The Writer in the Neutral by Gustav Janouch

 

In May 1921, I wrote a sonnet which was published by Ludwig Winder in the Sunday supplement of Bohemia.

Kafka said on this occasion: ‘You describe the poet as a great and wonderful man whose feet are on the ground, while his head disappears in the clouds. Of course, that is a perfectly ordinary image drawn within the intellectual framework of lower-middle-class convention. It is an illusion based on wish fulfillment, which has nothing in common with reality. In fact, the poet is always much smaller and weaker than the social average. Therefore he feels the burden of earthly existence much more intensely and strongly than other men. For him personally his song is only a scream. Art for the artist is only suffering, through which he releases himself for further suffering. He is not a giant, but only a more or less brightly plumaged bird in the cage of his existence.’

“You too?’ I asked.

 

‘I am a quite impossible bird,’ says Franz Kafka. “I am a  jackdaw –a kavka. The coal merchant in the close of the Tein cathedral has one. Have you seen it?

‘Yes, it flies around outside his shop.’

 

“Yes my relative is better off than I am. It is true, of course, that his wings have been clipped. As for me, this was not in any case necessary, as my wings are atrophied. For this reason there are no heights or distances for me. I hop about bewildered among my fellow men. The regard me with deep suspicion. And indeed I am a dangerous bird, a thief, a jackdaw. But that is only an illusion. In fact, I lack all feeling for shiny objects. For that reason I do not even have glossy black plumage. I am gray, like ash. A jackdaw who longs to disappear between the stones. But this is only joking, so that you will not notice how badly things are going with me today.’

Supplement VI; The Neutral by Roland Barthes

The Sense of History by Myron P. Gilmore

 

By the eve of the Reformation the European world of learning had been supplied with editions and commentaries on the Old and New Testaments which represented the application to scripture of the humanistic techniques of criticism. Upon this achievement rested the hopes of a whole generation of elites for the purification and restoration of the Christian Church.

The common denominator between Greek and Hebrew scholarship was a new understanding of history. The development of a sense of perspective on the past, the ability to place oneself in time with respect to an age as a whole, the awareness of historic distance, all this  was a contribution build on the Christian heritage, which stressed the linear evolution in which the Incarnation was the most important event and the Last Judgment was the  goal towards which society was tending. But in spite of this historic element in Christian thought the Middle Ages had singularly lacked a sense of the reality of time. Countless representations of biblical; and classical scenes on manuscripts and portals testify to the fact that these distant events were thought to have happened only yesterday. The Flight to Egypt is the peasant family in the next village on their mule.

This tradition had a powerful hold on men’s minds and indeed in many ways was not completely shaken off until the triumph of historicism in the nineteenth century. No popular representation today of Imperial Rome or of the Old Testament Judea such as Hollywood has from time to time given us would be attempted without all the apparatus that archeology and history, fake or real, could supply. But down through the eighteenth century popular audiences were not bothered by the fact that Greeks of the Age of Pericles appeared in the costumes of Versailles. Yet the attainment of a sense of distance in time and space which is one kind of reality has been accomplished at the sacrifice of another kind of reality. Today the process goes so far that we feel self-conscious about trotting out characters dressed in historical costumes as if for a fancy  dress ball. Shakespeare in modern dress or St. Joan in modern talk may come with a greater shock of recognition.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century this sense of history, which was subsequently to triumph*, was only beginning  to manifest humanist thought. The tradition of the medieval chronicle continued in many forms. Whether such chronicles purported to give the history of a national group, a political entity, a city or a monastery, they began with the history of creation and pretended to universal scope Among the famous examples of this genre was the Nurnberg Chronicle of Hartmann von Schedel, published in 1493 and illustrated with woodcuts by Wohlgemut, the father-in-law of Durer. Mixed with the realistic portrayal of German cities were representations of biblical; events and wonderful prodigies. A work of this kind, still essentially medieval, exemplified the philosophy of history shared by the greatest number of the contemporaries of Columbus.

Side by side with these interpretations of the past, however, there appeared increasing numbers of direct personal accounts of contemporary episodes and experiences. The Memoirs of Commines remain perhaps the most famous example, but diaries such as those of Burchard, Infessura and Marino Sanudo belong in the same category. Personal, secular, limited to the life span of the individual, these accounts are at the opposite extreme from the world chronicle. To those who were connected with a more remote past they opened the possibilities of a more individualistic and realistic treatment of history.

