Recently Oppermann stated he had found his copy of this work. I will publish the latest draft I know of. This essay was removed from my 2005 dissertation on the basis of space:
Chapter 6:
On the very idea of a confessional scheme
Laura Pozzo: “There is a beautiful sentence by Kafka that says something like ‘Confession and lie are the same thing. We cannot communicate what we are because we are it. We can communicate only what we are not: that is, only the lie.’ We cannot communicate what we are exactly because truth and sincerity are not the same thing. So you can tell the truth without being sincere.”
James Hillman: “Truth is revealed. It can never be told. We cannot tell the truth. It has to appear inside the telling or through the telling….”
(Hillman, 1983, p. 6)
Section I: Introduction: Biography and Confession - the one who “can’t go on”
Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and Saint Augustine (354-430) both wrote a certain kind of literature that was entirely different from previous expressions of written form. Previous genera had attempted to speak poetically from myths or dreams that remained “collective” in their ideal or demonic representations (heroes, villains, lovers); even science itself, governed by “reason,” presents the purest and most transcendent form of the myth of the heroic observer. However Rousseau and Augustine differed in terms of their subject matter in that their “subject matter” was the story of their own lives - the authors themselves; their form was called “the confession.” It concedes that the even the most heroic of all living heroes is actually a human being riddled with foible and even great fault and inner conflict. This gave rise to a sense in literature that human beings were in a sense individuals, whose human foibles particularly were the relevant subject matter of the confession. Never before had human shortcomings been the subject of so much attention. Moreover, in a sense these shortcomings were in fact raised to being a “path” and an “example” of being able to move from a life of sin to a life of grace. This is particularly the case with Saint Augustine who literally viewed his “confession” as something that would allow him to communicate to the fallen people of his land and convert them to the Christian faith. Thirteen hundred years later Jean-Jacques Rousseau undertook an exposition of his faults, calumnies and triumphs. However this time there was no longer the barely hidden agenda of “conversion” and indoctrination that besets Augustine’s work. Jean-Jacques wanted to explore his human self as a kind of pure artistic presentation or portrait of his life. In a sense this too was Jean-Jacques’ exploration between “sin” and “redemption,” to see if he could turn some rather embarrassing moments of his personal existence into the secular “grace” of what we call a work of art.
What manner of confessions is written today? In what way do I write confessions in the reveries at the end of this dissertation, or do I write something other than “the very idea of a confessional scheme?” Like Jean Jacques Rousseau, I sought “grace” in “reflection as a work of art.” Somehow I have believed that in studying my own neuroses and broken or mistaken sense of self I might be able to accomplish creating a work of literary art. The result is of course mixed and at times a complete failure. But I have yet two other recourses in mind when I begin to compare my own and these other forms of “confessions:” first, that a work of art is not really entirely intended in my writing, after all I do not know if there is any real grace in all this introspective “art;” and second, what I have written belongs to the domain of “research,” which is not art, but a genera of a weird kind of social science I seem to be re-inventing. I am researching the domain of dissertation research from the standpoint of a personal confession. I am showing: this is what a research investigator goes through when confronting their own condition. And it is hoped that such an investigation of investigation, or research of research is not merely fruitless naval gazing, but an attempt to grasp some of the real suffering and despair that I have read in other efforts at transparent, scientific social science and research.
