Volume 13 - Issue 1

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I Volume thirteen, number one

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Back in the U.S.S.R. Volume thirteen, number one November 1979 An Interview with Alexander Ginzberg

TNJ: How old were you when you -------first became aware of the restrictions on human rights that you believe the Soviet system imposes?

Karen Sideman AG: I was ten years old when I Designer and Graphics Editor discovered that there was no notion of human rights at all in the Soviet Eric Bibler Union. I began to express my thoughts, and to ask questions, and I Publisher Pro Tempore was told that it was forbidden to speak my thoughts and not only forbidden, Julie Peters but dangerous.

Jamie Romm TNJ: When you speak of human Assistant Editors rights, do you refer only to the rights of free expression? Or do you include Graphics Staff' economic rights too within your about 800 teachers there and they Craig Fitt, Paul De Vries, tiefiniti_on? needed a two-thirds majority to pass Kacey Clagett, Stacey Levy, .AG: ~ include both kinds of rights. the declaration to fight. To my Jane Stanier, Anthony Press, ln the Soviet Union, people have no pleasure, they did not get a two-thirds Dale Robbins, Liz Forman, right to work-but only the obligation majority. They just missed it. I feel to work. They have no right to study, sorry for a child whose teacher is but only the obligation to do so. homosexual.

Business Staff: There are no such things as rights, no TNJ: Is the abrogation of human Jeff Foster, Leslie Boyce. such concept, but only things that are rights inherent in a socialist system of forbidden or are obligatory. government?

Special Thanks: TNJ: What about a country where AG: The utter lack of human rights is Margaret Cohen, Master Charles Davis, there were a few rich people, while the one of the main points of socialism.

Jeffrey Nunokawa, Dean Eustace Theodore, majority of people were very poor.

Under socialism, there is a leveling off Terry Murphy, Jane Dickenson, Would that country be violating the according to the lowest common Peter Swenson, Lanny Hammer, Ella human rights of its citizens? denominator. The system tells the Torrey, Jami~ Hutchison, Charlton Press, AG: That would depend on the way Harold Conklin people: there is no need to reach. Let . . the rich behave towards the poor. If everyone be poor. Let everyone be the poor received welfare help, if they stupid. Don't stick out. If you stick Copyright © 1979 by The New Journal at received medical care when they out, you will be cut off. Show me a Yale, Inc., a non-profit journal of needed it, that country might be comment on the arts, the belles-lettres, different kind of socialism. alright. and politics. Letters and unsolicited TNJ: What do you mean by manuscripts welcome: 3432 Yale Station, TNJ: What about Sexual socialism?

New Haven, CT. 06520. Editorial discrimination, the rights of women AG: I mean a system wherein there is meetings are held Tuesdays at 8:00 p.m. and homosexuals? Are the rights of no private property and all property is in Calhoun College Common Room, or these groups included in your controlled by the government. phone the Editor at 865-1106. definition?

TNJ: You would not include Sweden AG: Women, yes. Homosexuals is a then, as a socialist state.

Graphics: more difficult question. The AG: No. Sweden is a welfare state, p.2, pp.6,7 Paul De Vries, declaration of human rights can only but is is not a socialist state. pp.8,9 Karen Sideman, p:ll Pablo include those rights which don't harm TNJ: Do you think that it is the Picasso, Dog aad Cock 1921, Courtesy of others. I spoke at the conference of the socialist system of government that is Yale University Art Gallery-Gift of American Federation of teachers. solely responsible for the eclipse of Stephen C. Clark, B.A. 1903, Immediately before I spoke, there was human rights that you speak of, or do p.13 from The Gmt Houses of Paris by a vote to decide whether the teachers you think that the emphasis o~ science Fregnac and Andrews, pp.16,17 from union should fight for the right of and technology which is pervasive in Catalogue of Fantastic Tblap by Jacques homosexuals to teach. There were Western societies also endangers Care/m(ln human rights? .

AG: The human spirit does not depend on technology. There were, I am sure, technological exploits in the ~~ Thorn in the Side of Complacency,, stone age as well. ·rNJ: Do you think that consumerism, Comment and tlie building of a consumer society 2 Micha Odenheimer such as we have here in the United An Interview with Alexander Ginzberg States, has an adverse effect on human Dark Victory rights?

5 JamieRomm AG: This is not a consumer society.

The Yale Band Fight Song Competition Where else but in America does one Deborah Weiss witness so many volunteer Ain't Misbehavin' 6 organizations.

I visited such an An Interview with B.F. Skinner organization, in Washington, the Martha Hollander, Freedom House. In America you have Metropolitan Life 8 voluntary organizations that do many Roberts Eleanor Way Out West on West End A venue things. From such an organization as Alexa11dra Kahn.

Amnesty International, to 10 Dress Well and Be Good Looking organizations that teach English to for Five good Reasons black and Indian children. These J.D. McClatchy would not exist in a consumer society.

13 Book Review TNJ: Do you think that there is a J.D. McClatchy does Paris common ground, a unity in aim or Pam Schirmeister approach, among the various dissident 16 The Trope Stops Here groups, from Jews to Ukranians, to An Interview with Jacques Derrida Baptists, to Lithuanians?

Heart of Glass 17 Deconstruction and Witticism A G: I worked on the Helsinki monitar with Scharansky, with Bride of Derrida Russians, with Lithuanians, with Ukranians and there was no problem at alL All of us want to attain freedom-not anarchy. Just room to breathe. In a totalitarian system, all who do not have enough air band ~ together. All .of us made it our goal to Eva Saks Editor in Chief

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TNJ: Have the forms of persecution in the Soviet Union changed since the days of Stalin?

AG: The conditions in the prisons have gotten worse. They put in prison as many as they have to, as many as they can get away with. Now, for instance, they will not put Sakhorov in prison. They are afraid that scientific contacts crucial to their military will be interrupted.

• TNJ: Do you feel that anti-semitism in the Soviet Union is a major ,problem?

AG: There is anti-semitism because the Soviets disapprove of any nationalism, of any group that has a strong identity and commitment to anything besides the state. There is anti-semitism, and there is also antiLithuanianism and anti-Ukranianism.

The J~ws are one percent of the population. What about the other ninety-nine percent? They are also being persecuted. There has been an agreement between the United States and the Soviet government. It is all right for America and the American press and politicians to talk about the Jews. They have been made into a special case, and the Americans and the Russians will haggle about them.

The Russian people consider them a special case. But all the other groups, one is not allowed to speak of them.

The editors of The Washington Post told me that I had space to write a column in their editorial section on anything that I wanted to. I chose to write about the ten thousand Baptists who wish to emigrate from the Soviet Union. They did not print this. The Jews are the only group who it is permitted to write about.

TNJ: Because the Jews own the press?

AG: No, because the Jews can be seen as a special case-for better and for worse.

TNJ: What would your advice to American students be?

AG: Students are a real force in American politics. Ten years ago they turned to the left, they stopped the Vietnam war-either because they thought it was unfair or because they did not want to fight. Students can cause another turnto. I'm sure you have surmised by now that I am a reactionary.

TNJ: Don't you think that American students turned to the left because they saw their country supporting regimes that denied their own people human rights, regimes that the American government supported for economic reasons-South Africa, South Korea, South Vietnam, certain Latin American regimes?

A G: Have you ever been through a war? There can never be full human rights during a war, while a war is being waged. During the American Revolution, there were areas and times in which a person could be shot simply on suspicion. The situation of South Africa, South Korea, South Vietnam has been that of a very tense battle.

Still, millions upon millions more people have die<i as a result of the Russian and Chinese revolutions than have been affected by these rightist regimes. Sixty million people have been murdered by the Soviet government since the revolution-and this does not count war time. Six million people have been killed in Communist China.

The same brutality occurs in any country in which such a system is introduced. Cuba is a country of one

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The New Journal, November 1979

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Dlfilion people-<X>unt the victims of her system . In East Germany, there has been no noticable population increase in recent years. This is not because they use birth control over there, but because they shoot people who dissent.

TNJ: Still, if the American students are to support the use of American power, acting as a global judge and policeman, we have to be sure of the morality of those who wield the powe1 I think many students remained unconvinced of the moral fibre of those groups which lead our nation.

AG: I must defend America. Who is now most involved in saving the Vietnamese refugees? Isn't it America I know because I have been involved, since I left Russia in the movement to help the boat people. Those people who were against the war in Vietnam are not helping the boat people.

TNJ: That's not exactly true.

AG: Jane Fonda, Daniel Ellsberg, Angela Davis-they were asked for their help and they refused. I tried to arrange a meeting with Jane Fonda and Muhammed Ali-they refused to meet with me.

TNJ: Joan Baez , . .

AG: I have no trouble with Joan Baez. At least she has a conscience.

She learned about the U.S.S.R. while visiting there. She was not allowed to sing in public. So she came and sang in the kitchen of Sakhorov.

TNJ: Getting back to the question of American students-what direction would you like their activism to take.

AG: Fmt of all, I wish that they would not listen to me, or to anyone else. I want them to go and inquire and listen and see things with their own eyes. You know in Moscow, when a visitor comes, they show him MQSCOw State University. It is much smaller than Yale-and it is for forty thousand students. There is no freedom for the student .

TNJ: Does it matter to you that there are people living witl}in a few blocks of this university who don't have adequate places to live or enough to eat?

AG: This is true? Of course this bothers me. Of course I believe that people must take care of one another-if I did not believe that I would not have been a dissident in the Soviet Union. I think that each person is responsible to others, and that the community and the state is especially so. In my country they spit on other people. In the Soviet Union, men help one another and are put in prison for it.

iNJ: And

what wouJd you hke to see students doing?

AG: If American students would set up a volunteer organization similar to the Peace Corps-to the ideal of the Peace Corps-I know little of how this organization actually worked-a corps that would work in China, in the U.S.S.R. in Southeast Asia, in Eastern Europe, a group that would concern itself with human rights-then they would help us and our people and they would work for peace. Nobody would ask such an organization to work according to political rules. This would not be a government organization. I do not want others to work for the political goals of Alexander Ginsberg. If they will o nly carry on their own ideals.

Micha Odenheimer '80 is not yet a Communist.

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The New Journal, November 1979

Dark Victory The Yale Band Fig_ht Song Competition -Jamie Romm The ltrst poetry of mankind is lost forever in the murky eddies. of prehistory; but it probably originated, like so much of human culture and perhaps even society itself, in warfare. The battlecry or paean is certainly a common aspect to of war from the very beginnings of history, and it is not hard to imagine bands of neolithic warriors chanting rhythmic exhortations to one another u they aavanced into the fray. The raw might of these battlelteld poems was later picked up in parts of more civilized works like Homer's /Iliad, in which Agamemnon orders: "Let no one escape towering doom at our hands, not even the manchild in his mother's belly!' Since .then, the battlecry has been taken up by Greek lyric poets, Roman state poets, Galliards, Elizabethans, Cavaliers, Romantics-almost every age that has sent its youth off to war has produced poetry to rally them. football ltght song we see the modern descendant of this ancient literary form. Here, the primordial gods of destruction and carnage are raised up anew. Once again the martial rhythms sound their sonorous beat, and the cry for battle · and conquest goes up from the host. Students and alumni who ten years ago might have been Conscientious Objectors and voted for Eugene McCarthy can be heard in today's football arenas calling out for blood.

