Daniel Martin by John Fowles is your Daddy

 Tommy Bunting, who’s your Daddy?  Daniel Martin (pub. 1977) is.  The former is the protagonist, narrator of The Book against God (pub.2003) by James Wood (recall: against God ) the latter is the eponymous narrator of Daniel Martin by John Fowles.  There’s a generation between Dan and Tommy, one went to Oxford and the other to  University College London.  Both their fathers are vicars in country livings (where it ain’t easy).  They are of course atheists which is reported to be standard for the sons of the cloth.  The novels are philosophically inflected, Dan’s by alienation and bad faith, Existentialism on the Oxus and Tommy’s by Theodicy and the quicksands of Epicureanism, the subject of his foundered doctoral thesis.  The one is separated from his wife the other an older man of forty five has left a twenty seven year old starlet behind in Hollywood where he is a successful scriptwriter.  She is moving in on him fast and he is planning ahead on how to extricate himself.  Alas poor Tommy.  His Jane is moving into an objective view of his capers.  When women become objective it’s game ball.  Dan was in love with a Jane during his student days and yet married her younger sister Nell.  It’s complicated but you can see the novel as sociology interest.

Oh yes, both are liars, one performitively the other constructively.  I don’t know what that means either.

<i>Daniel Martin</i> is 688 pages long in paperback with more noticing than is good for narrative health, as James Wood might say, and irritating Trollopean buttonholing in the guise of alienation.  I’m 35% through it, at the same point possibly where I abandoned it many years ago.  Inertia in me and entropy in the novel are forces that must be overcome.

Later, on the rive gauche, Danny.

Vedic Truth and the Novel

“Concentration, cessation from sense-objects, rites, etc., are its legs: the Vedas are all its limbs: truth is its abode.” (Kena Up. IV.8)

The murk  of rationalisation that clouds the truth is seen for what it is when we apply the single pointed instrument of concentration.  What flashes on that inward eye is the tawdry nature of our desires.  The useful question - what do you want, really; is that it? is like the handy branch from our firewood basket that we use to gather together the embers and is then thrown on the flames.  We can’t be given the truth, we have to establish it by elimination.

“Satya (truth) means freedom from deceit and crookedness in speech, mind, and body; for knowledge abides in those who are free from deceit and who are holy, and not in those who are devilish by nature and are deceitful, as the Vedic text says, “those in whom there is no insincerity, falsehood, and deceit” (Prasna Up. I.16)  Therefore Satya (truth) is imagined as the abode.  Although by implication, truth has already been mentioned as legs, along with concentration etc., still its allusion again as the abode is for indicating that as a means (for the acquisition of knowledge) it excels others, as the Smrti says.  “ A thousand horse sacrifices and truth are weighed in a balance: and one truth outweighs a thousand horse sacrifices” (Vishnu Smrti. 8)”(Shankaracarya's commentary)

Novels can be true to life or true in the life of their writers if they are honest and undiverted by the fame of a successful formula.  You could say that they are true if they approximate a scryed dream where chaos is given a shape and can live free of the individual dreamer.  Great novels are always about to become formless reservoirs of dark energy. 

What-gate

 The Smoking Man.  We already have one.  Now all we need are Bernstein and Woodward manques.  Joe ‘Big Guy’ might like Nixon get elected and later be impeached.  What sort of -gate will it be: Tweakergate, Lapgate ?  Cast your minds back, this is just beginning to roll.

Downcast by the Problem of Evil

  -  Do you accept physics?   Are you affronted by the failure of over-stressed beams?  Are lava flows an unjust imposition?   What is your position on tsunamis?

 -  Nature is naturing, from indigestion to cancer.  It’s all normal.  It is what it is: only a fool could object to it.

