheep were rather mad than brave,
Which scorn'd the example their wise leader gave. 90
Let us then every vulgar hint disdain,
And from our brother's laurel wash the stain.'
The admiring court applauds the president,
And Pug was clear'd by general consent.
FRIEND.
There needs no magic to divine your scope,
Mark'd, as you are, a flagrant misanthrope:
Sworn foe to good and bad, to great and small,
Thy rankling pen produces nought but gall:
Let virtue struggle, or let glory shine,
Thy verse affords not one approving line. 100
POET.
Hail, sacred themes! the Muse's chief delight!
Oh, bring the darling objects to my sight!
My breast with elevated thought shall glow,
My fancy brighten, and my numbers flow!
The Aonian grove with rapture would I tread,
To crop unfading wreaths for William's head,
But that my strain, unheard amidst the throng,
Must yield to Lockman's ode, and Hambury's song.
Nor would the enamour'd Muse neglect to pay
To Stanhope's[3] worth the tributary lay, 110
The soul unstain'd, the sense sublime to paint,
A people's patron, pride, and ornament,
Did not his virtues eternised remain
The boasted theme of Pope's immortal strain.
Not e'en the pleasing task is left to raise
A grateful monument to Barnard's praise,
Else should the venerable patriot stand
The unshaken pillar of a sinking land.
The gladdening prospect let me still pursue,
And bring fair Virtue's triumph to the view; 120
Alike to me, by fortune blest or not,
From soaring Cobham to the melting Scot.[4]
But, lo! a swarm of harpies intervene,
To ravage, mangle, and pollute the scene!
Gorged with our plunder, yet still gaunt for spoil,
Rapacious Gideon fastens on our isle;
Insatiate Lascelles, and the fiend Vaneck,
Rise on our ruins, and enjoy the wreck;
While griping Jasper glories in his prize,
Wrung from the widow's tears and orphan's cries. 130
FRIEND.
Relapsed again! strange tendency to rail!
I fear'd this meekness would not long prevail.
POET.
You deem it rancour, then? Look round and see
What vices flourish still unpruned by me:
Corruption, roll'd in a triumphant car,
Displays his burnish'd front and glittering star,
Nor heeds the public scorn, or transient curse,
Unknown alike to honour and remorse.
Behold the leering belle, caress'd by all,
Adorn each private feast and public ball, 140
Where peers attentive listen and adore,
And not one matron shuns the titled whore.
At Peter's obsequies[5] I sung no dirge;
Nor has my satire yet supplied a scourge
For the vile tribes of usurers and bites,
Who sneak at Jonathan's, and swear at White's.
Each low pursuit, and slighter folly, bred
Within the selfish heart and hollow head,
Thrives uncontroll'd, and blossoms o'er the land,
Nor feels the rigour of my chastening hand. 150
While Codrus shivers o'er his bags of gold,
By famine wither'd, and benumb'd by cold,
I mark his haggard eyes with frenzy roll,
And feast upon the terrors of his soul;
The wrecks of war, the perils of the deep,
That curse with hideous dreams the caitiff's sleep;
Insolvent debtors, thieves, and civil strife,
Which daily persecute his wretched life,
With all the horrors of prophetic dread,
That rack his bosom while the mail is read. 160
Safe from the road, untainted by the school,
A judge by birth, by destiny a fool,
While the young lordling struts in native pride,
His party-colour'd tutor by his side,
Pleased, let me own the pious mother's care,
Who to the brawny sire commits her heir.
Fraught with the spirit of a Gothic monk,
Let Rich, with dulness and devotion drunk,
Enjoy the peal so barbarous and loud,
While his brain spews new monsters to the crowd; 170
I see with joy the vaticide deplore
A hell-denouncing priest and ... whore;
Let every polish'd dame and genial lord,
Employ the social chair and venal board;
Debauch'd from sense, let doubtful meanings run,
The vague conundrum, and the prurient pun,
While the vain <DW2>, with apish grin, regards
The giggling minx half-choked behind her cards:
These, and a thousand idle pranks, I deem
The motley spawn of Ignorance and Whim. 180
Let Pride conceive, and Folly propagate,
The fashion still adopts the spurious brat:
Nothing so strange that fashion cannot tame;
By this, dishonour ceases to be shame:
This weans from blushes lewd Tyrawley's face,
Gives Hawley[6] praise, and Ingoldsby disgrace,
From Mead to Thomson shifts the palm at once,
A meddling, prating, blundering, busy dunce!
And may, should taste a little more decline,
Transform the nation to a herd of swine. 190
FRIEND.
The fatal period hastens on apace.
Nor will thy verse the obscene event disgrace;
Thy flowers of poetry, that smell so strong,
The keenest appetites have loathed the song,
Condemn'd by Clark, Banks, Barrowby, and Chitty,
And all the crop-ear'd critics of the city:
While sagely neutral sits thy silent friend,
Alike averse to censure or commend.
POET.
Peace to the gentle soul that could deny
His invocated voice to fill the cry! 200
And let me still the sentiment disdain
Of him who never speaks but to arraign,
The sneering son of Calumny and Scorn,
Whom neither arts, nor sense, nor soul adorn;
Or his, who, to maintain a critic's rank,
Though conscious of his own internal blank,
His want of taste unwilling to betray,
'Twixt sense and nonsense hesitates all day,
With brow contracted hears each passage read,
And often hums, and shakes his empty head, 210
Until some oracle adored pronounce
The passive bard a poet or a dunce;
Then in loud clamour echoes back the word,
'Tis bold, insipid--soaring, or absurd.
These, and the unnumber'd shoals of smaller fry,
That nibble round, I pity and defy.
[Footnote 1: 'Williamson:' governor of the Tower.]
[Footnote 2: 'Vanquished knight:' Sir John Cope.]
[Footnote 3: 'Stanhope:' the Earl of Chesterfield.]
[Footnote 4; 'Scot, Gideon,' &c.: forgotten contractors,
money-lenders, &c.]
[Footnote 5: 'Peter's obsequies:' Peter Waters, Esq.]
[Footnote 6: 'Hawley:' discomfited at Falkirk in 1746.]
* * * * *
THE TEARS OF SCOTLAND.
WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1746.
1 Mourn, hapless Caledonia! mourn
Thy banish'd peace, thy laurels torn!
Thy sons, for valour long renown'd,
Lie slaughter'd on their native ground;
Thy hospitable roofs no more
Invite the stranger to the door;
In smoky ruins sunk they lie,
The monuments of cruelty.
2 The wretched owner sees afar
His all become the prey of war;
Bethinks him of his babes and wife,
Then smites his breast, and curses life.
Thy swains are famish'd on the rocks,
Where once they fed their wanton flocks:
Thy ravish'd virgins shriek in vain;
Thy infants perish on the plain.
3 What boots it, then, in every clime,
Through the wide-spreading waste of Time,
Thy martial glory, crown'd with praise,
Still shone with undiminish'd blaze?
Thy towering spirit now is broke,
Thy neck is bended to the yoke.
What foreign arms could never quell,
By civil rage and rancour fell.
4 The rural pipe and merry lay
No more shall cheer the happy day:
No social scenes of gay delight
Beguile the dreary winter night.
No strains but those of sorrow flow,
And nought be heard but sounds of woe,
While the pale phantoms of the slain
Glide nightly o'er the silent plain.
5 Oh! baneful cause, oh! fatal morn,
Accursed to ages yet unborn!
The sons against their father stood,
The parent shed his children's blood.
Yet, when the rage of battle ceased,
The victor's soul was not appeased:
The naked and forlorn must feel
Devouring flames, and murdering steel!
6 The pious mother, doom'd to death,
Forsaken wanders o'er the heath,
The bleak wind whistles round her head,
Her helpless orphans cry for bread;
Bereft of shelter, food, and friend,
She views the shades of night descend,
And, stretch'd beneath the inclement skies,
Weeps o'er her tender babes, and dies.
7 While the warm blood bedews my veins,
And unimpair'd remembrance reigns,
Resentment of my country's fate,
Within my filial breast shall beat;
And, spite of her insulting foe,
My sympathising verse shall flow:
Mourn, hapless Caledonia! mourn
Thy banish'd peace, thy laurels torn!
* * * * *
VERSES ON A YOUNG LADY
PLAYING ON A HARPSICHORD AND SINGING.
1 When Sappho struck the quivering wire,
The throbbing breast was all on fire;
And when she raised the vocal lay,
The captive soul was charm'd away!
2 But had the nymph possess'd with these
Thy softer, chaster power to please,
Thy beauteous air of sprightly youth,
Thy native smiles of artless truth--
3 The worm of grief had never prey'd
On the forsaken love-sick maid;
Nor had she mourn'd a hapless flame,
Nor dash'd on rocks her tender frame.
* * * * *
LOVE ELEGY.
IN IMITATION OF TIBULLUS.
1 Where now are all my flattering dreams of joy?
Monimia, give my soul her wonted rest;
Since first thy beauty fix'd my roving eye,
Heart-gnawing cares corrode my pensive breast.
2 Let happy lovers fly where pleasures call,
With festive songs beguile the fleeting hour;
Lead beauty through the mazes of the ball,
Or press her, wanton, in Love's roseate bower.
3 For me, no more I'll range the empurpled mead,
Where shepherds pipe, and virgins dance around,
Nor wander through the woodbine's fragrant shade,
To hear the music of the grove resound.
4 I'll seek some lonely church, or dreary hall,
Where fancy paints the glimmering taper blue,
Where damps hang mouldering on the ivied wall,
And sheeted ghosts drink up the midnight dew:
5 There, leagued with hopeless anguish and despair,
A while in silence o'er my fate repine:
Then with a long farewell to love and care,
To kindred dust my weary limbs consign.
6 Wilt thou, Monimia, shed a gracious tear
On the cold grave where all my sorrows rest?
Strew vernal flowers, applaud my love sincere,
And bid the turf lie easy on my breast?
* * * * *
BURLESQUE ODE.[1]
Where wast thou, wittol Ward, when hapless fate
From these weak arms mine aged grannam tore?
These pious arms essay'd too late
To drive the dismal phantom from the door.
Could not thy healing drop, illustrious quack,
Could not thy salutary pill prolong her days,
For whom so oft to Marybone, alack!
Thy sorrels dragg'd thee, through the worst of ways?
Oil-dropping Twickenham did not then detain
Thy steps, though tended by the Cambrian maids; 10
Nor the sweet environs of Drury Lane;
Nor dusty Pimlico's embowering shades;
Nor Whitehall, by the river's bank,
Beset with rowers dank;
Nor where the Exchange pours forth its tawny sons;
Nor where, to mix with offal, soil, and blood,
Steep Snowhill rolls the sable flood;
Nor where the Mint's contamined kennel runs:
Ill doth it now beseem,
That thou should'st doze and dream, 20
When Death in mortal armour came,
And struck with ruthless dart the gentle dame.
Her liberal hand and sympathising breast
The brute creation kindly bless'd;
Where'er she trod, grimalkin purr'd around,
The squeaking pigs her bounty own'd;
Nor to the waddling duck or gabbling goose
Did she glad sustenance refuse;
The strutting cock she daily fed,
And turkey with his snout so red; 30
Of chickens careful as the pious hen,
Nor did she overlook the tom-tit or the wren,
While red-breast hopp'd before her in the hall,
As if she common mother were of all.
For my distracted mind,
What comfort can I find;
O best of grannams! thou art dead and gone,
And I am left behind to weep and moan,
To sing thy dirge in sad and funeral lay,
Oh! woe is me! alack! and well a-day! 40
[Footnote 1: Smollett, imagining himself ill-treated by Lord
Lyttelton, wrote the above burlesque on that nobleman's Monody on the
death of his lady.]
* * * * *
ODE TO MIRTH.
Parent of joy! heart-easing Mirth!
Whether of Venus or Aurora born,
Yet Goddess sure of heavenly birth,
Visit benign a son of grief forlorn:
Thy glittering colours gay,
Around him, Mirth, display,
And o'er his raptured sense
Diffuse thy living influence:
So shall each hill, in purer green array'd,
And flower adorn'd in new-born beauty glow, 10
The grove shall smooth the horrors of the shade,
And streams in murmurs shall forget to flow.
Shine, Goddess! shine with unremitted ray,
And gild (a second sun) with brighter beam our day.
Labour with thee forgets his pain,
And aged Poverty can smile with thee;
If thou be nigh, Grief's hate is vain,
And weak the uplifted arm of Tyranny.
The morning opes on high
His universal eye, 20
And on the world doth pour
His glories in a golden shower;
Lo! Darkness trembling 'fore the hostile ray,
Shrinks to the cavern deep and wood forlorn:
The brood obscene that own her gloomy sway
Troop in her rear, and fly the approaching morn;
Pale shivering ghosts that dread the all-cheering light,
Quick as the lightning's flash glide to sepulchral night.
But whence the gladdening beam
That pours his purple stream 30
* * * * *
ODE TO SLEEP.
Soft Sleep, profoundly pleasing power,
Sweet patron of the peaceful hour!
Oh, listen from thy calm abode,
And hither wave thy magic rod;
Extend thy silent, soothing sway,
And charm the canker care away:
Whether thou lov'st to glide along,
Attended by an airy throng
Of gentle dreams and smiles of joy,
Such as adorn the wanton boy; 10
Or to the monarch's fancy bring
Delights that better suit a king,
The glittering host, the groaning plain,
The clang of arms, and victor's train;
Or should a milder vision please,
Present the happy scenes of peace,
Plump Autumn, blushing all around,
Rich Industry, with toil embrown'd,
Content, with brow serenely gay,
And genial Art's refulgent ray. 20
* * * * *
ODE TO LEVEN WATER.
On Leven's banks, while free to rove,
And tune the rural pipe to love,
I envied not the happiest swain
That ever trod the Arcadian plain.
Pure stream, in whose transparent wave
My youthful limbs I wont to lave,
No torrents stain thy limpid source;
No rocks impede thy dimpling course,
That sweetly warbles o'er its bed,
With white, round, polish'd pebbles spread; 10
While, lightly poised, the scaly brood
In myriads cleave thy crystal flood;
The springing trout, in speckled pride,
The salmon, monarch of the tide,
The ruthless pike, intent on war,
The silver eel, and mottled par.
Devolving from thy parent lake,
A charming maze thy waters make,
By bowers of birch, and groves of pine,
And edges flower'd with eglantine. 20
Still on thy banks, so gaily green,
May numerous herds and flocks be seen,
And lasses, chanting o'er the pail,
And shepherds, piping in the dale,
And ancient faith, that knows no guile,
And Industry, embrown'd with toil,
And hearts resolved, and hands prepared,
The blessings they enjoy to guard.
* * * * *
ODE TO BLUE-EYED ANN.
1 When the rough north forgets to howl,
And ocean's billows cease to roll;
When Lybian sands are bound in frost,
And cold to Nova-Zembla's lost;
When heavenly bodies cease to move,
My blue-eyed Ann I'll cease to love!
2 No more shall flowers the meads adorn,
Nor sweetness deck the rosy thorn,
Nor swelling buds proclaim the spring,
Nor parching heats the dog-star bring,
Nor laughing lilies paint the grove,
When blue-eyed Ann I cease to love.
3 No more shall joy in hope be found,
Nor pleasures dance their frolic round,
Nor love's light god inhabit earth,
Nor beauty give the passion birth,
Nor heat to summer sunshine cleave,
When blue-eyed Nanny I deceive.
4 When rolling seasons cease to change,
Inconstancy forgets to range;
When lavish May no more shall bloom,
Nor gardens yield a rich perfume;
When Nature from her sphere shall start,
I'll tear my Nanny from my heart.
* * * * *
ODE TO INDEPENDENCE.
STROPHE.
Thy spirit, Independence! let me share,
Lord of the lion-heart and eagle-eye;
Thy steps I follow with my bosom bare,
Nor heed the storm that howls along the sky.
Deep in the frozen regions of the north,
A goddess violated brought thee forth,
Immortal Liberty, whose look sublime,
Hath bleach'd the tyrant's cheek in every varying clime.
What time the iron-hearted Gaul,
With frantic Superstition for his guide, 10
Arm'd with the dagger and the pall,
The sons of Woden to the field defied;
The ruthless hag, by Weser's flood,
In Heaven's name urged the infernal blow,
And red the stream began to flow:
The vanquished were baptised with blood![1]
ANTISTROPHE.
The Saxon prince in horror fled
From altars stain'd with human gore;
And Liberty his routed legions led
In safety to the bleak Norwegian shore. 20
There in a cave asleep she lay,
Lull'd by the hoarse resounding main;
When a bold savage pass'd that way,
Impell'd by destiny, his name Disdain.
Of ample front the portly chief appear'd:
The hunted bear supplied a shaggy vest;
The drifted snow hung on his yellow beard,
And his broad shoulders braved the furious blast.
He stopp'd; he gazed; his bosom glow'd,
And deeply felt the impression of her charms; 30
He seized the advantage Fate allow'd,
And straight compress'd her in his vigorous arms.
STROPHE.
The curlew scream'd, the Tritons blew
Their shells to celebrate the ravish'd rite;
Old Time exulted as he flew,
And Independence saw the light;
The light he saw in Albion's happy plains,
Where, under cover of a flowering thorn,
While Philomel renew'd her warbled strains,
The auspicious fruit of stolen embrace was born. 40
The mountain Dyriads seized with joy
The smiling infant to their charge consign'd;
The Doric Muse caress'd the favourite boy;
The hermit Wisdom stored his opening mind:
As rolling years matured his age,
He flourish'd bold and sinewy as his sire;
While the mild passions in his breast assuage
The fiercer flames of his maternal fire.
ANTISTROPHE.
Accomplish'd thus he wing'd his way,
And zealous roved from pole to pole, 50
The rolls of right eternal to display,
And warm with patriot thoughts the aspiring soul;
On desert isles 'twas he that raised
Those spires that gild the Adriatic wave,[2]
Where Tyranny beheld, amazed,
Fair Freedom's temple where he mark'd her grave:
He steel'd the blunt Batavian's arms
To burst the Iberian's double chain;
And cities rear'd, and planted farms,
Won from the skirts of Neptune's wide domain.[3] 60
He with the generous rustics sate
On Uri's rocks[4] in close divan;
And wing'd that arrow sure as fate,
Which ascertain'd the sacred rights of man.
STROPHE.
Arabia's scorching sands he cross'd,
Where blasted Nature pants supine,
Conductor of her tribes adust
To Freedom's adamantine shrine;
And many a Tartar horde forlorn, aghast,
He snatch'd from under fell Oppression's wing, 70
And taught amidst the dreary waste
The all-cheering hymns of liberty to sing.
He virtue finds, like precious ore,
Diffused through every baser mould;
E'en now he stands on Calvi's rocky shore,[5]
And turns the dross of Corsica to gold.
He, guardian Genius! taught my youth
Pomp's tinsel livery to despise;
My lips, by him chastised to truth,
Ne'er paid that homage which my heart denies. 80
ANTISTROPHE.
Those sculptured halls my feet shall never tread,
Where varnish'd Vice and Vanity, combined
To dazzle and seduce, their banners spread,
And forge vile shackles for the freeborn mind;
While Insolence his wrinkled front uprears,
And all the flowers of spurious Fancy blow;
And Title his ill-woven chaplet wears,
Full often wreath'd around the miscreant's brow;
Where ever-dimpling Falsehood, pert and vain,
Presents her cup of stale Profession's froth; 90
And pale Disease, with all his bloated train,
Torments the sons of gluttony and sloth.
STROPHE.
In Fortune's car behold that minion ride,
With either India's glittering spoils oppress'd;
So moves the sumpter-mule in harness'd pride,
That bears the treasure which he cannot taste.
For him let venal bards disgrace the bay,
And hireling minstrels wake the tinkling string;
Her sensual snares let faithless Pleasure lay;
And jingling bells fantastic Folly ring; 100
Disquiet, doubt, and dread shall intervene,
And Nature, still to all her feelings just,
In vengeance hang a damp on every scene,
Shook from the baneful pinions of Disgust.
ANTISTROPHE.
Nature I'll court in her sequester'd haunts,
By mountain, meadow, streamlet, grove, or cell,
Where the poised lark his evening ditty chaunts,
And Health, and Peace, and Contemplation dwell.
There Study shall with Solitude recline,
And Friendship pledge me to his fellow swains, 110
And Toil and Temperance sedately twine
The slender cord that fluttering life sustains;
And fearless Poverty shall guard the door,
And Taste unspoil'd the frugal table spread,
And Industry supply the humble store,
And Sleep unbribed his dews refreshing shed;
White-mantled Innocence, ethereal sprite!
Shall chase far off the goblins of the night,
And Independence o'er the day preside,
Propitious power! my patron and my pride! 120
[Footnote 1: 'Baptised with blood:' Charlemagne obliged four thousand
Saxon prisoners to embrace the Christian religion, and immediately
after they were baptized, ordered their throats to be cut. Their
prince, Vitikind, fled for shelter to Gotrick, king of Denmark.]
[Footnote 2: 'Adriatic wave:' although Venice was built a considerable
time before the era here assigned for the birth of Independence, the
republic had not yet attained to any great degree of power and
splendour.]
[Footnote 3: 'Neptune's wide domain:' the Low Countries, and their
revolt from Spain, are here alluded to.]
[Footnote 4: 'Uri's rocks:' alluding to the known story of William
Tell and his associates.]
[Footnote 5: 'Calvi's rocky shore:' the noble stand made by Paschal
Paoli, and his associates, against the usurpations of the
French king.]
* * * * *
SONG.
1 While with fond rapture and amaze,
On thy transcendent charms I gaze,
My cautious soul essays in vain
Her peace and freedom to maintain:
Yet let that blooming form divine,
Where grace and harmony combine,
Those eyes, like genial orbs that move,
Dispensing gladness, joy, and love,
In all their pomp assail my view,
Intent my bosom to subdue,
My breast, by wary maxims steel'd,
Not all those charms shall force to yield.
2 But when, invoked to Beauty's aid,
I see the enlighten'd soul display'd;
That soul so sensibly sedate
Amid the storms of froward fate,
Thy genius active, strong, and clear,
Thy wit sublime, though not severe,
The social ardour, void of art,
That glows within thy candid heart;
My spirits, sense, and strength decay,
My resolution dies away,
And, every faculty oppress'd,
Almighty Love invades my breast!
* * * * *
SONG.
1 To fix her!--'twere a task as vain
To count the April drops of rain,
To sow in Afric's barren soil,
Or tempests hold within a toil.