In the

1. Smash, Bang, Crash Brian Overland, 1980 We're going to start a panic in Harvard Square, Right after we send a jolt through Nassau · Halli We're going to make them suffer, but we don't care, The truth is we like to watch them cry and bawl.

Smash! Bang! Crash! Eli's men will st9r~ and rail!

Smash! Bang! Crash! Poor old Harvard we will nail!

We're going to start a panic in Harvard Square, As we smash! Bang! Crash! For Eli Yale!

The startling energy and vigor of this song reminds us at once~of the warrior poems of old.

The author's conltdent assertion that "we don't care" about the enemy's suffering recalls the lordly detachment of Achilles as he abandons the hardpressed Greek army. The notion of the hero as someone who stands outside the social and moral codes of his day is plainly at work here.

The idea of panic recurs throughout the song, conjuring up a frightening picture of the utter tragedy of defeat. One is reminded of Byron's "The Destruction of Sennacherib": "And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail/ And the idols are broke in the temples of Baal." Defeat means more than just material or economic loss

for the vanquished; it loosens the very underpinnings of social unity. Mr. Overland reflects this sense of chaos with the resonant "Smash! Bang! Crash!" of the refrain. The result is a poem of striking power and brutality. The masterful ltfth line is enough to send shivers of barbarian glee down even the most civilized spines.

2. Mother Yale Scott MacCiarty, 1980 We're not afraid of Princeton, and we're not afraid of Brown, And Dartmouth doesn't scare us; we'll run them out of town.

We leave the Crimsons shaking, 'cause Harvard has no chance!

Although they wear their cleats, its Mother Yale who wears the pants.

REFRAIN: We'll ltght for Mother Yale, We'll ltght for good old Eli and for Mother Yale, The one we'll ever stand by-only Mother Yale!

Our hearts belong to you, so give another wail!

It's for the team that wears the blue!

Yale, For Thee Jim Gardner, 1980 Yale for thee, thy victory, Our voices now as one we raise; Guaranteed ascendancy for Eli throughout our college days; Onward go, your prowess show Each foe your mighty will obeys.

For our hearts and minds eternally We tender unto Eli, as Yale we praise.

Anthropologists tell us that ancestor worship evolved as the ltrst form of religion in many cultures. Perhaps it was the dead ancestor who was invoked for strength in the ltrst tribal battle songs.

These two works seem to rely heavily on pagan ritual and belief, particularly with regard to ancestor worship.

Mr. Gardner addresses his song of adoration to a numinous force dubbed •Yale', which possesses no physical appearance or attributes, but hovers cloudlike above the plane of the poem. There is some suggestion at the end that this is in fact Eli Yale, a legendary ancestor from the distant past, but this is not developed. In any event the author clearly speaks as a worshipper of this force, singing its praise and carrying forth its glory throughout time. One is reminded of the ancient heroic ballads, which were sung by the baras partly to preserve the immortality of the hero. The notion of memory as life is important here.

Mr. MacClarty's work reminds us more of the warrior-goddess figure popularized by many pagan cultures. As is customary she is given certain male characteristics; in this case she is portrayed as wearing pants. It is highly significant that she is characterized as a •mother': the maternal ancestor as warrior!leader is a strong theme in martial poetry, as it is in myth. The prototype for

MacClarty's heroine originates in ~ly matriarchical societies such as the legendary Amazons.

The Eli figure appears in this song also, possibly as a male counterpart or consort to the Mother.

The warriors who sing the song stand in a complex and intimate relationship to the mother-goddess; its Oedipal nature is clearly expressed by the poet and need not be discussed here.

4. The Big Blue Wave Steve Hayes, 1981 Eli! Eli! The Big Blue wave is breaking!

Now the wave is at its height!

Now the bulldog growls with all his might!

Eli! Eli! And Victory's for the taking!

Big Blue victory's in sight, as we fight for Eli Yale!

Eli! Eli! The Big Blue wave is rising!

The save will crash, the field will quake!

The wave is leaving conquest in its wake!

Eli! Eli! And Harvard is capsizing!

Blues will win, make no mistake, for the sake of Eli Yale!

The use of metaphor achieves a vivid effect in both these songs. Mr. Hayes uses the image of an enormous wave to characterize the might of the Yale team. One is reminded of Byron's description of the Assyrian army: "And the sheen o.f their spears was like stars on the sea/ When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee." The image here is not a serene one, however, but a violent one. The repetition of the "ake" sounds throughout the poem creates a harsh slamming effect similar to Tennyson's famous "Break, break: break,! On thy cold grey stones, 0 sea."

The result is a poem of towering might and beauty. It is interesting that the Harvard team is portrayed as being at sea (cf...capsizing") while the wave itself is breaking onto the field; perhaps there is a mythical allusion intended.

5. Bulldog Blues Sam Zurier, 1980 When the Crimson sabers rattle, And the bears of Brown do roar, Eli's troops will come to battle Like we always have before.

We will meet them and defeat them As we ride our victor cruise They can run, they can race, but they'll get second place When they face our bulldog blues!

We will rally the Eli's nation From the Bowl to Wooster Square, As we establish domination On the ground and in the air.

So let's give three cheers, for the good years Cause we know we cannot lose, They can use all their men, but we'll beat them again When they face our bulldog blues! continued on page eighteen

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T1te New Journal, November 1979

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would go to India, he would give me one hundred human babies to study. spent my Ufe finding alternatives to punishment and yet because I talk about control, they think I mean the whip. I tt}ink people are controlled and I want to make sure that that control works for the betterment of the individual and of the species as well. All my work in education and elsewher-e has been to_get rid of not only the paddle and the birch rod but aU of the subtle ways in which teachers punish students.

Although I may have coined the word "behavior modification" (I'm not sure of that) I don't mean implanted electrOdes or vomit therapy. When Clockwork Orange came out, I was in London and some underground magazine there bad an iSSlJe the whole thing on me.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •blaming Both Kubrick and Burgess have said that it was an attack on my position. They're miles off the target because I have never- suggested that type of control at aU, though I do raise these questions.

Burgess said that he and Kubrick wanted to A n Interview with B.F. Skinner demonstrate that violence, if done with a free will, was better than being good due to conditioning. . -Deborah Weiss The violence in Clockwork Orange wasn't due to free will. They were high on a drug and were as B. F. Skinner is a professor of psychology at Harvard. ll)UCh conditioned as they could possibly be.

A pioneer in the field of behavioral psychology, his

Ain't Misbehavin'

first popular work was the utopian novel Walden Two (1948). During the 'sixties, popular interest in his

work increased. In 1971, qfter the publication of &yond Freedom and DiKnity, Time published a cover story on Skinner which concluded that .,Skinner's utopian projection is less likely to be a blueprint for the Golden Age than for the theory and practice of hell." The second volume of Skinner's autobiography The Slulping of a Behaviorist was published by Knopf this summer.

DW Why t,lid you write an autobiography?

BPS My work has been very much misunderstood. And I have been misunderstood .

When I lecture at a university someone is bound to say afterwards, "You should do this more often.

People think of you with two heads or something like that. You ' re really a human being."

I've tried to show the differ-ent sides of my life and particularly the development of my scientific work, which was a series of accidents very largely.

Lucky accidents certainly. It gives a better picture of a scientist at work than the philosophers of science who reconstruct what goes on in a scientific discovery.

One principle is to tell the story as it happened.

I'm writing as you'd write a novel. I've avoided reading autobiography since I started. I don' t want to imitate anyone on this. I've just been following some principles of what I think a story should be rather- than giving it any artistic structure too . . . I'm not dressing it up. I'm not putting in irrelevant but teasing tension.

D W Were you hoping to correct popular or scholarly misunderstanding?

BPS There's a great deal of very strange misunderstanding: At a conference in Washington, a man came from India and said to me that if I would go to India he would give me a hundred human babies to study . . . the whole business about the daughter- we raised in the SO<alled air crib, that she killed herself or became psychotic. I've somehow or other- been confused with John B. Watson. At one time Watson published a book in which he claimed that affection is a very danaerous thing and a parent shouldn' t show affection. He later- on regretted that he ever published that.

Special tlumlcs to Guy 9tzrden, Terry Holloway, NllltCY Mtlllll, Rulon Wells, and the ~ at Haskins Labs.

D W How do you view the contro"versy between you and Noam Chomsky?

BFS I am so perfectly confident that my book Verbal Behavior is the right way to go about this and that Chomsky has kept the linguists from discovering it that I don't worry about this issue.

The curious thing is that Chomsky has tied this aU into political and philosophical and ethical issues. He now has quo\e 'figured out> that Locke, with the idea that you ~ learn from experience was really the figure bebiri«l.__the whole Industrial Revolution and capitalism. ~t that's absurd -beaiuse that is an environmentaijst approach and it is the Descartes kind of inborn lnt,elligence which

is the belief that people are as they are- they' re bright or not bright-because they are born that way. He's really on the wrong side of the fence because according to Locke anyone can become a genius if he just has enough experience wher-eas according to Descartes you're licked at the start.

You have inborn rules according to Chomsky, but you have only what you got with your genes.

He should be on Jensens side completely. I don't understand this at aU. I am, naturally, as John B. Watson was, an environmentalist. Watson exaggerated, he said, "Give me a dozen infants and I can make them into a doctor, lawyer- and so on. He couldn't do that, of course. He said right away, "I am exagerating and I know it."

1 C:lon·t tJUnk very well about the so<alled 'genetic endowment' of the human organism. My specialty, and I don't want to try and talk outside my specialty, is to discover what .can be done with

an· organism . It might be a human being, it might be a pigeon, it might be a raccoon. We have in the

last thirty or forty years, made extraordinary progress in shaping new types of behavior, and in maintaining behavior in strength (what's usually called 'motivation').

D W Do you still believe, as you suggested in Walden Two, that the family is becoming obsolete?

BFS As SOciety has evolved, you have families, and it has been extremely important for the protection of children and later for the conservation of property, to respect family relationships. But we've now reached the point where about half the families are only one parent families. It presumably is possible to raise children more effectively if you know something about it.

The textbook doesn't come with the baby. An ordinary small apartment with two parents and two kids is a very difficult sort of situation. With a differ-ent organization to society as a whole, the old styl~ _family would not any longer be needed.

D W Do you think that parental instincts are too weak to determine much behavior, or that some instinctive tendencies are strong but should be replaced by learned behavior? .

BFS We have got rid of most of our instinctive behavior because we have ~telligenC! to take its place.

Personal relationships however, are things which remain constant for thousands and thousands of gener-ations. The only feature of the human environment today that resembles that of twenty thousand years ago is other- people. That is constant, so that instinctive behavior which deals with other people bas a chance to survive. Love relationships, caring relationships, could well have a measure of phylogenetic character in them. That would apply only wher-e the environment is stable from generation to generation and would involve mostly other people. Care of a child, mother embracing a child at her breast could be quite strong for merely phylogentic reasons and yet would not necessarily be strong enough to keep the mother nursing unless the culture wer-e doing a great deal more, showing her how and criticizing her if she dido 't.

