This is your host Robert Harrison for entitled opinions during our ongoing exile from the studios of KZSU.
With all that's going on in the world and especially in our American Republic,
it's time to double down on our own brand of militancy on behalf of literature and ideas,
especially untimely ideas or what Nietzsche called "thoughts out of season."
If it's not untimely, it's not entitled opinion.
I would like to reflect today on the "fantitic powers of literature."
As a word you might not have heard before, "fantitic" of or relating to prophecy,
it puts together two Latin words, "factum" and "deechetary," both of which have to do with saying.
"factum" or "fate" comes from "fari" to speak, and why is that?
Because the ancients understood fate as what has been spoken by prophets and oracles.
Your fate has been foretold.
Deechera also has to do with speech, it means to say,
hence our English words, diction, and prediction.
So when I speak of the "faticic powers of literature,"
I mean a book's "proleptic insights" into the fate of the future.
If there's one oracle that won't let you down, it's literature.
To understand its victims, you have to learn to hear the silence.
[Music]
Michel Foucault, following Nietzsche, defined his approach to history as genealogical,
by which he meant that he looked at the past with a view to the present
for the purpose of a critical reevaluation of history,
above all its discursive formations, as he called them.
My approach to literary history by contrast looks to the past
the visionary foreshadowings of the historical present, and I mean our historical present.
So to put it simply, I believe that certain literary works from past eras or epochs
understand our present age better than it understands itself.
That they see into the covert passions of the time, as it were.
And so that's why I'm much less interested in how literary works belong to their time than I am
in how they speak the fate of the future from their outposts in the past.
Being a phenomenologist at heart, I always prefer to show rather than tell,
so I'm going to focus today on one work of literature, in particular,
to show just how fotitic it appears in retrospect.
But before I turn to that work, let me quote the critic Lionel Trilling,
who back in 1964 wrote that there is nothing that we moderns recoil from
as much as the idea of Eden.
Quoting Trilling, how far from our imagination is the idea of peace
as the crown of spiritual struggle.
The idea of bliss is even further removed.
The two words proposed to us a state of virtual passivity, which is the negation
of the more life that we crave.
We dread Eden, and of all Christian concepts, there is none which we understand so well
as the phallic scooper or the fortunate fall.
Not, of course, for the reason on which these Christian paradoxes were based,
but because by means of the sin and the fall,
we manage to get ourselves expelled from that dreadful place.
End quote.
Trilling is surely right that our craving for more life makes us impatient
with a denic serenity and contentment.
And the French novelist Michel Tournier is also right when he speaks of,
"our modern contempt for all values that do not relate to action, energy,
and emotional tension."
Michel Tournier, by the way, was the subject of our very first episode of
entitled opinions back in 2005.
In any case, has there ever been a more restive or frenzied age in human civilization
than ours at present?
I seriously doubt it.
At this restlessness of ours, I think has a lot to do with the historic
disintegration of certain, how should I call them,
psychosocial structures that once directed and regulated human desire.
We no longer have an image or concept of an ultimate end point of desire.
Say like Dante did when he finally reached the Imperium at the end of his padaisou.
Desire today desires more of itself or more of its own self-propelling dynamic.
The spiritual condition of our age could be characterized as a world
when we're in those of us who are swept up in its turbulence or at once driven and aimless.
Now that's a paradoxical condition to be sure, to be both driven and aimless.
It means that our impulses that set us into motion may have proximate goals but no ultimate aim.
Unless the perpetuation of aimless motion can be considered an aim in itself.
Now when I look for deeper insight into this paradoxical syndrome of aimless
drivenness or of the behavioral and psychic disorder of our age,
I find it in a very unlikely place, namely in a 500-year-old epic called the Orlando Fuyoza.
By Ludovico Adioso.
Adioso is the most important Italian author of the 16th century, along with Torquatotasso.
And for those of you who might want to check up on this, the first two paragraphs of the entry in Wikipedia offer a nice condensed summary of all you need to know about the Orlando Fuyoza to follow the rest of this show.