 -  I agree and we differ only in my seeing God as the underlying energy of all this, supporting and sustaining and so forth.  You though, with a very narrow perspective on omni-benevolence claim that I should be baffled by a supposed dilemma and merely hold to belief through obdurate ignorance and refusal to draw a rational conclusion.  I think my love of physics, as such, is greater than yours as I am not in the least downcast by it whereas by your account I ought to be.

The Book against God by James Wood (pub.2003)

 Here is the unreliable narrator, Thomas Bunting, telling us that he is an unreliable narrator.  Does that mean that he will drift into the truth or “win us with honest trifles, to betray’s in deepest consequence”?  His account of Augustine is defective and a Bunting truth.  Evil is privative and a lie is privative inasmuch as it deprives the world of a feature that is inconvenient for the utterer.  The bunts of Bunting are generally sportive fabrications, fabulisms of an idle drifting mind or it maybe, as we read deeper into inadvertent truth, symptoms of incipient madness.

In any case his wife Jane has given him the red card and sent him off the marital pitch, not to take an early bath for he doesn’t do baths or ablutions of any kind preferring to loll unshaven in a filthy dressing gown of a morning and onwards into a day of divagation from his doctoral thesis into a ragbag of theodicy - The Book against God.

"At the moment I’m living in an unpleasant little room, a bedsit I suppose, in Swiss Cottage, in a 1930s building on the Finchley Road pounded by traffic. I moved here in May, just after my father’s funeral, and after my estranged wife put me “on probation.” At the service, with Father’s body barely cold, Jane told me that she would have me back only if I could prove to her that I was no longer a liar, an operation which, I see now, has more than a touch about it of the famous Cretan paradox. In four months nothing has happened yet on that front, so here I am on the Finchley Road, alone.”

In the manic phase he lives beyond his card’s means and won’t open the dunning letters until the baliffs are threatened.  He claims that due to his parents’ lack of means he is lead into sybarite temptation.  Daddy is the vicar of a country parish outside Durham, a scholar who left the university theological faculty.

"But my parents’ finances were sickly; in my memory, Father seems to be continually driving in to Durham to meet “the bank manager,” to arrange for “another lease of life.” Though my parents weren’t ascetic, indeed quite worldly by instinct, our life was materially thin. All our textures were strained through the sieve of their finances.”

Wood is a fine writer steeped in English literature and Dickens spreads his wings over the descriptions of his fathers dwindling congregation.

"With gentle, undogmatic faith, he fit himself around the lives of his flock. Peter believed that most of his petitioners were in search of friendship rather than God. Mr. Tattersall, now long dead, used to come every week on Sunday afternoon when I was a boy. He had a red birthmark like a wax letterseal across one cheek, and always carried a small umbrella, even when it was sunny. Father told me that Mr. Tattersall was “terribly alone.” Mother told me that Mr. Tattersall had driven a bus for many years, the cream-coloured 54 that went every day between the villages. He had had an accident in which he knocked down a pedestrian. There had been nobody on the bus at the time—there rarely was—and Mr. Tattersall had accelerated away. The pedestrian recovered, and Mr. Tattersall, whom no one liked, was not charged; perhaps it was felt that he was already punished by the now shameful symbolism of his birthmark.”

Is Thomas Bunting’s theodicy an attempt to kill the god of his father or relief from seven years labour on a thesis on the Epicureans.  He’s nearly finished and the question ‘and then what’ may be the  burden that he can no longer bear or put down.  It’s not unknown in the academic world -

burn out

The portrait of Tommy’s wife Jane is tender, close and accurate:

“Her hair is very dark, fiercely commanded into a ponytail which hangs quiveringly, like the needle of a delicate instrument designed to monitor her moods. I got to know this shaking sleek ponytail very well indeed, because Jane has many moods, and there is no way to predict when or why she will laugh (at which point her ponytail, laughter’s tassel, swings and rocks) or become angry (the ponytail, now pride’s brush, stiff and unmoving, as she tilts her head to the left and closes her eyes in fury). Her noise is quite long—something suggestive of erotic prolongation in a long nose, I think—and her neck is long, too. At its base is a teaspoon declivity. There are freckles on her collarbones: eager touchmarks, sexual dapple. Her accent is very proper.”