2 I know it, friend, she's light as air,
False as the fowler's artful snare,
Inconstant as the passing wind,
As winter's dreary frost unkind.
3 She's such a miser, too, in love,
Its joys she'll neither share nor prove,
Though hundreds of gallants await
From her victorious eyes their fate.
4 Blushing at such inglorious reign,
I sometimes strive to break her chain,
My reason summon to my aid,
Resolved no more to be betray'd.
5 Ah! friend, 'tis but a short-lived trance,
Dispell'd by one enchanting glance;
She need but look, and, I confess,
Those looks completely curse or bless.
6 So soft, so elegant, so fair,
Sure something more than human's there;
I must submit, for strife is vain,
'Twas Destiny that forged the chain.
* * * * *
SONG.
1 Let the nymph still avoid and be deaf to the swain,
Who in transports of passion affects to complain;
For his rage, not his love, in that frenzy is shown,
And the blast that blows loudest is soon overblown.
2 But the shepherd whom Cupid has pierced to the heart,
Will submissive adore, and rejoice in the smart;
Or in plaintive, soft murmurs his bosom-felt woe,
Like the smooth-gliding current of rivers, will flow.
3 Though silent his tongue, he will plead with his eyes,
And his heart own your sway in a tribute of sighs:
But when he accosts you in meadow or grove,
His tale is all tenderness, rapture, and love.
* * * * *
SONG.
1 From the man whom I love though my heart I disguise,
I will freely describe the wretch I despise;
And if he has sense but to balance a straw,
He will sure take the hint from the picture I draw.
2 A wit without sense, without fancy a beau,
Like a parrot he chatters, and struts like a crow;
A peacock in pride, in grimace a baboon,
In courage a hind, in conceit a Gascon.
3 As a vulture rapacious, in falsehood a fox,
Inconstant as waves, and unfeeling as rocks;
As a tiger ferocious, perverse as a hog,
In mischief an ape, and in fawning a dog.
4 In a word, to sum up all his talents together,
His heart is of lead, and his brain is of feather;
Yet, if he has sense but to balance a straw,
He will sure take the hint from the picture I draw.
* * * * *
SONG.
1 Come listen, ye students of every degree;
I sing of a wit and a tutor _perdie,_
A statesman profound, a critic immense,
In short, a mere jumble of learning and sense;
And yet of his talents though laudably vain,
His own family arts he could never attain.
2 His father, intending his fortune to build,
In his youth would have taught him the trowel to wield.
But the mortar of discipline never would stick,
For his skull was secured by a facing of brick;
And with all his endeavours of patience and pain,
The skill of his sire he could never attain.
3 His mother, a housewife, neat, artful, and wise,
Renown'd for her delicate biscuit and pies,
Soon alter'd his studies, by flattering his taste,
From the raising of wall to the rearing of paste;
But all her instructions were fruitless and vain,
The pye-making mystery he could ne'er attain.
4 Yet, true to his race, in his labours were seen
A jumble of both their professions, I ween;
For when his own genius he ventured to trust,
His pies seem'd of brick, and his houses of crust;
Then, good Mr Tutor, pray be not so vain,
Since your family arts you could never attain.
END OF SMOLLETT'S POEMS.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell,
Gray, and Smollett, by Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
*** | {
"pile_set_name": "Gutenberg (PG-19)"
} |
274 Kan. 939 (2002)
58 P.3d 716
STATE OF KANSAS, Appellee,
v.
JAMES McINTOSH, Appellant.
No. 86,386.
Supreme Court of Kansas.
Opinion filed December 6, 2002.
*940 Paige A. Nichols, assistant appellate defender, argued the cause, and Reid T. Nelson, assistant appellate defender, Steven R. Zinn, deputy appellate defender, and Jessica R. Kunen, chief appellate defender, were with her on the briefs for appellant.
Keith E. Schroeder, district attorney, argued the cause, and Thomas R. Stanton, deputy district attorney, and Carla J. Stovall, attorney general, were with him on the briefs for appellee.
The opinion of the court was delivered by
LOCKETT, J.:
Defendant petitions for review from the Court of Appeals' affirmance of his convictions of rape, aggravated indecent liberties with a child, and two counts of aggravated criminal sodomy and his sentence of 316 months' imprisonment. Defendant claims (1) the trial court erred in finding that he failed to establish a compelling reason to require the victim to submit to an independent psychological examination; (2) the Court of Appeals erred in finding that a district court has no authority to order an independent physical examination of a victim in a criminal case; and (3) the trial court erred in admitting expert testimony.
The facts as set forth in the Court of Appeals' opinion provide sufficient background in this case. Further facts are incorporated in the opinion as necessary.
"McIntosh lived with Zoe D., his girlfriend, from December 1995 until July 1999. After McIntosh moved out, Zoe's daughter, A.D., told her mother that McIntosh had sexually abused her. Zoe reported the sexual abuse to the police.
"A.D. was interviewed by Detective Eric Buller, but the interviews were not recorded. A.D. told Detective Buller that McIntosh raped her using his finger and penis and that he anally and orally sodomized her. A.D. stated that the incidents occurred in several different locations throughout their residence and in the *941 family van. A.D. also told the detective that the sexual abuse began when McIntosh moved into the house when A.D. was 7 years old and ended when McIntosh moved out of the house when she was 10 years old.
"McIntosh was charged [in a complaint attested to by the prosecuting attorney] with five counts of rape, nine counts of aggravated criminal sodomy, five counts of aggravated indecent liberties with a child, and two counts of aggravated indecent solicitation of a child. Two counts of aggravated criminal sodomy and two counts of aggravated indecent solicitation of a child were dismissed at the preliminary hearing. Single counts of aggravated criminal sodomy and rape were dismissed by the State after it conceded that it could not prove that those offenses occurred in Reno County, Kansas. A jury convicted McIntosh of two counts of aggravated criminal sodomy and single counts of rape and aggravated indecent liberties with a child. McIntosh was sentenced to 316 months' imprisonment." State v. McIntosh, 30 Kan. App.2d 504, 505-06, 43 P.3d 837 (2002).
The Court of Appeals affirmed McIntosh's convictions. McIntosh filed a timely petition for review. We granted review solely upon the three issues briefed to this court. See K.S.A. 20-3018(c); Supreme Court Rule 8.03(a)(5)(c) (2001 Kan. Ct. R. Annot. 56).
DISCUSSION
Prior to trial, McIntosh filed a motion requesting both a physical and psychological examination of the victim, A.D. The trial judge denied the motion.
Psychological Examination
A trial court's denial of a defendant's motion to compel the victim, who is not a party in the State's criminal action but is often referred to as the complaining witness or complainant, in a sex abuse case to undergo a psychological examination is reviewed for abuse of discretion. See State v. Gregg, 226 Kan. 481, 489, 602 P.2d 85 (1979); State v. Bourassa, 28 Kan. App.2d 161, 164, 15 P.3d 835 (1999), rev. denied 269 Kan. 934 (2000). The party who asserts the court abused its discretion bears the burden of showing such abuse. State v. Thompkins, 271 Kan. 324, 334-35, 21 P.3d 997 (2001). "Judicial discretion is abused when judicial action is arbitrary, fanciful, or unreasonable. If reasonable persons could differ as to the propriety of the action taken by the trial court, it cannot be said that the trial court abused its discretion." State v. Doyle, 272 Kan. 1157, 1168, 38 P.3d 650 (2002).
*942 In Gregg, this court was faced, as a matter of first impression, with whether the trial court abused its discretion in denying the defendant's motion for the victim in a criminal case involving a sex crime to submit to a psychiatric examination. The victim in Gregg was an 8-year-old girl who was the sole witness to corroborate the charges against the defendant. The Gregg court first looked to other jurisdictions for guidance and noted that other jurisdictions fell into one of the following three categories: (1) The court has no inherent power to compel a psychiatric examination; (2) the defendant has an absolute right to an order compelling a psychiatric examination; and (3) the trial judge has the discretion to order a psychiatric examination of a complaining witness where compelling reason is shown. The court noted that the minority view was that the court had no inherent power to compel a psychiatric examination, while the majority of jurisdictions recognized that the trial judge has discretion to order a psychiatric examination when a compelling reason exists. 226 Kan. at 485-87.
The Gregg court adopted the majority view, stating:
"We, too, adopt the `middle ground' and hold a trial judge has the discretion to order a psychiatric examination of the complaining witness in a sex crime case if the defendant presents a compelling reason for such examination. Even if a trial court finds a compelling reason for ordering the psychiatric examination, the further safeguard as to its admissibility remains." 226 Kan. at 489.
The Gregg court, in finding that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in denying the defendant's motion for psychiatric examination of the victim, relied upon the fact that the defendant in that case failed to put forth evidence as to (1) the victim's mental instability; (2) the victim's lack of veracity; (3) the victim's having asserted similar charges against other men that were later proven to be false; or (4) other reasons why the victim should be required to submit to such an examination. 226 Kan. at 490.
In reaching its decision, the Gregg court quoted in length from Ballard v. Superior Court, 64 Cal.2d 159, 49 Cal. Rptr. 302, 410 P.2d 838 (1966) (statutorily overruled by Cal. Penal Code § 1112 [West 1985]):
"`We therefore believe that the trial judge should be authorized to order the prosecutrix to submit to a psychiatric examination if the circumstances indicate a *943 necessity for an examination. Such necessity would generally arise only if little or no corroboration supported the charge and if the defense raised the issue of the effect of the complaining witness' mental or emotional condition upon her veracity. Thus, in rejecting the polar extremes of an absolute prohibition and an absolute requirement that the prosecutrix submit to a psychiatric examination, we have accepted a middle ground, placing the matter in the discretion of the trial judge.' 64 Cal.2d at 17[6]-177, []." Gregg, 226 Kan. at 489.
See State v. Rucker, 267 Kan. 816, 822, 987 P.2d 1080 (1999) (recognized trial judge has discretion to order psychological examination of victim in sex crime case if defendant presents compelling reason); State v. Lavery, 19 Kan. App.2d 673, Syl. ¶ 1, 877 P.2d 443, rev. denied 253 Kan. 862 (1993); see Annot, 45 A.L.R. 4th, 310.
Unlike the California Legislature, the Kansas Legislature has not statutorily overruled the 22-year-old decision in Gregg. Thus, it can be said that the legislature approves of the court ordering such examinations. Cf. In re Adoption of B.M.W., 268 Kan. 871, 881, 2 P.3d 159 (2000) (when legislature fails to modify statute to avoid standing judicial construction of statute, legislature is presumed to agree with court's interpretation).
The trial court in this case found:
"Here, the defense hasn't put on any evidence or any reason whatsoever that would get to a level of compelling. The defense is more than free at trial to attack the findings of Horizons [John Theis], and they are more than free to attack Dr. Glover's examination. But the fact that this defendant simply wants to have those findings verified is not a compelling reason to have a little eleven-year-old girl subjected to a psychological exam and particularly to a physical exam."
Regarding this issue, the Court of Appeals stated:
"Here, McIntosh argues that an independent psychological examination was required because a State witness completed a sexual abuse evaluation of A.D. and that he wanted his own expert to evaluate A.D. Specifically, McIntosh wanted an independent psychological examination of A.D. to determine whether A.D. suffered from post traumatic stress disorder as found by the State's witness. In addition, McIntosh wanted to ascertain the effect of the repeated questioning of A.D.'s memory of the alleged events. The trial court denied McIntosh's motion for a psychological examination of A.D. after finding that none of the factors cited by the Gregg court were argued by McIntosh.
"We find that the trial court correctly determined that McIntosh failed to establish a compelling reason for A.D. to submit to an independent psychological examination. At the hearing on the motion for a psychological examination, McIntosh *944 did not argue that A.D. was mentally unstable, that she lacked veracity, or that she had made false charges against other men. Moreover, the grounds argued by McIntosh did not constitute a compelling reason to require an independent psychological examination. McIntosh could have attacked the finding of post traumatic stress disorder without conducting an independent examination of A.D. Similarly, McIntosh could have cross-examined the State's witnesses concerning the psychological evidence as to the effect of repeated questioning of A.D.'s recollection of the alleged incidents. As a result, we find that McIntosh has failed to carry his burden to show that the trial court erred in denying his motion for an independent psychological evaluation of A.D." McIntosh, 30 Kan. App.2d at 507-08.
Before this court, McIntosh asserts the Court of Appeals erred because he did in fact state compelling reasons for an independent psychological examination, including mental instability and lack of veracity of the victim. McIntosh specifically cites to A.D.'s bedwetting, diagnosis of attention-deficit disorder for which she never took her medication, behavioral problems at school, and resentment for the fact her biological father was not around, that were present prior to McIntosh's moving into the home, as showing A.D.'s mental instability. In support of his claim that A.D. lacked veracity, McIntosh points out: (1) A.D. did not report her allegations until 2 months after McIntosh moved out of the home; (2) A.D. demonstrated friendly feelings toward McIntosh before and after the alleged abuse; (3) A.D. gave implausible, inconsistent, and continually inflated accounts of what allegedly happened between herself and McIntosh; and (4) the medical evidence was inconsistent with A.D.'s complaints of anal sodomy. Additionally, McIntosh claims that because A.D. was subjected to multiple psychological examinations, independent examination was necessary to determine (1) the validity of the State's examining experts' conclusions and (2) whether A.D.'s recollections had been altered by the multiple previous interviews.
Kansas courts have addressed similar assertions in other cases involving child victims of sexual abuse. See Rucker, 267 Kan. 822-23, (no abuse of discretion in denying defendant's motion for independent psychological examination where defendant contended victim had been under psychological care related to alleged acts, nature of victim's testimony was critical to defense, victim had psychological *945 motivations for making the charge, and evidence would be relevant to issue of credibility of victim); Gregg, 226 Kan. at 490 (no abuse of discretion where no compelling reason for independent psychiatric examination was shown or alluded to; motion was "clearly fishing expedition embarked upon in the hope something damaging and admissible in the trial would be unearthed"); Lavery, 19 Kan. App.2d 673 (no abuse of discretion in denying defendant's motion for independent psychiatric examination where defendant contended and put forth evidence that victim was inappropriately exposed to sex and was using knowledge to falsely accuse, was unsupervised most of the summer, used foul language, was possibly molested by another man, and had told false story about killers in the school basement to neighborhood girls; trial judge had also noted there was episode of victim "`playing doctor'" with neighborhood children); State v. Blackmore, 15 Kan. App.2d 539, 542, 811 P.2d 54, affd in part and rev'd in part 249 Kan. 668, 822 P.2d 49 (1991) (no abuse of discretion in denial of defendant's motion for independent psychiatric examination where victim had been taken to health center for treatment of behavioral problems and had problematic behavior that consisted of hyperactivity, sleeplessness, bowel movements in his pants, and gagging himself at night until he vomited); cf. Bourassa, 28 Kan. App.2d at 167 (abuse of discretion in denying defendant's motion for independent psychological examination where defendant proffered evidence of victim's mental instability, which involved recent charge that her father had sexually molested her, that she had mutilated two kittens the previous summer, and that she had tendency to soil herself; victim was taking Prozac and undergoing mental health counseling for behavioral disorders at time of motion; and victim's sister contradicted victim's testimony as to abuse).
The October 1999 psychological examination of A.D. performed by John Theis, a licensed clinical social worker, was videotaped and provided to the defense. McIntosh was able to cross-examine Theis and other State's witnesses who interviewed A.D. In addition, McIntosh had the opportunity to put forth his own experts to testify as to whether Theis' conclusions were accurate. We note that McIntosh did call Robert Barnett, a licensed clinical psychologist, as *946 a witness to demonstrate to the jury that children are easily influenced during the interview process; that the most important interview is the first interview, which in this case was not recorded; that repeat interviews can affect the accuracy of the information conveyed; and that it is well understood that there are no behaviors or groups of behaviors that are exhibited by sexually abused children that are not also exhibited by children who are not abused.
The testimony of the individuals who interviewed and counseled A.D. did not reflect that there was an attempt to influence A.D.'s account of the events. In general, A.D.'s accounts of the abuse were consistent throughout all interviews and at trial. After reviewing the record, we affirm the Court of Appeals' finding that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in finding that McIntosh did not establish a compelling reason for A.D. to submit to an independent psychological examination.
Physical Examination
In his motion requesting a physical examination of the victim, McIntosh relied for support upon Gregg, 226 Kan. 481, and K.S.A. 2001 Supp. 22-3212. At the hearing on the motion, defense counsel argued that the physical examination conducted by Dr. Reagan Glover was not "of a definite character to say that [A.D.] was sexually abused." Defense counsel noted that there was no photographic record of the injuries sustained to A.D. Defense counsel asserted that under such circumstances McIntosh's due process right to challenge the State's physical examination evidence of the victim required an independent examination. The State noted that the defense failed to state the relevance of a physical examination conducted more than a year after the cessation of abuse. As stated previously, the trial court, relying upon Gregg, found that McIntosh also failed to meet his burden of establishing a compelling reason for an independent physical examination.
After his conviction, McIntosh asserted in his motion for judgment of acquittal or new trial that the trial court's denial of his motion for physical examination denied him the opportunity to confirm or refute the findings of Dr. Glover. The motion was denied by the trial judge.
*947 Before the Court of Appeals, McIntosh claimed the trial court's denial of an independent examination of the victim infringed upon his due process rights under the United States and Kansas Constitutions. For support, McIntosh relied upon the Kansas Code of Civil Procedure, specifically K.S.A. 2001 Supp. 60-235, and Turner v. Com., 767 S.W.2d 557 (Ky. 1988). Furthermore, McIntosh asserted the standard for ordering the examination was "good cause" rather than "compelling reason."
The State argued that K.S.A. 2001 Supp. 60-235 applied only to civil matters. The State maintained that the issue was not a constitutional question as McIntosh claimed, but an evidentiary ruling that is reviewed for abuse of discretion. The State asserted that following the reasoning set forth in Gregg regarding psychiatric examinations, McIntosh failed to set forth a compelling reason for an independent physical examination.
The Court of Appeals agreed with the State and held that K.S.A. 2001 Supp. 60-235 does not apply in criminal cases. McIntosh, 30 Kan. App.2d at 507. The Court of Appeals also determined that the decision of the trial court was subject to review for abuse of discretion because it involved an evidentiary ruling and not a violation of a constitutional right. The Court of Appeals did not, however, address the trial court's denial of McIntosh's motion for independent physical examination based upon the rationale for a psychiatric examination under Gregg. Instead, the Court of Appeals examined the statutes and determined that the district court did not have the authority to order an independent physical examination under K.S.A. 2001 Supp. 22-3212, which governs discovery in a criminal action and provides:
"(a) Upon request, the prosecuting attorney shall permit the defendant to inspect and copy or photograph the following, if relevant:.... (2) results or reports of physical or mental examinations, and of scientific tests or experiments made in connection with the particular case, or copies thereof, the existence of which is known, or by the exercise of due diligence may become known, to the prosecuting attorney....
"(b) Upon request the prosecuting attorney shall permit the defendant to inspect and copy or photograph books, papers, documents, tangible objects, buildings or places, or copies, or portions thereof, which are or have been within the *948 possession, custody or control of the prosecution, and which are material to the case and will not place an unreasonable burden upon the prosecution."
In reaching its conclusion, the Court of Appeals relied upon State v. Dressel, 241 Kan. 426, 738 P.2d 830 (1987). McIntosh, 30 Kan. App.2d at 507. We note that the lack of jurisdiction was not argued to the district court, nor was the Dressel case cited by either party on appeal.
In Dressel, 241 Kan. 426, this court was faced with whether a trial court had the authority under K.S.A. 22-3212 to compel discovery from the complaining witness in a criminal case. The Dressel court concluded it did not. In Dressel, attempted felony theft and felony theft was alleged by Cargill, Inc. (Cargill). The defendants sought discovery of certain items from Cargill and sanctions for destruction of evidence. The district court noted that Cargill was not a party to the criminal case and, therefore, was outside its jurisdiction. The court denied the defendants' discovery motions and refused to impose sanctions. The court concluded that the defendants had the ability to obtain relevant records of a nonparty by use of subpoena.
On appeal, the Court of Appeals held that because Cargill had hired an attorney to assist in the prosecution pursuant to K.S.A. 19-717 and this attorney had knowledge and control of the items requested by the defendant, the items were subject to discovery under K.S.A. 22-3212. On petition for review, this court reversed the Court of Appeals and affirmed the trial court, noting that because Cargill was not a party to the criminal prosecution, the trial court did not have the authority to compel discovery from Cargill under K.S.A. 22-3212. 241 Kan. at 432. The court concluded that an attorney employed under K.S.A. 19-717 to assist the prosecutor is bound by K.S.A. 22-3212 to turn over items subject to K.S.A. 22-3212 that are within that attorney's possession, custody, or control. 241 Kan. at 434.
In rendering its decision, the Dressel court stated:
"Failure to impose the discovery mandates of K.S.A. 22-3212 on a complaining witness does not foreclose discovery; it merely forecloses one method of discovery. Criminal defendants have the right to subpoena witnesses and to compel the production of documents. This right is statutorily provided by K.S.A. 22-3214 and *949 was explicitly recognized by this court in State v. Humphrey, 217 Kan. 352, 361, 537 P.2d 155 (1975)." 241 Kan. at 432.
When determining that the district court did not have jurisdiction to subject the victim to a physical examination in this case, the Court of Appeals noted that K.S.A. 2001 Supp. 22-3212 fails to provide that an independent physical examination may be ordered but specifically provides for numerous others items that are subject to discovery. Therefore, pursuant to the maxim "expressio unius est exclusio alterius, which means `the inclusion of one thing implies the exclusion of another,'" the Court of Appeals held K.S.A. 2001 Supp. 22-3212 precluded the district court from ordering an independent physical examination of the victim. McIntosh, 30 Kan. App.2d at 510.
This reasoning assumes that K.S.A. 2001 Supp. 22-3212 sets forth every possible item subject to discovery in a criminal case. The Court of Appeals failed to note that this court specifically recognized the contrary in State v. Davis, 266 Kan. 638, Syl. ¶ 1, 972 P.2d 1099 (1999). The Davis court was faced with determining whether the district court had the authority to order the county attorney to mail documents to the defense that were clearly subject to discovery and under the control of the State. K.S.A. 2001 Supp. 22-3212 provides that the prosecutor must permit the defense to "inspect and copy, or photograph" the documents, but does not specifically provide that the county attorney must mail the documents. The Davis court held that the district court had the discretionary authority to order the county attorney to mail the documents.