But if you want to go to that trouble, here are the essential facts.
In English, the Orlando Fuyoza is known as the "frenzy of Orlando", a more literally raging Roland.
It's a sprawling epic poem full of magic, adventures and wandering nights in forests.
The earliest version appeared in 1516, but the poem was not published in its complete form until about 1532.
Its historical setting and characters re-prieze the old French-Shan-Sondaholah, the old French epic of the 11th century, which tells of the death of Roland, the great Christian pious night of Charlemagne's empire.
Adioso's version does not tell the story of Roland's death, but of his love for a sereson princess that actually ends up driving him mad.
Hence, the title "Raging Roland".
The story is also a chivalric romance that stemmed from a tradition, beginning in the late Middle Ages and continuing in great popularity in the 16th century and well into the 17th century.
So, Orlando is the Christian night known in French and subsequently in English as Roland or Rolau in French.
The story takes place against the background of the war between Charlemagne's Christian paladins and the sereson army that has invaded Europe and is attempting to overthrow the Christian empire.
The poem is about war and love and the romantic ideals of a bygone era of chivalry.
It mixes realism and fantasy, humor and tragedy.
The stage is the entire world, plus a trip to the moon.
The huge cast of characters features Christians and seresons, soldiers and sorcerers and fantastic creatures, including a gigantic sea monster in the world.
The gigantic sea monster called the orc and a flying horse called the Hippogriff.
Many themes are interwoven in its complicated episodic structure, but the most important ones are Orlando's unrequited love for the pagan princess Angelica, which drives him mad.
The love between the female Christian warrior Bradaamante and the sereson Urugero,
were supposed to be the ancestors of Adiosos patrons, the Esta family, and finally the war between Christian and Infidel.
What else do you need to know about this poem?
Well, one last thing. It's divided into 46 cantas, each of which contains a variable number of eight-lined stanzas, known as Otabadima, a rhyme scheme of ABA, B-C-C,
it's 39,000 lines long in total, and that makes it one of the longest poems in European literature.
So, while Orlando Fudioso ostensibly looks backwards to a bygone era of chivalry and Christian heroism, it in fact more importantly looks forward to the great upheavals associated with the new age to which Adioso belongs.
These upheavals are associated with things like the invention of gunpowder, which changed the whole nature of warfare in the early modern period.
The geopolitics of the modern nation-state, the nation-state, if you want to call it that.
The libidinal will depower of the increasingly enriched European ruling classes.
The advent of relativity, cultural relativity, moral relativity, religious relativity, and the loss of certainty in many domains.
And that's just to mention a few of these great upheavals.
And so, in Adioso's nights, we actually can recognize ourselves in a way that we don't recognize ourselves when it comes to Dante's medieval, very Christian pilgrim.
Whereas the latter, Dante's pilgrim seeks beatitude in a vertical ascent through the celestial spheres.
Adioso's paladins wander the Earth laterally in search of action and distraction.
In the world of the Fudioso, desire is a principle of motion just as it is in Dante's comedy.
Yet the difference is that desire here does not have a master plan, nor does it have a final destination.
It merely desires more of its own excitation, more of its own intoxication, more of its own swirling energies.
The story of the Fudioso is supposed to revolve around Charlemagne's war against the Saracins,
but in fact the action constantly deviates diverts from the central plot, as the poem follows the dispersed nights along errant byways that intersect for the most part randomly and converge only temporarily if at all.
It's difficult to know in what part of the forest or continent the fighting is taking place or for how long,
because the scene of action constantly shifts sometimes even in mid-course.
It is a tumultuous world of digressive compulsions where the nights constantly go astray as they court adventure, pursue elusive erotic objects and strive to measure up to their rivals.
Orlando, the most formidable night of the Christian army, is so distracted by his love for Angelica that he temporarily loses his mind,
absenting himself from the war for an indefinite amount of time.