In preparing for this essay I have come to see my own work as being neither biographical nor autobiographical. First of all I do not regard “life” (which in this sense is not Zoe, which is completely un-circumscribe-able, but closer to Dasein, a life that may be ) as a chronological sequence of events which biography seems to rely heavily upon (this man at age 12, 15, 20, 30, 60 and so forth). I am looking at life by means of the intensity and intimacy with which it can draw on a certain symbol. The more conscious we are of the symbol, which is out of the chronic recording of timeThe discussion of “my life,” or my “father’s life” (or its development) is part of something else that I am attempting to get at, which is the strange contour of the “present” occurring in dreams, memories and reflection. The biography of the “hero” diminishes in the light of the “present,” as the ego is diminished in the light of the “self.” The symbol of the present, if I dare call it that, means to let go of all past heroes and remain in one’s own uncanny horror, the heroic act itself of remaining in the present. These moments of experience of the uncanny are not redemption, but serve to mark the limits of our capacity to express and conceive of perplexity, which spills over, and only can be contained in the bare capacity for life. As Samuel Beckett writes:
“Where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.” (The Unnamable, 1959, p. 418)
This phrase, “the very idea of a confessional scheme” first occurred in a seminar on contemporary philosophy lead by Professor Harvey Rabbin (at the Colorado College, Colorado Springs) in the late 1980’s. It came from the title of an essay by Donald Davidson (1974), “On the very idea of a conceptual scheme.” However, at least for me the sense of “confession” is more vehement toward the living. “Concepts” (Begriffen – “en-graspings”) merely grasp at living things and consume them. But the “confession” is offered on bended knee, often in confusion and humiliation; it is a far better if much less certain state of affairs. Nonetheless I truly liked and appropriated the turn of phrase of this philosopher, “on the very idea of….” The title seems to convey a kind of sticky limit, where one is forced to face something compelling and repulsive, in its essence prejudicial, “the very idea of…” which is somehow compromising to one’s “scheme.” It is as though from such a title one is waving a huge dead insect in the air saying, “’the very idea of …’ this happening is offensive to me!” Donald Davidson is more or less an analytical philosopher; he had a widely published discussion or debate with Richard Rorty about the concept of “truth” in contemporary philosophy. Should we do without the “truth?” Is the “truth” really best told in fiction?
Section 2: How is the Archetype of the Hero related to the confessional scheme?
Is the “confessional scheme” an expression of the heroic journey toward consciousness? To what extent were Augustine and Rousseau attempting to become “heroes” through their confessions? Do they fight for “presence” in its awkward vulnerability, or do they constantly look backwards to a history they claim to overcome, but which actually overcomes them? What is the meaning of being a “hero?” Does my emphasis on the “symbol of the present” differ from the struggle of heroic consciousness to obtain the present, the immanence of the divine in the present?
I pause to consider whether this “symbol of the present” could be interpreted in a Freudian or Jungian sense may be part of the “Mother” symbol or archetype. (It doesn’t matter to me that this is a reductive psychoanalytic interpretation, there is something to it that I just like.) “The Goddess-Mother” is “divine immanent.” To say it is a “Goddess” hearkens to my own puer-like predisposition as an author: to be in love with the mother, to be at war with the father, to repudiate His transcendence and accomplishment as a “lie”. (The “father’s accomplishments” may or may not be a “lie,” I am pointing to my own limitations here.)
Much of what I have yet to say repudiates the base level of the “Heroic myth,” where the victory of “good and light” over “darkness and evil” is uncertain because we cannot be sure if what is good is good. Many times what is said to be good is really an overblown pretension, full of false pride and arrogance. Heroic biographies if they are too simplistic present transcendent ideals, which are highly irritating because they negate the “bloody mess” (the confused web of good and evil) of our current predicament. Have they come to terms with the fact that the “hero” (Herakles) first murders his wife and children, the nadir of incomprehensible grief?
The transcending, heroic ideals relegate the “bloody mess,” the confusion and nakedness of our condition to a means by which heroic sacrifice is accomplished and redeems the entire thing. This redemption would “transcend” the endless meaningless bloody struggle of the world/mother. “God, the Father” is the “Divine transcendent.” This transcendence decries the world of “sin” (confusion, and lost-ness) as “illusion.” I want to write without redemption, but I do not know if it is possible because I still keep trying to make sense. At least I can try to write with extreme caution toward redemption. “Redemption” that can be written is not “real” or the truth. If we follow Hillman’s sense of what the truth might be (in the passage from Inter-views at top), then redemption might be seen “inside or through” the telling. It is impossible to say exactly because this telling has not yet stopped.
Here is the warning for me as I write this paper: there is another sense in which the term “the symbol of the present” is not filled with enough ambiguity and possible relation to the present to convey my meaning here. The heroic consciousness must realize it is wedded into an impossible condition in which it “can’t go on,” before it can begin to relate.
