A Review of Roberto Calasso and Som Raj Gupta
In an essay on Zhuangzi (the opening lines of which would someday have the honor of being plagiarized by Borges), Giovanni Papini offered an epitome of modernism: “that the so-called Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which had the discovery of classic culture as one of its causes and one of its effects, will ultimately prove to be but a slight affair in comparison with the Renaissance of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, which will be due to the discovery of oriental culture.”
As Papini knew very well, it was not the first time that the West had made this discovery, nor would it be the first time that such an encounter left in its wake a trail of cultural landmarks, artistic masterpieces, literary impostures, shallow spiritualism, and kitsch. Thus it was that late seventeenth-century translations from Arabic made an indelible impression on the European fiction of the next two centuries: Hayy Ibn Yaqdhan led to the creation of Robinson Crusoe, while Galland’s translation of the Arabian Nights made its influence felt not only through a multitude of insipid, eighteenth century imitations, but in Beckford’s Vathek, Potocki’s The Manuscript found in Saragossa, Stevenson’s New Arabian Nights, and innumerable others. Likewise, the early nineteenth century found itself even more indebted to translations from the ancient Sanskrit, without which German romanticism and American transcendentalism might have taken very different forms indeed. The phenomenon of renaissance, in all its sundry manifestations, almost always owes itself to this spirit of encounter and appropriation — a spirit often associated with the so-called “Age of Globalism” which we currently inhabit.
Yet one of the great ironies of the Age of Globalism is that it is scarcely global at all. On the contrary, it has proved an age in which such encounters no longer seem possible, in which the circulation of ideas, much like that of goods or people, has become too smooth, too regulated, for the kind of sudden shocks that characteristically wake a culture from slumber. Or at least, when these encounters do take place, they can no longer occur in plain sight, but only at the margins of visible culture. In such an age, it has proved possible, even, for two multi-volume works of immense ambition and originality, written according to the most exacting intellectual standards, and drawing on the traditions of both India and the West, to go almost entirely unnoticed.
For the Italian publisher and essayist, Roberto Calasso, the adjective “unnoticed” may seem undeserved — heavily-praised, his books have made the best-seller lists of various countries, and have been translated into a dozen languages. Yet in more than one sense Calasso has been neglected, as the five books of his under discussion, conceived by him as the components of a single, unified work, have invariably been assessed as self-contained entities — and this failure to understand the larger meaning and form of Calasso’s oeuvre may also help to explain the unfortunate tendency among many reviewers to label his books as “novels.” It is, in part, an understandable oversight, as, at first glance, the sections of this ongoing work do not even share the same genre. The first in the series, The Ruin of Kasch, is a chaotic essay about modernity; the second and third books, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and Ka, are retellings of Greek and Hindu myths; while the fourth and fifth (K. and Tiepolo Pink) each undertake an analysis of the works of a single artist (Kafka and Tiepolo). Such incongruities are deceptive. In truth, these volumes are chapters in a work of history.
In the final essay of his collection The Forty-Nine Steps, Calasso meditates upon two definitions of the word “myth” — one which “refers to an absolute, to something prodigious beyond which one cannot go,” and the other, which refers to “an imaginative lie, accompanied by some emotion, which the clear mind must dispel and stamp out.” “Behind the distressing banality of these two accepted meanings,” writes Calasso, “a long story lies hidden, and it is by no means banal. Quite the contrary: I would say that it throws open the very vortex of history.” To open one of Roberto Calasso’s books is to witness this vortex.
This is especially true of the first volume, Calasso’s masterpiece, The Ruin of Kasch. According to Italo Calvino, “The Ruin of Kasch takes up two subjects: the first is Talleyrand, and the second is everything else.” It is a just description; though he always returns to the eras straddled by Talleyrand, Calasso moves constantly between subjects, from Aztecs to Kampuchea, from Joseph de Maistre to Marx (“more capitalist than capital itself”), to Pascal, to Nietzsche, to the Vedas, to the legend of a lost African city, to the history of all sacrifice and exchange ever. At times, Calasso will even speak in the voices of historical actors, or slip into poetry, and seldom lets a page go by without uttering some grand, Nietzschean declaration. What is even more remarkable is that these bold, eccentric gestures are never made for their own sake, but are always carried out in such a way that their juxtapositions with one another illuminate Calasso’s subjects in startling ways, while simultaneously contributing to his larger purpose. While the later books are less wild in form (and, it must be said, less brilliant in argument), their techniques are animated by the same style of observation, in which Calasso traces chains of secret, luminous connections between myths, or within the works of his two artists. At the same time, Calasso’s varied interests have a way of popping up even in these more focused books, so that Proust and Wittgenstein are able to make appearances in Ka, while the vedas become necessary to discuss certain elements of the work of Kafka. In some cases, his asides become free-wheeling expositions on particular images, as in Tiepolo Pink, where an exhaustive analysis of Tiepolo’s sketches allows for a lengthy digression on the symbolic meaning of serpents. In all of these books, even when one does not necessarily agree with Calasso’s readings (which often have more to do with his own intellectual concerns than with the material under discussion) one is constantly impressed with the penetration of his insights and the expansiveness of his erudition.