In reaching its decision, the Davis court observed:
"K.S.A. 22-3212 is based on Fed. R. Crim. Proc. 16. See State v. Jones, 209 Kan. 526, 528, 498 P.2d 65 (1972). The Federal Advisory Committee, in its notes on Rule 16, states:
`[Rule 16] is intended to prescribe the minimum amount of discovery to which the parties are entitled. It is not intended to limit the judge's discretion to order broader discovery in appropriate cases. For example, subdivision (a)(3) is not intended to deny a judge's discretion to order disclosure of grand jury minutes where circumstances make it appropriate to do so.' Federal Advisory Committee's Notes on 1974 Amendment on Rule 16. *950 "Federal courts interpreting Rule 16 have held that it is within the sound discretion of the district judge to make any discovery order that is not barred by higher authority. See United States v. Campagnuolo, 592 F.2d 852, 857 n.2 (5th Cir. 1979); United States v. Sawyer, 831 F. Supp. 755, 757 (D. Neb. 1993)." Davis, 266 Kan. at 642-43.
See also United States v. Richter, 488 F.2d 170, 173 (1973) ("The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure are intended to constitute a comprehensive procedural code for criminal cases in the federal courts. But even the rules themselves do not purport to set outer limits of the power of the court.").
The text of K.S.A. 2001 Supp. 22-3212 is not all-inclusive. The fact submission to physical examinations is not specifically provided for under the statute does not mean the district court does not have the authority to order the examination in a particular case. Therefore, the Court of Appeals erred in relying upon K.S.A. 2001 Supp. 22-3212 to divest the district court of the authority to order a physical examination.
McIntosh's best argument is that the Court of Appeals' decision is inconsistent with this court's decision in Gregg. Although the decision and reasoning of Gregg involved a psychiatric examination, Gregg is the logical point at which to begin in determining whether a district court in this state has the authority to order a victim in a sex crime case to submit to a physical examination upon a defendant's request. The reasoning of other jurisdictions that have addressed the issue of the more intrusive physical examination is also relevant.
In State v. Barone, 852 S.W.2d 216 (Tenn. 1993), the highest court in Tennessee was faced for the first time with this exact issue. Barone was convicted of two counts of aggravated rape and one count of aggravated sexual battery involving his minor daughter. On appeal, Barone contended the trial court erred in denying his motion to have the victim submit to a physical examination. The victim had been examined previously, just shortly after the abuse was reported.
In rendering its decision that the trial court had the authority to order a victim to submit to a physical examination, the Barone court stated:
*951 "We begin our analysis by observing that, as a matter of background, `the common law does not authorize a court to require the physical examination of a witness, because discovery in criminal cases was unknown to the common law.' State v. Smith, 260 So.2d 489, 491 (Fla. 1972). Nor does there exist in Tennessee a statutory right to a compelled physical examination of a witness by a criminal defendant, either in the Tennessee Rules of Criminal Procedure or otherwise. It is also true that there are several state courts that, in the absence of such a statutory right, have held there is no constitutional or other basis for defense-demanded physical examinations of alleged sex-offense victims. See State v. Smith, 260 So.2d 489, 489-90 (Fla. 1972); State v. Holmes, 374 N.W.2d 457, 459 (Minn. App. 1985); State, ex rel. Wade v. Stephens, 724 S.W.2d 141, 143 (Tex. Crim. App. 1987).
"There are no reported cases in Tennessee addressing this issue. However, there are a number of Tennessee cases dealing with a defendant's right to request a psychological examination of sex-abuse complainants. The analysis to be followed by a trial court in ruling on that type of request is set out in Forbes v. State, 559 S.W.2d 318, 321 (Tenn. 1977), where this Court followed the general rule when it stated:
"We hold that in any case involving a sex violation, the trial judge has the inherent power to compel a psychiatric or psychological examination of the victim, where such examination is necessary to insure a just and orderly disposition of the cause. Such power should be invoked only for the most compelling of reasons, all of which must be documented in the record. This discretion should be exercised sparingly.'
"A number of state courts have determined that as in the case of psychological examinations, a trial court may exercise its discretion to order an involuntary physical examination of sex-abuse complainants when the defendant demonstrates a compelling reason for the examination. People v. Chard, 808 P.2d 351 (Colo. 1991); State v. DRH, 127 N.J. 249, 604 A.2d 89 (1992); State v. Ramos, 553 A.2d 1059 (R.I. 1989); State v. Delaney, 187 W. Va. 212, 417 S.E.2d 903 (1992). The decision of a trial court judge to grant or deny a motion for an independent physical examination should not be reversed on appeal absent a manifest abuse of discretion. Lanton v. State, 456 So.2d 873, 874 (Ala. Crim. App. 1984); 75 C.J.S. Criminal Law § 80 (1952).
"State courts have adopted a number of approaches to determining whether an accused sex-offender is entitled to a compulsory physical examination of a complainant. First is the material assistance inquiry, which requires a physical examination when it could lead to evidence of material assistance to the defendant. See Turner v. Commonwealth, 767 S.W.2d 557 (Ky. 1988). Second is the compelling need inquiry, which balances the defendant's interest in the evidence against the burden the examination imposes upon the complainant. Some states include a factor-based balancing approach. See People v. Glover, 49 Ill.2d 78, 273 N.E.2d 367 (1971); State v. Ramos, 553 A.2d 1059 (R.I. 1989); State v. Garrett, 384 N.W.2d 617 (Minn. App. 1986). Third is the exculpatory approach, which allows a defendant a physical examination only when the evidence likely to be *952 obtained could absolutely bar his conviction. See People v. Nokes, 183 Cal. App. 3d 468, 228 Cal. Rptr. 119 (1986); State v. Hewett, 93 N.C. App. 1, 376 S.E.2d 467 (1989). Fourth is the medically deficient standard, which permits an examination only if the prosecutor's examination failed to conform to proper medical procedures. See State v. Drab, 546 So.2d 54 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 1989), rev. denied, 553 So.2d 1164 (Fla. 1989). See also Note, A Fourth Amendment Approach to Compulsory Physical Examinations of Sex Offense Victims, 57 U. Chi. L. Rev. 873 (1990).
"Initially, we are satisfied that the Forbes rule of compelling need should be extended to physical examinations of sex-abuse complainants. We think the practice of granting such physical examinations should be engaged in with great care and only upon a showing of compelling need by the defendant. Other courts have observed, and we agree, that the highly intrusive nature of a physical exam raises the same concerns about emotional trauma, embarrassment, and intimidation to the child victim that are present with psychological examinations. People v. Chard, 808 P.2d 351, 355 (Colo. 1991). In addition, we think those concerns should be balanced against the likelihood of the examination producing substantial material evidence that will be beneficial to the defendant's case. Id. We recognize that there is a delicate balance to be struck, and that the critical inquiry is whether the evidence sought by the defendant is of such importance to his defense that it outweighs the potential for harm caused by the invasion of the complainant's privacy, including the prospect that undergoing a physical examination might be used for harassment of a prosecuting witness. See Turner v. Commonwealth, 767 S.W.2d 557, 559 (Ky. 1988)." 852 S.W.2d at 221-22.
We note that the result in Barone is not unique; other jurisdictions have also reached similar conclusions. See State v. Chard, 808 P.2d 351, 357 (Colo. 1991); People v. Visgar, 120 Ill. App.3d 584, 587, 457 N.E.2d 1343 (1983); State v. D.R.H., 127 N.J. 249, 259-60, 604 A.2d 89 (1992); State v. Ramos, 553 A.2d 1059, 1062 (R.I. 1989);. However, there are other jurisdictions that refuse to recognize that a defendant could ever have the right to obtain an order for a victim to submit to a physical examination. See State v. Joyce, 97 N.C. App. 464, 467, 389 S.E.2d 136 (1990); State ex rel. Wade v. Stephens, 724 S.W.2d 141, 144-45 (Tex. App. 1987); Clark v. Commonwealth, 262 Va. 517, 521, 551 S.E.2d 642 (2001).
Following the reasoning stated in Gregg and case law from other jurisdictions, we determine that where there is a compelling reason, the district court has the discretion to order a victim in a sex crime case to submit to an independent physical examination. We *953 note that it is important for district courts to recognize that the victim in a criminal case is not a party to the action.
This court must now determine whether the district court abused its discretion in denying McIntosh's motion for independent physical examination. The factors from Gregg that establish a compelling reason for an independent psychological examination do not apply to the more intrusive physical examination. In addition, there is a notable distinction between psychological examiners and physical examiners. A psychological examiner is an expert witness specifically retained by the prosecution for the purpose of examining the victim. A physical examination, however, is usually conducted by a medical doctor and hospital staff. The standard of review over a trial court's decision to grant or deny a motion for discovery is abuse of discretion. See Davis, 266 Kan. at 643-44; Gregg, 226 Kan. at 489; Bourassa, 28 Kan. App.2d at 168.
The Rhode Island Supreme Court set forth factors that a trial court should consider in determining whether to grant a defendant's motion for independent physical examination:
"(1) the complainant's age, (2) the remoteness in time of the alleged criminal incident to the proposed examination, (3) the degree of intrusiveness and humiliation associated with the procedure, (4) the potentially debilitating physical effects of such examination, and (5) any other relevant considerations." Ramos, 553 A.2d at 1062.
See also State v. Delaney, 187 W. Va. 212, 217, 417 S.E.2d 903 (1992) (in addition to factors set forth in Ramos, also consider emotional effects of examination on victim, probative value of examination to issue before court, and evidence already available for defendant's use).
McIntosh argued the following reasons before the trial court as support for an independent physical examination being warranted: (1) Examination of Dr. Reagan Glover did not show sexual abuse was definite; (2) there was no photographic evidence of injuries sustained by A.D.; (3) independent examination was the best way to challenge the prosecution's evidence; (4) denial of the examination was a violation of due process; (5) defendant was denied the opportunity to challenge the evaluation of Dr. Glover; (6) Dr. Glover found no physical evidence to corroborate A.D.'s claim of *954 repeated anal sodomy; (7) A.D. delayed reporting the abuse until 2 months after McIntosh left the home; and (8) A.D.'s mother's animosity toward McIntosh was the source of A.D.'s allegations.
Before the Court of Appeals, McIntosh took issue with the fact Dr. Glover was made aware of the purpose of the examination prior to conducting it and was guided through the examination by A.D.'s providing a history of the events. McIntosh cited for the first time to a study that concluded that a diagnosis is often affected and changed when a history of the examinee is given. Additionally, McIntosh cited studies and articles that he contended were are at odds with the testimony and conclusions of Dr. Glover. At trial, McIntosh did not present or attempt to present evidence to refute Dr. Glover's conclusions.
The Court of Appeals noted in its decision that denying McIntosh an independent physical examination was not unfair because the objective results of the State's examination of A.D. were available through discovery, McIntosh could have cross-examined Dr. Glover on the results of the examination, and McIntosh had presented experts who had reviewed Dr. Glover's findings to refute those findings. McIntosh, 30 Kan. App.2d at 510-11.
A.D. was 11 years old at the time of trial. The abuse was claimed to have begun within a couple of months of McIntosh moving into the home in December 1995. A.D. was 7 years old at the time. The abuse was alleged to continue until a couple of weeks before McIntosh moved out of the home in July 1999, when A.D. was 10 years old. The physical examination was performed on September 28, 1999. The complaint was filed against McIntosh in November of 1999, yet McIntosh failed to request an independent physical examination until September of 2000. Thus, a year passed between the first examination which occurred only 2 months after the cessation of the alleged abuse and McIntosh's request for a subsequent examination. McIntosh did not put forth an explanation for the delay, nor did he put forth any support to refute the natural assumption that signs of the physical abuse would be different, if not less evident, a year later.
Requiring an 11-year-old victim to submit to a physical examination would undoubtedly be humiliating and traumatizing. McIntosh *955 attempts to downplay the humiliation and trauma that A.D. would experience by noting that A.D. has already been examined by Dr. Glover. This assertion is not convincing. Since the cessation of abuse, A.D. has undoubtedly begun to heal both physically and mentally. An additional physical examination could only serve as a setback to the healing process and should only be granted upon a showing of compelling reason. In a situation such as this, where there has already been a physical examination performed, the argument that a second physical examination is necessary must be especially compelling. Factors that a court must consider in determining whether to grant a defendant's motion for independent physical examination are (1) the victim's age; (2) the remoteness in time of the alleged criminal incident to the proposed examination; (3) the degree of intrusiveness and humiliation associated with the procedure; (4) the potentially debilitating physical and emotional effects of such examination; (5) the probative value of the examination to the issue before the court; (6) the evidence already available for the defendant's use; and (7) any other relevant considerations. The findings and testimony of the medical doctor who performed the prior physical examination for the State can, in most instances, be sufficiently challenged on cross-examination and through defense expert witness testimony.
McIntosh had the burden of proving the trial court abused its discretion. See Thompkins, 271 Kan. at 334-35. McIntosh did not meet this burden. Thus, the trial court did not abuse its discretion in finding that McIntosh failed to put forth a compelling reason for A.D. to submit to an independent physical examination.
Admission of Expert Witness Testimony
McIntosh contends the trial court erred in admitting over objection the testimony of John Theis, a licensed clinical social worker, that A.D. exhibited behavioral patterns consistent with a child who had been sexually abused.
Qualification of a witness as an expert and admission of expert witness testimony is within the broad discretion of the trial court. See State v. Heath, 264 Kan. 557, 573, 957 P.2d 449 (1998); State v. Rice, 261 Kan. 567, 589, 932 P.2d 981 (1997).
*956 "Two requirements must be present before expert testimony is admissible at trial. First, the testimony must be helpful to the jury. Second, before expert scientific opinion may be received into evidence at trial, the basis of that opinion must be shown to be generally acceptable within the expert's particular scientific field." State v. Hodges, 239 Kan. 63, Syl. ¶ 1, 716 P.2d 563 (1986).
Expert conclusions or opinions are inadmissible where the normal experiences and qualifications of lay persons serving as jurors permit them to draw proper conclusions from given facts and circumstances. State v. Colwell, 246 Kan. 382, 389, 790 P.2d 430 (1990). The trial judge allowed Theis to testify over McIntosh's objection. In denying McIntosh's motion for judgment of acquittal or new trial on this ground, the trial judge relied upon State v. Reser, 244 Kan. 306, 767 P.2d 1277 (1989).
In Reser, this court addressed whether there was an adequate foundation to qualify a State's witness as an expert on symptoms consistent with child sexual abuse. The State's witness was a licensed clinical specialist with 12 years of experience in the area of mental health, had a master's degree in social work, and had worldwide recognition in the field of child sexual abuse. The witness testified that sexually abused children have common patterns of behavior resulting from the trauma, including failing to report the abuse immediately. The witness testified that it was her opinion that the victim exhibited behavior consistent with a child who had been sexually abused. The Reser court looked to other jurisdictions in which expert testimony regarding characteristics of sexually abused children had been held proper to provide helpful information to the jury and concluded that the expert was "imminently qualified" as an expert to testify as to common patterns of behavior resulting from child sexual abuse and that this victim had symptoms consistent with those patterns. 244 Kan. at 315.
Before the Court of Appeals, McIntosh contended that there was no foundation for Theis' testimony that A.D. fit the profile of a sexually abused child. McIntosh acknowledged that the Reser court had specifically approved this type of testimony but contended that in the 10 years since Reser, research demonstrates that such testimony is no longer generally accepted.
The Court of Appeals held:
*957 "McIntosh argues that this court should decline to follow Reser because the court failed to address whether characteristics of child sexual abuse have been generally accepted. McIntosh adds that Reser is a decade old, and research subsequent to the case shows that the supposed indicators of child sexual abuse cited in that case are not generally acceptable. While it may be true that there is not a universally accepted profile for sexually abused children, the Reser court held that expert testimony on common patterns of behavior by child victims of sexual assault is admissible as corroborating evidence of the abuse. This court is duty bound to follow our Supreme Court precedent, absent some indication the court is departing from its previous position. State v. Maybin, 27 Kan. App.2d 189, 205, 2 P.3d 179, rev, denied 269 Kan. 938 (2000). Because our Supreme Court has not indicated that it is departing from its previous position that expert testimony on common patterns of behavior of child victims of sexual assault is admissible corroborating evidence, this court is duty bound to follow Reser.
"McIntosh suggests that this court follow State v. Bressman, 236 Kan. 296, 689 P.2d 901 (1984). In Bressman, a physician testified that in her opinion the complaining witness had been raped. On appeal, the defendant argued that the trial court erred in admitting the expert witness testimony because it was without sufficient foundation. The Bressman court agreed, finding that the trial court committed prejudicial error in permitting the expert witness testimony because there was not a sufficient foundation to qualify the physician as an expert to give such an opinion since there was no showing that she was trained as an expert in psychiatry and that she had examined the complaining witness for the purpose of rendering a diagnosis as to whether she evidenced rape trauma syndrome. 236 Kan. at 304, 689 P.2d 901.
"Bressman, however, is distinguishable from the instant case. The Bressman court recognized that under State v. Marks, 231 Kan. 645, 647 P.2d 1292 (1982), qualified expert psychiatric testimony regarding rape trauma syndrome is relevant and admissible. Although expert opinion testimony on rape trauma syndrome is admissible, the Bressman court found that the physician did not qualify as an expert witness because she was not trained in psychiatry and because she did not examine the victim for the purpose of rendering a psychiatric diagnosis. Accordingly, McIntosh's reliance on Bressman is misplaced because the case supports the admission of expert witness testimony as to the characteristics of sexual assault victims, provided the testimony is given by a qualified expert.
"As a result, we follow our Supreme Court precedent in Reser and hold that qualified expert witness testimony on the common patterns of behavior of a sexually abused child was admissible to corroborate the complaining witness' allegations. In addition, we find that Theis was qualified as an expert on child sexual abuse. Theis was a licensed clinical social worker with a master's degree in social work and had regularly conducted sexual abuse evaluations. In fact, Theis' qualifications were very similar to the qualifications of the expert witness in Reser, who was found to be a qualified expert on child sexual abuse. Accordingly, we find that Theis was qualified as an expert witness in this case.
*958 "We further find that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in admitting Theis' testimony. There was a sufficient foundation for the expert witness testimony and Theis was qualified as an expert witness. Moreover, the expert testimony was not used to prove that A.D. was sexually abused, but rather was used to corroborate her allegations. As a result, we find that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in admitting expert witness testimony that A.D. fitted the profile of a sexually abused child." McIntosh, 30 Kan. App.2d at 520-21.
As the trial court and Court of Appeals correctly recognized, Reser controls. Many of the cases from other jurisdictions relied upon by the Reser court remain good law today. See Rodriquez v. State, 741 P.2d 1200 (Alaska App. 1987); State v. Radjenovich, 138 Ariz. 270, 674 P.2d 333 (Ariz. App. 1983); Poyner v. State, 288 Ark. 402, 705 S.W.2d 882 (1986); State v. LeBrun, 37 Or. App. 411, 587 P.2d 1044 (1978), rev. denied 286 Or. 149 (1979). We note, however, State v. Cressey, 137 N.H. 402, 628 A.2d 696 (1993) (child abuse expert testimony may not be offered to prove child has been sexually abused; such evidence may only be used to explain behavioral characteristics commonly found in child abuse victims to preempt or rebut inferences the child was lying; recognized there was no difference between expert testifying the child was abused and testifying that child exhibited behaviors consistent with sexually abused children), and State v. Michaels, 264 N.J. Super. 579, 599, 625 A.2d 489 (1993) (held child abuse expert evidence is admissible only for rehabilitation purposes, e.g., explaining traits often found in children who have been abused when trait may seem inconsistent with abuse).
McIntosh urges this court to reconsider the holding in Reser. For support, McIntosh cites numerous articles and cases from other jurisdictions which have concluded that such evidence should be inadmissible. McIntosh argues the identification of common characteristics associated with sexual abuse is unreliable and that some jurisdictions admit such evidence only to rehabilitate the victim.
On direct examination, Theis detailed the format he underwent in evaluating A.D. and the information obtained from the interview. Theis also testified on direct that there are common patterns of abuse among sexually abused children. Upon objection from the *959 defense, the prosecutor contended Theis was qualified to testify to such because of his extensive training in dealing with sexually abused children and his performance of numerous sexual abuse examinations of children. The trial judge found Theis qualified to testify as to whether there are established patterns.
Theis stated that the common patterns of abuse include: nightmares, extreme guilt, social withdrawal, acting-out behavior, firesetting, avoidance of school, aggressive behavior, inappropriate sexual acting-out, as well as other symptoms not specifically set forth. Theis then testified, over defense objection, that in interviewing A.D. he had observed behaviors that were "consistent with" a child who had been sexually abused. The behavior that Theis was referring to consisted of A.D.'s extreme nervousness when talking about the abuse, tearful and emotional breakdown, sleep disturbance, fear for her safety, distressing thoughts about the abuse, distrust of others, hypervigilance (anticipatory anxietyworry about negative events happening again), feelings of guilt, and delayed disclosure.
It must be noted that Theis testified on cross-examination that the behaviors he had identified as being consistent with children who have been sexually abused are also capable of being seen in children who have not been abused. Additionally, McIntosh put forth Robert Barnett, a licensed clinical psychologist, to testify that it is well understood that there is no single behavior or group of behaviors that are exhibited solely in sexually abused children.
In cases involving sexual abuse, the evidence is often centered entirely upon the credibility of the victim and the alleged abuser. Theis' testimony provided circumstantial support in favor of A.D.'s credibility by demonstrating that her behavior was not inconsistent with someone who had been sexually abused. Theis did not testify that in his opinion A.D. was abused. McIntosh, through testimony elicited on cross-examination and later in his case in chief, made the jury aware that the presence of such behaviors in a child victim does not prove sexual abuse. Although jurisdictions differ as to the allowance of such testimony, McIntosh does not state a significant reason for this court to exclude such evidence in Kansas.
*960 The Court of Appeals did not err in finding that the trial court did not abuse its discretion in qualifying Theis as an expert for the purpose of testifying as to common behaviors among sexually abused children and allowing Theis to testify that A.D. exhibited behavior consistent with a sexually abused child.