It would be 'true of lovemaking, different ways of making love. All the taboos would probably be cultural and would then modify the way the thing was carried on.

D W Do you have any general views about the importance or unimportance of genetic factors in determining human differences?

BFS I differ with my friend E. 0. Wilson and the soc'obiologists. I don' t think that the notion of ~iC?logical restraints is anything like as powerful as he thinks. It is true that one cannot learn to play the piano without the genetic ability to move the fmgers but that doesn't mean that ther-e is anything fundamentally genetic about learning to play the piano. People have invented and produced pianos because certain kinds of noises are reinforcing. Now that is genetic, I am sure, in very obscure way.

Without a body we wouldn't have behavior. If you ' re going to teach a roomful of children you must be sure that they h<ave eyes and ears , you must be sure that they have fingers but aside from that, what they're taught and bow well they learn and how fast they learn are pretty much a matterof the environment. There are limitations: There are retarded children who do not learn at the same speed. You accept these and deal with them as you can. Even so they can do much more than most people think they can.

I -think there are important differences among people. I think it's absurd to suppose that everyone can profit from a Yale education. and

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The New Journal, November 1979

it's absurd to suppose that everyone could ·be a concert pianist. I couldn't be. I can't memorize music. My eyes have gone bad and I can't read music. Since I can't memorize, I can't play and it's a great tragedy to me. There's no way in which I could ever have, no matter how I had been trained as a child.

I don't feel inferior. I don't feel I should be bussed to another school. I don't resent being unequal. I wish I could do it, but I do other things.

Any prejudice against any group-blacks, Asians, homosexuals-is very unfortunate. Youjudge people in terms of their ability and what they can contribute. But to do the other thing around-to say you ought to give them an exceptional chance-is the same principle. You are again showing some kind of prejudice. This is the Bakke case. I haven't made up my mind on that.

The only strong issue that I do anything about-and it's just a question of where I put my United Fund money instead of the United Fund-is population. I think the great problem in the world today is overpopulation.

These Boat People: that's a population problem.

I see no alternative to a lifeboat ethic on this. You cannot sink the boat because you felt unhappy about cracking someone's knuckles when he grabs onto the ed~e.

My book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, came at the watershed between the huge individualism of the sixties and the tapering of that in the seventies. We must look to the future of the species and meanwhile the future ways of life which we think are promising ways of life with respect to preserving the species.

That's the point of the work 'beyond' in my title. I wasn't saying "down with freedom and down with dignity." I want people to feel freer than ever before, to have a sense of dignity and a sense of achievement.

DW Was it intended os a provocative title?

BFS Yes. It may have been a mistake, I don't know. It sold a lot of books. Actually I was calling it "Freedom and Dignity" right up until I sent it off to the publishers, and my editor then said, "Look, when you get through with this, it isn't really freedom and dignity we're talking about," and I said, "Let's call it Beyond Freedom and Dignity."

I was thinking of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and /!:vi/ and Freud's IJeyond the Pleasure Principle. So 'beyond • got in there and it did cause trouble, but it also pulled people up short so they started to think about this issue.

I am really very unhappy about the extension of the notion of individual right at the present time.You aren't born with rights.

You're born with the power to get what you can and defend yourself. When you use "rights" you're talking about really what you can do. You organize and strengthen the workers against management and capital and you create rights.

There is no such thing as a "right," it doesn't exist, it has no physical dimensions at all. It has to do with the way people control each other and particularly the countercontrols of people who are controlling in undesirable ways.

People talk about the rights of animals now; the next thing is going to be the rights of plants.

7

breakfast. Now, someone's going to say, "Ah, but these people have a right to food, to clothing, to privacy, to entertainment. You can't take those

You aren't hom with rights. You're born with the power to get what you can and defend yourself. rights away to use them as reinforcers." The American Civil Liberties Union is after this.

They're tryng to establish the principle that anything that a retarded or a psychotic person or a prisoner has had the right to cannot be taken away from him to use as a reinforcer.

Now what does that right mean? Why does a prisoner have any rights? You can work up a lot of rhetoric for this. You must help the helpless but if any person can help themself, he or she must be required to do so. A home for retarded people which was entirely self-supporting would be ideal.

DW Is it compatible with your analysis in Verbal Behavior to suppose that some gromotico/ structures ore innate?

BFS No. You can't plead genetic sources unless you can give some potent reason how they could have arisen. People have been speaking languages only for, let us say twenty thousand years. Now, how important to the survival of the individual to breeding age is speaking grammaticaJly? In a few generations you can develop resistance to a disease-that's crucial. But there is nothing very crucial about speaking either broken English or good English.

I think Chomsky backed down on this and said, "Well, grammar isn't exactly verbal. It's other intellectual things which have had a chance to develop before we're talking about the actual linguistic environment."

The argument that all languages have some common features and that, therefore, there must be some structural principle due to the genetics of the individual, is wrong. The innate grammatical rules are due to the fact that all languages serve similiar functions. In every language people caJl the other person by name: "Ah, vocatives." They

DW Hove you'revised your views on physiology?

BFS I am not anti-psysiological. Many people misunderstood me on this. I think it's a fine field and an important field.

The textbook doesn't come with the baby name objects: "Ah, nouns." They talk about action: "Ah, verbs." They ask questions: "Ah, the interrogative." They express wishes: "Ah, the optative." All languages are used for certain practical purposes and hence they all have certain common features. Not because they are part of the genetic endowment but because they are part of the verbal environment.

D W There ore certain transformations, common td all languages, that seem to defy explanations of this kind, for instance. the rule that 'which • clause cannot be moved to some positions where they seem to make sense. How do you deal with these?

BFS Chomsky is of course a structuralist. This · all goes back to Roman Jakobson, Levi-Strauss and linguistics and anthropology.

Jakobson himself has done the most absurd thing in analyzing structure. He's taken a Shakespeare sonnet and he talks about the

T here is not a world of experience. There is a world, and there's behavior with respect to that world. going to say we eat carrots. I've thought of writing an article, "Libertas Nervosa." We've gotten rid of lots of the infringements on our freedom that we really object to, but we're going on and on. We resent every kind of control including those that will keep us alive just as the anorexia nervosa case goes right o~ down through the normal weight, dying a matchstick figure.

In my own field there has been some work, some good and some bad, in hospitals for the psychotic and retarded, and in prisons, to use positive reinforcement rather than the usual

you name the principles and turn arounu ana explain the behavior. If, for example, you glimpse a circle and it's broken, but you see it as a whole circle, that's called 'closure' or 'pregnance' or something. Then you say, "Why do you see it that way?" "Oh; because of pregnancel" This is just double talk. You can do the same thing with language. You can extract grammatical principles, as the Greeks did when they frrst discovered grammar, and you say, "Well, why do people speak grammaticaJly? Because they know these principles." That's not true.

If I have a dog I can teach the dog to catch a ball or a frisbee. Now this does not mean that the dog has deduced the laws of trajectories. Yet he acts as if he knew the rules. People speak grammaticaJly who don't know the rules. The ordinary Frenchman doesn't even know how to break the thing up into words. After you extract the rules then you can speak according to the rules.

DW So how· do you explain the universality of those difficult transformations? · BFS I don't know this transformation business at all. I would have to take them one by one, I suppose, and make a guess as to the common features of the verbal environment that would make this possible.

'centripedal flow' when you get to the middle and the 'centrifugal flow' when you get to the end. Of course, every sonnet is centripedal and centrifugal.

But it's all done (by Jakobson) in terms of that particular sonnet.

The Gestalt Psychologists did this many years ago. You discover some structural principles, then

What I was objecting to was the psysiology which is merely inferences from behavior, as if you could tum around and use this to explain the behavior. It throws light on relationship between psysiology and behavior, yes.

D W Does psysiology provide hypotheses about behavior, os in Garcia's experiments? {Garcio .showed that rots will refuse to eat food of certain color if they ore i"odioted 4-6 hours after eating that food.)

BFS That is not reinforcement, it is punishment.

It works precisely as I analyzed punishment. It doesn't suppress it, it gives you reasons to get apy from it.

-Im' Haven't we used physiology to produce on hypothesis?

BFS But you see, we don't know anything about the physiology. All we know is the facts.

"Something to do with avoiding poison" is an appeal to genetics rather than to physiology.

I would like to see more and more physiology done. When someone tells me what's going on inside my pigeon I 'II be delighted to hear about it.

But at the moment I don't know and moreover it's going to be harder to fmd out than it is about the behavior.

I don't know of any features of behavior that I now understand more clearly because someone has told me about the physiology.

D W Are there logical problems in explaining behavior by events at another level of description. like physiology?

BFS It would be very awkward to do it that way.

Even though we now know a good deal about genetics, you don't really breed a racehorse by examining the DNA. you would take the records continu~

on page fiftHn

s

The New Journal, November 1979

I'll Take Manhattan -Eleanor Roberts About New York, Joan Didion wrote that "those days before I knew the names of all the bridges were happier than the ones that came later.'' After a year, I still can't tell the Triborough from the George Washington. I guess that's good. Neither have I ever gone to the Frick, MOMA, or the Bronx Zoo, sins of omission so shaming I bsually avoid mentioning them. But this is about life after Yale, and the untumed comers of the city.

Once you've graduated, New Haven is a lot farther away from New York than the all-toofamiliar Conrail for the distance is compounded by the feeling that once you've left, you really oughn't go back and hang around. Looks like you can't make it back from Mother Yale.

Mother Yale bas quite a stronghold in the city, • anyway-few weeks go by without an encounter on the street, the subway a shop.

"Didn't you go to Yale?" Well, yes, but right now I'm trying to decide if these plastic wrapped tomatoes are ripe. One does run into alot of Yalies in New York, doesn't one?

"Have you been up to New Haven lately?" not since graduation. Except once to pick up some dry cleaning.

I forgot to pick up my dry-cleaning in New York, too, which means not much has changed, right?

It takes a while for the intellectual and emotional sediment to settle after the flurry of finals, graduation, moving, job hunting. No doubt this process of precipitation is easier for some than for others; certainly it's simplified if you know what you want, what brought you to New York, and where you'll go next. It takes even longer to have a feeling of digesting Yale. Heartburn.

Bluebooks. Yearbooks if it's really bad and happens to be raining.

Yet, my Yale education is paying off. I'm still paying Yale off, too, will be for about twenty years. But a heartening number of the new old Blues I know have found work in their beloved humanities.

Should I update my resume?

There's some difficulty in reconciling yourself to the idea that you're here for awhile, with a job, probably a lease, some friends, and it might be okay, even a good idea, to go ahead and buy some plates, a bed, curtains. After all, taking off for parts unknown isn't really imminent, at least not on the salary of an editioral assistant.

