On his book The History of Missed Opportunities: British Romanticism and the Emergence of the Everyday
Cover Interview of June 27, 2017
Lastly
In Imre Kertész’s autobiographical novel, Fatelessness,
the protagonist comes to conclusions virtually identical to those I explore but
under radically different circumstances. “[I]magination,” he recalls,
remains unfettered even in captivity. . . . [I could] have
been anywhere––Calcutta, Florida, the loveliest places in the world. Yet that
would not have been serious enough . . . for me that was not credible, if I may
put it that way, so as a result I usually found myself merely back home. . . .
my favorite pastime was. . . to visualize an entire, unbroken day back home,
from the morning right through the evening if possible . . . . but then I
normally only envisaged a rotten day, with an early rising, school, anxiety, a
lousy lunch, the many opportunities they had offered back then that I had
missed, rejected, or completely overlooked, and I can tell you now, here in the
concentration camp, I set them all right to the greatest possible perfection.
The last thing any of us needs these days is another
self-serving appropriation of Holocaust-related materials. At the same time,
there is too much in this passage––the “missed opportunities” being only the
most obvious––that is relevant to the point of being uncanny.
Most significantly, there is the continuum––the “entire,
unbroken” stratum as Kertész frames it––that the everyday comes to constitute
as a parallel world that had been “overlooked” and, like that “day back home,”
emerges as history or, closing the circle, a history of missed
opportunities. It matters a great deal that also missing here is the very term
itself. In this Kertész is all but restaging the everyday’s emergence as a concept,
where, far from the ceiling it eventually becomes for an historian like Fernand
Braudel and countless others (not to mention a camp inmate), the everyday is
allied with history and, to complicate matters more, history as opposed
to memory.
There are other histories that elude memory, notably
traumatic ones where the “event” ––for example a train wreck––is forgotten only
to reemerge weeks, months, even years later. What’s interesting, then, about
Kertész’s recollection and about the various histories fashioned by writers
much earlier is that they forgo memorable content in deference to something of
which memory––or such memories as Kertész conjures––is no more than a feeble
index. The early rising, the lousy lunch give way to opportunities that go
unrecognized and unappreciated not because they’re suddenly recuperable in
comparison to lousier lunches and lousier regimens. They offer back something––something
yielding to perfection––because at the moment of its discovery as something new
or different, the everyday is both present and, to borrow directly from
Blanchot, what continually “escapes.” It may be available in the “shape of
fields or ploughs” as “part of the immense wealth that humblest facts . . .
contain” for a social thinker like Lefebvre, whose “critique of everyday life”
simultaneously celebrates an earlier, precapitalist quotidian. But it is just
as importantly an “implicit, unexplored content” that eludes him, and that Kertész,
all duress aside, captures in a conceptual move that he calls setting right.
Cavell, in one of his many meditations on the ordinary, describes this content
as “something there,” something “open to our senses,” that “has been missed”
and whose discovery amounts to what––no less hyperbolically than Kertész––he calls
an “ecstatic attestation of existence.”
Now, to someone in the concentration camp at Zeitz, the
appeal of ecstatic self-abandonment, as opposed to being in captivity, scarcely
requires elaboration. But that prospect is not the point, either for Kertész or
for the Romantic-period writers who preceded him. At stake in the peculiar
surprise that underlies the everyday’s emergence––its being set right––is
something inaccessible that is fathomable by retrospection but not necessarily
in retrospect: something missed and––phenomenologically––“missable,” but
present as an article of faith or, with special bearing on Kertész again, a
basis for hope.
The idea that such a perfect world could shadow, even
subsume, the relentless probability of a labor camp is hard to conceive. Yet
this in fact is where his historiography leads. Not to something irreducibly
anterior but to a parallel world, again, whose very possibility is guaranteed––and
here we’re back to setting things right––in the understanding that it happened,
that it is possible, and that its possibility is what makes it perfect––now
more than ever.