The Court of Appeals and the district court are affirmed.
| {
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Abstract
SWFP ensures the secure broadcasting of web feeds ’ content over a local network or the Internet. The protocol is built to ensure a secure channel to enterprises that broadcast news and information to their employees through web feeds. The protocol also ensures the legitimacy of the readers. 1 | {
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Shame and Scandal in the Family
"Shame and Scandal in the Family", also known as "Shame & Scandal" for short, is a song written by calypso singer Sir Lancelot for the movie I Walked with a Zombie in 1943 and originally titled "Fort Holland Calypso Song". Sir Lancelot issued his recording of it in the late 1940s. The Sir Lancelot version was covered by folksingers Odetta and Burl Ives. In 1962, Trinidadian calypsonian Lord Melody wrote new lyrics for the verses while keeping the melody and the chorus. The Historical Museum of Southern Florida said of Lord Melody's version that "No calypso has been more extensively recorded".
Lyrical content
In Sir Lancelot's version, the lyric reports gossip about a prominent family on a Caribbean island named San Sebastian.
In Lord Melody's 1960s version the story follows a young Puerto Rican man in search of a wife. In each of the verses, the young man asks his father for permission to marry a different woman, only to be told he can not marry the girl as "The girl is your sister, but your mamma don't know". However, the tables are turned during the last verse, where the young man's mother tells him that "Your daddy ain't your daddy, but your daddy don't know", clearing the path for him to marry any of the girls.
Famous covers
In 1962, the Trinidadian calypsonian Lord Melody used Sir Lancelot's song as the basis of his song "Shame and Scandal", although he titled it "Wau, Wau". Melody's version used the same chorus and tune as the original 1943 song but with different verses.
In 1964, Shawn Elliott released it as a single
Also in 1964, The Kingston Trio included a live performance of the song (retitled "Ah Woe, Ah Me!") on their last Capitol Records album Back in Town.
In 1965, the British comedy actor, Lance Percival, reached number 37 in the UK Singles Chart with his cover version, under the expanded title of "Shame and Scandal in the Family".
In the mid 1960s, Jamaica's Kingston Hilton Hotel resident mento band, The Hiltonaires, also recorded it as "Shame and Scandal".
In 1965, a ska cover version was recorded in Jamaica by Peter Tosh and The Wailers on vocals, backed by the Skatalites and released on the Studio One label.
Also in 1965 Los 3 Sudamericanos released a cover in Spanish: "Qué familia más original".
In 1966, French-Italian singer Dalida recorded the song as Un grosso scandalo (with Italian lyrics by Luciano Beretta) for one of her Italian-language LPs on Barclay Records.
In 1972, Australian singer, Johnny Chester's version with Jigsaw called "Shame And Scandal (In the Family)" peaked at No. 13 on Go-Set National Top 40.
In 1977, American vocal group The Stylistics released a cover version titled "Shame and Scandal in the Family" from their album, Sun & Soul. The single reached #87 on the Hot Soul Singles chart.
In 1983, Clint Eastwood & General Saint released a reggae cover version
In 1993, Skatalà released a cover version titled "Skandol Dub" in the album "Borinot, Borinot".
In 2003, David Lindley and Wally Ingram recorded a version of "Shame and Scandal" on their album "Twango Bango III". Lindley had previously performed the song a few times in the 80s with his band El Rayo-X.
In 2012, the South African band Dr Victor & the Rasta Rebels released a cover titled "Shame and Scandal" featuring South African singer Kurt Darren.
There are known versions by Trini Lopez, De Maskers, King Bravo with Baba Brooks & his band, Bobby Aitken and Blue Beat, Odetta, Freddie McGregor, Laurel Aitken. Instrumental versions were also popular, most famously by Caravelli and by Franck Pourcel and his Grand Orchestre.
Language versions
The song has been translated to a number of major foreign languages:
French: "Scandale dans la famille" performed by Dalida, by Sacha Distel and by Les Surfs in three separate versions all in 1965. French translated lyrics were by Maurice Tézé
German: "Schande Unserer Familie" performed by Harry & Ronny in 1965
Italian: "Un Grosso Scandalo" performed by Dalida and by Giovanna
Portuguese: "O Escândalo" performed by the Brazilian band Renato e Seus Blue Caps in 1965 and later on by The Supersonics.
Spanish: "Escandalo en la Familia"
Hungarian: "Szégyen és gyalázat a családban" performed by Iván Darvas
Polish: "Skandal w rodzinie (Co za skandal, gdy tata dowie się)" performed by Chochoły
Estonian: "Skandaal perekonnas" performed by Ivo Linna and Rock Hotel
Slovak: "Nervózna família" performed by Jozef Krištof, later band Ventil RG
Greek: "Τι ντροπή" (Ti dropi) (What a shame), performed by Dakis
Hebrew: "Tsarot Ba'Mishpacha" (Troubles in the family), written and performed by Shmulik Kraus
Madness version
British ska/pop band Madness covered the song having previously covered several Prince Buster ska recordings, including the songs "Madness", and "One Step Beyond". The band began performing the song at a series of low-key performances as 'The Dangermen' in 2005.
Madness later recorded the song for their cover album The Dangermen Sessions Vol. 1, and released it as a single later that year.
Formats and track listings
These are the formats and track listings of major single releases of "Shame & Scandal".
7" Single
"Shame & Scandal" (Lord/Pinard) - 2:52
"Shame & Scandal [Dub]" (Lord/Pinard) - 2:56
"Shame & Scandal" (Peter Touch (Tosh) and The Wailers) - 3:03
CD Single
"Shame & Scandal" (Lord/Pinard) - 2:52
"Skylarking" (Hinds) - 3:02
"Dreader Than Dread" (Galnek) - 3:04
Chart performance
The Madness release did not fare well in the UK, only spending two weeks in the charts, peaking at number 38. However, the song did better in France, where it peaked at number 12 and spent 19 weeks in the charts. The song also made an appearance on the Swiss Singles Top 100, spending 8 weeks in the charts and reaching a high of number 69, and just made the Dutch Singles Top 100, hitting number 100 and remaining in the chart for a single week.
References
External links
Odetta and Johnny Cash sing "Shame and Scandal in the Family" on YouTube (from 1969)
Category:1943 songs
Category:1965 singles
Category:1972 singles
Category:1977 singles
Category:2005 singles
Category:The Stylistics songs
Category:Madness (band) songs
Category:V2 Records singles | {
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Easy Carrot & Walnut Loaf
March 29, 2017 This post may contain affiliate links.
There is something super indulgent about carrot cake. I think it’s because it’s so heavy. You can feel its full of the good stuff. And, I’m not sure why, but it always seems to feel heavier after I bake it.
I never quite know whether to make it as a cake or a loaf. Same recipe. Different shape. And it makes a big difference. Especially to the kids. They are way more inclined to enjoy it if its shaped like a cake. Funny little things. Oh and if you sprinkle it with icing sugar. Well, then it’s just “the best carrot cake you’ve ever made, Mom”.
A couple things I would like to point out about this recipe:
It doesn’t have any raisins or sultanas in it. It’s a personal taste thing. For me. They just lose their appeal when added to baked goods. I will eat them if I have to, but if I’m cooking, I don’t have to. They get all squishy, and soft … Agh. Sends shivers down my spine. So no raisins. But feel free to add 1/4 cup if you really, really want to.
No Orange rind. Now if you have kids (which I’m assuming you do if you are reading this, you may notice that some of them don’t like too many lumps or irregular textures in their food. You can put this down to picky eating and try and force this issue, but I have found that they grow out of this in time. So instead of orange rind I add orange juice. This seems to do the trick nicely to keep the loaf moist and sweet.
This is a seriously great versatile recipe that can be used as a cake (just bake in a round pan and top with a cream cheese icing) or as a loaf (serve in thick slices with butter) or as lunch box sized muffins (divide into 12 hole muffin tray and reduce cooking time to 12 -15 min)
It freezes beautifully.
And lastly, it’s so flippin’ easy. Carrot cake has a reputation of being hard work. I think it’s got something to do with the thought of grating carrots?? This takes about 30 seconds and it’s all down hill from there. | {
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(CNN) Whatever spurred Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi to drive across two states to shoot up a Prophet Mohammed cartoon contest is lost on their families, their neighbors and the place they had worshipped.
One was a described as "gentle person," albeit one who had been convicted of a terror-related charge and supported an ISIS propagandist.
The other was a father who had "put his son above everything" -- until the day he and his roommate opened fire at the event in Garland, Texas, wounding a security guard before police shot and killed the gunmen
Here's what we know about the attackers:
ELTON SIMPSON
He may have been an ISIS supporter
While U.S. authorities investigate whether Sunday's shooting has any link to international terrorism, ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack
In a radio broadcast, ISIS referred to Simpson and Soofi as two of its "soldiers" and and threatened more attacks. But it's unclear whether the terror group in Iraq and Syria actually had contact with Simpson or Soofi, who both lived in Phoenix.
JUST WATCHED Gunmen opened fire at Mohammed cartoon event Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Gunmen opened fire at Mohammed cartoon event 02:07
Moments before the shootout, Simpson posted an ominous tweet with the hashtag #texasattack: "May Allah accept us as mujahideen."
The tweet also said Simpson and his fellow attacker had pledged allegiance to "Amirul Mu'mineen," which means "the leader of the faithful." CNN terrorism analyst Paul Cruickshank said that probably refers to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi.
Earlier, Simpson had asked his readers on Twitter to follow an ISIS propagandist.
After the shooting, the same propagandist tweeted: "Allahu Akbar!!!! 2 of our brothers just opened fire."
Both Twitter accounts have been deactivated.
He has a rap sheet
In 2011, Simpson was convicted of making a false statement involving international and domestic terrorism.
Prosecutors said he told FBI agents that he had not discussed traveling to Somalia to engage in "violent jihad" -- when, in fact, he had, according to an indictment.
Simpson was sentenced to three years of probation, court records show.
His former lawyer, Kristina Sitton, told CNN that Simpson ended up on the federal no-fly list. In fact, he contacted her once after trying to get on a plane at a Phoenix airport, only to be turned away.
He was a 'very devout Muslim'
That's according to Sitton, who spent many hours over about two years in her office with Simpson while representing him in the Somalia case.
When the meetings ran long, the attorney recalled Simpson asking to leave to pray somewhere quiet.
"He was a very devout Muslim," said Sitton, who sensed Simpson was trying to convert her and her staffers but never saw him as a threat. "... I can tell you with absolute certainty that I didn't observe anything that had anything to do with radicalization."
In fact, Sitton said, "there were no signs" that Simpson would pull off an attack like the one in Garland.
"He was a very kind-hearted, respectful young man," the lawyer added. "He always treated me with respect."
He had 'a good demeanor'
That view was seconded by the president of the Islamic Community Center of Phoenix, where both Simpson and Soofi worshiped.
Usama Shami said Simpson came regularly until around 2010 or 2011, about the time the FBI arrested him on the false statement charges. Soofi came less frequently.
Simpson "was a gentle person," Shami said. "He always had a good attitude, a good demeanor."
Like others at the mosque, Shami said he was stunned to hear about the attack Sunday night.
"They didn't show any signs of radicalization or any signs of even thinking about those things in that manner," he said. "So when that happens, it just shocks you. 'How good did you know these people?' That's the question that people ask themselves."
His family is stunned, too
On top of their grief, Simpson's relatives are struggling to come to terms with his involvement in the attack.
"We send our prayers to everyone affected by this act of senseless violence, especially the security guard who was injured in the line of duty," Simpson's family said in a statement.
"We are sure many people in this country are curious to know if we had any idea of Elton's plans. To that we say, without question, we did not. Just like everyone in our beautiful country, we are struggling to understand how this could happen. ... We are heartbroken and in a state of deep shock as we grieve."
He and Soofi were roommates
Their neighbors in Phoenix said they had no clue about what Simpson and Soofi were plotting to do.
Ariel Whitlock was actually about to buy a car from Simpson. She was horrified to see the same black Chevrolet Cobalt, damaged from the attack, on the news.
JUST WATCHED Were Texas shooters self-radicalized? Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Were Texas shooters self-radicalized? 02:08
"I'm getting goose bumps thinking about it right now just because I wanted to buy that car," she told CNN's Kyung Lah. "On the news, I see it, it's just blown up. I'm like, 'I was going to purchase that car.' "
Whitlock said she's sickened by the possibility that, had she bought the car, the money could have gone to fund an attack.
"Maybe he's just gonna go plot something and you're giving the money to help him go plot something," she said. "It's just crazy."
NADIR SOOFI
He died near where he was born
Soofi was born in Garland and spent the first three years of his life there, his mother said, according to The Dallas Morning News
JUST WATCHED Traffic officer praised for thwarting Texas attack Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Traffic officer praised for thwarting Texas attack 02:15
"He was raised in a normal American fashion," Sharon Soofi said. "Yes, he was very politically involved with the Middle East. Just aware of what's going on. I don't know if something snapped or if Elton Simpson was just working on him."
He left behind an 8-year-old son
Sharon Soofi also said her son had an 8-year-old boy whom he adored.
"He put his son above everything," she said . "The hard thing to comprehend is why he would do this and leave an 8-year-old son behind."
He went to a prestigious private school
Soofi's father is Pakistani, and his mother is American, a source with knowledge of the family told CNN.
After his parents divorced, Soofi and his brother moved to the United States in 1998 to live with their mother and gradually lost touch with many of their friends in Pakistan , the source said.
In the 1990s, Soofi attended a prestigious private school in Islamabad.
He wasn't on the FBI's radar
Unlike Simpson, who had been convicted of a terror-related charge, Soofi was relatively unknown to federal investigators, a law enforcement official told CNN.
Authorities knew of no indication the two planned to launch Sunday's attack, another law enforcement official said.
He had asked for forgiveness
Soofi's Facebook page reveals strong opinions, but no call to violence.
But a note from four years ago shows he asked Allah for forgiveness for every sin -- both intentional and unintentional.
He was a helpful neighbor
Tim Rains remembers Soofi helping him when he had a heart condition about a year ago.
JUST WATCHED Cartoon contest organizer defends decision to hold event Replay More Videos ... MUST WATCH Cartoon contest organizer defends decision to hold event 02:07
As Rains was coming home, he collapsed on a stairwell. Soofi noticed.
"He seen all that, and he came over and offered me help," Rains said.
So how does he reconcile the notion that his neighbor also tried to shoot people in Texas?
"Oh, it's easy, everybody has a good side to them," Rains said. "If you see somebody hurting like that, you're going to help them. I think he went to Texas to shoot people for a reason." | {
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Grafana Labs Blog
Covered in this article:
Lucene Query Format Templated Queries Sawtooth-Like Graphs Incomplete data at the beginning and the end of a graph Sum function broken About one year after I created an issue at Grafana’s GitHub page, we finally have support for using Elasticsearch as a time series database! At that time, I was trying to lower the burden of adopting the open source Java performance monitoring tool stagemonitor which I’m the project lead of. | {
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Q:
Algorithm for creating fisheye effect from a normal image
I am trying to create an OpenGL fragment shader that converts a normal image to an image that contains fish eye effect. This is what i mean by fish eye affect (http://www.marcofolio.net/photoshop/create_a_fish_eye_lens_effect_in_photoshop.html).
By normal image i mean a rendered image taken from a virtual camera in a 3d interactive environment, not an image taken from a real camera, but i guess that doesnt really make much difference in terms of this problem.
Does anyone have any idea how Photoshop does it, or where i can find material that explains the algorithm?
Thanks
A:
You don't really even need a shader in this case. From the sound of things, you have your original image as a bitmap of some sort. If that's so, just use it as a texture, and attach it to a sphere.
Of course, you can use a shader (or pair of shaders, really), but unless you're going to do more than you've described, doing so won't gain you much (if anything).
| {
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BookGoodies host Deborah Carney is joined by indie author PJ Sharon to discuss why she chose to publish independently and share her tips on becoming a successfully published author. Some of the resources PJ shared are below, there are many more great tips in the podcast. | {
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// Copyright 2013 The Go Authors. All rights reserved.
// Use of this source code is governed by a BSD-style
// license that can be found in the LICENSE file.
package spdy
// headerDictionary is the dictionary sent to the zlib compressor/decompressor.
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Cite as 2014 Ark. 184
SUPREME COURT OF ARKANSAS
No. CR-13-223
ROBERT LEANDER STIGGERS Opinion Delivered April 24, 2014
APPELLANT
APPEAL FROM THE PULASKI
V. COUNTY CIRCUIT COURT, FIFTH
DIVISION
[NO. CR2003-793]
STATE OF ARKANSAS
APPELLEE HONORABLE WENDELL LEE
GRIFFEN, JUDGE
AFFIRMED.
KAREN R. BAKER, Associate Justice
On June 16, 2005, a Pulaski County jury convicted appellant, Robert Leander
Stiggers, of first-degree murder and first-degree battery. He was sentenced to forty years
imprisonment for the murder conviction and twenty years imprisonment for the battery
conviction with the sentences to run consecutively. Stiggers’s convictions and sentences
were affirmed in Stiggers v. State, CACR 05-1399 (Ark. App. May 31, 2006) (unpublished).
Stiggers’s convictions and sentences stem from a January 10, 2003 shooting that
occurred in the Hollingsworth Courts neighborhood in Little Rock. Raynaud Muldrew and
Wardell Newsome were both shot. Muldrew was found in a vehicle, and Newsome was
lying near it. Muldrew died as a result of his injuries. Despite being shot in the back of the
head, Newsome survived his injuries. Immediately after the shooting and at trial, Newsome
identified Stiggers as the shooter. The relevant facts, as recounted by the court of appeals in
Stiggers’s direct appeal are as follows:
Cite as 2014 Ark. 184
Sergeant Sidney Allen . . . discovered Wardell Newsome lying on the ground near the
vehicle. He had been shot four times in the right shoulder and once behind his right
ear. While at the scene, Newsome told Sgt. Allen that [Stiggers] was the person who
shot him.
. . . Detectives Eric Knowles and Keith Cockrell questioned Newsome about
the incident while he was undergoing treatment at UAMS. Newsome explained that
he had borrowed a friend’s car earlier in the evening and picked up Muldrew. He told
the detectives that Muldrew had purchased marijuana and then the two of them went
to a liquor store to purchase cigarettes and a couple of Swisher cigars. While there,
they saw [Stiggers] who asked for a ride to Hollingsworth Courts. [Stiggers] was
riding directly behind Newsome in the back seat of the car, and during the ride,
[Stiggers] apparently became aggressive and started yelling. Newsome stated that, at
one point, he turned around and noticed that [Stiggers] was holding a small handgun.
While following [Stiggers’s] directions into the Hollingsworth Courts neighborhood,
Newsome testified that [Stiggers] told them to “say goodnight” and “say your
prayers” because he was going to kill them. Newsome indicated that he did not think
[Stiggers] was serious because they had known each other and been friends for years.
Newsome explained that, as he pulled into an alley in the residential complex
at [Stiggers]’s request, [Stiggers] shot him behind the right ear. He pointed out that
he lost consciousness immediately, and when he regained consciousness, he noticed
Muldrew slumped over in the front passenger seat. Newsome explained that he then
crawled out of the vehicle to look for help, and a neighbor called the police.
Newsome recognized [Stiggers]’s picture in a group of photos presented by Detectives
Knowles and Cockrell, and he again identified him as the shooter.
Stiggers, CACR 05-1399, slip op. at 1.
After the court of appeals issued its mandate, on August 20, 2006, Stiggers filed his
initial Rule 37.1 petition in Pulaski County Circuit Court. After several continuances due
to issues related to Stiggers’s representation, on July 2, 2012, Stiggers filed an amended
petition and the circuit court held a hearing that same day. On November 16, 2012, the
circuit court denied Stiggers’s petition. Stiggers now brings this appeal and presents one issue
for review: the circuit court erred by denying Stiggers’s Rule 37.1 petition because Stiggers
received unconstitutional ineffective assistance of counsel when his counsel failed to interview
2
Cite as 2014 Ark. 184
and call certain witnesses.
“On appeal from a circuit court’s ruling on a petitioner’s request for Rule 37 relief, this
court will not reverse the circuit court’s decision granting or denying post-conviction relief
unless it is clearly erroneous. E.g., Prater v. State, 2012 Ark. 164, at 8, 402 S.W.3d 68, 74. A
finding is clearly erroneous when, although there is evidence to support it, the appellate court
after reviewing the entire evidence is left with the definite and firm conviction that a mistake
has been committed. Id., 402 S.W.3d at 74.” Mason v. State, 2013 Ark. 492, at 1–2, ___
S.W.3d ___, ___.
Our standard of review requires that we assess the effectiveness of counsel under the
two-prong standard set forth by the Supreme Court of the United States in Strickland v.
Washington, 466 U.S. 668 (1984). Claims of ineffective assistance of counsel are reviewed
under the following standard:
A convicted defendant’s claim that counsel’s assistance was so defective as to require
reversal of a conviction has two components. First, the defendant must show that
counsel’s performance was deficient. This requires showing that counsel made errors
so serious that counsel was not functioning as the “counsel” guaranteed the defendant
by the Sixth Amendment. Second, the defendant must show that the deficient
performance prejudiced the defense. This requires showing that counsel’s errors were
so serious as to deprive the defendant of a fair trial, a trial whose result is reliable.
Unless a defendant makes both showings, it cannot be said that the conviction resulted
from a breakdown in the adversary process that renders the result unreliable.
Burton v. State, 367 Ark. 109, 111, 238 S.W.3d 111, 113 (2006) (quoting Strickland, 466 U.S.
at 687).
The reviewing court must indulge in a strong presumption that counsel’s conduct falls
within the wide range of reasonable professional assistance. Id. The petitioner claiming
ineffective assistance of counsel has the burden of overcoming that presumption by identifying
3
Cite as 2014 Ark. 184
the acts and omissions of counsel which, when viewed from counsel’s perspective at the time
of trial, could not have been the result of reasonable professional judgment. See id. Therefore,
Stiggers must first show that counsel’s performance fell below an objective standard of
reasonableness and then that counsel’s errors actually had an adverse effect on the defense. Id.
Stiggers must satisfy both prongs of the test, and it is not necessary to determine whether
counsel was deficient if Stiggers fails to demonstrate prejudice as to an alleged error. Abernathy
v. State, 2012 Ark. 59, 386 S.W.3d 477 (per curiam).