Calasso’s work is also distinguished by an almost awesome persistence in explaining his own work through the description of other men’s. Calasso’s Nonnus, as R. Shorrock has observed, is in fact Calasso; and the same is true of his Tiepolo, of whose Würzburg ceiling he writes: “The judgment implicit to this vision without frontiers is not only aesthetic. Cultures are equated and mixed, as if each one needed the others in order to stand out. And as if all were members of a single caravanserai, which is history.” Perhaps the most striking of these projections is found in The Ruin of Kasch, in a passage on Sainte-Beuve’s Causeries du Lundi, which more or less amounts to an autobiographical statement: “There we find unknown people and classical heroes, kings and men of letters, grand ladies and politicians, the worldly and the cloistered. It is an endless tapestry of voices, judgments, events, reports, and words once lost and here recaptured. Wasting his talent week after week on books that the vicissitudes of publishing deposited on his desk, Sainte-Beuve after many years had constructed, with toothpicks and moss, that grandiose, excessive, maniacal edifice which was much like a novel but which he would never have dared present as such.”
But what is the purpose of this edifice? Early on in The Ruin of Kasch, Calasso writes: “The History we are dealing with here is ‘synoptic and simultaneous.’ It is the immense carpet without borders, where ‘it is possible to juxtapose and knot tightly together, before your eyes, the most disparate or distant events,’ where events and comments on events and stories about events and the ghosts of events remain perpetually enmeshed on a bed of torture and pleasure, where forms and forces cannot disentangle themselves, where the gaze has always been exposed to the ‘terrible danger of touching symbols.’ Any judgment here is a thread lost in the tangle of the carpet, and its sole claim is that it has added its faint color to the texture of the whole.” With such an explicit refusal to provide any kind of unifying thesis, the attempt to provide one here is no doubt an act of disfigurement — but it is one that must be performed if we are to understand the relationship between the work’s individual volumes.
Mirroring Nietzsche’s account of “How the ‘Real World’ Ended Up as a Fable” from Twilight of the Idols, Calasso’s is the story of how mankind forgot how to recognize the divine: “History is summed up in the fact that for a long time men killed other beings and dedicated them to an invisible power, but that after a certain point they killed without dedicating the victims to anyone.” Like Spengler, Calasso sees the modern world as one which, contrary to the idea of disenchantment, is spiritualized through and through, but in which the spiritual is simultaneously unrecognized and unnameable. What this means for us is communicated by the parable of the wooden image of Taurian Artemis, which Calasso relates in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, and in truncated form in The Forty-Nine Steps: “Orestes stole it from the shrine. He traveled a long way holding it tightly in his hands, and all the while he felt madness hanging over his head. Then one day, he thought he would try to live by himself and hid the statue in a thicket of reeds, not far from the Eurotas River. There the image lay for years. One day two young Spartans of royal blood, Astrabacus and Alopecus, discovered it accidentally when they entered the thicket. Upright, wreathed in branches, the statue stared at them. The two Spartans were driven mad, because they had no idea what they were seeing. This is the power of the simulacrum, which cures only those who know it. For others it is a sickness. Thus the myth: the power that arouses terror is also the only one that can cure it, as happened with Orestes. But only if it is recognized for what it is.”
While the modern world is driven mad by its failure to recognize the divinity that pervades it, Calasso uses the Vedic “Doctrine of the Forest” as a metaphor for the position of the artist. According to the Vedic teachings, the cosmos is maintained through a perpetual chain of sacrifices. While the priest in the city affirms the world through sacrifice, the seer in the forest is able to escape the cycle of ritual: “since sacrifice is all, we could actually dispense with performing it in society. Instead we could simply lie in wait in the forest and see it performed there every moment, in our very physiology, in our very breathing, just as today everything can be described as a moment in the cycle of production and consumption.” The modern artist is the seer in the forest — the one capable of recognizing the idol in the marshes.