Section 3: Bestandsaufnahme and the Confessional Scheme
This chapter will deal with the autobiographical essays of Rousseau and St. Augustine called “Confessions.” But are these men really heroes or are they otherwise? These confessions attempt to reveal the human form who is caught up in their history, growth and development. They begin with a past, childhood, they move through their development to their current views on life and what they expect. The plan is simple enough: past, present, and future.
What if this form of confession, neatly ordered for the reader, did not exist? What if one had to face the intense jumble of the present, its chaotic non-historical, non-self-legitimation?
The part we will glean from St. Augustine and Rousseau is the intimacy of their confession. The part we will move away from is their historicizing of personal process. History, a very simple and innocuous narrative structure: past, present, and future still priveleges the “ego” over the “self,” which is all potential relations.
But in discussing the issue of the heroic “defense of consciousness,” I will say at the beginning that I am advocating another turning beyond the biographical history of the hero toward the “heroic” defense of the “present.” I use the term Bestandsaufnahme to convey a sense of what is beyond traditional biographical form in a confession: beyond the traditional ordering and historicizing of a life that comprises biography is the predicament of the present. In attending to the predicament (Predicament, “pre-dicare” “to say before?”) of the present, the emphasis on intimate personal process, the bare and abject nakedness of the Bestandsaufnahme, may be maternal.
Personal history is a means of seeing through to the “bloody mess” of “the present” moment of research. I wrote in the introductory essay here that “research is a double take of searching and searching again. Why? Because what one has discovered has confounded one so much that one is forced to repeat the experience in perplexity. We are in a sense circling round the present moment as a symbol, and it is the intensity of “the living symbol” of the present that we are looking for. The present in its symbolic truth is non-historical, we meander and circumambulate about the symbol because its very life essence holds us to it. But this life essence is bloody, it involves elements, strands, and rhizomes of personal existence, vignettes of one’s life and the life of the collective as well. Only, perhaps, in one’s last breath may one fully understand the meaning of one’s life, a meaning which for the living must remain necessarily obscure. C.G. Jung himself writes in the last pages of his own autobiography, “I have become a stranger to myself.” Such a statement is disconcerting because there is no comfort of readily available “meaning” offered by old age, only a deeper stance to one’s own being a “stranger” to oneself. Yet the disconcerting part of this statement of the “stranger” is a challenge to remain in a kind of wisdom echoed in Samuel Beckett’s phrase, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” “Meaning” is there, but all the more difficult and threatening to encounter.
Section 4: Augustine’s confessions: Appetites and Ladders
St. Augustine! Well hast thou said,
That of our vices we can frame
A ladder if we will but tread
Beneath our feet each deed of shame!
(Longfellow, “The ladder of Saint Augustine”)
The Augustine that Longfellow eulogizes climbs toward spirit upon a ladder of sins and sufferings, I believe, at the calamitous cost of his soul. However, at least there are still sufferings and they are recorded in some way that contests all his desire to convert and reject his life. On the contrary side of St. Augustine of Hippo are the words of Walt Whitman of New York. In Whitman’s words I want to affirm the perilous flavor of the “appetites” or “vices,” whose embrace, rather than rejection, may allow for the possibility of an even deeper spiritual life than Augustine professed. The ultimate loss of the chance to bring soul together with spiritual life is the calamity of the Augustinian “confessional scheme.”
I believe in the flesh and the appetites,
Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag
of me is a miracle.
Divine am I inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch
or am touch'd from,
The scent of these arm-pits aroma finer than prayer,
This head more than churches, bibles, and all the creeds.
(Whitman, “Song of Myself,” section 24, web source: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/whitman/song.htm)
In Whitman’s poem is a contradiction to the soul broken and suffering in Saint Augustine’s Confessions. And yet it leads to the same spiritual yearning in “Christian life” that opposes itself to the “soul.” Perhaps in Whitman’s writing we (as a collective) had learned something in over a thousand years since Augustine’s death. Whitman works in embracing the senses, a reprobate fool, and Augustine is about rejecting them for the sake of some higher spiritual “truth.” I take Whitman’s poetry as being one of the fullest human expressions, queer, naked and vulnerable to the terrible generativity of life as a good way to begin an exploration of Augustine. Whitman had to be mentioned in any sense as one of the naked poets of this dissertation, even if he opposes Augustine with every word and breath. I acknowledge both Whitman and Augustine in their confession of conscious struggle through an unseemly blind and furious mess of one’s conscious circumstance. Where Whitman acknowledges “sweat,” Augustine will acknowledge “prayer,” but what for?