Further, with respect to an ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claim regarding the decision
of trial counsel to call a witness, such matters are generally trial strategy and outside the
purview of Rule 37.1. Banks v. State, 2013 Ark. 147. Where a petitioner alleges ineffective
assistance of counsel concerning the failure to call witnesses, it is incumbent on the petitioner
to name the witness, provide a summary of the testimony, and establish that the testimony
would have been admissible into evidence. Moten v. State, 2013 Ark. 503 (per curiam);
Stevenson v. State, 2013 Ark. 302 (per curiam) (citing Hogan v. State, 2013 Ark. 223 (per
curiam)). In order to demonstrate prejudice, the petitioner is required to establish that there
was a reasonable probability that, had counsel performed further investigation and presented
the witness, the outcome of the trial would have been different. See Carter v. State, 2010 Ark.
231, 364 S.W.3d 46 (per curiam). Trial counsel must use his or her best judgment to
determine which witnesses will be beneficial to the client. Id. Nonetheless, such strategic
decisions must still be supported by reasonable professional judgment. Id. Finally, “[w]hen
assessing an attorney’s decision not to call a particular witness, it must be taken into account
4
Cite as 2014 Ark. 184
that the decision is largely a matter of professional judgment which experienced advocates
could endlessly debate, and the fact that there was a witness or witnesses that could have
offered testimony beneficial to the defense is not in itself proof of counsel’s ineffectiveness. Huls
v. State, [301 Ark. 572, 785 S.W.2d 467 (1990)]; Dumond v. State, 294 Ark. 379, 743 S.W.2d
779 (1988).” Johnson v. State, 325 Ark. 44, 49, 924 S.W.2d 233, 236 (1996).
We now turn to the sole issue raised by Stiggers. Stiggers’s allegation of ineffective
assistance of counsel is that his trial counsel failed to interview four potential witnesses in
preparation for Stiggers’s defense or call them as a witness at trial: Eddie Pride, Temika
Donley, Kristopher Johnson, and Damika Mitchell. Stiggers contends that these witnesses
would have supported his argument that another person, a person named “Jason,”1 was the
shooter. He further asserts that the witnesses’ testimony was admissible under hearsay
exceptions but that his trial counsel did not interview or call the witnesses at trial to determine
what exceptions applied. Stiggers asserts that the witnesses’s testimony would have impeached
the State’s witness. Finally, Stiggers asserts that he was prejudiced by his defense counsel’s
failure to call these witnesses.
Stiggers’s theory at trial was as follows: while he was purchasing drugs from the two
victims, two unnamed men came up to the vehicle and shot the victims. Stiggers testified at
trial that the two men approached the vehicle and let Stiggers run away prior to the shooting,
and that as he was running away he heard the gunshots. In sum, Stiggers’s theory of the case
was that someone else was the shooter.
1
The record does not reflect Jason’s last name.
5
Cite as 2014 Ark. 184
Prior to trial, on April 8, 2005, the circuit court conducted a pretrial hearing. The State
made a Zinger motion to prohibit Stiggers from eliciting testimony from witnesses regarding
“Jason” because the testimony was inadmissible hearsay.2 The circuit court granted the
motion. Stiggers acquiesced to the circuit court’s ruling and agreed that the “Jason” testimony
was hearsay, but explained that there could be a chain of events in the testimony where
Stiggers could elicit such testimony. Stiggers complied with the circuit court’s ruling but
reserved the right to approach the bench if such circumstances arose. At trial, defense counsel
did not call Pride, Mitchell, Donley, or Johnson as witnesses.
In his petition, Stiggers asserted that counsel was ineffective for not interviewing or
calling the four witnesses, three of which he alleges would have provided “Jason” testimony.
2
A Zinger motion refers to Zinger v. State, 313 Ark. 70, 75–76, 852 S.W.2d 320, 323
(1993), where we held that the standard for admissibility of evidence tending to incriminate
other persons in the crime being charged is as follows:
A defendant may introduce evidence tending to show that someone other than the
defendant committed the crime charged, but such evidence is inadmissible unless it
points directly to the guilt of the third party. Evidence which does no more than create
an inference or conjecture as to another’s guilt is inadmissible.
[T]he rule does not require that any evidence, however remote, must be admitted to
show a third party’s possible culpability . . . . [E]vidence of mere motive or
opportunity to commit the crime in another person, without more, will not suffice to
raise a reasonable doubt about a defendant’s guilt: there must be direct or
circumstantial evidence linking the third person to the actual perpetration of the crime.
Id. (quoting State v. Wilson, 367 S.E.2d 589 (N.C. 1988) and People v. Kaurish, 802 P.2d 278
(Cal. 1990)).
6
Cite as 2014 Ark. 184
At the postconviction hearing, Stiggers introduced statements from two of the “Jason”
witnesses: Donley and Johnson. The third “Jason” witness, Pride, also provided a statement;
however, the circuit court did not accept Pride’s statement because Pride was not known at
trial, there was no statement in the case file, and Pride had not testified at a previous hearing.
Stiggers did not introduce a statement from Mitchell. At the Rule 37 hearing, defense counsel
testified that he did not recall interviewing the four witnesses and did not call them as
witnesses.
Stiggers first asserts that Eddie Pride would have testified that Newsome told Pride that
Stiggers was not the shooter but that it was “Jason.” Second, Stiggers asserts that Donley,
Muldrew’s girlfriend, would have testified that Muldrew told her that “Jason” had threatened
to kill Muldrew, Muldrew’s child, and the child’s mother. Third, Stiggers asserts that Johnson
would have testified that “Jason” had threatened to kill Muldrew. He contends that Johnson
would have testified that he overheard Muldrew on the phone with “Jason” four or five days
before the shooting, and heard “Jason” discussing a “bad drug deal” or “theft of drugs”
involving “Jason’s” drugs, and threatening to kill Muldrew and others. Fourth, Stiggers
contends that Mitchell would have testified that she saw both victims prior to the shooting and
that the vehicle’s lights were off, which was contrary to the State’s witness’s testimony.
First, with regard to Pride, although Stiggers testified that he informed his counsel about
Pride, defense counsel testified that prior to trial he had likely heard Pride’s name, but did not
recall knowledge of Pride’s allegations that Newsome had told Pride that Stiggers was not the
shooter. Defense counsel further testified that,
7
Cite as 2014 Ark. 184
that certainly would have been something . . . very important. . . . I don’t recall that
ever being told to me. If I had been given that information, that would certainly would
have been the diligent thing to do, to look for Mr. Pride. I would say if I had recognized
that there was possibly a prior statement out there saying that someone else had done it
coming from a living witness, I would have absolutely asked him about it.
With regard to Donley and Johnson, defense counsel testified that after reviewing
Donley and Johnson’s police statements in the file, he considered both witnesses’s testimony to
be in the group of people he categorized as Zinger witnesses and concluded that their testimony
would have been inadmissible hearsay. Defense counsel said “My analysis was that it didn’t
come in because of Zinger and there were hearsay issues obviously, but beyond that, even
beyond the hearsay, the Zinger issue kept it out.”
Finally, with regard to Mitchell’s testimony, defense counsel testified that although he
could “see there was some argument” that Mitchell’s testimony regarding the lights in the car
being off at the time of the shooting would have helped Stiggers, he did not recall interviewing
Mitchell or making a strategic decision to not interview her. Defense counsel testified that he
cross-examined every witness that came near the vehicle regarding the facets of the vehicle,
including the surviving witness, Newsome. Defense counsel further testified that there “was
a huge amount of discrepancies” in the testimony from witnesses regarding whether the lights
were on or off and that he cross-examined every witness.
Here, Stiggers fails to substantiate his claim that counsel was ineffective based on the
failure to interview or call the “Jason” witnesses. Stiggers has failed to meet his burden under
the first prong of Strickland because he has not demonstrated that his counsel’s performance fell
below an objective standard of reasonableness. Additionally, Stiggers has failed to demonstrate
8
Cite as 2014 Ark. 184
that the “Jason” testimony would have been admissible hearsay and makes conclusory
allegations that it may have fit under an exception to hearsay. Further, the record supports that
defense counsel’s decision to not interview or call the witnesses was based on reasonable
professional judgment. The testimony was inadmissible pursuant to Zinger, as it did no more
than create an inference or conjecture as to “Jason’s” involvement, the testimony was hearsay,
and Stiggers failed to demonstrate that it was admissible. Nor has Stiggers met the second prong
under Strickland because he has failed to demonstrate that he was prejudiced by defense counsel’s
failure to interview the witnesses. Stiggers must do more than allege prejudice; he must
demonstrate it with facts. Walton v. State, 2013 Ark. 254 (per curiam). Here, Stiggers provides
no evidence that he suffered any prejudice as a result of counsel’s failure to call the “Jason”
witnesses. We find no merit in Stiggers’s claim regarding Pride, Donley, or Johnson.
Finally, with regard to Mitchell’s testimony, as discussed above, our law requires that
Stiggers name the witness, provide a summary of the testimony, and establish that the testimony
would have been admissible into evidence. Moten v. State, supra. The objective in reviewing
an assertion of ineffective assistance of counsel concerning the failure to call certain witnesses
is to determine whether this failure resulted in actual prejudice that denied the petitioner a fair
trial. Woody v. State, 2009 Ark. 413 (per curiam). In order to demonstrate prejudice, Stiggers
must establish that there was a reasonable probability that, had counsel performed further
investigation and presented the witness, the outcome of the trial would have been different. Id.
While Stiggers claims that Mitchell’s testimony regarding the vehicle would have
discredited Newsome’s testimony, defense counsel testified that he cross-examined every
9
Cite as 2014 Ark. 184
witness that came into contact with the vehicle. Based on the record, we are not persuaded that
had defense counsel interviewed and called Mitchell as a witness regarding the lights of the car,
the outcome of the trial would have been different.
Stiggers simply did not provide any support for his conclusory claims that counsel was
ineffective and made no showing that counsel committed any specific error that prejudiced the
defense. See Johnson v. State, 325 Ark. 44, 49, 924 S.W.2d 233, 236 (1996) (“[T]he fact that
there was a witness or witnesses that could have offered testimony beneficial to the defense is
not in itself proof of counsel’s ineffectiveness.”). In reviewing the record before us, we
conclude that Stiggers has not met his burden.
Based on the discussion above, we do not find that the circuit court erred.
Affirmed.
Ronald L. Davis, Jr. Law Firm, PLLC, by: Ronald L. Davis, Jr., for appellant.
Dustin McDaniel, Att’y Gen., by: Nicana C. Sherman, Ass’t Att’y Gen., for appellee.
10
| {
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Instructions: You have ten minutes to answer the following questions. Use Google and/or Ask.com to search for the answers to the following questions. Use the stopwatch to keep track of your time. Once you have finished, you may compare your responses with the answer key.
Define garrulous.
Who stated that The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do?
Where is Mosi-oa-Tunya located?
What is 4 to the 5th power?
What does PDF stand for?
After a gigabyte comes...
What does the word modem abbreviate?
Who averaged one patent for every three weeks of his life?
What portable device did James Spengler invent in 1907, using a soapbox, pillow case, a fan, and tape? | {
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} |
Hey folks - I tried to search the forums for help but didn't really find what I needed, so I apologize if this is a newbie duplication of an existing discussion.
I have a Breville Cafe Roma machine where I have swapped out the original pressurized filter basket for a non-pressurized Krups one, and I use a Baratza Virtuoso Preciso grinder.
My issue is this:Should there be grinds in the bottom of my espresso cup? I think I had some using the pressurized basket but maybe just a few fines, but this looks a bit excessive to me. There are some good-sized particles on the side of the cup and in the bottom, plus some fine dust-sized particles on the side of the cup. Shouldn't the filter basket be filtering the non-dust particles?
I am still experimenting with my grinder settings, but for those familiar with this, I am adjusting the macro usually around 11-13. Mark Prince's review recommends 11 for espresso and 12 for pressurized filter espresso. I have been trying coarser as it seems like my shots are running slow (like 28-30s for 2oz)
Here is a picture of the bottom of my cup after finishing my drink. Please advise - thanks in advance!
Doesn't look very appealing. Did you have some leakage at the top of the PF (ie, it wasn't screwed in tight enough)? If not, the fault is probably your filter basket - take a good look at it through light - are there excessively large holes along with smaller ones?
I do see minor (very minor) grounds in the bottom of many of my shots, but not this much.
To many fines/grounds left in the cup. Solution...follow Mark's advise for checking the pf and basket. If you don't see anything wrong there, double check your volume and extraction times...you should be pulling a 2 oz double in 25-27 seconds. If you're good on extraction time and volume...coursen the grind and increase the dose until you have minimized the appearance of fines in the bottom of the cup. Given your equipment, you probably won't be able to completely eliminate the appearance of fines...but you should be able to minimize them. Coursening the grind and increasing the dose should balance extraction time and volume while reducing fines. Since you're working with a step grinder...coursen the grind by one step and increase the dose by 1 g...pull a shot. If that shot runs 30 sec...coursen the grind one more step, but don't change the dose...pull another shot. If the shot runs like 35 sec, you might coursen the grind by two steps and leave the dose the same. I would continue this process checking shot time, volume, and the amount of fines left in the cup until you've minimized the fines. If you get back to the 2 oz in 25-27 sec mark and you still aren't happy with the amount of fines in the cup...increase the dose by another gram and start over with your grinder adjustments. I don't know for sure...but I would guess your max dose is probably somewhere between 17-19 grams...chances are, once you get to a dose of 19 g with a 2 oz extraction in 25-27 sec...whatever is left in the cup is probably as good as you're gonna get without upgrading equipment...particularly the grinder.
So to start here is what my filter basket looks like. (see first photo)
When held up to the light, it looks like all the holes are the same size. I think the photo amplifies the size of the holes, but they do look bigger than those on the original (pressurized) filter basket that came with the machine. (see second photo)
What do you think? Could it simply be that the Krups filter basket is letting them pass through?
With regards to the possibility of leaking around the portafilter, I have it locked into the machine pretty good and there is no signs of any liquid coming around and onto the sides.
It does look like the original basket has much smaller holes, which would make sense. I think you're using a pod basket. Larger holes, with the machine pressure ramped up into the 12 bar range to be pod compliant, you'll push loose grounds through. If you have access to a dremel tool, cut out the bottom layer of the original basket, leaving enough metal at the edges to support the inner layer. You'll most likely eliminate most of the grounds in the cup that way.Don't know the size of your p/f, but check into the Mr. Coffee double baskets, they're about 51 MM I think, and may fit your p/f.
I guess some others have found that the holes in this basket were too big for properly finely ground coffee. I notice that Breville USA (but not Canada) lists single wall / non pressurized filters on their website so I may look into these before I look for someone to drill my current basket
Well, to wrap this up, I managed to get a hold of the official Breville single wall filter baskets - got them from a local appliance shop in Chinatown for $20. The holes are definitely smaller than the Krups basket I had, and of the same size as the original Breville pressurized filters.
On my first attempt with these, I note that the leaking coffee grounds problem looks to be solved - excellent. I think that these filters will provide a great benefit over even that non-pressurized Krups one...
The grind setting I was using on my PReciso with the Krups basket to get a 25sec 2oz shot (with lots of leaking grinds) is a few clicks coarser than the suggested espresso setting. Keeping this setting, I just ran my first double shot with the Breville basket....and it blew through in 10 sec, hahaha. I think this is great because it must suggest that the Krups basket somehow by virtue of its tapered shape must have been providing some extra pressurizing. Now I can learn to improve my shot more without the influence of the basket adding pressure.
Here are the new baskets next to the old Krups one....an identical result to chopping off the bottom of a dual-wall filter for those of us without the skill or machine access to do so.
When you suggest upgrading his grinder as a posible solution, it implies that you find the Baratza Precisio to be substandard. According to all the reviews I have read, the Precisio is generally regarded as a fine espresso grinder.
I'm admittedly a newbie at this, but I like my Precisio better than the Rocky and I find little or no difference between the grind of the Precisio and my MACAP M4. If you find the Precisio to be substandard what about it is it that you do not like?
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Hollym Gate railway station
Hollym Gate railway station is a disused railway station on the North Eastern Railway's Hull and Holderness Railway to the west of Hollym, East Riding of Yorkshire, England. It was opened in 1855. The station was closed to passengers on 1 September 1870.
References
Category:Disused railway stations in the East Riding of Yorkshire
Category:Railway stations opened in 1855
Category:Railway stations closed in 1870
Category:Former North Eastern Railway (UK) stations
Category:Hull and Holderness Railway | {
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When you talk to animal lovers, zoos can be a controversial topic.
Some see zoos as a place of education that allows the general public to encounter some of the most wondrous species in the world.
But others see zoos as unnatural and intrinsically cruel to the animals trapped behind the bars.
This debate extends to the topic of conservation. Many people assert that zoos are helping the ecosystem by saving species threatened by extinction.
The basic idea is that if a species is struggling in the wild, it can be protected in zoos. Breeding can be encouraged in a safe environment, and the public can be educated about the dangers the species is facing.
Zoos have some track records of success. When the California condor was down to fewer than 30 birds, all remaining birds were placed in zoos. Through a captive breeding program, the species was restored and reintroduced into the wild.
But some people are skeptical of this model.
PETA asserts that “most animals” in zoos are not truly endangered and that the motivations of the zoos are not necessarily aligned with true conservation.
“Zoos aren’t breeding animals with the intent of replenishing threatened populations,” PETA says. “Babies bring visitors through the gates, and captive breeding gives the public a false sense of security about a species’ survival. But that belief undermines support for and diverts resources from in-situ conservation efforts.”
But not everything zoos do is necessarily within the walls of the zoo itself.
The Association of Zoos and Aquariums tout its SAFE program that leverages zoo audiences to raise awareness for endangered animals. While SAFE does coordinate the placement of endangered animals within zoos, it also devotes resources to the field. It aims to rehabilitate animals in their natural habit and create a rebuilding strategy for the species.
One example of SAFE making a difference is with the African penguin.
“One year after its successful Kickstarter campaign to design, build, and test artificial nests for African penguins, the team has reported great success in developing the first artificial nest that mimics the biological parameters of natural nests almost perfectly, and the penguins have responded positively,” according to a SAFE report. “Two hundred artificial nests were installed and monitored at two penguin colonies in 2018 and nearly all (96 percent) were occupied at some point during the year.”
Although some people accuse zoos of paying lip service to education while not really providing any educational value, across numerous endangered species, such as the American red wolf, it seems like a solid effort is being made by SAFE-affiliated zoos.
“The American red wolf SAFE program was started with the hope of increasing awareness for this critically endangered native species,” Chris Lasher, North Carolina Zoo animal management supervisor, said in the SAFE report. “After less than a year, the American red wolf is seeing the advantages of being an AZA SAFE program with the increased exposure of the wolves’ story to a wider audience.”
There are some other fears about using zoos to rehabilitate species. Inbreeding within zoos can change the genetic makeup of species, making it harder to reintroduce them into the wild. Animals can also contact fungi and bacteria in zoos that may not be found in their native habitat, which poses a risk to their wild ecosystem.
Ultimately, the ideal place for conservation is a species’ natural habitat. But if there is not enough habitat remaining — or circumstances are extremely dire — then placement in zoos can be a last-ditch effort to save the species. In addition, zoos can help endangered species by deploying their expertise, education and other resources to help wildlife in the field.
Zoos definitely have a place in the conservation process. But it should continue to be a larger strategy than just putting endangered species behind bars.
This May, Care2 is launching a campaign to protect endangered species. Join us to save these real-life fantastic beasts!
This article was first published by Care2.com on 7 May 2019. Lead Omage Source: Ring-tailed Lemurs are very common in zoos but critically endangered in the wild Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo | {
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**3 - 9195*r**2 - 3488*r?
408593388
Find the first derivative of 195051664*p**3 - 124954135.
585154992*p**2
What is the second derivative of 281292271*w**5 - 510*w - 780413 wrt w?
5625845420*w**3
What is the derivative of -63687318*u**3 + 562473557?
-191061954*u**2
What is the derivative of -95214738*c**2 + 8731439 wrt c?
-190429476*c
Find the second derivative of 3*x**3 + 9991986*x**2 + 30338174*x - 3 wrt x.
18*x + 19983972
Find the first derivative of 679*j**4 - 57858*j**3*k**2 + 165273892*k**2 + 3 wrt j.
2716*j**3 - 173574*j**2*k**2
Find the second derivative of 10468559*h**2 + 168384*h - 5.
20937118
Differentiate 121897106*d**2 + 99133476 with respect to d.
243794212*d
What is the second derivative of 1075406*l**3 + 170*l**2 - 2*l - 75651793 wrt l?
6452436*l + 340
What is the first derivative of -4*w**4 - 959839*w**3 + 16794031?
-16*w**3 - 2879517*w**2
Differentiate -34021230*q**4 + 15656616 wrt q.
-136084920*q**3
Find the third derivative of 12960721*n**3 - 5*n**2 + 21318*n + 13.
77764326
Find the third derivative of 59*o**5 - 102*o**4 + 9313*o**3 - 1534781920*o**2.
3540*o**2 - 2448*o + 55878
Differentiate -4179768*m**2*r + 3536405*m**2 wrt r.
-4179768*m**2
What is the second derivative of 56429776*m**5 - 50807987*m?
1128595520*m**3
What is the second derivative of -42150590*k**2 - 50925534*k?
-84301180
What is the third derivative of -13811*x*y**3 + 1692699*x*y**2*z + x*y**2 - 3*x*y*z - 136*y**4*z + 3*y**4 wrt y?
-82866*x - 3264*y*z + 72*y
What is the first derivative of -7225239*x + 8460038?
-7225239
Find the first derivative of 72912*j**2 + 831*j + 166853546.
145824*j + 831
What is the third derivative of 204*q**5 + 31445*q**4 + 2*q**3 + 14*q**2 + 76535*q - 9 wrt q?
12240*q**2 + 754680*q + 12
What is the derivative of 3651*p*w**2 + 519*p*w + p + 54253350*w**2 wrt p?
3651*w**2 + 519*w + 1
Find the second derivative of -91419126*m**2 - 162128943*m.
-182838252
Find the third derivative of 5*l*u*y**3 + l*u*y - 5*l*y**2 - 4621073*u*y**3 - 1755838*u*y**2 + u wrt y.
30*l*u - 27726438*u
Find the third derivative of 317297018*s**3 + 3136*s**2 - 30884*s wrt s.
1903782108
What is the third derivative of -16525*f*r**3 + 20*f*r + 356*r**3 + 1425730*r**2 wrt r?
-99150*f + 2136
What is the second derivative of 199836725*j**2 - 443399*j - 462 wrt j?
399673450
What is the derivative of -27*n**2 + 4783*n - 4781175 wrt n?
-54*n + 4783
What is the second derivative of 1993362*q**3 - 10453532*q?