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If Calasso’s untitled opus has been neglected by virtue of not being read as a single work, then The Word Speaks to the Faustian Man, the great, unfinished work by Som Raj Gupta, is simply neglected. To some extent, this lack of attention may be attributed to its apparent function as a scholarly tool, as it is a translation of the Prasthanatrayi (the Upanishads, the Bhagavadgita, and the Brahmasutras) and of the medieval philosopher Shankara’s commentaries on them, accompanied with the translator’s own commentary on the commentaries. That this is no ordinary scholar’s reference may be inferred from the work’s title, and becomes abundantly clear in the opening paragraph of the first volume’s preface:
“There are men who read a lot but do not turn into scholars because they do not read for the sake of systematic research and within the parameters of a methodology but in the hope, ultimately vain and futile, of finding some meaning and purpose in life. Their reading is often extensive, almost always profound and concentrated, but not systematic and objective enough to satisfy the norms set up by the great seats of learning and research. Such men think long and deeply but do not turn into thinkers because they think in pain and in anguish, think as much with their blood, their breath, their pulse as with their brains. Their thinking tells visibly upon their health and the working of their minds; its effect can be seen in their nervousness, in their indecisiveness, in their embarrassing clumsiness. They do not turn into thinkers because they do not think in what are called precise and rigorous terms and do not, cannot, look at every aspect of their thought as a systematic thinker would do. They are more anxious to see truth, to feel it and live it than to talk about it in coherent and precisely communicative terms. Such men also fail to be pious people because they find it difficult to observe the accepted laws of piety, or to be civilised because they do not always live up to the norms of civilisation. Nor can they pray with fervent devotion as men of faith do because their souls often remain amassed and frozen within themselves. They are, in one word, unhappy souls that can never come to be successful in life, in thought, in cultural pursuits. To fail in every sphere is their destiny—and the promise of their redemption.”
What follows, under the guise of a translator’s commentary upon the commentary of Shankara, is nothing less than a total encounter between Vedantic tradition and western philosophy, in which Gupta uses passages from western literature to demonstrate the universality of Shankara’s truths, and the futility of the western philosophic tradition. With such a premise, one might expect a dogmatic and rather shallow engagement from the author — yet Gupta’s argument moves across the spectrum of western thought with both facility and precision, taking on virtually everyone from Plato and Aristotle to modern thinkers like Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Lacan, and Derrida (among many, many others) on their own terms. The result is made especially strange by the fact that these sophisticated, and often exceedingly dense engagements are triggered by translated passages with no obvious relation to them, and are set alongside detailed explanations of Vedic rituals, myths, and line-by-line analyses of various passages from western literature. Thus, a couplet from the Isa Upanishad (“He who sees all beings in the Self alone and the Self in all/beings, he, with this vision blessed, will shed off all hate.”) gives rise to a twenty-six page disquisition on Brahman, Kant, Mandalas and the myth of Prajapati, close readings of passages from Wordsworth’s Prelude and Tintern Abbey, Dante, Homer, the Bagavadgita, and King Lear. At times, however, this wealth of intellectual resource can be disorienting, as Gupta tends to declare open season on all analytical vocabularies, sometimes combining terms from Sanskrit, Greek, French, and German in a single paragraph.
Like Calasso, Gupta is fond of grand declarations, and peppers his work with them to striking effect:
“The Interpreted world alone is hell. You do not have to seek it elsewhere. It is a mutilated version of the existent.”
“We moderns killed god to replace him with man, but succeeded in killing both god and man. Today, man is as much a chimera as god is.”
“In this post-modern age, we have come to proclaim ourselves as prophets of the ambiguous. We believe we perceive the ambiguous everywhere: in our truths, in our norms, in our values, in our relationship. It is because we think we perceive the ambiguous, because we think we know and understand it, and proclaim it with every force and conviction that we find ourselves in a mess. How has it happened that we have found untruth in truth, nonbeing in being and vice versa and managed to retain ourselves, our conceptualisations, our formulations to proclaim this so-called truth? How is it that, despite my loud proclamations of the ambiguous, I cannot share in the stoniness of the stone and the stone share in my consciousness and in my speech? How is it that it does not share in my perception of it? For the real seer of the ambiguous is one who floats between polarities, who flows into the other to let the other flow into him, not one who claims the concept of the ambiguous.”
It must be said, however, that the limitations of the commentary form, combined with Gupta’s idiosyncratic writing leads to a text that alternates between the dazzling and the monotonous, with startling observations and inspired textual readings sometimes placed back to back with repetitive explications of various terms and arguments. This unevenness, which comes as a consequence of the form Gupta has chosen, should not, however, diminish our gratitude to him for expanding upon the range of what is possible in English non-fiction.