Ab, that's a treasured euphemism-the name? everything and nothing. Most of all it means the landlady won't get the rent until next week. If you are planning to be an editorial assistant, choose

much prefer to sentencing myself to two years of law school-it's much harder to predict what I'll have to show for it. (They don't give diplomas in the school of hard knocks.) · "At least we don't have to worry about getting irred," said a woman (Harvard, '78) I work with.

"Slaves have to be sold."

A standard job in a standard way in the place of your dreams is nevertheless a standard job, nine to five, 60 wpm, withholding taxes of a criminal nature, and take home wages heading straight into your landlady's fist. (1'11 bet her apartment is warmer than mine.) There are weeks when you live for Friday at 5:00, and hate yourself for it. But stiff upper lip, you're a career woman now, don't call home collect and for god's sake pay the Con Ed bill on time for once.

Anyway, it really isn't any colder in my apartment than it was in my single last year. And there's a great deal of comfort to be found in every Sunday night not spent in CCL. Cold weather, at any rate, ought to decimate the roach population in my kitchen. Sprays don't do much. The super does less. Many people here have worse New York horror stories to tell-the girl who gets electric bills for hundreds of dollars every month, though she lives by herself in one room.

She's ready to blow up the computer, but at least they haven't forced her to pay the bill (now in the thousands). Then of course there are the weird things that happen on the subway, multiple locks on the doors. I heard of a Yalie who was mugged, and said, frankly, in the face of a knife, "I'm sorry, I only have enough money to get by for this week." It worked.

Trying to find a place to live in New York is a nightmare for which standing in line at Closed Reserve in December does not prepare you. I asked a friend who is currently looking for an apartment to say something funny I could use in this piece. "There's nothing funny about looking for an apartment," she said. Do not expect much help from the legion of agents sprung up in a tight market; tell everyone you know and as many people whom you don't know who will listen to you that you are house hunting. And wait.

Waiting in line is a way of life here-just remindyourselfthat it's not as bad as Russia and step right up. Because there are so many lines to choose from in New York, one develops decided tastes in the 'queues' one Fmds worth standing in.

I personally refuse to stand in line for two hours to see a movie (the entire state of Idaho saw "Manhattan" before me), or at the hosiery counter at Saks. (This saves me a lot of money.)

My favorite line is at the bank on Friday at lunch.

Lunch is the New York power meal, as testified by all the mavens at the Four Seasons, 21 Club, and other places so exclusive I haven't even heard of them. (There is a sign in a dining room of the

home by taxi from their apartments.

In •COmpensation., however, New York neighbors are seldom dull. I have an Intense Young Writer from Atlanta downstairs-shades of Capote, although Holly Golightly moved out just before I got here. Across the hall lives a woman who has withdrawn into the spaces of insanity: she doesn't go out of her apartment. has her JUOCeries (veal cutlets and canned peas) delivered, gets everything else by mail (piles of strange packages in the downstairs hall), and plays a gruesomely out of tune piano at all hours. I suppose she doesn't qualify as a true New York crazy, though, since she doesn't rant or carry bags around. At least not yet. Unable to approach her, I suffer from a (probably misplaced) case of sympathy.

~

Most of the people I know here go out for breakfast on the weekends, I think mainly because none of us has his own toaster; and it just doesn't taste the same if you make it in the oven. I can't bring myself to buy a toaster-they're too specialized a symbol of domesticity. Never having braved the wilds of off-campus life at Yale I have found the adjustment to self-sufficiency arduous at times. I've stopped eating meat, not out of high motives on behalf of innocent cattle, but because it is too much trouble, and too expensive. Eggs can be eaten in a surprising number of ways. Olive oil comes in attractive tins, sponges in day-glo colors.

Care packages from home are more and more infrequent, which is just as W$!ll, I'm a grown-up now, after all. Toaster or no.

Nobody ever said it was going to be easy. The suburbs, now, the suburbs are easy. If you live in the suburbs, you have a toaster. But the work you put into simply living day to day in Manhattan is repaid day to day, if you're looking. At its best, the city of Broadway is itself something of a musical comedy. I wouldn't even be particularly surprised, that someone should burst into song and a tap dance routine on the comer of Fifth A venue and Fifty-Seventh Street. It might even seem a sensible reaction, with Indian Summer shining, and the mannequins wearing veiled hats and highheeled pumps. It would have to be a song about love or youth, or New York itself, which has to do with both tbose things. Joyful excess-the concentration of power and wealth here is heady enough to live on (vicariously?) for weeks at a time.

However, still I think I'd like to go to the Harvard game this year, and be rowdy at the Bowl . again. I thought I'd avoid returning to New Haven

----- --- --- ---- --- --- --- ,..,

. 1rt . J

'

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your landlady carefully.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, let me count the days. La vie quotidienne can be quite a shock after those happy golden bygone days. At Frrst you just go home and sleep after work, but eventually stamina and even affection for office routine develop. The worst of times generates the best of resigned camaraderie. And then we read statistics on the unemployed, the underemployed, and the Boat People, and count our blessings. Moreover most of us like to work, just not at 9 a.m. And anyway we can expect to move on. Nooethdcss I Fmd myxlf avoidina acquaintances in Citibank's training JX'Oil1Uil, aJt.bougb I reason that I'm serving a comparable apprenticeship-which I

Harvard Club which reads; "An excessive display of business papers is prohibited.") One· of the Frrst New York expressions you learn is "Let's. have · lunch sometime.'' Among non-business acquaintances, this phrase leads to meetings with people who insist on eating yogurt, to whom you have nothing to say across the gap which wasn't there the last time you met, in New Haven. Just as frequently it simply means, "Let's not have lunch sometime. We have nothing to say to each other."

Sad but true, it requires lots more energy to keep up With people in New York than it does in New Haven, where a walk across Cross Campus brings you to their door. You end up streamlining your list of close friends when it costs"SS.OO to get

until l could go back to a place once more unfamiliar, and see it with new, New York eyes.

Perhaps that can never happen anyway: it will probably never be really new again. More.like discovering money in an oid jacket pocket: it's not serious money, it's already been spent, and come back to you again, free, and you have to go out and spend it quickly and heedlessly on something unplanned. The currency of New Haven is dormant in some pocket, some New York closet; it's been spent, but it will come back, free.

Ektlnor R~ 78.

11 f~

Editor-ilr<lrie/ of

The New Journal, CIITFWIIIy worb for Conde

NtJSt PllblictltioltS.

9

The New Journal, November 1979

They are Everywhere The Roach in the Big Apple.

-Martha Hollander Without a doubt the most traditional, if not legendary, aspect of apartment life in New York is the cockroach problem. Learning to live with cockroaches should by no means be at the top of one's priorities, at lenst nui: before doublelocking the doors or fmding out where to put the garbage once a week, but it is nonetheless an ongoing process: by turns a tedious chore, an outright battle or even a source of great personal agony, very much like one's relationship with the landlord. In fact, the very mention of the word "cockroach .. evokes a series of hard-and-fast images associated exclusiv~Cw Ymk;

though it's hardly the only city with this problem many of its inhabitants, with true urban ' provincialism, are ready to swear that it is or might as well be. No matter how slick and modern the apartment (houses don't count really), no matter how beautiful the surrounding neighborhood, the cockroaches will be there.

I, for one hate cockroaches. I hate all insects with a passion bordering on paranoia, but cockroaches are the worst offenders. Even though I consider myself a hardened city-dweller in other respects (l think nothing, for example, of the groggy dope-pushers who sleep on my front stoop), roaches are anathema, my downfall. The frrst time I ever saw one was my first summer in New York; I was an innocent eight-year-old, fresh from an idyllic life in the suburbs of southern England and quite unprepared for the change.

Hanging out around in the kitchen one bright sunny day I caught sight of a small brown spot shaped a little like a cigar that suddenly darted across the counter-a UFO in miniature and twice as menacing. "Ugh, what's that?" I screamed.

"A cockroach," said my mother matter-of-factly, disengaging me from the fold of her skirt where I'd hidden in terror. "They live here too." "You mean there's more than one?" She nodded and went on chopping vegetables, apparently unaware of the catastrophe I'd discovered only too quickly.

There were lots of them. They could reproduce.

And they lived here t,po. Suddenly I seemed to see them everywhere, on the walls, in the drain along the moldings, under the furniture. It was a severe culture-shock from which I never quite recovered,

,/81?

persistent insect-until I remembered that in the confusion I'd forgotten to get rid of it. For all I knew, it was still there on the corner of the pillow, testing out its slimy feelers and guaranteeing me-no, plotting for me-a dose of infectious plaGUe. I'd been driven from my own room even with the apartment immaculately clean. They can get in anyway.

The other chief reason for the ugly mystique of cockroaches is that they're rather difficult to kill.

Casual swatting with a rolled-up newspaper may work fme for mosquitoes and big flies, but not for cockroaches: they show a remarkable and frightening ability to survive even the most powerful blows. Flushing them in the ·toilet after wrapping them gingerly in tissue paper is also a bad idea because, horribly, they just crawl out again. I made this mistake once and for weeks was tortured with visions of an entire roach-colony living in the sewer pipes, a dark, wet Utopia of insects underneath the city rather like the mythical

heaps of it were dumped liberally behing the albino crocodiles said to inhabit the subway-tracks. kitchen sink. The apartment.was an upper West The only natural method, as it were, is to step on side slum and the powder made it look even more them until their shells give a bloodcurdling decrepit, but we told everyone that it represented crack-remember always to wear thick shoes when "Squalid chic"-a vaguely punk thing like our doing this-and it requires great fortitude. A quick dog~ed collection of Talking Heads and The stamp may do no good; the roach will only be Jam records, our refrigerator that had long since stunned and can still scurry away out of sight ceased to work, and the usual .naked light bulbs. while you nurse your smarting foot. Instead the The visitors were terribly impressed; we tried not fatal step must be slow, subtle, and grinding, like to step in the powder or get it in our food, and pounding up a spice, and must thoroughly wring two weeks later every single cockroach had out the creature's life. It's very disgusting. Only vanished. the hardiest among us can succeed as roach killers, Apart from the telltale white line of boric acid and it is, ironically, the sole problem of roaches users, the symptoms of the cockroach problem, or that can turn the most gentle-hearted person into a at least a cockroach-sighting, are generally blood thirsty enemy. manifested in one's personal style. Some scream Given this transformation, then, the cleanest and and run, others look grim, roll up their sletves and most efficient method is all one needs. There are search (foolishly) for a rolled-up newspaper, and a three basic weapons currently on the market few real heroes crush the insect with their very which, if one is, indeed, bloodthirsty enough, seem fmgers without a pause in the conversation. My truly enchanting in their variety: insecticide, boric own tendency is to stand in a comer quaking and acid, and my personal favorite, the roach motel. gibbering until someone elso takes care of it. In This last one attracted me initially for its name, the meantime, the roaches go right on living there and because the mode of its advertising has such a too, exploring and reproducing. "You fool," my hearty prurience, such a good-natured vulgarity patient roommate once said to me, "don't you about it, that it momentarily dispels any fears I know what happens if you don't kill cockroaches? may have about my cockroach problem. On They crawl behind the stove and make little almost every subway car in the city, we are given cockroaches." If they stay away from motels, I hints of the lethal simplicity of the roach motel: thought, hanging my head in shame; yet nothing· we're told that the foolhardy roaches check in, but would compel me to lift a fmger. I could they never (underlined) check out. Wonderful! The remember a high-school literature class all too illustration shows what is apparently a "young well, a deeply embarassing experience ever since couple"-a green-and-brown boy roach with black the frrst day when I fainted at p~ one of Kafka's brows and a leer, and a bright pink girl roach· -----__,~ ........ a~~

~~

~

it left the glamorous image of my home town permanently tainted.