In still another category was the formal humanist historiography modeled on ancient examples. The tradition which had begun in Italy with Bruni and Poggio was carried on in most of the Italian Courts. Rucellai wrote his History of the invasion of Charles VIII, which Erasmus thought worthy to be compared with Sallust and Polydore Vergil had begun as early as 1505 the collection of materials for his history of England which was finally published only in 1533. The chief contribution of the Italian school of humanists was to limit history to past politics and treat it as an autonomous area of study. The emphasis was on the pedagogic value of history and upon the belief that the record of the past was in reality philosophy teaching by example. In many of the most formal humanist histories the chief figures were described as personifications of abstract and traditional virtues and vices, and this approach was replaced only in the sixteenth century with the more realistic observation of the age of Machiavelli and Guicciardini. Divine intervention and prodigies of all sorts might still be allowed – and even in some cases recommended –but the thread of political action could be followed by the interpretation of human motives.

Works of this kind were bound to raise by implication the question how far man controlled his own history. What areas in the past could be understood in terms of a secular understanding of men’s behavior and so what could be learned from history? The question preoccupied the historical work of Machiavelli and Guicciardini and it frequently received a pessimistic answer. Yes in the long run these histories were written in the faith that men could learn from them. In the twenty-fifth chapter of The Prince Machiavelli considered how much fortune can do in  human affairs and how it might be opposed. He felt that

 

‘Fortune is the ruler of half our actions, but that she allows the other half or thereabouts to be governed by us . . .

I compare her to an impetuous river, that when the turbulent, inundates  the plains, cuts down trees and buildings, removes the earth from tis side and places it on the other, everyone flees before it and everything yields to its fury without being opposed to it, and yet though it is of such a kind, still when it is quiet men can make provision against it by dykes and banks, so that when it rises it will either go into a canal, or its rush will not be so wild and dangerous. So it is with fortune .  .  .’

If even the pessimistic Machiavelli could see that the study of the past might enable men to make this much provision for the future, the hopes of those who studied the distant classical and Christian pasts were still more comprehensive. Both antiquity and early Christianity were now seen as remote eras, but they could be known through the proper application of historical; techniques and the fruit of knowledge would be the restoration of piety and learning that lay at the roots of western civilization.





*Seems like a bit of  Post-World War Two optimism from the standpoint of 2022.

The New Broom by Jervis Wegg

Philip II was a ‘new broom’ to sweep out heresy and bent on the task but peace with his all enemies was essential before he could do more than take preliminary steps.  Just before his abdication in 1559 Charles V had taken further measures against heretics and in his farewell speech before the States and again in a codicil to his will just before his death, he pointed out the importance of stamping out heresy. Now his son was left to achieve that which his father had desired to accomplish. Philip hastened to reaffirm and reissue his father’s Placards dealing with heresy. But the Magistrates of Antwerp complained that the concessions granted to their town were being violated and pointed out that the Placard of 1550 had not been published in any of the four great towns of Brabant. Again,  however, war came to hamper the  persecution and Philip’s bankrupt condition made him dependent on the goodwill of his subjects.. In August 1556, however, the Placards dealing with the Anabaptists were republished in Antwerp in spite of protests. While Philip was in Antwerp in January 1556 five persons – two old men and three young girls- were arrested for infringing the Placards but obtained pardon on account of the King’s visit.

The religious truce reached at Augsburg in February 1555 was the cause of the  Netherlands being flooded with books on Luther’s doctrines. Many considered that the preaching of the chaplains who came with Lazaraus Swendi’s German mercenaries in 1555 and the liberty to live as Lutherans which was permitted to the German troops themselves, did much to strengthen  the growth of these doctrines in the town Also many Protestants came from England at Queen Mary’s accession and spread them further. It was, no doubt, to stem the wave of heresy that Philip, during his stay at Antwerp in 1556, gave permission to the Jesuit Fathers to establish themselves in the town. But a new teaching had by this time reached Antwerp, though few observedi t. It was one that moved the people  much more than the ‘damned teaching’ of Martin Luther or that of the ‘horrible sect’ of the Anabaptists, as two Catholic contemporaries called them, and was that of Calvin. It entered the Netherlands from France soon after the crushing of Ghent, and Antwerp gradually became its headquarters. Calvinism aimed at reforming the State, and on its appearance in the Netherlands the whole aspect of the Reformation changed, its aim being henceforth revolutionary. Its devotees were found mostly among the poorer class and and they sought political liberty in rebellion. The first Calvinists was put to death in the Netherlands suffered at Tournal in 1545. It was from such places as Tournal that the doctrines were brought by Walloons to Antwerp. Yet those put to death in Antwerp under Philip prior to the treaty of Gateau Cambresis do not seem to have included many Calvinists. In 1556 an Anabaptist named Abraham was sentenced o death and executed at the Market Place  .  .  .