That madness is in fact the true center or anti-center of this poem, a kind of black hole that devours whatever comes within its vicinity.
So what do we, 500 years later, have to learn from these erratic nights, and what does it all have to do with the Lionel Trilling quote?
I invoked earlier about our present loathing of Eden.
Well, to begin with, the Garden of Eden does make an appearance in the Orlando Fudioso.
It is one of two important gardens in the poem that Adioso juxtaposes to one another,
and these two gardens are different from one another yet they are both equally inimical to the demand for action that spurs on the nights.
Let me say a word about the first one, it's the most important one.
It's on the island of Alchina, this garden, Alchina is a sorceress, and her garden is typical of the enchanted gardens that so captivated the medieval and Renaissance imagination.
These are fantasy gardens where the hero usually a night succumbs to the bewitching charms of the resident sorceress and gets trapped in her magic garden world.
Here's a quote from book six of the Orlando Fudioso.
This was the abode of youths and maidens here where soft April, presenting a serene and merry face seemed constantly to smile.
By a spring some there were who sang in sweet melodious voice in the shade of a tree or a cliff others played and danced and indulged in honest fun.
Another had gone apart and was communing with his true love.
As another enchanted gardens in medieval and early modern literature, things are not what they seem on Alchina's island.
All is false semblance and appeals to our native desire for illusion, a desire that lurks in all of us I would say.
It's in many respects a psychedelic outpost.
The gems here are not real gems, the plants are not real plants, and the beautiful as China, so irresistible to the nights.
She lures into her garden is eventually revealed to Rugeira one of the epic male heroes for what she really is, an ugly and loathsome old hag.
Alchina's garden is neither created nor cultivated by human labor. It's made by magic and is ultimately sterile.
In fact, the plant life of the garden is made up of Alchina's former now disillusioned lovers whom she transformed into the fauna and flora of the place.
It's sterile in another sense as well.
For as it ensnares and immobilizes the male knight, it removes him from the theater of action on whose stage he presumably finds his productive purpose in life.
The classical precedents for the emasculating and even dehumanizing powers of the enchanted garden, we find those precedents in the island of Chirche in Homer's Odyssey, where Odysseus' men are transformed into swine, and also the city of Carthage in Virgil's Aniid, where Anius seduced by the blandishments of Queen Diodo,
is derailed from his mission to found the future city of Rome.
The male heroes who have been thus arrested by a feminine power are in need of rescue, and oftentimes it's a god that comes to the rescue.
Certainly it's Mercury who comes to tell Anius that he has to leave Diodo behind and get on with his business of becoming the eventual founder of the future city of Rome.
In other words, the story has to move forward, cities have to be founded, enemies must be fought, the hero's purposeful drive, in other words, must overcome the paralysis of the garden's spell.
If reality can have a Medusa effect on those who look too directly and intently on his horrors, the enchanted garden can have a Chirche effect as it were, on those who fall under its fantastical, call it "Fentasmatic spells", causing them to lose all touch with reality.
There's a subtle yet crucial difference, however, between traditional heroes like Odysseus or Anius and Adioso's knights.
The latter's wanderings are not in fact guided by a higher personal or historical purpose.
One can even say that their actions are misdirected because this would imply that there exists a proper direction or orientation for those actions,
whereas in the world of the Orlando Fudioso, the actors are fundamentally aimless and without issue, precisely as Valyosto makes clear because their actions do not have a real goal but feed on the need for ever-new challenges exploits and distractions.
So much so that remaining in motion, wherever that motion may lead, becomes an end in itself.
This does not mean that battles are not engaged, that prowess is not demonstrated, that victories are not achieved.
It means that there is no fixed center to the poems, a glutenation of episodes, no discernible progress towards a redemptive end point, hence no greater underlying purpose,
to all the digressionary commotion that makes the Fudioso such a delight to read.
The Knights craving for action is at bottom a craving for diversion, or what the 17th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal called "Divétismo" without which the modern male, according to Pascal, so quickly succumbs to melancholy.