Augustine does have this capacity to “look back” in his confessions, and the capacity to grieve, which is the beginning of relationship. Perhaps what we begin to mean by relationship is part of what was held in Augustine’s aspirations to the Catholic Church. Even if he denies his former life of sin and perdition it seems that somehow Augustine acknowledges it by the great groan of writing that it does exist, confuting the outcome of his apparent “spiritual victory.”
There was something queer as well in Saint Augustine. Something about his life and the intensity of his friendship with a fellow in Thagaste which reminds one that it could possibly be a little more intense and Whitman-esque than he wrote. The only thing that Augustine is clear about.
But why speak I of these things? For ‘tis no time to ask questions, but to confess unto thee. Wretched I was; and wretched is every soul that is bound fast in the friendship of mortal things; who becomes all to pieces when he forgoes them, and then first he becomes sensible of his misery, by which he is already miserable even before he foregoes them. (Augustine, 1996, Book 4, Chap. 6, p, 165)
It strikes me that the “truth” that Augustine is struggling for is the truth of spiritual relationship. He describes himself in his youth as selfish and seducing, beholden only to his senses and the immediacy of desire and intellectual acuity. Perhaps what he is fighting for in the “conversion” is the possibility of charity through relationships rather than the selfish immediacy of desire.
So was Saint Augustine was a kind of “hero?” Did Saint augustine achieve a heroic rise from the illusion, sin and perdition of his youth, selfishness? To do so this “hero” relied on the constant aid and prayer of his mother, Monica. As opposed to the selfishness of his youth Saint Monica seemed to hold the possibility of relationship and charity toward his fellow soul. He tells the story as vehemently as possible that he has in some manner overcome the sins of his youth and obtained a righteous and godly way. And yet he tells also at length of sin and lost-ness.
By comparison we return to Walt Whitman, who rejoiced in his senses once again over a thousand years later. Could Whitman be accused at moments of falling too easily into the selfishness of his senses, and abandoning the possibility of relationship, or does he embrace in an even deeper relationship the possibility of the senses too being holy? What does it mean, “to be holy?” –I do not know, but something flares up as a consuming flame where desire or affinity seeks its own overcoming, overturning, or simply turning aside….
Augustine in the passage above refutes the possibility of asking any more questions. His questions were motivated in grief at the loss of his dear friend. He questions the universe and God of the rightness of things. He has said that questions will not be enough, and they will not be enough precisely because they will accuse the Maker, and hold on to the resentment that the world is not his way. Augustine says that the only thing left to do is confess. And this “confession” I would add is the intensity of his soul-grief and longing to exist. When I say “soul” I hope not to be speaking of an “immortal soul” in any literal sense, but soul which comes from the “shared-ness” of one’s experience: “confession.” All Augustine may offer to us and to the Universe or God is his cry of grief, it may be all he has. Through that grief comes the possibility of relationship with the world, if he has truly suffered.
Section 5: Saint Augustine and Doctor Faustus
Did Dr. Faustus deny the possibility of relation to the world? -The answer is “no,” but only through the negative, through his mother and through his very own shadow. His mother will be discussed in terms of her “dream” below, but his shadow, which I will discuss here, can be spoke of as “Doctor Faustus” himself.
Dr. Faustus was a Manichee, a member of one of the most syncretic of world religions or beliefs. Manichees seemed to be more on the side of drawing relationship into the world in the ocean of spiritual experience, even though, or perhaps because they saw the profound conflict of light and dark (their experience may not have been as unbalanced as the Roman Catholic point of view). I have pondered Augustine’s refutations of Dr. Faustus both in the Confessions and in a text Augustine wrote completely devoted to the refutation of Faustus. The only crime that I could see Faustus commit was that he thought differently from Augustine. Augustine makes a lot of intellectual points. He makes himself to be an enormous “talker,” but little more.