In 1559 about forty Anabaptists were executed in the Netherlands, of whom eighteen suffered at Antwerp. Feelings ran very high among the crowd but nothing happened, though in one instance the Schoul was seen to turn white as a sheet when he saw that his guards had fled. Most of these Antwerp victims appear to have been Anabaptists. They seem to have been inoffensive men and women whose chief sin related to baptism, there being  no suggestion that they inclined towards communism or polygamy. Their heads were full of the Bible story and they regarded themselves as the reincarnation of Bible heroes. They particularly admired the oppressed and likened all oppressors to Egyptians or Babylonians. Usually they refused to abjure their opinions and awaited the extreme penalty attached to such obduracy  even in spite of advice of their counsel to plead guilty and say they were led into heresy  by others.

Certain fact are noticeable about these prosecutions. Lutherans seem no longer to have been hunted down, and Anabaptists seem to have lost the characteristic excesses of those who had held Munster, and to have appealed to a very harmless sort of folk of the artisan class. The Venetian Ambassador, writing in 1557, expressed surprise at the courage displayed by all those who suffered martyrdom in the Netherlands. In truth it was becoming evident that the blood of the many men and women had not been spilt in vain, and the secret drownings and beheadings in the Steen and the gagging of victims on the scaffold show how much the spectators sympathized with the victims.

A French Calvinist Congregation was established in the town in 1554 by the minister Francois Perucel with which Calvin corresponded, and in 1556 he was urging the necessity of assembling together to give each other courage, and was exhorting his followers not to be content with solitary devotion. The advice seems to have been followed, for an Ordinance was issued by the Magistrates on the 1st of March, 1557,  which mentioned evangelical meetings which were being held in and outside the town and forbids them in the future. At the same time a closer inquisition into the character of the newcomers to the town was made, and in 1558 the Duke of Savoy ordered the Magistrates to stop the secret meetings which were being held, especially at night. Preaching both in and outside the town had always been common in Antwerp, but it was the Calvinists who made the practice popular. We find recorded in the accounts of the Scout that Jehan des Champs, school master of Berghen-in- Hainut, was arrested and confessed that he had fallen into evil opinions and had got mixed up with some of the sects, particularly Calvinism.. He persisted in his error and was burnt alive. So during the war that was ended by the Treaty of Cateau Cambresis the burnings and the drownings of heretics were many in Antwerp, and the Calvinism which was to teach men how to make head against Philip’s tyranny was already on foot in the town.

The teaching of Calvin as to man’s relation to the State and the fervor aroused by the palm-singing advocated by the ministers of the meetings opened a new era of the Reformation in the Netherlands, and the peculiar circumstances of unscrupulous aristocracy on the one side and stubborn resistance on the other made the Netherlands the field on which many battles were fought for freedom in the second half of the sixteenth century. The gatherings to hear the preachers grew until in 1566 thousands trooped from the town with arms in their hands. Upon to 1559 the persecution in Antwerp had been of a sort less severe than that carried out in the Netherlands beyond the borders of Brabant. This was due to the anxiety of the Magistrates to judge the town themselves in such affairs to the exclusion of Inquisitors and to the natural fear of upsetting the trade which proved to lucrative to the Government Treasury. The citizens who acted reasonably –reasonably, that is to say, for an age in which most men were bigots- were little interfered with, and those who suffered were such as could not keep their mouths shut and advertised their views on matters, forcing their opinions before the public, and preferring martyrdom to relinquishing the notoriety they had gained by their singularity. The man or woman of mediocre intellect who has picked up ideas from others, which are not shared by and perhaps abhorrent to the rest of the race – too easygoing or too self-conscious to see themselves against their neighbors – has commonly believed his idea to to be mainly of his own coining and has arrogated to himself the right to ridicule the rest of the world or to pay the extreme penalty of martyrdom in the endeavor to prove the superiority of his arguments over all others.