Let's listen to Pascal on diversion, I quote.
Nothing is so insufferable to man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study.
He then feels his nothingness, his forebornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness.
There will immediately arise from the depth of his heart, weiriness, gloom, sadness, fretfulness, vexation, despair.
Another Palséf Pascal's, number 139.
When I have occasionally set myself to consider the pains and perils to which men expose themselves at court or in war,
Once arise so many quarrels, passions, bold and often bad ventures, etc., I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact that they cannot stay quietly in their own rooms.
A man who has enough to live on, if he knew how to stay with pleasure at home, would not leave it to go to sea or to beseech a town,
A commission in the army would not be bought so dearly, but that it is found insufferable not to budge from the town, and men only seek conversation and entering games because they cannot remain with pleasure at home.
I go on.
If a king be without what is called diversion, he is more unhappy than the least of his subjects who plays and diverts himself.
The king is surrounded by persons whose only thought is to divert the king and to prevent his thinking of himself.
For King, though he be, he is unhappy if he thinks of himself.
Last Palséf Pascal, that I'll invoke, those who philosophize on the matter, and who think men unreasonable for spending a whole day chasing a hair which they would not have bought, scarce no-ar nature.
The hair in itself would not screen us from the sight of death and calamities, but the chase, which turns away our attention from these, does screen us.
Good old Pascan.
So in Adioso's world, I would say this craving for diversion arises from this inner issuelessness of the night's mode of being.
I've spoken of that before. The issuelessness of being nights in a post-Shavalric world, or simply of being men of action in an age where action has lost its normative or ethical bearings.
And that is why Al-Cheena's Garden is much more than just a trap that temporarily immobilizes the Pals heroes.
By the same token, it is also why Orlando's madness is not simply a momentary derailing of the hero's military mission,
but a revelation of the prevailing neurosis of the time.
The war's true appeal for Adioso's protagonist is that it offers them opportunities for adventures and escapades.
In that sense, Al-Cheena's enchanted garden is where their motivating passions flower in their truest colors.
Al-Cheena is the escapade of all escapades.
For a garden remains a source of irresistible fascination, even after the nights have been freed from its enchantments.
As it lures the nights into its vortex, it reveals their covert desire for illusion, distraction, and self-disposition,
even at the cost of losing their humanity and becoming plants.
I would call Al-Cheena's island the modern era's oceanic fantasy, a place where the desire for irreality translates into reality through the medium of self-deception.
It's not by chance that over the centuries, Adioso's readers, like the poem's nights, have been so captivated by Al-Cheena's realm.
Remove her enchanted garden from the foodiozo and you take away the heterotopia around which so much of the readers desire, as well as the epic's aimless action gravitate.
The other garden realm in Adioso's epic belongs to a woman named Logistila.
After Ruggero of triumphs over Al-Cheena and freeze the nights who have been trapped in on her island,
Those nights come to Logistila's realm, where there are no incantations, no false jewels or flora, no deception.
The verger is perpetual, as is the "beauty of the eternal flowers."
In other words, it's a veritable garden of Eden.
All is peace, benevolence, and leisure.
Yet this earthly paradise, strangely enough, offers little attraction for Ujero and the other nights,
because they simply do not know what to do with themselves there.
After a day or two in that idenic environment, the nights leave it of their own accord,
and rejoin a war that offers risks, dangers, intrigues, and rewards.
Nor does Adioso's poem linger there very long either, because this is a poem after all that sings of,
I quote "ladies, nights, arms, loves, manners, and brave enterprises."
The first verse of the whole Ojolanda Fudioso.
So for a poem that sings of those matters,
Logistila's garden is where it comes to die.
For the poem's element is actually the world-wind of history,
the enticements of illusion, the propulsions of desire,
and the relentless pursuit of moving targets.
That's what's so delightful about the Ojolanda Fudioso.