It may be that this Faustus of Augustine’s time is the one who later became mythologized in medieval and modern Europe as the one who made the deal with the Devil. The modern figure seems however to be largely related to a Johan Georg Faust (1480-1540) from Germany. Christopher Marlowe wrote various versions of the drama between 1604 and 1616, which were rudimentary descriptions of a fellow making a deal with the Devil for love and power and summarily being sent to hell. J.G. Goethe’s version (1808) works with profoundly deeper aspects of conscious introspection and life through the myth of Faust. Goethe’s “Faust” committed the folly and sin of yearning too much for life and conscious relationship, and in a sense for Goethe this ultimately becomes his redemption. (Goethe’s Faust was received with greatest interest and admiration by C.G. Jung, who wrote about it in Memories, Dreams and Reflections as an encounter with a real question to his Lutheran upbringing.)
There is however one other piece of literature that may relate more poignantly to the intellectual denial of “relation to world” in the writings of Thomas Mann (1948), his version of Doctor Faustus. Mann’s version of Faustus portrays a great fictive composer Adrian Leverkuhn who really does give his soul in the sacrifice of a young boy to a fever that in a sense does permit him to create his greatest work of music. In Mann’s Doctor Faustus there is very little hope for redemption, the boyish innocence is completely sacrificed, and the innate possibility of relating to the world is lost forever.
Section 6: Saint Augustine’s Mother’s Dream: Planks and Ladders
Saint Augustine’s mother wanted Augustine to join with the Roman Catholic church as a matter of “relationship in the Life of Christ,” but also it is a matter of “conversion” and conformity to institutional rule. The church ostensibly offers the image of Christ/Dionysus as the symbol of greatest empathy and suffering, but then magically removes it by pointing to the hierarchy of power and “authority,” which corrupts the Church. The Church of Saint Monica, the Roman Catholic Church, both asks one to go to Christ and the Devil.
Saint Monica is the mother of Saint Augustine. It is through her he has some relation to womb and to world and to the earth rather than the infernal trappings of intellectual power in the Church (which is to say that Augustine was another version of the man he repudiated: Augustine was Doctor Faustus). What is her dream?
For what other source was there for that dream by which thou didst console her, so that she permitted me to live with her, to have my meals in the same house at the table which she had begun to avoid, even while she hated and detested the blasphemies of my error? In her dream she saw herself standing on a sort of wooden rule, and saw a bright youth approaching her, joyous and smiling at her, while she was grieving and bowed down with sorrow. But when he inquired of her the cause of her sorrow and daily weeping (not to learn from her, but to teach her, as is customary in visions), and when she answered that it was my soul's doom she was lamenting, he bade her rest content and told her to look and see that where she was there I was also. And when she looked she saw me standing near her on the same rule. (Source: online Augustine Confessions: http://www.ccel.org/a/augustine/confessions/confessions.html)
I am not certain what that “rule” is (the Latin is “regula lignea” which means “ruler or plank). Was it a Rule standing in outer space, under the stars? Did they have a huge wooden ruler back then? Were they “walking the plank” at the mercy of notorious North African pirates (probably many centuries later)? What are they doing on a plank? It is not a safe place. Maybe it is a balancing plank and dear Saint Monica is trying to balance her weight with that of the golden youth who comes to console her. I like that she is, in a sense, never satisfied with her son just as he is but needs to “convert him,” it hearkens back to the more primitive form of the crone, the “rejecting one,” maybe even to Hecate herself! On the other hand she is still “walking the plank” with her son. What if the image of the Godhead, the Orderer (Regulus) of the universe, had become this stiff rule (regula), and they were standing upon this stiff wooden rule/ruler? Wood is “ok” in some of its aspects, even while it is stiff it can be smoothed and become beautiful and show its true deep grain. Maybe this “wood” is a stiff phallus! Saint Monica and her son Saint Augustine stand near to each other on a huge wooden penis floating in outer space! (Chanting, undoubtedly, “Lamb of God, You take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us!”) She is confronted by this beautiful lad who may be her “animus projection.” Her animus stands in distinction and opposition to her son who is fully living in and enjoying the shadow, and together all three hang in the balance. Where is this wooden ruler/penis/space-ship going? There is no movement that is indicated. Everything hangs in balance, and the place of the rule remains uncertain in the shrouds of time.