 

The conduct of the Magistrates was remarkably tolerant for the age both in their administrative and their judicial function, and they were reluctant to share with the contemplative  Orders of monks the duty of suppressing heresy. The Carthusians were not allowed to rebuild their cloister after its destruction in 1542, but Dominicans and Franciscans were sometimes empowered to collect evidence, and they worked under the Court and the Inquisitor- General;. Brandt tells how at this time one of the Magistrates named Gaspar de Realme was struck with pity while hearing charges against heretics and was carried home in a fever crying that he was guilty of shedding innocent blood.  We have seen the opposition the Magistrates offered to the Placard of 1550 which mentioned an Inquisitor as if he was a recognized official in the city. Those accused of heresy were brought before the Vierschare  and sentenced by it if found guilty, but the Magistrates were often anxious to set the prisoner free if he would turn over a new leaf. As it was, poorters and foreign merchants were not often arrested; the victims being rather fugitives from infected paces, and the Magistrates had no jurisdiction to inquire into matters of conscience only, so that those who did not publicaly offend against the Placards were left alone.

 

The Treaty of Cateau Cambresis set Philip and the French king free to take repressive measures, against Calvinism and revolution, which go to make up the history of France and the Netherlands during the latter half of the sixteenth century. Persecution in Antwerp became much heavier just before Philip left  the Netherlands . . .

Whatever chagrin Philip may have felt at the loss of Calais by the English was assuaged by his victory at Graveline in late 1558. Negotiations for peace were opened although hostilities did not cease, and Mary was dead before the deliberations were concluded. When the Treaty  of  Cateau Cambresis was published in Antwerp on the 7^th of April, there was great rejoicing, for it was anticipated that a marriage between Philip and one of the French princesses would assure amity between the two nations. The great bell played, the Tower of Our Lady’s was hung with lamps, prizes were put up for competition, arches were set up, bonfires were lighted, wine flowed freely, and among the novelties introduced were greasy poles (the falls of those trying to get the prize at the top provoking much laughter), while blindfolded men  hunted pigs and women ran races. Among the foreign merchants  who took part in these celebrations were the English, but very little reflection shows their joy must have been assumed if they felt their prosperity depended on peace between England and the Netherlands. When the negotiations which led up to the Treaty were opened, Philip had been the husband of the English Queen and the restoration of Calais to the English had been one of the objects  Philip’s commissioners kept in view.. When the Treaty was signed Mary was dead and Elizabeth was on the throne, and all talk of such restoration was forgotten, so that with  the Treaty of Cataeau Cambresis the long amity which had extended between England and the House of Burgundy came to an end.  Her championship of the Protestant cause threw Elizabeth into stronger opposition to Philip, but she became at the same time the idol of the supporters of the new doctrines among the merchants and citizens at Antwerp.

Many in the provinces, like Pontus Payen, hailed the treaty as the harbinger of a Golden Age, and poets sang of the closing of the doors of the Temple of Janus, foretelling that, since Mars was enchained and the Furies put to flight, Rhetoric and Music would join hands for the solace of the Provinces.

The exhausted condition of Philip’s treasury had made him anxious to end war with France and devote himself to combating Islam in the Mediterranean and Protestantism in his own dominions. The crushing of the latter seemed to him vital to the safety of his throne, and in his resolve he had the sympathy of the Pope. He had formed the opinion that the interest of the State  was so bound up with the maintenance of the religion that neither the authority of princes nor concord between subjects, nor the public peace could exist if two religions lived side by side in one country. Both he and Henry II had the crushing of heresy in their minds when they signed the Treaty and both were actuated rather by fear of a revolt than by any anxiety for the souls of their subjects. Neither could contemplate with equanimity a complete alteration in established institutions, knowing well the effect it would have in men’s attitudes towards the State. Indeed the Treaty of Cateau Cambresis was regarded by them rather as a league for the suppression of Calvinism and other heresy than as a mere cessation of war. The means adopted by the two monarchs to attain these ends for te history of the Revolt of the Netherlands and of the Huguenot Wars in France, while the measures applied to Antwerp and the resistance offered to them by the Magistrates and the inhabitants make memorable the period of decline of Antwerp from the prosperity in which she was in  1559 to her ruined condition after the siege by Parma in 1586.