There was a time, not long before the eighteenth century,
when probability was difficult to assess or to calculate in a world where
things were simply too random and unstable and where everyday life, by sad
contrast, was an unrelenting grind. By century’s end, however, when life in
general became fated and more predictable (thanks to innovations in science and
technology), the world was also ready for the kind of do-over that both Kertész
and the Romantics administer. It was ready thanks to the opening that history
could perform in finally slowing things down: both as an aperture onto what was
missed and unappreciated in a world blessed (and cursed) by probability and
progress; and as a pathway to a present that was always possible––fateless, if
you will––because it was there, hiding in plain sight.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
Lastly
In Imre Kertész’s autobiographical novel, Fatelessness, the protagonist comes to conclusions virtually identical to those I explore but under radically different circumstances. “[I]magination,” he recalls,
remains unfettered even in captivity. . . . [I could] have been anywhere––Calcutta, Florida, the loveliest places in the world. Yet that would not have been serious enough . . . for me that was not credible, if I may put it that way, so as a result I usually found myself merely back home. . . . my favorite pastime was. . . to visualize an entire, unbroken day back home, from the morning right through the evening if possible . . . . but then I normally only envisaged a rotten day, with an early rising, school, anxiety, a lousy lunch, the many opportunities they had offered back then that I had missed, rejected, or completely overlooked, and I can tell you now, here in the concentration camp, I set them all right to the greatest possible perfection.
The last thing any of us needs these days is another self-serving appropriation of Holocaust-related materials. At the same time, there is too much in this passage––the “missed opportunities” being only the most obvious––that is relevant to the point of being uncanny.
Most significantly, there is the continuum––the “entire, unbroken” stratum as Kertész frames it––that the everyday comes to constitute as a parallel world that had been “overlooked” and, like that “day back home,” emerges as history or, closing the circle, a history of missed opportunities. It matters a great deal that also missing here is the very term itself. In this Kertész is all but restaging the everyday’s emergence as a concept, where, far from the ceiling it eventually becomes for an historian like Fernand Braudel and countless others (not to mention a camp inmate), the everyday is allied with history and, to complicate matters more, history as opposed to memory.
There are other histories that elude memory, notably traumatic ones where the “event” ––for example a train wreck––is forgotten only to reemerge weeks, months, even years later. What’s interesting, then, about Kertész’s recollection and about the various histories fashioned by writers much earlier is that they forgo memorable content in deference to something of which memory––or such memories as Kertész conjures––is no more than a feeble index. The early rising, the lousy lunch give way to opportunities that go unrecognized and unappreciated not because they’re suddenly recuperable in comparison to lousier lunches and lousier regimens. They offer back something––something yielding to perfection––because at the moment of its discovery as something new or different, the everyday is both present and, to borrow directly from Blanchot, what continually “escapes.” It may be available in the “shape of fields or ploughs” as “part of the immense wealth that humblest facts . . . contain” for a social thinker like Lefebvre, whose “critique of everyday life” simultaneously celebrates an earlier, precapitalist quotidian. But it is just as importantly an “implicit, unexplored content” that eludes him, and that Kertész, all duress aside, captures in a conceptual move that he calls setting right. Cavell, in one of his many meditations on the ordinary, describes this content as “something there,” something “open to our senses,” that “has been missed” and whose discovery amounts to what––no less hyperbolically than Kertész––he calls an “ecstatic attestation of existence.”
Now, to someone in the concentration camp at Zeitz, the appeal of ecstatic self-abandonment, as opposed to being in captivity, scarcely requires elaboration. But that prospect is not the point, either for Kertész or for the Romantic-period writers who preceded him. At stake in the peculiar surprise that underlies the everyday’s emergence––its being set right––is something inaccessible that is fathomable by retrospection but not necessarily in retrospect: something missed and––phenomenologically––“missable,” but present as an article of faith or, with special bearing on Kertész again, a basis for hope.
The idea that such a perfect world could shadow, even subsume, the relentless probability of a labor camp is hard to conceive. Yet this in fact is where his historiography leads. Not to something irreducibly anterior but to a parallel world, again, whose very possibility is guaranteed––and here we’re back to setting things right––in the understanding that it happened, that it is possible, and that its possibility is what makes it perfect––now more than ever.
There was a time, not long before the eighteenth century, when probability was difficult to assess or to calculate in a world where things were simply too random and unstable and where everyday life, by sad contrast, was an unrelenting grind. By century’s end, however, when life in general became fated and more predictable (thanks to innovations in science and technology), the world was also ready for the kind of do-over that both Kertész and the Romantics administer. It was ready thanks to the opening that history could perform in finally slowing things down: both as an aperture onto what was missed and unappreciated in a world blessed (and cursed) by probability and progress; and as a pathway to a present that was always possible––fateless, if you will––because it was there, hiding in plain sight.