What is the fealty of a liar worth?  Not much  Jane thinks as he ducks and dives around her wish to have a child.  Then his father dies before God does and his eulogy at the service is a self-absorbed argument with the departed.  It’s about as far as an Englishman can take a Dostoevskian skandaly.

This is a book well worth reading and it must have been deeply frustrating for the critics who wanted to ply the birch.  I’m sure some found a way.

Sankara on Memory and Identity in Kena Upanishad II.4

 It is my fixed view that the Vedic philosopher theologians while unaffected by Western thoughts generated broadly similar responses to the aporiai of consciousness, identity,  and memory.  Here in his commentary on Kena Upanishad II.4  Sankara rejects the idea of the aloof Self as  an agent of the act of knowing.

“On the other hand, the explanation my run like this; “The Self being the agent of the act of knowing, one infers It to be the agent of the action from the fact of the cognitive act itself, just as one knows that it is the wind which moves a tree”.”

The Self then is understood as being aware of what is going on in the mind.  It is not the knowledge itself.  As knowledge occurs via perception, inference etc. the Self is activated like a substance undergoing modification.  There appears to be two processes going on here, mental activity producing knowledge and the modification of the Self producing awareness of this activity.  The changeability of the Self per this theory counters our sense of the permanence of the Self.

A view ascribed by Sankara to the school of Kannada:

“Knowledge arising from the contact of the soul and the mind, inheres in the soul; hence is the soul endowed with  knowership.  But it is not changeable; it is merely a substance  just like a pot in which colour inheres” - since according to this view, too, Brahman is a mere substance without consciousness, it contradicts such Vedic texts as, “Knowledge, Bliss, Brahman” (Br.Up. III.ix.28), “Brahman is Consciousness” (Ai. V.3)  And as the soul is partless and hence has no locality in it, and as the mind is ever in contact with it, the consequent  illogicality of admitting any law regarding the origination of memory becomes insurmountable.”

This remark about memory in its extreme allusiveness is somewhat inscrutable but if connected to the critique of Buddhist annica (momentariness) becomes intelligible.  The soul and the mind being viewed on the analogy of mental subject and mental objects requires that some mark of the supposed mental data must be discovered for them to be recognised as memory.  Thus you might have the thought, ‘someone won the lotto and yes now that I think of it, it was me’.

“Remembrance means recalling to mind something after its perception, and that can happen only when the agent of perception and memory is the same; for one person is not seen to remember something perceived by another.  How can there be an awareness of the form, “I who saw earlier see now”, arise unless the earlier and later perceiver be the same?  Moreover, it is well known to all that direct experience in the form of recognition,  such as “I who saw that, see this now”, occurs only when the agent of seeing and remembering  is the same.  Should their agents be different, then the awareness will take such a form, “I remember, but somebody else saw”; but nobody in fact experiences in this way.  Where cognition takes such a form, all understand the agents of seeing and remembering to be different, as for instance in, “I remember that he saw this then”.  (from Brahma-Sutra-Bhasya II.ii.25 pg.412 trans. Swami Gambhirananda, pub. Advaita Ashrama)

This critique of Sankaracarya’s would also apply to Hume’s fardel.

Plenipotent Trump

 You didn’t know that Trump was the cause of cheating at online chess?  It seems that winning at all costs establishes a template for the use of chess programs which in seconds give the best counter move.  Huge!  And he’s a fascist dictator but luckily not very good at it.  Where are the locked stadiums full of dissidents who later disappear and the rude 5 A.M. calls to a waiting meat wagon?  He has no control over the media, nothing bad happens to reporters who diss him.  Could he not at the very least sneak in an agent into the New Yorker canteen to switch the salt and sugar cellars?  Hopeless.