Objectively speaking, if that's possible when dealing with such a sensitive subject-1 suppose there's nothing really so awful about them; they are harmless enough little things who dully mind their own business, and as long as they aren't mistaken for grease-spots or stray Brazil nuts everything can be relatively peaceful. The real trouble comes in realizing that their presence implies contamination. Once the idea that cockroaches mean dirt comes to mind. it's impossible to forget , and immediately unbearable filth, fatal disease and eventual immersion in a quivering horde of beetles seem distinct and awesome possibilities. A single cockroach in the bathroom, bedroom, or anywhere other than the kitchen is the frrst sign of inexorable decay: you know your apartment is going to seed and presuDtably you will soon follow. The frrst time I found o~e in my bed I Jet out a tin-whistle shriek, fled to my roommate's spare cot and pulled the covers up in a protective cocoon. I was safe and sound, free ' from the threat of even the most

strength. One application of Raid in an afternoon will result in as many as hundred corpses littering the apartment, and although both produce the same nauseating crunch when stepped on, a live cockroach that can scuttle out of the way is infinitely preferable to a dead one. Boric acid, in fact, is the most effective weapon of all. Rather than attempting the impossible clean murder, it simply banishes the roaches for good, driving them away to the neighbors• apartment with a . mysterious and disagreeable chemical. Most people discover boric acid from hearsay-it's a little too weird to be advertised publicly as a roach repellent-and discover to their delight that this rather common household feature is capable, in great enou~h quantities, of working a small miracle. Last summer, in a somewhat cynical response to what we'd dismissed as an old wive's tale, my roommate and I decided to try it. I bought the largest jar of boric acic I could find (carefully avoiding the eye of the pharmacist, who evidently was vastly amused) and poured spoonfuls of it all over the apartment. Pretty soon there was a thin trail of white powder lining the floors, and

~ ~~

~etamorphosis.

Was Kafka, perhaps, more frightened than I?

SpOrting the requisite melting eyes with drooping lashes-about to enter the motel, blissfully unaware of their violent fate. What always gets me is the obvious sexual connotation of the picture which makes even the neutral, messy business of killing roac~es into something of a thrill: with just one box of Black Flag, you can catch them in the act. The ads in Spanish are even better, even raunchier, emblazoned with the cheerful slogan iLAS CUCARACHAS ENTRAN ... PERO NO PUEDEN SALIR! Grand stuff-unfortunately, the real thing hardly lives up to such promises.

First of all, the rather nifty idea of being able to tell one gender of cockroach from the other is sheer nonsense; they only vary in size, and in any case, who would want to scrutinize them closely?

Then, of course, the corpses of fun-loving roaches murdered in cold blood (or whatever they have) begin to fill the corners of the rooms. The motels are stuffed. No vacancy. The extremely unpleasant task of throwing all the motels away-while the unstuck corpses spill onto your arm-seems hardly worth the former glory of watching them at work.

Very little can be said about insecticide: it works, but the effects are appalling. Roaches refuse to die discreetly, and instead crawl out into the middle of the living-room with their remaining

They are SO revolting that it's hard to compare them accurately with anything else. In a sense, I suppose, they are like the most tenacious of unwelcome house-guests: they always get to the kitchen before you do, frrst thing in the morning; they stubbornly ignore hints about leaving some day; they scurry away in guilt if you catch them where they shouldn't be; then suddenly they tum familiar, gross and aggressive and crawl into bed with you. Above all, to those who aren't afflicted with my particular phobia, they make life irritating rather than tragic, like a chronic dull pain for which there simply isn't a cure. There are better topics of conversation, better ways of spending a quiet Sunday v,ftemoon than shuffling around on all fours, br~dishing an old shoe and shouting, "All right, you nasty little buggers, come on out."

Yet so much of living in New York, eSpeclally in the summer, involves just that: we sit about in the evening, moodily nursing our third mug of Jack Daniels (can't afford shot-glasses), and chatter seriously, far too seriously, about our jobs, our apartments, very occasionally our senior essays, who's sleeping with wbom, and our cockroaches.

Clearly, there's eno~gh as it is to madden us-why not simply eliminate the latter?

Marthll Hollander '80 lived on Christopher Str«t last summer.

The New Journal, November 1979

10

Dress Well and bee For Five Good Reasons SCHOOL PRIDE Who says smart girls can't be beautiful and well-dressed? Lindsay McCrum insists they can be. For spending a few quiet moments drinking tea and perusing the latest Elizabethan Club acquisition, Lindsay likes to wear "something long and sparkly: What a great thing for our school, if the girls could be visual knock-outs, like the buildings." Ms. McCrum continues, "Some people may think its snooty, but for me, personaJly, it's a way of showing how proud I am of this school."

I'M FEMININE

"Retaining my 'woman's point of view' isn't easy here, I don't care if the school is called Mother Yale, â&#x20AC;˘' says Kacey Clagett, "that's why I often wear dresses when I come for an evening in the Computer Center." Here Kacey is shown repairing Gandalf (a computer) and wearing roses, silk, and ruffles, at the same time.

She "came out" in the dress, and her mother shortened it for her.

HELPS ME THINK

"There's nothing like wearing black to the stacks to really psych me up for Nietzsche," says Evita Saks, Yale College Junior. "I usually study on the 7th floor, York Street side, so I can also keep my eye on the action at Toad's Place." Eva has written 30 papers (and none of them were Pass-Fail) in her sophisticated outfit of black satin and pearls. She is currently planning her senior essay wardrobe.

VISUAL HAPPINESS

"If I could have my way, badly dressed people would not even be allowed into art galleries," says Ella King Torrey, Scholar of the House in Art History. "Other people's insensitivity to form, line, and color really gets on my nerves." Like many scholars in her field, Ella believes that Picasso had an innate and very special talent for painting. For touching up Yale's Collection of Modem Masters she likes to wear " a wool hat, but nothing fancy."

ATTRACI'S mGH CLASS GUYS After a long day of trying to get a good education, there's nothing more relaxing than slipping into a tasteful nightgown. Add a tittle perfume and you might get invited to a Quaaludes and Sex Party at Skull & Bones. "There's usually a fight first, to see who gets the President Taft Memorabilia Bedroom, but they never hit the girls. The guys are just the coolest," says Betzyna. "I like to go on Monday nights, after Mory's."

The New Journal, November 1979

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11

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The New Journal, November 1979

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13

The New Journal, November 1979

Is Paris Burning?

-J.D. McClatchy

The Joy of Paris, by Bernard Hermann.

The Vendome Press. 160 pp. $17.95.

The Great Houses of Paris, by Claude Fregnac and Wayne Andrews. The Vendome Press. 280 pp. $50.

If you continue to be a very good American, we're told you'll go to Paris when you die. In the meanwhile for those who fmd that too high a price (though it's not much steeper than the combined cost of the two books here under review), there are memories: those who've visited that greatest of capital cities have their own; those who haven't have other people's. One prefers Proust or Colette, but photographs-once defined by Robert de Montesquiou as "mirrors with memories"- will occasionally do. These two picture-books-so contrary in many ways, the one just Grub Street junk food, the other a lavish and learned Quality Item-serve both sorts of people. The Joy of Paris (by the way, whom do we blame-poor old Irma Rombauer?-for kicking off the craze for "Joyof" titles?) is for those who don't know Paris; The Great Houses of Paris is for those who know it well enough to have envied those special places .One lsn 't Permitted To Visit. , The heart sinks when you first open The Joy of Paris. To begin with, there's-what! another?!-a shot of the Arc de Triomphe. (If there were custard pies made to be thrown at monuments . . . ) Then, worse yet, there's the start of the flimsy, interfacing text, whose single merit is its brevity. It is an odious example of what must be called brochurese. For instance: "Let yourself go. Don't be afraid to be fanciful. Paris is the stuff dreams are made of. That is what Paris is there for. In Paris everything is 'fou, fou, fou.' Mad, wild, crazy. Dream a little of Paris. Close your eyes and pretend you don't know the 'real' Paris exists. Close your eyes and dream of that 'other' Paris. It's an essential antidote to the aggressive bustle which makes Paris Paris.

Start with a stereotype like Pia f. " Okay, my eyes are closed. Now, take that Piaf record off the stereotype. Put on, oh, the Faure! piano quartet; it has the same delicious sentimentality, but without the wide eyes and hot flashes. Okay, now show me Mr. Hermann's photographs.

Ah, but one has seen them before. The polite term used to be "calendar art." Wide-angle gimmkks hanging from the Eiffel Tower, glamorous women at the racetrack lounging in the sumptuous insouciance of fashion magazine poses, lots of plumage and armor, the chorus line at the Folies, and the usual Cartier-Bresson imitations: old men at boules, widows in black peering out of 19th-century storefronts, kids scuffling in the streets as pigeons flutter up toward ... why, toward "elusive, enigmatic Paris, city of a million iUusions." Fou, fou, fou-y.

What a French intellectual would style as Hermann's image-repertoire is a very summery and prettily peopled Paris indeed. There is none of the city's severe beauty, that oyster-shell gray of winter. And most of his photographs include people, from the standard entwined couples on the quais, to a new but entirely appropriate touch, Japanese tourists. It is as if Hermann needed to domesticate and ingratiate his views. Rarely does he scramble our stale expectations, but he does have a good eye for crowds, and finds several striking portraits. (My favorite is of butchers unJoading sides of beef from a truck; they are burly men, and in their bloody cowls resemble nothing so much as Rodin's statue of Balzac.)

Hermann's temperament is strictly official. His camera never probes. it only soothes. There is no poverty. only the picturesque. No dullness, disgrace, kinkiness. 1be fabled sensuousness of the French is emptied of all its allure by being made to look either innocent or gaudy. Institutions-from the family to the museum, Maxim's to the Academie- prevail.

And yet ... The extent to which we indulge pictures of this sort-which are like very smart slides of someone else's trip-is the extent to which everyone has his own view of Paris and enjoys comparing remembered and realized scenes.

The advantage the mind claims over the eye is that it can summon back sensations, and many of one's deepest, most evocative and eloquent memories of Paris could never be caught in a photograph. The smell of espresso and cheap caporal tobacco and pissoirs. The sound of someone reciting Baudelaire's "Recueillment. " The taste of be/on oysters and old chevre and a great fat Burgundy.

The pleasant after-effect of Bernard Hermann 's pictures is that they start up one's own magic lantern.