The issue of “Conversion” is a sticky one. Many times religious “conversion” is an act of violence or brain-washing that transforms one state of consciousness to another. Moving into “group-think” of the Roman Catholic Church just proves one is capable of being a conformer to the “wooden rule” (spank across the knuckles or buttocks: can bring excessive humiliation). An effigy made of wood still lacks “numen” (nodding). It is not a golden wooden phallus carved with love and real desire, but a simple plank. The wooden plank in this dream may be something base and material, just enough to get across the mud and mire of the unconscious. We may be dealing with a base plank for a muddy school-yard, at best a meager bridge without getting one’s feet too dirty. Psychologically speaking, “Conversion” on a “ruler” (which Monica’s desire prefigures) is the shuttling “to and fro” of opposites in an attempt at a real transformation, which would be a third new element. In the dream Monica is at first between herself as “Mater Dolorosa” (she is weeping, weeping, and this too is a profound state of consciousness) and the golden boy, but this is not enough! The third that is borne of the discourse between herself and this lovely idealized figure is Augustine himself.
In the story of Iron John by the Brothers Grimm there is a singular moment where the boy is about to let the “wild man” out of the cage and asks the wild man where the key to his cage is hidden. The “wild man” responds: “Under your mother’s pillow!” The boy has to then steal the key from under the pillow and with the wild man is set free. The point is that the mother dreams of the son, albeit incestuous and taboo, from upon and under her pillow. The pillow is the place of dreams: “My son the Doctor” (and, “my son the Doctor Faustus!”). “My son the doctor (Faustus)…” indicates the mothers hidden and unconscious needs for the son to go to the devil, to become the devil, and to integrate him in some subtle or profound way. Many times he will fail. Many times he will simply go to the devil and that is all that will become of him. If he fails she can begin the hideous condescension of her lament: “We have tried to give him everything we can….”
Still the negative provides a coda: there is still work to do. Augustine becomes the Faustus, and then denies and disparages him, but this gets him no further than his own blindness, stuck on his mother’s “plank.” The rugged cross is the conjunction of two such wooden planks. Saint Monica has only one, still lain flat, she has no strength in her dream’s lament to erect the vertical tower for her own son to hang upon. Augustine has to do that himself, he has to ascend the vertical axis, which his mother cannot erect. And it is in his own Confessions that he attempts a poetry of the vertical line:
We ascend thy ladder which is in our heart, and we sing a canticle of degrees we glow inwardly with thy fire--with thy good fire--and we go forward because we go up to the peace of Jerusalem; for I was glad when they said to me, "Let us go into the house of the Lord." There thy good pleasure will settle us so that we will desire nothing more than to dwell there forever. (source: Augustine’s Confessions, Book 13, Chapter 9, http://www.ccel.org/ )
The “Canticle of degrees” refers to Psalms 119-133, which were regarded as a progression toward spiritual perfection. The ladder image is reminiscent both of “Jacob’s ladder”, and in a curious way is similar to Dante’s ascension in the later stages of Paradiso. All the images point to the erection and ascent upon a vertical axis, the axis of the “self,” that was actually missing in St. Monica’s dream. This vertical ascent is known of in alchemy as the “sublimatio” (discussed in Edward Edinger’s, 1996, Anatomy of the Psyche). The erection is a failure because there is only ascent, it lacks a meaningful way of descending once again toward dark psychic matter (“sin” or “appetite”) in a way that is conscious and wise. Descent for Augustine would mean complete reversal of his development, so he eludes descent, but at the cost of wholeness, and, in truth, holiness.
Maybe it is the Faustus of centuries later who actually redeems him. The shadow might be capable of redemption because Augustine has rejected the shadow of his appetites; that part of him that rejects actually gets damned to his own Christian hell. Faust sets to work in blindness, digging downward a water works, blinded by Care herself, he sets out that there is still work to do both in ascent and descent:
Faust (erblindet):
Die Nacht sheint tiefer tief hiereinzudringen,
Allein im Innern leuchted helles Licht;
Was Ich gedacht, ich eil es zu vollbringen;
Das Herren Wort, es gibt allein Gewicht.