11960172*q
What is the second derivative of 524854*c**3 + 3*c**2 + 98540997*c wrt c?
3149124*c + 6
Differentiate 1267*c**3*z - 167*c**3 - 6*c**2 - 4258*c*z**2 + 1020*c - 10 wrt z.
1267*c**3 - 8516*c*z
Find the second derivative of 535216*z**3 - 1981773*z.
3211296*z
What is the second derivative of 21203910*g**3 - 25824828*g wrt g?
127223460*g
What is the derivative of 132420*v**2 + 340*v - 26946351 wrt v?
264840*v + 340
What is the third derivative of -21436773*a**4*d + 357*a**2*d + 32*a*d + 2*a - 4*d wrt a?
-514482552*a*d
Find the third derivative of 3*f**5 + 380905960*f**4 + 13961*f**2 - 24*f - 149 wrt f.
180*f**2 + 9141743040*f
Find the third derivative of 5429*s**3*v**3 - 8*s**3*v**2 - 29*s**3 + 1153327*s**2 - 3*s*v**3 wrt s.
32574*v**3 - 48*v**2 - 174
Find the second derivative of -5*i**3*r**2 - 6*i**3*r*s + 7*i**3*r + 12088*i**2*r*s**3 - 14*i**2*r*s + 14374211*r**2*s**3 wrt r.
-10*i**3 + 28748422*s**3
What is the third derivative of 1520*g*p**2*u**3 - 24699*g*p**2*u**2 + 48*g*p**2 - 3*g*p*u**3 + 3*g*p*u**2 + 2*g*p + 38*u**3 wrt u?
9120*g*p**2 - 18*g*p + 228
Find the first derivative of -18988930*r + 32974737.
-18988930
What is the third derivative of -22*i**3*t + 2459236*i**3 - i**2*t + i**2 - 11059*i*t + 232*i - 2 wrt i?
-132*t + 14755416
What is the third derivative of 50193250*r**6 + 30912657*r**2?
6023190000*r**3
Find the third derivative of -4941*o**6 - 660*o**3 + 5848*o**2 - 357*o.
-592920*o**3 - 3960
What is the derivative of 9*r**4 + r**3 + 140062*r**2 + 237521658 wrt r?
36*r**3 + 3*r**2 + 280124*r
Find the first derivative of 838488*h*j - 7*h - 2841182*j + 2 wrt h.
838488*j - 7
Differentiate 1899*a*w - 21664971*a + 16911*w wrt w.
1899*a + 16911
Differentiate 1211*c*o**2 - 33*c*o - 10897*c + 90*o**2 + 151 wrt o.
2422*c*o - 33*c + 180*o
Differentiate 25*d*f**3 + 3*d*f**2 + 4*d*f - 28366*d - 774546644*f**3 with respect to d.
25*f**3 + 3*f**2 + 4*f - 28366
Find the second derivative of 56600901*q**2 - 18570*q - 1258.
113201802
Find the third derivative of -11*b*h**3*x + 377*b*h**3 - 8*b*h**2*x - 2479*b*h*x + 6*b*h - 25*h**3*x - 6*h**3 + 8*h**2 + 3*h wrt h.
-66*b*x + 2262*b - 150*x - 36
Find the third derivative of 15674662*t**3 - 4*t**2 + 21092*t - 4 wrt t.
94047972
Find the second derivative of -3*k**2*m**2*u + 1990961*k**2*u**3 - 4004*k*m**2*u**3 - 555*k*m*u - 26*m**2*u - m*u**3 wrt k.
-6*m**2*u + 3981922*u**3
What is the second derivative of -719466*c**5*o**2 - 57*c**2 + c*o**2 - 77*c + 38*o**2 + 2289*o wrt c?
-14389320*c**3*o**2 - 114
Find the second derivative of 3*v*w**2*y - 5633*v*w**2 - 10*v*w*y**2 - v*w*y - 54*v + 1345*w**2*y**2 + 6*w*y**2 - 41*y**2 wrt w.
6*v*y - 11266*v + 2690*y**2
Find the second derivative of -47*o**5 + 444981*o**4 - 6379*o + 1960 wrt o.
-940*o**3 + 5339772*o**2
Differentiate -32*u**2 + 186910*u + 24567638.
-64*u + 186910
Find the third derivative of 396812251*i**3 + 2*i**2 + 195091372.
2380873506
Find the second derivative of 10751*p**2*r**2*s - 14*p**2*r**2 - 60*p**2*r*s - 10*p**2 - 4*r**2*s - 18*r + 63*s wrt r.
21502*p**2*s - 28*p**2 - 8*s
Find the third derivative of -5593829*c*g**3 - 31*c*g**2 + 1199*c*g + 2*c - 16*g**4 + 46*g**2 - g + 2 wrt g.
-33562974*c - 384*g
Find the third derivative of 10398471*w**3*z**2 + 3*w**2*z**2 - w**2*z - 4*w*z**2 + 65*w*z + 354*z**2 wrt w.
62390826*z**2
What is the third derivative of -5*f**3*l**2 - 5083*f**3*l + 2*f**3 + 5208*f**2*l + 15*l**2 wrt f?
-30*l**2 - 30498*l + 12
What is the third derivative of 2*l**6 - 725*l**4 - 846*l**3 + l**2 - 23222414*l?
240*l**3 - 17400*l - 5076
What is the first derivative of -459*r**3 - 32*r**2 + 464*r*s - 13098*s + 3350 wrt r?
-1377*r**2 - 64*r + 464*s
Find the second derivative of -2905481*c**3*l**3 - c**2*l**2 + c*l**3 - 1081*c*l - 441 wrt c.
-17432886*c*l**3 - 2*l**2
Find the second derivative of 813326*f**2*n**3 - 27*f**2*n**2 - 2*f*n**3 - 3*f*n - n**2 - 18521*n - 6 wrt f.
1626652*n**3 - 54*n**2
What is the third derivative of 1412903*f**3*j**4 - 6455*f**3*j**2 + 9*f**3*j - 4*f*j**2 + 1 wrt j?
33909672*f**3*j
Find the third derivative of 47282812*o**6 + 3296*o**2 - 27*o + 41 wrt o.
5673937440*o**3
What is the third derivative of 6093642*b**3 - 3*b**2 - 348915*b?
36561852
Find the first derivative of -10870*n**3 - 1548*n - 144433751.
-32610*n**2 - 1548
Find the third derivative of -150046342*o**3*p*y**2 + 3*o**2*p*y**2 - 9*o**2*p + 2*o**2*y**2 + 2*o**2*y - 31*o*y**2 + p*y - 928 wrt o.
-900278052*p*y**2
Find the third derivative of -482663181*n**3*p*t**3 + 5*n**3*p*t**2 - 25*n**3*p*t - p*t - 63*p - 61 wrt t.
-2895979086*n**3*p
What is the second derivative of 15*i**3*v - 24*i**3 - 3365*i**2*v - 2*i**2 - 457839*i*v + 2*i + 2*v - 1 wrt i?
90*i*v - 144*i - 6730*v - 4
What is the third derivative of 4*k**6 - 15268646*k**5 + k**2 + 73474927*k?
480*k**3 - 916118760*k**2
Find the third derivative of -2*w**3*z**3 - 1387*w**3*z + 19*w**3 + 220370*w**2*z**3 - w*z**3 - 4*z**2 wrt z.
-12*w**3 + 1322220*w**2 - 6*w
What is the first derivative of -2677*m**2 - 27885*m - 97338546 wrt m?
-5354*m - 27885
What is the derivative of -h**3 - 30162*h**2 + 324*h - 43626211?
-3*h**2 - 60324*h + 324
What is the second derivative of 516419542*r*w**2 + 5*r*w + 461*r + 24094 wrt w?
1032839084*r
Find the first derivative of 2187*c*y**2 + 40*c*y + c + 12087*y**2 + 2*y - 148 wrt c.
2187*y**2 + 40*y + 1
What is the second derivative of -64770145*y**4 - 3748266*y wrt y?
-777241740*y**2
What is the derivative of 115*x**2 - 111940*x + 5014562?
230*x - 111940
Differentiate 14328210*n - 26988131 wrt n.
14328210
Find the third derivative of -2*c**4 + 18466594*c**3 - 2883*c**2 - 32*c - 2.
-48*c + 110799564
Find the third derivative of 6591814*u**3 + 64072*u**2 + 80*u wrt u.
39550884
What is the third derivative of 19416609*r**4 + 5440919*r**2?
465998616*r
What is the second derivativ | {
"pile_set_name": "DM Mathematics"
} |
Top 15 Generous Billionaires in the World
As the co-founder and ECO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg is one of the youngest self-made billionaires in the world. He is the member of the Giving Pledge, promising to donate at least half of his fortune. In the fight against Ebola in 2014, Zuckerberg donated $25 million alongside his wife Priscilla. He also endowed $75 million to San Francisco General Hospital through the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. According to Wealth-X, his net worth is $ 40.7 billion, and his lifetime donations are $1.6 billion.
#14 Li Ka-shing - Generosity Index: 5%
Li Ka-shing is a Chinese investor and one of the richest men in Asia. He established the Li Ka-shing Foundation in 1980 to donate to culture, healthcare, education and community-related causes. The Foundation supports the establishment of the only privately funded public university in China, Shantou University. He is also a supporter of many US universities, including Stanford University, UC Berkeley and University of California. Mr. Li’s net worth is $26.6%, and his lifetime donations are $1.4 billion.
#13 Michael Bloomberg - Generosity Index: 8%
Michael Bloomberg is an American businessman, who is the founder and CEO of Bloomberg media company. He established Bloomberg Philanthropies in 2006, which gives support to causes like environmental preservation, healthcare and education. He further launched a program through Bloomberg Philanthropies named “What Works Cities” in 2015, which is designed to help 100 mid-sized American cities enhance their use of data and evidence to improve people’s lives. Bloomberg’s net worth is $37.7 and his lifetime donations are $3 billion.
#12 Paul Allen - Generosity Index: 12%
Paul Allen is an American business mogul. He’s the co-founder of Microsoft, and the founder and chairman of Vulcan Inc. As the current chairman of the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, he supports a range of global-health causes, including Seattle BioMed, Alzheimer’s research, and Global FinPrint, which is a project working on the preservation of sharks. Paul Allen’s net worth is $17.3 billion, and his lifetime donations are $2 billion.
#11 Pierre Omidyar - Generosity Index: 16%
Pierre Omidyar is an Iranian-American businessman. He is the founder of eBay, serving as its Chairman since 1998. In 1998, Pierre established the Omidyar Foundation alongside his wife Pamela. The Foundation is made up of Ulupono Initiative, Hopelab, Humanity United and Omidyar Network, and it donates to various causes like human rights, entrepreneurship, games and technology, and food and energy. In 2012, Pierre Omidyar and his wife became member of the Giving Pledge, promising to endow most of their fortune. His net worth is $6.2 billion, and his lifetime donations are $1 billion.
#10 Bill Gates - Generosity Index: 32%
Bill Gates is best known as the the co-founder of Microsoft Corporation, however, he is now focusing on charity work. He and his wife started the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which donates to worldwide programs and initiatives ranging from education, urban poverty, global health, emergency relief to agricultural development. Bill Gates’s net worth is $84.2 billion, and his lifetime donations are $27 billion.
#9 George Soros - Generosity Index: 33%
George Soros is a Hungarian-American investor. He establishes the Soros Fund Management. After retiring from SFM, George is now the chairman of Open Society Foundations, which donate to education, health, social services, community development and international causes. Soros also pledged an endowment of €420 million to the Central European University. His net worth is $24.4 billion and his lifetime donations are $8 billion.
#8 Warren Buffett - Generosity Index: 35%
Warren Buffett is an American business tycoon. As the Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett is wealthy and philanthropic. He promised to donate 85% of his fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as other charitable foundations, in 2006. And in 2009, Buffett together with Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates founded The Giving Pledge, whereby billionaires pledge to donate half of their wealth at least. His net worth is $61 billion, and his lifetime donations are $21.5 billion.
#7 Eli Broad - Generosity Index: 45%
Eli Broad is an American entrepreneur. He’s the founder of KB Home and SunAmerica, which are both Fortune 500 companies. Broad established The Broad Foundation, focusing on arts, science and public education. His net worth is $7.3 billion, and his lifetime donations are $3.3 billion.
#6 Azim Premji - Generosity Index: 50%
Azim Premji is an Indian business magnate. He’s the chairman of Wipro Limited, a consulting and IT company. He starts the Azim Premji Foundation to improve India’s school and examination systems. The foundation also works on other educational causes, including computer training and teacher training. Premji’s net worth is $15.9 billion, and his lifetime donations are $8 billion.
#5 Ted Turner - Generosity Index: 57%
Ted Turner is an American media mogul. He’s the founder of Cable News Network (CNN) and vice chairman of AOL Time Warner. Turner runs his philanthropy work through Turner Global Foundation and Turner Foundation, which both invest in wildlife conservation, environmental conservation and community development. He also donate to the UN Foundation, promoting its charity causes on children’s health, world peace, women and population. His net worth is $2.1 billion and his lifetime donations are $1.2 billion.
#4 Gordon Moore - Generosity Index: 77%
Gordon Moore is the co-founder and emeritus chairman of Intel Corporation. He retired from his position in 2006 and then established the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation with his wife. The foundation covers a variety of fields, including environmental conservation, science, the San Francisco community and patient care. Moore’s net worth is $6.5 billion, and his lifetime donations are $5 billion.
#3 Jon Huntsman Sr. - Generosity Index: 128%
Jon Huntsman Sr. is an American businessman. He’s the executive chairman and founder of Huntsman Corporation, a global manufacturer of specialty chemicals. Huntsman devotes most of his charitable donations to cancer-research centres and colleges, because he himself has reportedly survived mouth cancer. He and his wife are also members of Giving Pledge, intending to give away 50% of their fortune. Huntsman’s lifetime donations are $1.2 billion and his net worth is $940 million.
#2 Sulaiman bin Abdul Aziz Al Rajhi - Generosity Index: 966%
Sulaiman bin Abdul Aziz Al Rajhi is the co-founder of Al Rajhi Bank, which is now one of the largest Islamic banks around the world. Sulaiman has devoted into charity work since 2013, supporting health, religious, educational and other social causes. The net worth of Sulaiman is $590 million, and his lifetime donations are $5.7 billion.
#1 Charles Francis Chuck Feeney - Generosity Index: 420,000%
Chuck Feeney is an Irish-American retail tycoon, who started a business pioneering the industry of duty-free shopping. It seems that Feeney’s life mission is to share his wealth. Frugality is the keyword of his life: living in a rented apartment, flying economy-class, not owning any real estate. Feeney’s net worth is $1.5 million while his lifetime donations are $6.3 billion. | {
"pile_set_name": "Pile-CC"
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Giving great oral sex is often a source of trepidation for men, but the payoff is well worth it. Many women achieve orgasm more consistently with oral sex than genital intercourse. Oral Sex She'll Never Forget goes beyond “Oral Sex ” to give men creative step-by-step oral sex routines that wil. Hotter oral sex is right at your fingertips. While other books require you to learn an entire approach or set up a whole scenario, The Oral Sex Deck has a pick-up- and-play approach. Simply pull a card, learn a great technique quickly, and use it on your partner tonight for mind-blowing pleasure. Illustrated with sexy. 22 feb 6 Moves For Better Sex | Class FitSugar - Duration: POPSUGAR Fitness , views · Hur vet jag om jag har PCOS? - Nyhetsmorgon (TV4) - Duration: Nyhetsmorgon 6, views · · Q:Convincing his wife to let him give her oral - Duration: Dana has 99 opinions 1, views. SEK Inrikes enhetsfrakt Sverige: 45 SEK In Stock. 1 dagar sedan. ISBN: ; Titel: Oral sex shell never forget - 50 positions and techniques that will make he; Författare: Borg, Sonia; Utgivningsdatum: ; Språk: English. Male daughters, female husbands - gender and sex in an african society. 19 aug (Written , March 25 till August 19) * hey Babe, don´t you give me that Oral Sex Look hey Babe, I can read you like an open book you never realized how big a toll it took. I should have known from start that you were nothing but a schmook. I wish that for just once. I could get off your hook. I´m doin´ all of. No matter who is going down on whom, the goal is to make oral sex feel as good possible. Here are some tips to make that happen.
I have to give a shout out to all my sisters in Christ out there who really aren't sure how to give great oral sex, but really want to! You are not alone. We need to do away with this crazy assumption that a wife will automatically know how to make oral sex an incredible experience for her guy. No one becomes an expert without a little trial and error, and this is as true with oral sex as it is with anything else. It's like cooking an incredible meal -- even if you follow a recipe, along the way you learn how to add your own nuances and adjustments to make him crave it even more.
Explore Texas Teacher, High School Girls, and more! how to perform oral sexually Oral sex, sometimes referred to as oral couples may perform oral sex as their that oral sex is commonly practiced by sexually active male. Here's everything you ever wanted to know about oral sex including getting him to return the favor.
Muntlig kön är en av de många typerna av kön där en partner använder hisher- läppar, mun och anda för att stimulera könsorganen hos den andra. Även om det kan vara roligt, är några av dess hälsorisker. A Texas high school math teacher has been arrested over claims she performed oral sex on a young teen in her classroom. Corrie Anne Long, 43, is accused of abus. Ok so I've seen this pinned several times now. Has no one realized it's grammatically incorrect? Shouldn't it say "When a womAn " Or am I just being dumb? How To Get Whiter Teeth Naturally · WatchesArbetsrumVärlden. How To Get Whiter Teeth Naturally. Det här enkla tricket kommer hjälpa dig rensa din garderob.
Can someone be infected with a sexually transmitted infection STI from oral sex? Many STIs, including chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis, can be spread through oral sex.
Giving great oral sex is often a source of trepidation for men, but the payoff is well worth it. Many women achieve orgasm more consistently with oral sex than genital intercourse. Oral Sex She'll Never Forget goes beyond “Oral Sex ” to give men creative step-by-step oral sex routines that wil. Ok so I've seen this pinned several times now. Has no one realized it's grammatically incorrect? Shouldn't it say "When a womAn " Or am I just being dumb? How To Get Whiter Teeth Naturally · WatchesArbetsrumVärlden. How To Get Whiter Teeth Naturally. Det här enkla tricket kommer hjälpa dig rensa din garderob. SEK Inrikes enhetsfrakt Sverige: 45 SEK In Stock. 1 dagar sedan. ISBN: ; Titel: Oral sex shell never forget - 50 positions and techniques that will make he; Författare: Borg, Sonia; Utgivningsdatum: ; Språk: English. Male daughters, female husbands - gender and sex in an african society. How to Go Down on a Woman Safely Ask the woman who you would like to perform safe oral sex on if she would be interested in having you go down on her.
Learn how to give a woman great oral sex, with the inside advice from a woman to educate men as to what she, and others, really want you to do in bed. Can someone be infected with a sexually transmitted infection (STI) from oral sex? Yes. Many STIs, including chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis, can be spread through. What people get off on sexually can vary as much as love songs on the radio. While some women may prefer to perform oral sex on the ladies they love, there are likely. We need to do away with this crazy assumption that a wife will automatically know how to make oral sex an incredible but also to want to please him sexually. The research is inconclusive as to whether or not hepatitis B can be transmitted via oral sex. Oral If you perform unprotected oral sex on of Sexually. Knowing how to perform sexual intercourse will come into To perform sexual intercourse it starts with a man and a woman getting sexually Perform oral sex. Gamingtillbehör för dig
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“Denna webbplats kan använda sig av affiliate länkar till olika företag. Denna webbplats agerar självständigt och har fullt ansvar för sitt innehåll. Vänligen kontakta -> [email protected] för eventuella frågor om denna webbplats.” Any content, trademarks, or other material that might be found on the this website that is not our property remains the copyright of its respective owners. In no way does this website claim ownership or responsibility for such items, and you should seek legal consent for any use of such materials from its owner.. 2015-2018 SWEDEN | Nederland narro7.allformen.se | {
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{
"_from": "isstream@~0.1.2",
"_id": "[email protected]",
"_inBundle": false,
"_integrity": "sha1-R+Y/evVa+m+S4VAOaQ64uFKcCZo=",
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"_spec": "isstream@~0.1.2",
"_where": "/Users/rhwood/Developer/JMRI/JMRI/rhwood/JMRI/web/app/node_modules/request",
"author": {
"name": "Rod Vagg",
"email": "[email protected]"
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"bugs": {
"url": "https://github.com/rvagg/isstream/issues"
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"bundleDependencies": false,
"deprecated": false,
"description": "Determine if an object is a Stream",
"devDependencies": {
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"tape": "~2.12.3"
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"homepage": "https://github.com/rvagg/isstream",
"keywords": [
"stream",
"type",
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"license": "MIT",
"main": "isstream.js",
"name": "isstream",
"repository": {
"type": "git",
"url": "git+https://github.com/rvagg/isstream.git"
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"test": "tar --xform 's/^package/readable-stream-1.0/' -zxf readable-stream-1.0.*.tgz && tar --xform 's/^package/readable-stream-1.1/' -zxf readable-stream-1.1.*.tgz && node test.js; rm -rf readable-stream-1.?/"
},
"version": "0.1.2"
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Q:
Ruby instance variable
class Polygon
attr_accessor :sides
@sides = 10
end
When I try to access
puts Polygon.new.sides # => nil
I get nil. How to access sides?
What is wrong here?