How refreshing and exciting, then, to tum to The Great Houses of Paris, which puts the "civilization" back into the city. Hermann gives us

pictured. Some are now museums, others visitable only on certain days and with a special guide, and others, private houses or offices of state, generally closed to the public. To stroll through the book, then, is to oscillate between the symmetrical shocks of recollection and surprise. It is to see gorgeous pictures of the Hotel de Soubise or Hotel Lauzun. whose interiors have the jewel-like perfection of Faberge boxes, and to reflect that these are, royal palaces aside, the most beautiful houses extant from the 17th century. At least until I came upon pictures of the Hotel Lambert, in which the Baron Guy de Rothschild lived privately and which I have never visited.

The house is one of Le Vau's most harmonious designs, combining strength, complexity, and refmement. The interiors are awe-inspiring. For example, the library, so filled with treasurable books and so encrusted with ormolu as to resemble

an ''unreal" Paris, cossetted and contrived.

Frc!gnac and Andrews remind us that "contrivance" literally designates an assembly of tropes-figures no less real for being highly imaginative, wealthy with the rhetoric of the grand gesture and rich display.

The decorative arts have always held a high place in French culture, but we have not always tried to understand fully their function and meaning. Now, with the writings of Roland Barthes and the increasing refinement of a system of interpretation based on linguistic science but applicable to non-verbal media, when we confront classic houses and interiors we can decipher them, no longer simply inspecting them. We now approach these great civic residences, most of them state-owned, in an almost "anthropological" spirit. Tell us, we say to them, what it was to live here then, to be those first inhabitants, to think their thoughts.

It is impossible, for example, to leaf through The Great Houses of Paris without speculating on the role played by ornament in the furnishings and interior spaces of 17th and 18th-century houses.

Ornament seems to have been a means of conferring existence on objects. of proving their importance by making a small arena of iconic s ignificance out of a medallioned wall panel, say, or the fluted leg of a writing desk. In French neoclassical decoration, objects in wood, porcelain, or glass apparently will be legible. or will not be at a ll. The book inspires-or rather, commands-admiration for these objects.

A few technical matters: the book is handsomely produced. with sharp photographs in color and in black~d-white printed on hiJUl-gloss paP.Cr. .

Nearly all the photographs are excellent; they are telling and carefully composed. The adjunct text, though not distinguished in its writerly qualities. is rich in historical and cultural detail. It tells much of what is known about the frrst residents of these houses, as well as non-technicalJy, ¡ the particular virtues of each-larger coverage, probably, than most who lift this book from its place on the coffee-table will actually require.

I have visited about a quarter of the houses

itself a preciously bound volume, is the setting for paintings such as lngres's portrait of Betty de Rothschild, and-can it be?-Vermeer's The Astronomer. This painting is listed in catalogues always under the rubric, "Private collection, Paris." The photograph caption here expressly makes no mention of the painting, so that for a moment one can speculate that it is only a copy; but after a further scansion of the room, and of the other rooms pictured, one abandons, with a gulp, that hypothesis.

The Hotel de Biron will bring back fond memories to those who think of it primarily as the Musc!e Rodin, with its collection of that puzzling sculptor's vulgar but grand work; considered as architectural achievement, and with its huge garden and reflecting pool, it would merit a visit even without the collection. (Indeed, I felt a twinge of envy for an older friend of mine, a lady who lived there briefly in the first decade of this century, when she was a schoolgirl and it was a Convent of the Sacred Heart.) As for sculpture, the Hotel de Rohan with its stupendous "Horses of the Sun," a pediment carved by the sculptor Robert Le Lorrain in the early 18th century and one of the few pedimental groups that can be placed without scandal beside the Elgin marbles, is equally worth the effort of seeking in the Marais quarter. ¡ Oh, but one could go on-on to the Hotel Matignon and the Elysc!e Palace-but they defy any easier description than a photograph confers.

Taken as a whole, these great houses of France at the pinnacle of its cultural achievement must be considered without rival-except perhaps for the imperial Japanese residences at Katsura, built within a diametrically opposed aesthetic of bareness and plainness. In them, man is presented as subordinate to a vaster and ftnally ungraspable nature. In the sumptuous houses of Paris, man is enthroned. lord of the earth and master of the salon, possessor of Ideas nowhere to be found in nature, except where the hand of artifice has embodied them.

The New Journal, November 1979

Skinner

continued from page seven . at ~e track, if that's !h~ horse you pay to have SCTVIce your mare. This IS a pure breeding experiment. We now know a lot about why they work but that doesn't give us a practice. If, eventually. they start finding a couple of genes in the chr~mosomes of a horse that have something t~ do With speed, and they start fiddling around w1th those genes, then you've got something. We haven got there even in genetics, let alone bebav1or.

DW Would it be incorrect to speak of a cau$al relationship between a gene and a behavior even if there were known correlation between them?

BFS If you have a mare and you say: "I want this mated to a Spectacular Bid and I want to pay $50,000 for it," and someone says, "Why are you doing that?", and you say, "Well, there's a little gene somewhere . . . " DW So~our objection isn't a philosophicol objection about mixing ontological levels?

BFS No. What I object to is a phony physiology, like.."Your nerves are on edge." People still say things lilce that. ·

15

D W In Verbal Behavior you seem to quote with approval a passage from Russell where he SllYS that words don 'I refer to things.

BFS I don't think I quote him with approval. I didn't like what he said. His book, Inquiry into Meaning and Truth. was a very. very sloppy thing and I didn't like any of that. He used a rather crude conditioned reflex idea of meaning, and it just doesn't make any sense at all. I've forgotten exactly how I put it, but it's in Verbal Behavior.

[Skinner goes to the bookshelf and returns with Verbal Behavior) D W When you say of this quote, "In one sense this is a fair shot, " in what sense do you mean?

BFS (quoting himself from Verbal Behavior) "In one sense this is fair shot. The hardy determinist will recognize a tendency to believe that what be is saying is, for the moment at least, removed from the field of determined action.

"But the student of behavior is not the only one to face this dilemma. Behaving about behaving raises the same difficulties as knowing about knowing."

D W So tlu:Jt ~ the sense in which lte is correct.

You don't believe that words don't refer to things.

BFS Oh yes. He had given the William James lectures the year before, and so I was probably being kind to him. But I was thinking of something else of his.

There's another reference here Verbal Behavior]. There are a whole lot of references; two four. six eight, ten. That's an awful lot for one book. But there was one in there about bow, when we see a fox, we say 'fox\ and so on. Actually, what be said was not correct. I'm sure of that. On the whole question of reference, Watson made the same mistake. He was trying to get the whole th.iJlg in terms of conditioned reflexes.

That's one of the cases where I've been misunderstood. I am not a stimulus response psychologist. · D W When interviewed by Ewms, you said, "The study of perception suffers from the idea tlu:Jt one is somehow relating experience to reality. " How does it su.t/er from this?

BFS There is no difference between experience and reality. It's the same thing.

This is the old copy theory. Those flowers: I can't see them out there 011 the counter. so I must have a copy of them back here that I'm seeing.

This is Plato. He couldn't understand how you could see something at a distance. I don't know bow he figured you got the copy in there either.

There is no copy. That's even out of focus on my retina. The idea that, somehow. I can reconstruct those flowers out of neural events in the back of my head is absurd. When I shut my eyes I can still see them. I don't see them very well, but I can still do with my eyes shut what I do with my eyes open.

There is not a world of experience. There is a world, and there's behavior with respect to that world. The idea that I-only have a psychological world inside me and that's what everything is-that's nothing unless it ll!eaDS something to

thing .

D W What do you think is the correct use of the word 'causality'?

BFS Well, I think I've said somewhere that operant behavior is the field of purpose. It's the effect of the future on the present. What appears to be the 'future directedness• of behavior is due to the past consequences and not, of course, to the actual future consequences, which can never act at all. There's no First Cause. The future can't act.

But we are directed towards the future because we are reacting in ways which have had consequences in the past."

I have a manuscript I should get around to publishing called Selection by Consequences in which I compare natural selection, operant conditioning, and the evolution of cultures. They all raise the same questions. Who creates? Darwin had a creation problem and I have a creation problem.

Cultures arise from the social contract. What is the goal and what is the purpose? The band is not to grasp things but is the way it is because it bas grasped things in the past successfully. These same DW You mention tlult Bertrand Russell issues come on all three levels, all due to the fact irifluenced W>Ur work. that this is a causal principle which only exists in BFS He was .~ popularizer. Principia living things, selection by consequences. It emerged Matltematica, I think is still accepted, though .it from the world with the emergence of life. should be by now. He did that over seventy years DW Is this c:au.sol principle differenttlu:Jn a fully ago. It should have been changed by now. reduced mechanistic principle?

Wittgenstein, Russell, the logical positivists, all BFS This full kind of causality? Oh, yes. That is of those people: I never went very far with them why it is quite wrong to say that I treat animals really. Rusself, was a prestigious person. I read his like machines. They can't be machines. No review of Ogden Richard's The Meaning of machine can do what an animal does. You can Meaning, and be ended it by saying, "The reader program a computer to be modified by will see that I have been enormously influenced by consequences only because a human being designed Dr. Watson, whose recent book Behaviourism I it. No machine is affected by consequences. regard as massively impressive." Well, that was all Darwin was the one who really finally I n~ed. enumerated the ideas of natural selection. Hence, I never knew very much about Russell. I admire you don't have to have design or purpose to begin Russell a good deal. He had some very interesting it. I think human behavior is precisely the same ideas about marital questions. He was against the thing. You don't will, you don't plan, you don't Vietnam business, and sat in Trafalgar Square in initiate action. You are affected by the protest when be was ninety years old, carefully consequences of past action. You can design at all having an inflatable pillow in his pants before be three levels. That's a later step that only happens went there. when a culture emerges which puts the individual For example, I don't go very far with people in possession of everything needed for design. like Gilbert Ryle, or Ayer. and all of those people.

Then you can design genetically. In the old days, They dido 't have the science of behavior needed. they used breeding; now they can do it by fiddling Wittgenstein towards the end groped for it. He around with the variations. You can design said, "We will have to study the behavior of behavior by consequences and arrange animals to get this thing clear. •• reinforcement, contingencies, behavior This was in the Blue and Brown Books and in modification.

Philosophical Investigations also. The Tractatus he You also get new behaviors by sort of modeling himself abandoned. behavior: giving instructions to get something I starte'd to look at the Blue and Brown done, then you reinforce. Cultures almost always Books. Every sentence started me off on just fiddle with the variations-new ways of something else. I cannot accept that kind of teaching and so on-but you can, if you want to, wordplay. I'd say it's true of Ayer and Ryle and change the contingencies of selection of the the whole gang. culture. You say, "Let's keep the Samoan culture They're not getting back to fundamentals. That intact." goes for Chomsky too. They don't get back to the actual behavior involved.

DW Would tlu:Jt be a good idea?

BFS No, I don't think ... What do you mean, DW You have Sllid tlu:Jt you do not like 'good idea'? But it could be done. You could of science.

Were you contemporary philosophy select a cultural practice by making sure that it rrun~c.rng of the Vien1Ul Circle, or of Thomas Kuhn works. But it isn't done. Ordinarily with cultures we only fiddle with the variation, not the selection.