Unrecognized at present as an artistic genre, the commentary was once a form as venerated as it was necessary — the vehicle by which sacred texts were made to pronounce the law or reveal mystic truths. Even in more secular contexts it was essential: in the Confucian tradition, the Zuozhuan used the Spring and Autumn Annals as a key for opening China’s history, expanding Confucius’ skeletal text into one of the great works of Chinese literature; likewise, among the Fa diviners of Dahomey — who used stories to interpret the lines they drew between the palm kernels dropped on their divination boards — exegesis held an even more sovereign position. Not only did the stories hold the key to the future, but they maintained the world through their multiplication: for every story corresponded to a year on earth, and it was only when the exegetic stories have become exhausted that the world would finally come to an end. The difference between such traditions and the pronouncements of certain post-modern figures is evident in the lackadaisical approach taken by the latter, in which commentary is always selective and strategic, whereas the rigor of the traditional approach — in which nothing less than working line by line, or even word by word, is adequate — assumes a degree of intellectual seriousness difficult to find among those who scoff at the absolute. In Gupta’s hands, this form becomes all the more remarkable for the effect it has on all of the other texts incorporated in his analysis — the totality of his reading of the Prasthanatrayi bleeds into everything else, seeming to unite all of Western literature into a sacred text running parallel to the ones interpreted by Shankara and Gupta. So far as I know, there is nothing else like it. It is a great misfortune for most serious readers that its length, rarity, and obscurity will deprive them of the opportunity of reading it — Gupta’s prefaces alone are a treasure, and the dedication, revealed only in the fifth volume, is the most moving I have ever read.
As with Calasso, the argument of Gupta’s work is one that has to do with the power of seeing. The Faustian men of its title, when not consumed with the pursuit of praxis, become trapped in a dialogic relationship with the world that cannot yield positive results: “They feel the absence of truth with a passion that makes them feel ill, sometimes literally ill. They have no choice but to obey the call of truth. They do not seek to humanise reality but rather to ontologise themselves. Men of this sort often get indifferent to the world of experience which, to them, appears a dark cave peopled with shadows and lurid lights. They would escape from them as quickly as they can. For truth lies, for them, not in the cave but in the enchanted happy world outside. But the way out is not found, and the cave becomes endless.” The solution to this difficulty, Gupta argues, is to give up interpretation through the de-predication of the world:
“Modern man has ceased to feel the dread extent of the mystery of what we ordinarily deem to be familiar things; he cannot even suspect how fearfully and redemptively abysmal are the depths that ever heave within them. He can only find them ‘interesting’ or problematic. They rouse his curiosity and greed but do not strike him dumb and deaf. And if he ever comes to feel fear in their presence, it is a petty narcissistic fear that he feels, not the dread that can shatter a man into beatitude... Man is no longer expected and asked to open himself out to reality, to allow it to visit him, to enrich and suffuse him; he is only asked to move on from one interpretation to another... But for him who has self-submitted to appearances, to maya, maya will benignly transform itself into Brahman. The apparent will become the real, the other the self. He does not have to seek a trascendental reality beyond the world of appearance. For the surface itself will reveal itself as the depth.”
This difficult operation, the very articulation of which denies its purpose, is unlikely to persuade readers who are not already at the end of their rope, so to speak (as Gupta says, “It is the impoverished soul alone that can hope for redemption.”). If one can be forgiven for discussing such a work from the standpoint of uses outside those intended by its author, it must be as an escape plan from intellectual ennui, and an opening of new horizons.
***
It is an interesting fact (and a fact so obvious that, if it were not mentioned, one might run the risk of ignoring it) that Shakespeare’s principal achievements were in the field of drama. To say the same of a leading writer today would be inconceivable, and this is perhaps as good a summary as any for the poverty of contemporary world literature. What does it mean that, if asked to name the most ambitious writers of our times, most people would reply with the names of novelists? Or that we cannot imagine a new literary work in history, drama, or narrative poetry capable of eliciting excitement on equal terms with a book like 2666?
Alongside the myth of the age of the global encounter, and Gupta’s myth of post-modern ambiguity, one might place the myth of post-modern hybridity. In truth we inhabit an age of closed forms — hermetic genres that all advance in their own directions, and whose practitioners therefore can only learn from predecessors within the same genre. Even the so-called “experimental writer” is one whose experiments are sharply delimited by convention — the experimental novelist remains a novelist, just as the experimental dramatist remains a dramatist. The cliché of mixing genres, or, in academic circles, of becoming more “interdisciplinary,” is possible precisely because our intellectual antecedents have become so predetermined by form. Yet, one of the most persistent qualities of great artists and thinkers is the creativity with which they define their own predecessors. The works of Roberto Calasso and Som Raj Gupta are reminders of what such encounters can look like.