A:
Since ruby class definitions are just executable code, when you say @sides = 10 in the context of a class definition, you're defining that on Polygon (not instances of Polygon):
class Polygon
attr_accessor :sides
@sides = 10
end
Polygon.instance_variables
# => [:@sides]
You probably want to set the number of sides on the instances of Polygon, from the initializer:
class Polygon
attr_accessor :sides
def initialize(sides)
@sides = sides
end
end
Polygon.new(10).sides
# => 10
| {
"pile_set_name": "StackExchange"
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The epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) is characterized by the loss of cell-cell adhesion and cell polarity in epithelial cells and the acquisition of motile and invasive properties. While essential for development, the EMT is one mechanism by which tumors can acquire the capability to undergo tissue invasion and metastasis. It is therefore important to identify novel therapies that can inhibit the EMT, but few assays for EMT inhibitors in high throughput screens (HTS) have developed. A change in fibroblast growth factor receptor 2 (FGFR2) splicing occurs during the EMT and using an innovative luciferase-based splicing reporter assay we previously carried out a genome-wide high throughput cDNA expression screen for regulators of this splicing switch. This screen identified the epithelial cell type specific splicing regulators ESRP1 and ESRP2 demonstrating the feasibility of cell-based splicing assays in high throughput, array-based screens. An extensive set of ESRP-regulated exons switch splicing during the EMT, indicating that global changes in alternative splicing occur during this process. A change in this splicing network is a thus a dynamic feature of the EMT and changes in splicing of ESRP-regulated targets can be used as a biomarker for the EMT. In this application we will develop more robust next generation splicing reporter assays using ESRP- regulated exons that undergo profound "switch-like" changes in splicing and configure them for HTS assays using the Molecular Libraries Production Centers Network (MLPCN). In Aim 1, we will adapt existing minigene reporters containing ESRP regulated exons and flanking intronic regulatory sequences for HTS in the context of our established luciferase-based reporter minigenes. The reporters will include exons whose inclusion is activated as well as those that undergo skipping during the EMT. Additional reporters will also be developed for use in counter-screens to prioritize HTS hits. In Aim 2, these screens will be configured for screening in 384 well format and pilot screens will be carried out using several small compound libraries as well as several previously described compounds that have been shown to function as general modulators of splicing. These compounds will be screened in mesenchymal cells for splicing changes indicative of the reverse process of mesenchymal to epithelial transition (MET) and in epithelial cells for inhibition or reversal of an inducible EMT. Successful completion of this pilot phase of this funding mechanism (PAR-10-182) in year one will enable us to submit these assays for the larger scale screening phase using the MLPCN library of compounds. Such screens hold great promise to yield novel small molecule regulators of splicing, including a subset that broadly promote epithelial-specific splicing pathways to inhibit or reverse the EMT and block cancer metastasis. Such compounds will potentially include those that affect signaling pathways or other upstream events that might potently activate broad transcriptional and post-transcriptional gene expression programs that inhibit the EMT. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: The epithelial to mesenchymal transition (EMT) is the process by which cancer cells can escape from the primary site and metastasize to distant sites and is therefore a target for novel cancer therapies. We have identified regulators of alternative splicing that control an epithelial splicing network that is lost during the EMT, suggesting that a mesenchymal splicing program can promote the EMT and that these splicing changes serve as biomarkers for this process. The current application will use innovative splicing assays to carry out screens for novel compounds that inhibit this splicing transition and thereby identify lead compounds for drugs to prevent tumor metastasis. | {
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Barron's Corrections
Corrections & Amplifications
Updated Sept. 11, 2006 12:01 a.m. ET
Last week's article on Medifast (MED) stated that the diet-program company's customer-acquisition costs "had risen 25%, to $125 million, in the first quarter." In fact, the increase took them to $125 per... | {
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Bridge rectifiers for automotive-type alternators are well known in the art. An example of a bridge rectifier is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,606,000. Generally, a bridge rectifier comprises two metallic heat sinks that are electrically insulated from a each other. Each heat sink carries a plurality of semiconductor diodes such that the heat sinks form respective positive and negative direct voltage output terminals. The diodes are grouped in pairs and are connected to respective output phase windings of the alternator. | {
"pile_set_name": "USPTO Backgrounds"
} |
Working with the Energy Modeling team at Buro Happold a Grasshopper definition was created in order to dynamically manipulate air in-take openings in the facade and exhaust opening in the return shaft in order to quantify and verfiy required air movement to execute the desired zero net energy tower. | {
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} |
/* LibTomCrypt, modular cryptographic library -- Tom St Denis
*
* LibTomCrypt is a library that provides various cryptographic
* algorithms in a highly modular and flexible manner.
*
* The library is free for all purposes without any express
* guarantee it works.
*
* Tom St Denis, [email protected], http://libtom.org
*/
#include "../../headers/tomcrypt.h"
/**
@file der_decode_integer.c
ASN.1 DER, decode an integer, Tom St Denis
*/
#ifdef LTC_DER
/**
Read a mp_int integer
@param in The DER encoded data
@param inlen Size of DER encoded data
@param num The first mp_int to decode
@return CRYPT_OK if successful
*/
int der_decode_integer(const unsigned char *in, unsigned long inlen, void *num)
{
unsigned long x, y, z;
int err;
LTC_ARGCHK(num != NULL);
LTC_ARGCHK(in != NULL);
/* min DER INTEGER is 0x02 01 00 == 0 */
if (inlen < (1 + 1 + 1)) {
return CRYPT_INVALID_PACKET;
}
/* ok expect 0x02 when we AND with 0001 1111 [1F] */
x = 0;
if ((in[x++] & 0x1F) != 0x02) {
return CRYPT_INVALID_PACKET;
}
/* now decode the len stuff */
z = in[x++];
if ((z & 0x80) == 0x00) {
/* short form */
/* will it overflow? */
if (x + z > inlen) {
return CRYPT_INVALID_PACKET;
}
/* no so read it */
if ((err = mp_read_unsigned_bin(num, (unsigned char *)in + x, z)) != CRYPT_OK) {
return err;
}
} else {
/* long form */
z &= 0x7F;
/* will number of length bytes overflow? (or > 4) */
if (((x + z) > inlen) || (z > 4) || (z == 0)) {
return CRYPT_INVALID_PACKET;
}
/* now read it in */
y = 0;
while (z--) {
y = ((unsigned long)(in[x++])) | (y << 8);
}
/* now will reading y bytes overrun? */
if ((x + y) > inlen) {
return CRYPT_INVALID_PACKET;
}
/* no so read it */
if ((err = mp_read_unsigned_bin(num, (unsigned char *)in + x, y)) != CRYPT_OK) {
return err;
}
}
/* see if it's negative */
if (in[x] & 0x80) {
void *tmp;
if (mp_init(&tmp) != CRYPT_OK) {
return CRYPT_MEM;
}
if (mp_2expt(tmp, mp_count_bits(num)) != CRYPT_OK || mp_sub(num, tmp, num) != CRYPT_OK) {
mp_clear(tmp);
return CRYPT_MEM;
}
mp_clear(tmp);
}
return CRYPT_OK;
}
#endif
/* $Source: /cvs/libtom/libtomcrypt/src/pk/asn1/der/integer/der_decode_integer.c,v $ */
/* $Revision: 1.5 $ */
/* $Date: 2006/12/28 01:27:24 $ */ | {
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} |
Plates having compartments are used for holding food Often, a main compartment is designed to hold a main dish whereas the other compartment, or wells, are used to hold sides, condiments, or both. Prior art disposable plates have had various designs or patterns printed thereon, but do not integrate the various compartments into the printed design or pattern.
Additionally, prior art designs or patterns printed on disposable plates focused on a small number of designs. The number of designs per collection in the prior art has been less than the total number of plates packaged together for retail sale. Thus, each retail package of plates includes only a complete collection of designs. The prior art does not address the situation where the number of designs per collection exceeds the total number of plates in a retail package and how to widely disseminate all of the designs in the collection in the market place. | {
"pile_set_name": "USPTO Backgrounds"
} |
For The Love Of The Chew
This is the year of the ‘Chew’, so it seems. Montrose is one of the most sought after destinations when it comes to seeking a location for the Houston food junkie, and businessman Irwin Palchick, along with business partner David Truong wants to expand the options in the upscale neighborhood.
Jimmy Chew Asian Kitchen is the brainchild of Palchick, and creative branding designer Aike Jamal, of the award-winning F Bar Nightclub in Montrose, with best friend Lucie Pognonec. Lead design team is design firm gindesignsgroup and owner, Gin Braverman, has recently brought to life projects like ‘Raven Tower’ and ‘White Oak Music Hall.’
“Jimmy Chew is a fun, funky new fast-casual concept,” Gin Braverman explained. “Bright colors, bold murals and fun textures collide to bring a dynamic and energetic atmosphere.” The afternoon thru very-late-night crowd will appreciate the variety of cuisines that are reflected in the interior design, like ‘Chew Here’ and ‘Chew Go.’
As Montrose bleeds artsy and diversity, Jimmy Chew’ will enlighten the eclectic side of it’s patrons; ‘promoting great service, and fantastic food.’ The menu will reflect options ranging from Asian fusion, Vietnamese, Chinese, American bites and Thai-anything goes in this crazy, poppin’ place! Chew’ has made sure to add beer, wine, and great desserts to the menu. Another notable mention for Chew’ is the offering of Bill’s World Famous Lemonade.
The street-food style popular in Europe, Asia & Australia but like something Houston has yet to experience until now. Chew’cited!
The front ‘vendera’ style porch will offer outdoor dining that will have a capacity of 22 for the dinners that would rather enjoy the Houston scenery that magically graces the Westheimer sidewalks after sundown.
Jimmy Chew Asian Kitchen will be located near the intersection of Westheimer Rd and Mandell St across from Buffalo Exchange and Guyz N Style at 1609 Westheimer Rd, Houston, TX 77006.
Current plans are to have the eatery open as soon as permitting is approved.
Hours of operations indicating they will open daily at 5pm, and will be open weekdays till 3am, and 4am on weekends. An added bonus will be the delivery service that will be open daily till 2am and will include beer and wine. | {
"pile_set_name": "Pile-CC"
} |
The pathophysiology of neurofibromatosis. I. Resistance in vitro to 3-nitrotyrosine as an expression of the mutation.
The in vitro expression of the autosomal dominant mutation responsible for neurofibromatosis was probed using the amino acid analogue 3-nitrotyrosine as a cell culture selective agent. The presence of 3-nitrotyrosine in culture medium led to inhibition of growth and cell death among normal skin fibroblasts in log phase growth, whereas cell strains derived from six different patients' neurofibromas or skin cells, or both, exhibited a consistently enhanced ability to survive under the same conditions. At 0.8 mM 3-nitrotyrosine, four patient-derived skin fibroblast strains could be differentiated from five strains of control skin fibroblasts with a high level of confidence (P < 0.0000). In the same way four neurofibroma-derived fibroblast strains were differentiated from control skin fibroblasts (P < 0.0022). Neurofibroma-derived cells were not different from control cells when treated with 5-fluorotryptophan or p-fluorophenylalanine. | {
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Abstracts"
} |
Q:
How to make an anonymous types property name dynamic?
I have a following LinqToXml query:
var linqDoc = XDocument.Parse(xml);
var result = linqDoc.Descendants()
.GroupBy(elem => elem.Name)
.Select(group => new
{
TagName = group.Key.ToString(),
Values = group.Attributes("Id")
.Select(attr => attr.Value).ToList()
});
Is it possible somehow to make the field of my anonymous type it to be the variable value, so that it could be as (not working):
var linqDoc = XDocument.Parse(xml);
var result = linqDoc.Descendants()
.GroupBy(elem => elem.Name)
.Select(group => new
{
group.Key.ToString() = group.Attributes("Id")
.Select(attr => attr.Value).ToList()
});
A:
No, even anonymous types must have compile-time field names. It seems like to want a collection of different types, each with different field names. Maybe you could use a Dictionary instead?
var result = linqDoc.Descendants()
.GroupBy(elem => elem.Name)
.ToDictionary(
g => g.Key.ToString(),
g => g.Attributes("Id").Select(attr => attr.Value).ToList()
);
Note that Dictionaries can be serialized to JSON easily:
{
"key1": "type1":
{
"prop1a":"value1a",
"prop1b":"value1b"
},
"key2": "type2":
{
"prop2a":"value2a",
"prop2b":"value2b"
}
}
| {
"pile_set_name": "StackExchange"
} |
Kinect automation controller, sparked by HN, adds WebGL, available for purchase - nitrogen
http://nitrogen.posterous.com/webgl-new-features-added-to-kinect-powered-ho
======
carbon14
Watched the video. Looks very solid. I'm interested in getting this setup for
my HTPC/server and lamps. It could certainly save some energy as well as look
cool.
| {
"pile_set_name": "HackerNews"
} |
Q:
PHP Associative Array Looping in Twig
How can i loop this array in Twig ?
what im doing wrong ?
here is what i have
<?php foreach (array('price','weight','length','width','height','points') as $mod) { ?>
<label class="col-sm-2 control-label" for="input-<?php echo $mod . $option_row; ?>"><?php echo ${'text_option_'.$mod}; ?></label>
<select name="product_option[<?php echo $option_row; ?>][value][<?php echo $mod; ?>_prefix]" class="form-control">
<option value=""<?php if (isset($product_option['value'][$mod.'_prefix']) && $product_option['value'][$mod.'_prefix'] == '') echo ' selected'; ?>>NONE</option>
<option value="+"<?php if (isset($product_option['value'][$mod.'_prefix']) && $product_option['value'][$mod.'_prefix'] == '+') echo ' selected'; ?>>+</option>
</select>
here is what i done but isnt work
{% for price, weight, length, width, height, points in mod %}
<label class="col-sm-2 control-label" for="input-{{ mod . option_row}}">{{ text_option_ . mod}}</label>
<select name="product_option[{{ option_row }}][value][{{ mod }}_prefix]" class="form-control">
<option value=""{% if product_option['value'][mod.'_prefix'] is defined and product_option['value'][mod.'_prefix'] == '' %} {% endif %} {{'selected'}}; >NONE</option>
<option value=""{% if product_option['value'][mod.'_prefix'] is defined and product_option['value'][mod.'_prefix'] == '+' %} {% endif %} {{'selected'}}; >+</option>
</select>
{% endfor %}
A:
You are building your array wrong. Also it's {% for needle in haystack %} in twig... So your first line should become:
{% for mod in [ 'price','weight','length','width','height','points' ] %}
| {
"pile_set_name": "StackExchange"
} |
Haagerup property
In mathematics, the Haagerup property, named after Uffe Haagerup and also known as Gromov's a-T-menability, is a property of groups that is a strong negation of Kazhdan's property (T). Property (T) is considered a representation-theoretic form of rigidity, so the Haagerup property may be considered a form of strong nonrigidity; see below for details.
The Haagerup property is interesting to many fields of mathematics, including harmonic analysis, representation theory, operator K-theory, and geometric group theory.
Perhaps its most impressive consequence is that groups with the Haagerup Property satisfy the Baum–Connes conjecture and the related Novikov conjecture. Groups with the Haagerup property are also uniformly embeddable into a Hilbert space.
Definitions
Let be a second countable locally compact group. The following properties are all equivalent, and any of them may be taken to be definitions of the Haagerup property:
There is a proper continuous conditionally negative definite function .
has the Haagerup approximation property, also known as Property : there is a sequence of normalized continuous positive-definite functions which vanish at infinity on and converge to 1 uniformly on compact subsets of .
There is a strongly continuous unitary representation of which weakly contains the trivial representation and whose matrix coefficients vanish at infinity on .
There is a proper continuous affine isometric action of on a Hilbert space.
Examples
There are many examples of groups with the Haagerup property, most of which are geometric in origin. The list includes:
All compact groups (trivially). Note all compact groups also have property (T). The converse holds as well: if a group has both property (T) and the Haagerup property, then it is compact.
SO(n,1)
SU(n,1)
Groups acting properly on trees or on -trees
Coxeter groups
Amenable groups
Groups acting properly on CAT(0) cubical complexes
Sources
Category:Representation theory
Category:Geometric group theory | {
"pile_set_name": "Wikipedia (en)"
} |
New Delhi, Nov 18: The Supreme Court has dismissed a plea claiming that a key witness in the sensational Kathua gang rape-and-murder case was allegedly tortured in custody by the Jammu and Kashmir Police in connection with a separate rape case.
A bench comprising justices A M Khanwilkar and Deepak Gupta rejected the petition filed by a close relative of Talib Hussain, a key witness in the Kathua case, on the ground that the petitioner failed to appear before it despite the court’s order.
In January, an eight-year-old girl from a minority nomadic community was allegedly abducted and gang raped in Jammu and Kashmir’s Kathua district.
Petitioner M A Khan had approached the top court alleging that his relative Hussain was tortured in custody by the state police after being arrested in connection with a separate rape case.
Advocate Shoeb Alam, representing the Jammu and Kashmir Police, had last month denied in the top court the allegations levelled in the petition and had said since Hussain has been granted bail, the plea has become infructuous.
On October 22, the court had asked Khan to appear before it on November 13 to respond to the application filed by his advocate seeking his discharge from the case.
“Despite our order dated October 22, the writ petitioner (Khan) has chosen not to appear before this court to respond to the application for discharge filed by Sunil Fernandes, advocate on record for the petitioner.
“In the circumstances, the writ petition is dismissed for non-prosecution,” the bench said in its November 13 order.
In his plea, Khan had alleged that Hussain was kept in illegal detention by police and was subjected to custodial torture. (Agencies) | {
"pile_set_name": "Pile-CC"
} |
I often like the idea of minimalism. Those beautiful Japanese apartments where the few items that are owned are on display in just the right spot. Those amazing eco-homes where everything has a purpose and is responsibly sourced.
But, then, there are times it makes me shudder. I look at homes like the one in this video and they just look so soulless that I can’t understand how anyone can bear to live there.
Sure, he’s happy, and that’s all that counts. I’m not criticising his choices, I’m just saying there is no way I would ever aspire to owning two pieces of underwear and living somewhere with no personality whatsoever.
Inspired by this video by Gayle Goddard, I have been thinking a lot about what she said about including ‘time to reset’ at the end of a task. This involves making sure that the last few minutes of the time you’ve allocated to a task are given to tidying up after it.
So, if you’re going to do some arts and crafts for half an hour, the last five minutes should be given over to cleaning up and putting things back where they belong.
To naturally neat people, this is probably just common sense. But for people like me, who gave up trying to have any order in her home for far too long, it feels a bit like a revelation.
Often, it seems pointless (oh hi, overwhelm again!), and yet, if we don’t, things get worse, not better. Progress is not just halted, it’s reversed.
FLYLady. I tried to follow her programme a few years ago but, getting her emails through the day to remind me to do a new task, I found it impossible. It seemed to be designed for people who had nothing to do but wait for her mails and it just didn’t suit someone with other things to do (like work, go out, see friends etc.)
However, there is some useful stuff in this video about how and where to start a decluttering journey. It’s common sense in many ways, but those of us with hoarded houses have to admit that we lack a certain amount of common sense in these areas!! Enjoy. | {
"pile_set_name": "Pile-CC"
} |
WIWP is an ongoing creative collaborative project, working with some of the most talented and internationally renowned Illustrators, Designersand Photographers . The project was set up in September 2003 by Darren Firth and Tim McKnight and after a year of running had over 130,000 unique hits and a solid user base of around 5000. What started off as a humble badge design site has now evolved into a global platform, promoting artist collaboration through various online activities, publications and exhibitions, becoming a great source for inspiration and limited edition products. [ Continue Reading ] | {
"pile_set_name": "Pile-CC"
} |
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../../config/boot'
require 'commands/performance/request'
| {
"pile_set_name": "Github"
} |
[A sociomedical geriatric assessment in the emergency units: an alternative to the hospitalization of aged patients?].
Elderly patients admitted to the emergency unit are usually hospitalized in medical units. Could a gerontologic evaluation in the emergency room lead to another solution than hospitalization? Since January 1993, a sociomedical geriatric reception has been operating in the emergency unit of the university hospital in Brest, France, every day from 10 AM. to 6 PM. Patients older than 75 years, dependent or at risk of dependence are examined by a geriatrician. The medical situation is evaluated. The nutrition status, the cognitive functions, the thymic functions, the gait, and the functional abilities are systematically studied. In the same time the social evaluation is realised by a social worker. From January 1993 to December 1996, 1,514 patients have been cared for by the social medical team. Once the assessment of each patient was made only 49% of them actually had to be hospitalized in a medical department. The outcome of 100 patients discharged between January 1994 and June 1994 was evaluated one year after their discharge at home, 11 patients were rehospitalized. The reason for rehospitalization were different from the reasons for the first hospitalization. A gerontologic assessment in the emergency room permits to avoid hospitalization in 50% of the cases. One year after discharge at home only 11% of the patients were rehospitalized. | {
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Abstracts"
} |
Assessment of dynamical properties of mercaptopurine on the peptide-based metal-organic framework in response to experience of external electrical fields: a molecular dynamics simulation.
In this work, the effect of the external electric field (EF) on the drug delivery performance of peptide-based metal-organic framework (MPF) for 6-mercaptopurine (6-MP) drug is investigated by means of the molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. It is found that the strength interaction of drug molecule with MPF is decreased under the influence of the electric field. In other words, the adsorbed drug molecules have more tendencies for the interaction with the porous nanostructure in the absence of EF. According to the radial distribution function (RDF) patterns, the probability of finding drug molecules in terms of the intermolecular distance with respect to the MPF surface is lowest during the high field strength. As the EF strength increases, the spread of drug molecules around MPF results in high dynamics movement and further more diffusion coefficient of drug molecule in the simulation system. This result emphasizes the weak intermolecular interaction of drug molecules with MPF with the application of EF. Assessment of dynamical properties of 6-mercaptopurine in the presence of EF with various strengths reveals that the applied electric field can act as a trigger on liberation behavior of drug from the porous nanostructure. | {
"pile_set_name": "PubMed Abstracts"
} |
USA Dot Com is a blog covering politics and government from a conservative Christian perspective. Verne Strickland is a 50-year veteran of investigative journalism. This blog offers a take-no-prisoners style with a modicum of biting satire. Verne and his wife of 55 years, Durrene, live in Wilmington, NC.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Pantano hosts friends and supporters at Riverfest event on banks of the Cape Fear
PANTANO FAITHFUL CHEER ON THEIR FAVORITE IN NC/7 CONGRESSIONAL RACE
Conservative GOP congressional candidate Ilario Pantano with guests
By Verne Strickland / October 9, 2012
The invitation read:
Come out to Mike McCarley's beautiful riverside garden in Historic Downtown Wilmington to view the Invasion of the Pirates Flotilla and Fireworks on the Saturday night of Riverfest and get 'fired' up for Pantano for Congress.
The event lived up to its billing -- and then some. An estimated 125 guests turned up to cheer on their hero and favorite in what is certain to be a long and arduous struggle for the Seventh District seat in Congress -- a contest that won't be settled until November 2012.
Pantano led the group in prayer, then launched into a patriotic stump speech that pounced on liberal Democrats far and wide, promising that GOP stalwarts in North Carolina would be in the front ranks to rout them from their cushy incumbent lethargy.
A pulse-quickening display of fireworks flared brilliant against the night sky. The "Pirate Flotilla" arrived to the thunder of booming cannon. When the echoes faded, one person onshore --doubtless a Republican -- was heard to inquire: "Is Obama the captain of this boat? He's a pirate isn't he?"