I'm not persuaded that this aversion to Eden, that we find in Adioso and his nights,
is strictly modern in nature, drilling and others, like Bartlett-Jamaiti did think so.
I think that we can actually detect a disenchantment with Eden as far back as Eve,
who secretly loathe the place,
or as far back as Homer's Odysseus,
who longs for Ithaca in the midst of Calypso's earthly paradise,
and even Dante,
when he enters Eden at the top of the mountain of Purgatory,
Dante feigns enchantment, but he too is in a hurry to get out of that serene and some niferous environment,
in fact he only spends a few hours in Eden.
The modern differential in Adioso's epic is not so much the nights aversion to Eden,
but their existential boredom and impatience.
Boredom indicates a deficiency or emptiness of being.
It's boredom in its subterranean connection with dread that sponsors the restless desire for action and distraction.
Alchina's dream world is far more enticing that Lord Yustiles earthly paradise,
precisely because Alchina diverts the nights, not from their mission,
but from their boredom.
Even after the nights have been freed from its snare,
Alchina's garden continues to exert a hold on them.
They never really overcome the temptation to fall under its bewitching spell again.
And the same could be said, I would argue, about our own terminal modernity.
Eden, as hardly any claims on our imagination,
while Alchina's garden of illusion is alive and well,
and it gets more and more surreal as we invent ever new gadgets to play with,
as we plunge into our magical boxes, I mean our computers.
When it comes to the various drugs that keep us going, day in and day out,
be they plant-based, chemical-based, or aerobic-based,
we are all Alchina's children.
The same goes for our consumerism, one drug among others,
that include our intoxication with ideology,
our partisanship, our worship of celebrity technology and online identity.
Alchina's garden is all around us, and we are the plant men and women who populate its ecology.
All of us seek out its lethal charms in one way or another without ever leaving our homes as it were.
All that one appears as the false likeness of the other, both Alchina and Lugeztiles gardens,
are sterile in nature.
The question here is not whether Alchina's nights should remain in Lugeztiles realm, they should not,
but what they do with themselves once they leave it.
They certainly do not follow in the footsteps of Adam and Eve,
who after the expulsion from Eden set out to cultivate the earth,
and turn it into a mortal home for themselves.
The nights instead simply revert to their prior waywardness,
seeking out the tumbled of war, and the vagaries of desire,
under the impetus of various passions.
Their aimless drives more often than not lead to the sort of destructive behavior that Orlando acts out in the central can'tos of the fuyozo.
After his love for Angelica turns into an explosive fury,
when he realizes that she's in fact in love with someone else,
an insignificant young night it turns out.
Orlando's loss of sanity and loss of self-control puts into dramatic relief the congenital,
self-disposition of his entire army of Christian,
or what I would even call post-Christian nights.
Orlando's loss of reason, interestingly enough, expresses itself in mindless acts that take the form of devastating,
what generations of other people have carefully cultivated.
In effect, Orlando goes on a rampage like a malfunctioning machine of war,
and lays waste to the farmer's fields, the serene countryside,
and the forests and rivers of another wise husbanded landscape,
a landscape cultivated over centuries of human caretaking.
In his fit of irrational behavior,
he directs his rage particularly against gardeners and shepherds,
assaulting flocks of sheep with his bare hands,
and he uses those domestic animals to batter the helpless shepherds.
This is not the kind of hero that are ravaged earth needs these days,
and yet, Orlando embodies exactly the kind of fury that our present age sends forth into the land all across the globe.
Orlando's fury, which creates a nihilistic vortex at the center of Adiosos poem,
stands as a figure for the destructive forces we unleash upon the earth
when restlessness reaches a pathological degree of agitation.
He offers a portrait of the kind of disorder in our desires that causes care to give way to carnage.
Again, it's not the night's rest of disposition per se, that's the problem.
The unquiet heart after all is what got us out of Eden and put us on the path to self-realization.
The problem is that after taking leave of Lord Yustila's garden,
Adiosos' nights move on to ravage the earth rather than to seed it or cultivate it.