The rat doesn't press the lever because be associates k isn't that anyone is going to step in from . ressing with food He p because food foUows outside the.cau.w stream and say, "We want P • resses people to be happy and productive. •• Nobody can when be presses. \ ;. do that. That would imply that there was somebody who wasn't determined. But cultures his '\. advance by discovering better ways of teaching, BFS I don't know Kuhn's stuff well. Paradigms ' better ways of getting people to work, better ways and so on. I don't know what he's saying. I have liiliil••llllliiillllllllllli•lllill•' l .l of organizing the family structure and getting never had any desire to look into it. me. Such meaning is in my behavior and in my along with people.

I say something myself a bit about scientific Different cultures do it in different ways and the history. method. I think we can analyze how scientists culture which makes the most of the people in the work. As a matter of fact, one point of the DW How do you feel about the treotment of group is going to be the most likely to solve its autobiography is to give as honest an account as I perception by the classical empiricists? problems and survive. can of how I have been working as a scientist. No BFS Oassical empiricists-the British So you have a competition. There's an evolution nonsense about testing hypotheses and so on. I Empiricists-were associationists and they bad you pf effective cultural practices which i"' th~ :answer don't do that at aU. doing things to the world. Even though it was to "Who is to decide?" It's like asking a fish, much better than what bad been done before, DW You mentioned. in one inl6viLw, tlu:Jt you • 'Why do you want to get out of the water and like Francis &con.· there was a mind which was picking up these walk on land?" No decision is ever made.

BFS Wd.l, Bacon had some right ideas. It isn't impressions. It was a tabula rasa which was getting just a question of classi£acation thou&b. He did these things written on it. I don't think }>elieve that kno-:tedge is power, and that ·s wbat I auociationism will do anything at all. 1be rat believe: to know IS to be able to do doesn't press the lever because he associates sOmething-not to be contemplative and pre:ssina with food. He presses because food understand passively. follows when be presses. That's a very different

:t

rm

•••llil•lill

16 The New Journal, November /979

The Thope Stops Here:

An Interview with Jacques Derrida -Pam Schirmeister

Jacques Derrida has been caUed a lot of names.

Subversive. Deconstructionist. Gallic linguistifier, emphasis on gall. He caUs himself, quite simply, a professor of philosophy, and he is, in fact, a maitre assistant of philosophy at L 'Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, and has been a visiting professor at Yale for four years now. But he is more than a collection of names.

Consider a statement made not long ago in a discussion section of HAL 36Sa (Modernism and Modernity). The reading for the week was a se.!Ullent. of Derrida's boolf. Of Grammatolozy After an hour and a half of near yelling and ¡ violent interruptions and disagreements, the T.A. concluded by saying that in one sense, the entire course was expressly directed against a Derridean way of reading. "That reading," he said, "is a subversion of the entire tradition of Western metaphysics."

Or, consider a professor who says, "A lot of people would rightfully argue that this way of reading just should not be taught to undergraduates." This way of reading, which seems peculiarly resistant to definition, is sometimes called "deconstruction," but that, too, is just a name. And a collection of names hardly provokes such responses.

Derrida himself was at Yale this fall, offering a seminar on translation, and when we go to Trumbull to ask him about his way of reading, he seems a contradiction of all that has been said about him. His speech is neither vehement nor flip, though perhaps characteristically, he begins by saying, "You know, I'm not used to giving interviews-the interview is a very problematic form." And yet, he tries hard to be thoughtful about our questions, qualifying his answers as he goes, occasionally asking if they are appropriate for an interview. He speaks seriously but with a reserved playfulness about his own authority to answer our questions. At one point the tape recorder breaks. and l ask him if he will wait while I fix it. "Oh-don't worry about it," he laughs, "just make up what you don't catch."

When we question him ~bout his way of reading, about this thing called deconstruction, he becomes evasive, telling us he would be wary about the word itself. But he agrees to use it for convenience, saying, "There has always been deconstruction. It did not begin one day in the twentieth century; there is a way of looking at Plato as the frrst deconstructor. It is not new-but it has always been a threat. There is always a permanent threat of deconstruction in every structure. It's simply a question of becoming aware of it."

But to become aware of it is not the same as to define it, and in this answer, as in the rest of the interview, Derrida avoids a direct definition of deconstruction. Like his critics, he agrees that "deconstruction asks questions about the foundations on which traditional classical methods are built," at the same time¡, it goes further than methodology. And perhaps it is because Derrida sees deconstruction as a principle inherent in every structure rather than as a critical tool that he provokes such violent responses in his readers.

"Deconstruction," he tells us, "has not only to do with texts that you find in a library. It cannot be reduced to discourse. It is something that affects my life, not merely a methodological approach. It is a way of doing, of speaking, of writing."

His writing, he explains, grows more and more autobiographical, "in a sophisticated sort of way."

"Indirectly, the problems I write about are the problems of my life." He adds, however that questions about literature and the philosophical problems in literary texts interest him most even though he would not caU himself a literary critic.

In this area, Derrida says deconstruction has something to do with seeking out the presuppositions in a text. He will not be much more explicit, but as Harold Bloom defines it, "to deconstruct a poem would mean to uncover Pam Schirmeister M'WlS assisted by Ma~ant Cohen '80 in conducting this interview.

whatever its rhetoricity conveyed, even if the poem, the poet, and the tradition of its interpretation showed no overt awareness of what implicity was revealed by such wordconsciousness ... To deconstruct a poem is to indicate the precise location of its figuration of doubt, its uncertain notice of the limit where persuasion yields to a dance or interplay of tropes." That limit might be described as the point at which we can no longer control language or be sure of what it is doing.

"Language," Derrida tells us emphatically, "is not an instrument, and in that case, I transform my own relation to language." With this, he suggests that his critical langtiage, like that of the poem, contains its own deconstruction, its own figuration of doubt, and cannot, therefore, be reduced to a technical operation. He is careful to remind us again that here, as elsewhere, deconstruction is not a universal method , although his critics continue to insist it is just that, and so to find it reductive.

Derrida expresses little confidence in this perspective, adding that as a key word, as a master concept, deconstruction loses interest. He has rather to do with a chain of concepts, and says, "I pay attention to something not identifiable, to heterogeneity, to otherness." Deconstruction, he continues, begins, in fact, by taking apart a universal language, and must not, in turn, become a universal language.

At the same time, he talks of the importance of unity, of tradition, saying that a university, for example, relies on programs with unity and has a history of fields of study, so that it could not be built on the deconstructive enterprise. And surprisingly, he speaks of his own place within that history, of his rigor as a teacher of a standard canon. "I have to take part in the tradition even as I question it," he says, but he does not seem optimistic about the future of that tradition. Of teaching it, he tells us, "Disunity is a condition of the work. We are in a critical period, and things will not be developing harmoniously."

He pauses for a moment here, but goes on to discuss literary criticism as one disturbing example of this disunity: "There is more disunity between two critics than between a critic and physicist. It's as if they're speaking different languages. The homogeneity is terrible. They have different presuppostions and it creates a scattering in pedagogy. Every scholar has his own code, and it makes a Babel tower." One wonders if he is referring to the tower at the far end of the Old Campus, but anyone who has been reading Derrida will know that he could certainly include himself in this statement, that he himself has a specialized code.

But disturbing as it may b'e, this coding is inherent in the language of literary criticism as Derrida sees it. "Literary criticism," he explains, "is not a metalinguistic survey of literature. It is not an objective discourse. To write criticism is to write fiction, for you cannot escape being within the field about which you write. This is not a triumph; it's a necessity." Such a perspective turns a considerable catachresis on the traditional concept of literary traditon and on the function of language, which in turn, creates a disagreement about the object of criticism. What is language?

What is literature? What is to compare? When literary criticism is forced to address these questions, it undermines the unity of its object, which naturally creates a scattering in pedagogy.

When we asked him if this kind of a crisis has any effect beyond the walls of the university, his response is immediate: ''The university is not an island. It's important to work within the academy, although what happens there is chiefly important in scientific and technical areas. What we do in other fields certainly affects the inside of the university, but also the ideological issues of the country. Yet these effects remain very indirect and potential, and perhaps unclear."

To talk about the effects of literary criticism is, in one way, to talk about our relationship to literature, and n~ the end of the interview, we

ask Derrida why in a broad sense he thinks we need to read literature. ¡He laughs softly and repeats the qu~tion twice before looking up at us.

When he does look up, he answers with an amused question about what we mean by literature, and adds, "You know, literature is a recent event, a Western adventure begun in the 18th century. Do you mean Western literature, or perhaps you mean all written texts?" Again he is being playful, evading the question, but he soon returns to it: "Why do we read? I have no serious answer to that. But I think it must be asked seriously. Our motivations and desires always differ. Why do we read fictions or poetry? I try to ask that question innocently of myself. But I'm not sure 1 need reading. Sometimes I have the impression it's something superfluous. It's not useful, but at the same time, it's vital."

Of his own reading habits he is even more skeptical, and when we ask him if there have been any particularly influential authors for him, he remarks that he is a little old to remember.

"Besides," he says, I'm not a massive reader anyway. My way of reading is very active and discontinuous, a violent way of reading. I'm not satisfied with that though. I feel guilty about it sometimes because sometimes reading should be more passive." He looks at us apologetically and then smiles waving his hand. "But I'm not passive about it. I exploit the book, eat the book, extracting little by little. I read to write-it's related to my project."

By now we have been talking for a little over an hour, and as Derrida f'mishes speaking, it seems difficult to imagine him any longer as a collection of names. In fact we have even seen him jogging through the Grove Street cemetary in Yale sweats, and as we stand to leave we ask him how far he goes. For a last time, he smiles, and says, "Yes a graduate student friend of mine here got me started when I f'rrst came to Yale. He said it was a good thing to do. But I don't run a certain distance, just for a certain time. I've improved, too, since I first started. I'm going for twenty minutes now and I couldn't do that before." He suddenly catches himself and says, "Wait. Are you going to use this for your interview? Well, if you do, you can tell people I intend to go further."

We suspect he was not just talking about his jogging.

.

Pam Schirmeister '80 is an intense English Major.

The New Journal, November 1979

17

Deconstruction and Witticism Bride of Derrida

•

- Heart of Glass

The exigencies, or urgencies, or emergencies of our disestablished era have pressed or oppressed us to a greater revaluation of our less conspicuous alternatives . Poetry as the sine qua non, the critic's duenna of rehabilitated consciousness, pales before the varied claims and shames of simplistic but ever more achingly present truths (Nietzsche). Akenside, in the 1740s, who saw wtth striking prescience the setting star of Abendland rise in the east of literary history, stands at the periphery of that Wordsworthian absolute, the voluble pansy, which repeated with endless consuetude the tale/tail of English poetry (see Wordsworth). Notwithstanding the inception of em-Byronic despair, the purpled glory of Victorian melancholy (Pater), or the contraplatitudinous pose/prose of Wildean wit, Hesperus continues to glimmer in the fiercely contiguous struggle of the opposing spirits of exiled historicism-those backward-glancing shuttlecocks of modern thought whose stolen gleams of tinkling thunder have sublimated the heuristic sublime in a more palatable mixture of Angst and joie de vivre.