No doubt many realized what was in store, and Sir Thomas Challoner, writing to Cecil from Brussels in January 1560  of the marriage feast of Philip and Isabella, the French Princess whom the Treaty gave to him, says:

‘The inquisition like the hangman shall shut up the tale of the feast with more than  hundred carbonades.’

 

The Strange Clarity of Roland Barthes by Tiphaine Samoyault

‘From where did the singular clarity of Roland Barthes come from? From where did it come to him, since he had to receive it? Without simplifying anything, without doing violence to either the fold or the reserve, it always emanated from a certain point that was not yet a point, remaining invisible it its own way.’ *


This dimension of clarification appears explicitly in the course on ‘The Neutral’ in 1978. Here, Barthes deploys the power and career of the  notion that, having been a theoretical proposition (the neutral as ‘zero degree’) became a veritable ethic (against arrogance), leading to an aesthetic (of the jotting, the incident). Although he was, like any white western male, trapped in the rigidity of binarisms and the oppositional paradigms of rationality, his fantasy had always consisted in envisioning forces capable of outplaying them. In writing, in ways of reading, and also in forms of moral behavior, he had found ways of doing or saying things that would prevent meaning from being caught up in categories, language in the definitive. Being in stable  identities. In grammar neither masculine or feminine, neither active nor passive. In politics, not to decide between two conflicting parties  . .  . The neutral was mainly a utopia, and it defines Barthes at the deepest level; it was away of dealing with language, the body, the gesture so as to deprive them of their authoritarianism of essence and fixed definitions. Hence his predilection for thresholds, vestibules, the in-between, all those intermediary places where you are not really anywhere, through which you pass without stopping. There are, of course, negative images of the neutral, both on the political level and on the ethical level; but if we were decide to turn it into a utopia, we will highlight the movement by which it destabilizes everything, refuses all that is done-and- dusted, given, obvious. The moral values promoted by the neutral, such as benevolence, delicacy and gentleness, may sometimes be mocked as effeminate, and  yet they are the values that are embodied, without authority, by the maternal feminine as Barthes receives and conceives it. It is also the principle of respect for the singular pleasure extolled by Sade in a letter to his wife, quoted in Sade, Fourier, Loyola; the enjoyment of all that is small, trivial, marginal, through which individualities express their truth, in other words, their fragile moments.

“I will happily call the non-violent refusal of reduction, the evasion of generality by means of invented, unexpected, non- paradigmatizable forms of behavior, the elegant and discrete flight from dogmatism, in short the principle of delicacy – in the final analysis, I will happily call it gentleness.’**

 

Unlike Blanchot, the neutral in Barthes is neither negative, nor the unspeakable, nor the night. Its positive force lies in the way it reduces intimidation of every kind: arrogance, totality, virility, the definitive judgment. It attenuates without abolishing, calms without lulling completely to sleep, renders expression more subtle and less vain. Herein resides its stranger power of clarification. Instead of displaying thought in the harsh light of an illusory intelligibility, the neutral makes it glitter for a while while as it scatters it in fragments, creating gaps and pauses, times and places that elude meaning,.

* Jacques Derrida, ‘The deaths of Roland Barthes’, in Psyche, vol. 1, p. 265

 ** The Neutral: Lecture Course at the College de France, 1977-1978, Columbia University Press. 2005




Humankind’s common desire is for a stable center, and for assurance of mastery –through knowing or possessing. And a book, with its ponderible shape and its beginning, middle and end, stands to satisfy that desire. But what sovereign subject is the origin of the book? ‘I was not one man only’ says Proust’s narrator, ‘but the steady advance hour after hour of an army in close formation, in which there appeared, according to the moment, impassioned men, indifferent men, jealous men . . . In a composite mass, these elements may, one by one, without our noticing it, be replaced by others, which others again eliminate or reinforce, until in the end a change has been brought about which it would be impossible to conceive if it were single person.’

 

-Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Translator’s Preface to Derrida’s ‘On Grammatology.’