Here in lies their quintessential, and I would argue even contemporary modernity,
because this is the spiritual condition of the age today.
Driven and aimless, we act under the compulsion of an unmastered will to destroy whatever lies in our way.
Even if we have no idea where the way leads or what its endpoint might be,
wherever the way leads through our landscapes, our traditions, our legacies, our institutions,
all that humankind is carefully cultivated over time,
and that means first and foremost the earth itself, all this risks obliteration,
as we rush headlong into a future of which we are not the architects,
but for which we bear full responsibility.
What that future will need most is what we seem most determined to destroy as we plunge into its abyss.
To say that the frenzy of the modern era is fundamentally aimless,
does not mean that we fail to set goals for ourselves.
On the contrary, there is no end of goals when it comes to our endless activity,
just as there is no end of desirable objects when it comes to our stupidity.
The positing of goals is one of the ways we dissimulate our aimlessness.
It's a question once again of deception or of self-deception that always seems to be.
Be it in its colonialist, capitalist, or communist rhetoric,
the West has invariably during the modern era,
vaunted the idea of some social or moral good that guides its actions and defines its aspirations.
But we know from the art, literature, and intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
that the putative moral good, be it of colonialism, capitalism, or communism,
was more often than not a mask, a lie, or a best an illusion behind which lurked another intention than the avowed one.
When it comes to the moral good of either party, Christian or Sarah's and capitalist or communist,
we find ourselves once more in Al-Cina's Garden of Falza-Simbianza, False-Simblis.
Moral ideals, in other words, in the modern era remain for the most part,
we pretend to believe in whether we are aware of our pretense or not.
And this holds true for the planetary process that is presently unearthing the earth
and unworlding the world in the name of eliminating poverty and suffering around the world.
We let loose Orlando in the guise of Christ and with a look of grave concern for human suffering, he devastates the land.
Precisely because our frenzy is fundamentally aimless while remaining nonetheless driven,
we set ourselves goals whose main purpose is to keep the frenzy going until it consummates itself in sloth or death.
If at present we are seeking to render the totality of the earth's resources endlessly available, endlessly usable, endlessly disposable,
it is because endless consumption is the proximate goal of a production without end.
Or better, consumption is what justifies the frenzy of production, which in turn justifies consumption,
the entire cycle of which serves more to keep us busy and to satisfy our real needs.
Martin Heidegger describes this syndrome with considerable clarity in his otherwise portentious and abstract prose.
Let me quote him on this.
The consumption of all material, including the raw material man, for the unconditional possibility of the production of everything, is determined in a concealed way by the complete emptiness in which beings, the material of what is real, are suspended.
This emptiness has to be filled up, but since the emptiness of being can never be filled up by the fullness of beings, especially when this emptiness can never be experienced as such, the only way to escape it is incessantly to arrange beings in the constant possibility of being ordered as the form of guaranteeing aimless activity.
That quote comes from his book, The End of Philosophy.
If Heidegger is right, much of our present activity is sponsored by our blind demand for endless activity, a demand that arises in turn from our dread as well as denial of the emptiness of being.
It could well be that our existential boredom has its source in our inability to experience that emptiness in a genuine way,
In which case, the endless productivity mandated by endless consumption, and the endless consumption mandated by endless productivity, become in our present day and age, ways by which we escape from, but do not fill that emptiness.
I believe that Adiosto's poem four saw 500 years ago, just how our age would act out rather than work through this psychic disarray.
How exactly we get from Adiosto to Heidegger remains opaque even to me, but in the rysomatic undergrowth of the Orlando Furyosa, there are no master highways, only by ways that lead to unexpected and unpredictable encounters.
I have followed one of them today, and it has led me here to the conclusion that this is a poem that still knows us better than we know ourselves.
That will do it for today. This is Robert Harris and for entitled opinions, wishing you all the best as we plunge into the turbulence of it all. Bye-bye.
[Music]