If criticism is ever to start or startle the hermeneutic genii from their prostration before the faded blooms of prior magnitude, the limpid spirits must divest themselves of their too contemJ)orary hang-ups, and loose their -auraJ..powers in a recrudescence of divine investiture.

Or if, as Freud thought, in his Jungian fashion, espression is cathartic of an expletive or almost explosive energy, Che complex that besets us remains undeciphered in its impenetrable plexus of meaning. The under-play of ludic , consciousness (Huizinga) portends no resurgence of metaphysical certitude.

Much remains to be done. The dispeptic reader· is a Wandering Jew who has eaten of the Tree of Knowledge, and finds himself, like Philomela, singing in the wood. Lacan or Derrida? If hermeneutics is to become Hermetics, the Seraphic fire must surely burn on another altar. And the altar /alternation of our too wavering faith must now reside (if Peguy is right) in the equilibria of stable alternatives.

The ontological imperative. The formalist critique deepened, but did not dispense, with the already transmogrified division of imaginative structures.

Surely the Stevensian cry, plucked on the violet strings of uncertain existense, was a challenge, never met, to our vilified language. And yet the Miltonic bequest must, too, demand our ear (as early, unencumbered, pristine verisimilitude)-such angelic strictures as it would not be wise to ignore. I would assert, nevertheless, that the compromise (or rather surmise) of Blanchot is unacceptable (see his Etudes Pitiables, p. 213). Deliquesence is not true quiescence.

Against this too vapid matrix of neo-Kantian insipidities, I have argued a reductio, but not, I hope, ad absurdum. Since the strange is never strange enough, until it becomes the primal estrangement, the Coleridgean caveat needs some revision. The langue that is out on parole arouses more suspicion than once it did. The Heavenly Hosts look more and more like the Assyrian hordes. And Rintrah, who may well be the final permutation of the displaced Chronos, now beats a sadder measure of hyperbolic, yet Hyperborean despair.

0 Time! 0 Tempus! The Romantics found in the Odic 01 a noose to encircle the vacuous core of a felt Kierkegaardian dread (see Kierkegaard). If I am not to be consumed by my own presumption, perhaps I had better offer a similar stop-gap with which to plug such dangerous perforations of soul.

The critical rhythms to which I have henceforth alluded are rootedly libidinous, manifestly so. All redaction is reduction, a tertiary defense against the originally erected text (see Freud again). And yet ... and yet, are they, in fact, no also pseudo-mystical extractions or even extrications from the · ravelled unfoldings of incarnate palaver? To explicate or haruspicate those astral imaginings ... though the hip aesthetic, of qualified purport and perhaps even out of joint, would carry us away in the whirlwind of unmaking. RHke does not abide, and Mr. Kurtz-he dead.

Heart of Glass teaches in Marina del Rey.

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18

Dark Victory

contin~edfrom pogefive

6. We're Invulnerable!

Hunter Prillaman, 1980 and Scott MacCiarty, 1980 We're invulnerable! And nothing seems to hurt us!

We're invulnerable! Our luck won't desert us!

As we roll down the field, the awesome force we wield Will make the Crimson yield! We're invulnerable I We're unbeatable! Even though they are persistent!

We're unbeatable! Their score is non-existant I Our team will never fail, we'U kick poor Harvard's tail; It's aU for Eli Yale! We're unbeatable!

We're invincible! We do it all for Eli! We're invincible! In a massacre like My Lai! The other team is weak, Their Quarterback's a freak; They're really up shit creek! We're invincible!

The unrestrained joy and exultation of these songs reflect the lighter side of the martial tradition. There is no hint here of the strife of "Smash! Bang! Crash!" or the terror of "The Big Blue Wave." Rather we find the same celebratory spirit that characterizes such works as the French Arc de Triomphe or Beethoven's Emperor concerto. It is ironic that Mr. Zurier should choose the title "Bulldog Blues" for his song; the spirit of his jubilant lines is the exact opposite of the blues.

Mr. Zurier establishes the metaphor of political rule with such phrases as .. the Eli Nation" and "establish domination;" his use of "the good years" suggests the idea of a golden age, a Pax Romana, in which the dynasty is young and flourishing. One is tempted to see behind this poem the political philosophy of Hobbes or Machiavelli, who felt that the security and prosperity of the state were the primary requisites for the happiness of the citizens. Mr. MacClary and Mr. Prillaman make a bold venture with their "We're lnvulnerable"-combining the gravity and might of martial poetry with the whimsy of Ogden Nashian rhymes. The humor does not, however, distract us from the main theme; it serves rather to instill the poem with the same heartfelt joy that .comes with being 'invulnerable'. Needless to say, the Eli-My Lai rhyme in the last stanza took reckless daring on the part of the authors but, provided the public interest groups are not too offended, I think they carry it off.

7 Saturday Nipt Fl&lat Soq Steve Hayes, 198/ Tonight we'll raise a cup at Mory's!

Tonight the band will play!

Tonight we'll sing the glories of the game we won today!

Tonight the Elis will be marching Up the old Blue victory trail; Today we'll faghtl Fight! Fight! And then tonight, Chalk up another win for Mother Yale!

7. 0 DIBhle

by Phil Kushner

With Autumn breezes blowing, we march to Yale's Bowl; All minds are set on victory, all hearts are on one goal; For Eli's sons and daughters, we vow we shall not fail To fight with all our might for .a:>untry, God and Yale.

REFRAIN: And as the Yale men take the fldd Our honor to defend 0 Eli blue, dear Bulldog blue We're with you to the end.

1be years they come and go, and nothing stays the same, But one proud banner waves in honor

The New Journal, November 1979

of the name Of men who shook the field and fought for Mother Yale, Who stopped the Crimson tide and pulled the Tiger's tail.

A hush is on Old Campus; the classrooms are all bare; The library is quiet, it seems no one is there; Where are the eager students, young scholars bent on fame?

They've thrown away their books and gone to see the game.

I find this song remarkable for the lyrlcal , almost haunting way in which they deal with the theme of battle. This is accomplished with the use of a shift in focus, a device which is used extensively in Homer: the narrative leaves the plain of war and travels to a more peaceful scene on Mount Olympus or inside Troy. The sudden stillness, the remoteness of the clamor of armies, creates an eerie melancholy in the reader; the importance of military contest seems somehow altered within a different context.

Mr. Hayes' work presents the viewpoint of a contestant looking forward to the celebration after the victory. The speaker seems to be lost in reverie, and is almost unaware of present time· his a b rupt "fi•ghtl fight! fight!" is spoken as if to ' remind himself that there is still arduous work to be done. The poem has very much the quality of a daydream, weaving an enchantment around us as we read, similar to that of Shakespeare's incantation: "When the burly-burly's done, when the battle's lost-and won ... " The more concrete aspects of warfare are cast aside for the sake of a greater vision.

Mr. Kushner's work has a similar quality of enchantment about it. Although the battle is just about to be joined, the poet's mind wanders over a wide range of other thoughts: the breezes of Autumn, the ceaseless cycle of change, and the remembrance of past glory. Finally we are presented with an unusually sombre image of the deserted main campus. The reader is left on a wistful final note that helps emphasize the grandeur of the contest about to take place, yet at the same time joins it with its eventual passage into oblivion through the victory of Time. It was in the same tones that Shelley wrote of the monumental statue of the ancient King Ozymandias: "And on the pedestal these words appear:/ 'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:/.

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair! '/ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay/ Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/ The lone and level sands stretch far away."

7. Yale's Got Hunter Prillaman, /980 Harvard men have higher S.A.T. 's, And the Princeton campus has a lot of trees.

Dartmouth men know about the birds and bees, and UConn players know their ABC's.

REFRAIN

But Yale's got a better football team!

Yale's got a better football team!

Yale's got a better football team!

And we know it's all that matters.

Columbia has New York to walk around And there must be something wonderful, at Brown.

It's not too bad at Penn and Cornell, And they all give poor Yale a lot of hell.

But Yale's got a better football team, etc.

Once again, Prillaman's lighthearted approach to bis subject is refreshingly unique. He employs a format that is familiar enough: that of cataloguing the names of his opponents. Witness this eumple of Sir Walter Scott's: • Proudly our pibroch has thrilled in Glen Fruin And Bannochar's groans to our slogan replied; Glen Luss and Ross-dhu, they are

smoking in ruin, And the best of Loch Lomon lie dead on her side Widow and Saxon Maid Long shall lament our raid Think of Clan-Alpine with fear and with woe; Lennox and Leven-glen Shake when they hear again, " Roderick vich-Alpine dhu, hoi iero!"

Prillaman's daring innovation is to make concessions to each of the opponents rather than vaunting it over them. This serves to build up tension, perhaps even outrage, in the reader, until the bright resolution of the refrain comes in at last. The success of the work hinges on whether or not the 'punchline' can make us laugh off or forget the self-deprecation that came before. For my own part, I believe that Mr. Prillaman can get away with any of his concessions, except that of the S.A.T. scores to Harvard; there I think he has overstepped the boundary of what is acceptable.

8. Mardi from Yoar hory Towers Charles .Baum, 1975 REFRAIN: March from your ivory towers to winning fields, Show them your mighty strength! Show them Yale never yields!

Play as though all your life hinges on winning now, Show your aggressiveness! Show them that Yale knows how!

For when you're in the world striving for excellence, There is no room for soft simpering sentiments.

And when you're at the top, then you learn life is cruel, And you will face the world fighting a constant duel.

And if this rat-raced pace seems like it gets too tough, May I say second place isn't quite good enough.

For although Eli's kin may hate the world they're in, Still we will fight to prove that dear old Yale will win.

I offer this poem last as a imal salute to the magnificence of martial poetry. Mr. Baum addresses far more than the simple question of winning and losing; he speaks to the most fundamental issues of human existence. The world is structured in such a way thal man achieves glory. only through suffering and toil; even when he reaches the summit he is still beset by strife and must struggle constantly to maintain his prominence. Yet, the poet implies, this is the most admirable way of dealing with the world. To stay apart, removed from the arena of strife, is not a valid solution; thus we are urged, "march from your ivory towers." Nor is it "good enough" to accept a secondary position and not face the burden of having to fight off constant challenges.

It is precisely because the competitive nature of life is so distasteful that we must reach for victory.

Only by vanquishing can we overcome the harshness of the conditions imposed on us by the competitive world; only in triumph do we redeem the inherent righteousness and nobility of humankind. Indeed, Mr. Baum's last two lines strike at the very center of the problem of strife and its relationship to victory. From the sphere of a world characterized by grief and struggle, the warrior can reclaim a share of greatness and distinction-but only by taking on more strife.

Human suffering and toil are redeemed at last in the spirit of the contest. Mr. Baum harkens back across the ages to his flrst known predecessor, Homer, who first set down the idea that: "men fight because they are mortal."

The winning song in the Yale Band competition is expected to be JH'f!Viewed at the Harvard-Yale game this weekend.

Jam~

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•

The New Journal, November 1979

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