Then it was down to business. I interviewed candidate Ilario Pantano about his campaign and the Riverfest GOP spin-off:
VS: It's a beautiful night, and your supporters are obviously fired up. What is this event all about?
It’s a celebration, and our chance to thank our growing ranks of supporters for all their hard work at the grassroots level. As I said, we’ve been building for seven months, and we have seven months to go. The heavy lifting starts now, and I say it matters. It matters more than ever. And I have a sense they all agree.
VS: Where are you now in your campaign?
We’re actually at the halfway point in this drive for a primary victory. We started this campaign back in February, and we’ve been running hard for seven months. We now have seven months to go before the primary, and we’re focused on that primary.
VS: You've always depended on strength and energy at the grassroots and precinct level. How is this ramping up?
What I will tell you is the support and the excitement in every county in this district is huge. And you know we have twelve counties in the Seventh now, and some of them are new. Even in these new counties, new friends are joining our cause, and are excited about what we represent. Because we are not the establishment, we’re not business as usual. We are just somebody who loves their country, and have sacrificed for it time and time again, who understand how the economy works and how to create jobs. That combination is pretty important right now.
VS: Many in the political game just talk the talk. But you claim to walk the walk. What does that mean actually?
A lot of people can quote the policy all day long, but when you look to their life experience and understand their true motivations, and understand that their heart isn’t a service heart, and what sacrifice really means, you have to wonder – do they know John 15:13? Do they really know? I am insistent on living out my faith, and this keeps me in a positive state of mind. I am really bullish on this country. What I see happening with this Occupy Wall Street movement is they want to replicate this right now. And this very desperate president wants to foment unrest throughout the country to shore up his chances in 2012. His game plan is a strategy of destruction. It is not in the best interest of the country. It’s not good for my children or yours. I going to fight it and fight it hard.
Joe Agovino of Southport, long-time GOP leader in Brunswick County, was on hand at the GOP Riverfest celebration. He said conservative candidate Pantano has learned much from his experience in the political arena since his challenge to incumbent Mike McIntyre in the last congressional election.
VS: So you feel he has only gained strength and wisdom from being in the political arena?
That's right. I think Ilario has grown a great deal in the last year and a half. He’s even more committed to serving his country. He has also learned a great deal about internal politics. I’ve been close to Ilario through the last campaign, and now this one. His commitment is genuine, and his loyalty is to his country, which he has served unselfishly.. In so doing, he has faced daunting challenges, but he has risen above all this, and has distinguished himself in many ways. So, today, I think he stands a better chance to win this primary because his supporters and the general public are comfortable with him and are really behind him.
VS: Ilario will face off in the GOP primary against State Senator David Rouzer of Johnston County. What do you expect from him as a candidate?
This race is a struggle between the old guard of the Republican Party and the newer members who are committed Constitutionalists and want to take our country back to work for the general well-being of the people. Mr. Rouzer is a bright young man, but is basically a Washington insider, and also a product of the system for a number of years. My personal opinion is that David Rouzer getting into this race will be good for Ilario, because of the stark contrast between the politician, David Rouzer, and the patriot, Ilario Pantano.
VS: You hang your hat in Brunswick County. How do you size up the conservative Republican base there?
In our county -- Brunswick -- we’re seeing growth and strength at the precinct levels. That will be vital as Obama’s paid volunteers flood into North Carolina with their liberal agenda. We intend to be ready.
What I’m seeing is more cohesiveness in the organization, and more motivation. I’ve been involved in politics for many years, and this is the earliest I’ve seen our Republican Party become involved in statewide or presidential elections in an off-election year. That’s a tremendous plus. Our leadership is proactive and aggressive.We're putting the lessons we've learned to work for us on the road to 2012. | {
"pile_set_name": "Pile-CC"
} |
Kodachrome (disambiguation)
Kodachrome was a brand of color transparency film sold by Kodak.
Kodachrome may also refer to:
"Kodachrome", a song by Paul Simon from his 1973 album There Goes Rhymin' Simon
Kodachrome (film), a 2017 American drama film
Kodachrome Basin State Park in Utah
The color scheme of the Southern Pacific–Santa Fe Railroad
See also
Kodacolor (disambiguation) | {
"pile_set_name": "Wikipedia (en)"
} |
2NE1 Dara's first lead role will be in the upcoming movie 'One Step'!
According to the production company�MCC Entertainment, Dara and actor Han Jae Suk have been�confirmed to play the leads in the new film 'One Step', previously called 'Echo'.�
Dara will be playing Siyeon, who perceives sounds with colors. Han Jae Suk will be taking on the role of Jee Il, a formerly famous songwriter currently in a slump. The movie is about the two working together and growing together.
'One Step' is set to premiere before the end of 2016.�
| {
"pile_set_name": "OpenWebText2"
} |
Q:
What will be the interval of convergence $\sum_{n=1}^{\infty} \frac{n! x^n}{2^{n^{2}}}$
$\displaystyle \sum_{n=1}^{\infty} \frac{n! x^n}{2^{n^{2}}}$ My main problem is how can I handle the denominator ${2^{n^{2}}}$? I used until know the ratio test, as I saw a factorial, but it the denominator makes it a little bit difficult.
A:
With Hadamard's formula: the radius of convergence $R$ of $\sum a_n z^n$ is given by
$$\frac1R=\limsup\Bigl(\lvert a_n\rvert^{\tfrac1n}\Bigr).$$
$$\text{Now}\hspace{10em}0\le\biggl(\frac{n!}{2^{n^2}}\biggr)^{\tfrac1n}\le\biggl(\frac{n^n}{2^{n^2}}\biggr)^{\tfrac1n}=\frac n{2^n}\to 0\hspace{11em},$$
so $R=\infty$.
| {
"pile_set_name": "StackExchange"
} |
Dubiaranea
Dubiaranea is a genus of dwarf spiders that was first described by Cândido Firmino de Mello-Leitão in 1943.
Species
it contains one hundred species found throughout South America, except one found on Borneo:
D. abjecta Millidge, 1991 – Ecuador, Peru
D. abundans Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. affinis Millidge, 1991 – Ecuador
D. albodorsata Millidge, 1991 – Colombia
D. albolineata Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. amoena Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. argentata Millidge, 1991 – Bolivia
D. argenteovittata Mello-Leitão, 1943 (type) – Brazil
D. atra Millidge, 1991 – Bolivia
D. atriceps Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. atripalpis Millidge, 1991 – Venezuela
D. atrolineata Millidge, 1991 – Colombia
D. aureola Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. bacata Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. brevis Millidge, 1991 – Bolivia
D. caeca Millidge, 1991 – Venezuela
D. caledonica (Millidge, 1985) – Chile
D. castanea Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. cekalovici (Millidge, 1985) – Chile
D. cerea (Millidge, 1985) – Chile
D. colombiana Millidge, 1991 – Colombia
D. concors Millidge, 1991 – Colombia
D. congruens Millidge, 1991 – Ecuador
D. crebra Millidge, 1991 – Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru
D. decora Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. decurtata Millidge, 1991 – Bolivia
D. deelemanae Millidge, 1995 – Borneo
D. difficilis (Mello-Leitão, 1944) – Argentina
D. discolor Millidge, 1991 – Colombia
D. distincta (Nicolet, 1849) – Chile
D. distracta Millidge, 1991 – Colombia
D. elegans Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. fagicola Millidge, 1991 – Chile
D. falcata (Millidge, 1985) – Chile
D. festiva (Millidge, 1985) – Chile
D. fruticola Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. fulgens (Millidge, 1985) – Chile
D. fulvolineata Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. furva Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. fusca Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. gilva Millidge, 1991 – Colombia
D. gloriosa Millidge, 1991 – Colombia
D. grandicula Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. gregalis Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. habilis Millidge, 1991 – Ecuador
D. inquilina (Millidge, 1985) – Brazil
D. insignita Millidge, 1991 – Peru, Bolivia
D. insulana Millidge, 1991 – Chile (Juan Fernandez Is.)
D. insulsa Millidge, 1991 – Ecuador
D. lepida Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. levii Millidge, 1991 – Brazil
D. longa Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. longiscapa (Millidge, 1985) – Chile
D. luctuosa Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. lugubris Millidge, 1991 – Ecuador
D. maculata (Millidge, 1985) – Chile
D. manufera (Millidge, 1985) – Chile
D. margaritata Millidge, 1991 – Colombia, Venezuela
D. media Millidge, 1991 – Venezuela
D. mediocris Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. melanocephala Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. melica Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. mirabilis Millidge, 1991 – Ecuador
D. modica Millidge, 1991 – Ecuador
D. morata Millidge, 1991 – Ecuador
D. nivea Millidge, 1991 – Bolivia
D. opaca Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. orba Millidge, 1991 – Ecuador
D. ornata Millidge, 1991 – Colombia
D. penai (Millidge, 1985) – Chile
D. persimilis Millidge, 1991 – Ecuador
D. procera Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. propinquua (Millidge, 1985) – Chile
D. propria Millidge, 1991 – Colombia
D. proxima Millidge, 1991 – Ecuador
D. pulchra Millidge, 1991 – Venezuela
D. pullata Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. remota Millidge, 1991 – Argentina
D. rufula Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. saucia Millidge, 1991 – Brazil
D. setigera Millidge, 1991 – Colombia
D. signifera Millidge, 1991 – Bolivia
D. silvae Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. silvicola Millidge, 1991 – Colombia
D. similis Millidge, 1991 – Chile
D. solita Millidge, 1991 – Colombia
D. speciosa Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. stellata (Millidge, 1985) – Chile
D. subtilis (Keyserling, 1886) – Peru
D. teres Millidge, 1991 – Ecuador
D. tridentata Millidge, 1993 – Peru
D. tristis (Mello-Leitão, 1941) – Argentina
D. truncata Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. turbidula (Keyserling, 1886) – Brazil, Peru
D. usitata Millidge, 1991 – Colombia
D. varia Millidge, 1991 – Peru
D. variegata Millidge, 1991 – Colombia
D. versicolor Millidge, 1991 – Colombia, Ecuador, Peru
D. veterana Millidge, 1991 – Ecuador
D. vetusta Millidge, 1991 – Ecuador
See also
List of Linyphiidae species (A–H)
References
Category:Araneomorphae genera
Category:Linyphiidae
Category:Spiders described in 1943
Category:Spiders of Asia
Category:Spiders of South America
Category:Taxa named by Cândido Firmino de Mello-Leitão | {
"pile_set_name": "Wikipedia (en)"
} |
Q:
Bitmap from byte[] array
I want to create a bitmap from a byte[]. My problem is that I can't use a BitmapSource in Unity and if I use a MemoryStream Unity gets an error.
I tried it with this:
Bitmap bitmap = new Bitmap(512, 424);
var data = bitmap.LockBits(new Rectangle(Point.Empty, bitmap.Size),
ImageLockMode.WriteOnly, System.Drawing.Imaging.PixelFormat.Format32bppArgb);
Marshal.Copy(arrayData, 0, data.Scan0, arrayData.Length);
bitmap.UnlockBits(data);
It works but the Bitmap I get is the wrong way up. Can someone explain me why and got a solution for me?
A:
This can be two things, perhaps combined: The choice of coordinate system, and Endianness
There's a convention (I believe universal) to list pixels from left to right, but there's none regarding vertical orientation. While some programs and APIs have the Y-coordinate be zero at the bottom and increases upwards, others do the exact opposite. I don't know where you get the byte[] from, but some APIs allow you to configure the pixel orientation when writing, reading or using textures. Otherwise, you'll have to manually re-arrange the rows.
The same applies to endianness; ARGB sometimes means Blue is the last byte, sometimes the first.Some classes, like BitConverter have buit-in solutions too.
Unity uses big-endian, bottom-up textures. In fact, Unity handles lots of this stuff under the hood, and has to re-order rows and flip bytes when importing bitmap files. Unity also provides methods like LoadImage and EncodeToPNG that take care of both problems.
To illustrate what happens to the byte[], this sample code saves the same image in three different ways (but you need to import them as Truecolor to see them properly in Unity):
using UnityEngine;
using UnityEditor;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Drawing.Imaging;
public class CreateTexture2D : MonoBehaviour {
public void Start () {
int texWidth = 4, texHeight = 4;
// Raw 4x4 bitmap data, in bottom-up big-endian ARGB byte order. It's transparent black for the most part.
byte[] rawBitmap = new byte[] {
// Red corner (bottom-left) is written first
255,255,0,0, 0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,
0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,
0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0, 0,0,0,0,
255,0,0,255, 255,0,0,255, 255,0,0,255, 255,0,0,255
//Blue border (top) is the last "row" of the array
};
// We create a Texture2D from the rawBitmap
Texture2D texture = new Texture2D(texWidth, texHeight, TextureFormat.ARGB32, false);
texture.LoadRawTextureData(rawBitmap);
texture.Apply();
// 1.- We save it directly as a Unity asset (btw, this is useful if you only use it inside Unity)
UnityEditor.AssetDatabase.CreateAsset(texture, "Assets/TextureAsset.asset");
// 2.- We save the texture to a file, but letting Unity handle formatting
byte[] textureAsPNG = texture.EncodeToPNG();
System.IO.File.WriteAllBytes(Application.dataPath + "/EncodedByUnity.png", textureAsPNG);
// 3.- Rearrange the rawBitmap manually into a top-down small-endian ARGB byte order. Then write to a Bitmap, and save to disk.
// Bonus: This permutation is it's own inverse, so it works both ways.
byte[] rearrangedBM = new byte[rawBitmap.Length];
for (int row = 0; row < texHeight; row++)
for (int col = 0; col < texWidth; col++)
for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++)
rearrangedBM[row * 4 * texWidth + 4 * col + i] = rawBitmap[(texHeight - 1 - row) * 4 * texWidth + 4 * col + (3 - i)];
Bitmap bitmap = new Bitmap(texWidth, texHeight, PixelFormat.Format32bppArgb);
var data = bitmap.LockBits(new Rectangle(0, 0, texWidth, texHeight), ImageLockMode.WriteOnly, PixelFormat.Format32bppArgb);
System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.Copy(rearrangedBM, 0, data.Scan0, rearrangedBM.Length);
bitmap.UnlockBits(data);
bitmap.Save(Application.dataPath + "/SavedBitmap.png", ImageFormat.Png);
}
}
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James Gurney
This daily weblog by Dinotopia creator James Gurney is for illustrators, plein-air painters, sketchers, comic artists, animators, art students, and writers. You'll find practical studio tips, insights into the making of the Dinotopia books, and first-hand reports from art schools and museums.
CG Art
Contact
or by email:gurneyjourney (at) gmail.comSorry, I can't give personal art advice or portfolio reviews. If you can, it's best to ask art questions in the blog comments.
Permissions
All images and text are copyright 2015 James Gurney and/or their respective owners. Dinotopia is a registered trademark of James Gurney. For use of text or images in traditional print media or for any commercial licensing rights, please email me for permission.
However, you can quote images or text without asking permission on your educational or non-commercial blog, website, or Facebook page as long as you give me credit and provide a link back. Students and teachers can also quote images or text for their non-commercial school activity. It's also OK to do an artistic copy of my paintings as a study exercise without asking permission.
Monday, June 1, 2009
The Düsseldorf School of painting had a big influence on 19th century landscape painting from the 1830s through the 1860s.
The school was notable for its dramatically lit historical subjects, often featuring scenes like shipwrecks, noble peasants, or epic mountainscapes.
The artists associated with the school include Wilhelm von Schadow, Karl Friedrich Lessing, the brothers Andreas and Oswald Achenbach, and Hans Fredrik Gude. Johann Wilhelm Schirmer is shown above. Some of them had experience painting theatrical backdrops, and they took some of those sensibilities into their easel paintings. Some of those pictorial features include:Realistic and detailed treatment of form.Strongest accents and focal point in middle ground.Dark framing masses at the sides of the compositions.Stormy skies and dramatic lighting.Road or trail leading into the picture.Filmy or atmospheric distances.Literary references in genre scenes.
Americans who studied there included George Caleb Bingham, Eastman Johnson, Worthington Whittredge, William Stanley Haseltine, James McDougal Hart, and William Morris Hunt, and Emanuel Leutze, who painted "Washington Crossing the Delaware" in Germany using American Dusseldorf students as models.
Although he wasn’t formally enrolled at the academy, Albert Bierstadt worked and studied among the community of artists, and became probably the best exponent of the style. The Russian painter Ivan Shishkin also spent time there soaking up the landscape vocabulary.
Above: Oswald Achenbach, "The Bay of Naples."
The goal of the Dusseldorf artists was to infuse the landscape with “stimmung” (mood). Their romantic sensibilities were tied to “Volkskarakter” or national character. According to Henk Van Os,
“The idea is that the soul of a people is expressed through its countryside, its landscape; painters make this soul visible. This was to become the cornerstone of realistic landscape in the second half of the nineteenth century.”
Amazing that he created such an iconographic image without, presumably, having been there. (washing delware) how did he get GW's likeness? He didn't pose all the students at once... so how did get the light right (i am not asking for answers, its more to say, it just amazes me.) I am realist painter who wants to do historical subjects - and it can intimidating and also, there is this idea now that you need to be real... if for example you were painting the saraha, if you don't practically put the sand in your paint its not 'authentic'. I do believe it helps, immensely to experience the thing...but sometimes we do that we sacrofice our imagination
I, me: Leutze was an artist who was born in Germany, grew up in USA, and returned to live and work in Germany. When he painted WCD, he insisted on using Americans as models. Worthington Whittredge's memoir describes how he posed for Washington in an accurate costume, and also how Bierstadt arrived as a very unpromising hopeful, and then how he did miraculous stuff by just working his tail off outdoors.
Beautiful paintings, especially the first one. I love dynamic rocky forms like that, but I find them very difficult to paint, so seeing one so well executed is especially inspiring for me.
On an entirely unrelated note, James, I saw your cover painting for "Citizen Phaid" in a sci-fi art book the other day, and I was blown away. With all your dinosaurs and baby birds and horses and whatnot, it's easy for me to forget how adept you are at painting futuristic, high-tech subjects.
Thanks, Moai, that's really nice of you. The art director, Gene Mydlowski, deserves a lot of credit on that cover for letting me do a long horizontal composition, very atypical for covers in those days.
I saw the painting 'Cornel Rhos - Spring' by William Morris Hunt in the Pre-Raphaelites exhibition in Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. Many times. It was one of my absolute favourites in that show. Unfortunately I can't find a picture of it online..
Not that it's relevant, but "Washington Crossing" brings back memories of my visit to the Met and to a previous carrier where I visited J&J in Titusville NJ, at walking distance of the actual crossing location along the Delaware.But as I said, not really relevant.
I recall Frank Frazetta remarking in an interview that he wasn't very influenced by N.C. Wyeth, with whom he's sometimes compared, but rather by old German painters. He didn't identify the German painters, but looking at these works and the qualities James mentions (their strongest accents and focal point in middle ground, dark framing masses at the sides of the compositions, stormy skies and dramatic lighting, filmy or atmospheric distances), I wonder whether this was the group he meant.
I'm always kind of happy, whenn I read about german artists here at Your blog. Thank's for that! :-) The "Düsseldorfer Malerschule" for me (as a student at the "Düsseldorfer Kunstakademie") was and is a great inspiration, allthough ther weren't really outstanding painters. Only well informed people know the names of Andreas and Oswald Achenbach, for example. On the one side, their compositions were really impressive and their knowledge of how to make pictures look "erhaben" (means: impressive in an grand with a sense of awe) was astonishing. But they weren't great painters, if one looks at their "brush-work". No "peinture", if You know, what I mean.And they got with the "Münchener Malerschule" big competitors in the second half of the 19th century. Like Leibl or Böcklin, for example.
Nevertheless it's really worth the time to look at and examine the landscapes of the "Düsseldorfer Malerschule" protagonists. For example the two Achenwald brothers. The "nordic" Andreas Achenbach painted many norwayen landscapes with impressive clouds, storms, the expressive mountains and fjords ob the scandinavien countrys. His "southern" brother painted large italian landscapes, very warm, with red glowing imprimiturs. I prefer the nordish Achenbach, but that's just a matter of taste...
Perhaps You could write something about the "Münchner Malerschule" in the future? Some american "impressionists" like T.C. Steele, William Forsyth or Ottis Adams studied in Munich (together with famous german Painters like Lovis Corinth) and it's interesting to see, how their training/education in Germany influenced their work, when they returned to the USA. | {
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Version
9.0 Upgrade
Now Shipping. . .
Status and
Notifications Interface:These new
interface modules will not only provide real-time
email status updates to your customers, but will
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include a picture of the technician that will be
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module will give you the ability to scan and save
documents directly into work orders. You will be
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be converted and appended to a PDF file. When you
select to view your scanned documents, CDA will
launch Acrobat Reader and display all documents as
thumbnails. You can also scan original parts
invoices and attach them to the Vendor's Invoice
record. You also have the ability to simply attach
any other type of file to a work order including
photos, word or excel documents, graphics, text
files, etc. All can be opened with a simple click of
the mouse.
Parts Tracking:This is a very detailed and comprehensive system
that will provide bar code labels to track every
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for exact pricing and status information. One quick
scan will tell you everything you need to know about
any part. View a history of every time a part is
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tracking. The system can also determine the amount
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vendor's return policies to help you resolve issues
of returning parts on time.
Real-Time Parts
Search:Now, via a
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can display a comparison of parts pricing and
availability on one screen in seconds. You also have
the ability to place an order with the click of the
mouse!
CDA Message Center:
A
Complete Internal Messaging system that will allow
you to send messages between employees from within
the CDA Program. Attach a Work Order to a message
for reference, display all messages that reference a
particular work order, or even send yourself a
reminder message. Messages can be flagged with
priority levels such as LOW, HIGH, or URGENT. You
are automatically notified of pending messages each
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In addition,
a real-time internet connection allows you to
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and Dispatching:Independently control
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internet interfaces with ServiceBench, NSA,
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dispatches placed directly by manufacturers, 3rd
party dealers or customers. Your available zip codes
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Notifications:Easily send email's to
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Search with Red Flag Alerts:When adding a new record,
the system will check the database for a previous
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Custom Search Engine
A Custom Search window will allow you to
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orders as well as add or delete work orders.
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User Profiles: The
CDA Service Manager system has a unique security
access system built-in. You will be able to set-up
user profiles for each user and assign separate user
names and passwords. Each profile can be customized
allowing you to grant or deny access for over 145
areas of the program. User files are hidden and
encrypted for security. | {
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Subsets and Splits