Vom Lager auf, ihr Knechte! Mann für Mann!
Laßt glücklich shauen, was ich kühn ersann,
Ergrieft das Werkzeug, Schaufel rührt und Spaten!
Das Abgesteckte muß sogleich geraten.
Auf strenges Ordnen, raschen Fleiß
Erfolgt der allerschönste Preis;
Daß sich das größste Werk vollende,
Genugt ein Geist für tausend Hände.
(Goethe, 1963, Faust, Kaufman Translation, p. 463)
In the End Faust may be bumbling and blinded, and his “work” utterly doomed (what he eventually thinks is his work is only the digging of his own grave) but his spirit is in a sense ascending as the work descends. There yet remains for Dr. Faustus, in the shadow of Augustine, the trembling and fallible, impossible redemption.
Section 7: Jean-Jacques Rousseau: The Persecutors
Another tangent on the path to “the very idea of a confessional scheme” lies in Rousseau’s Confessions. Completed in 1770, eight years before his death and nearly fourteen centuries after Augustine wrote his own work (397 CE), the Confessions ply a more sophisticated air of Enlightenment France, seething with the possibility of atheism and revolution. And yet these Confessions dare to speak of a similar scheme of baring oneself and one’s soul to the world for all to see – and we may say in the light that Faust was blind: at last to see. What we actually see at last however in this intimate study is the overwhelming possibility of the terror of personal existence (not only to speak of France’s post-revolutionary “Terror”), the monument of persecution and persecutors.
Rousseau’s Confessions contains at least one double text (there may be many): on the one hand Rousseau presents with open and magnanimous tone his reveries for us to see. This space is smooth and unruffled. Even though Rousseau offers us “confessions” of acts that might be deeply controversial and troubling for the reader (He uses the term “confession” as a “confession-of-sin” –or at least confession of a “compromising” moral action) it is always with a clear and equanimous tone. On the other hand Rousseau offers us a strange and utterly contemporary text, held together with a paranoia and a sense of persecution that will not be echoed until the nightmarish genius of Franz Kafka opens up the possibility of the Bestandsaufnahme a hundred-and-fifty years later.
I HAVE begun on a work which is without precedent, whose accomplishment will have no imitator. I propose to set before my fellow-mortals a man in all the truth of nature; and this man shall be myself.
I have studied mankind and know my heart; I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature has acted rightly or wrongly in destroying the mold in which she cast me, can only be decided after I have been read.
I will present myself, whenever the last trumpet shall sound, before the Sovereign Judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, "Thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I. With equal freedom and veracity have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed no crimes, added no virtues; and if I have sometimes introduced superfluous ornament, it was merely to occupy a void occasioned by defect of memory: I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood. Such as I was, I have declared myself; sometimes vile and despicable, at others, virtuous, generous, and sublime; even as Thou hast read my inmost soul: Power Eternal! assemble round Thy throne an innumerable throng of my fellow-mortals, let them listen to my confessions, let them blush at my depravity, let them tremble at my sufferings; let each in his turn expose with equal sincerity the failings, the wanderings of his heart, and if he dare, aver, I was better than that man."
(Online resource: http://www.swan.ac.uk/poli/texts/rousseau/confa.htm)
Rousseau writes “without precedent.” What more could be said? He wants to present us with an image, a “man in all the truth of nature.” He wants as much as is conceivable to reproduce a “man” through writing. Nowhere does he have a credible source for the “complete” memories (and forgettings) of any one man other than from himself. He wants to translate his life into language. This is yet another example of a kind of “creation myth.”
What are the myths of creation of a “man” – by a “man?” Rousseau’s efforts are reminiscent of earlier attempts to create a “Golem” in Kabbalistic literature, or a “Homunculus” in alchemical lore. Those attempts were shrouded in obscurity: did people literally try to do this? Later literature would present the same dilemma of creation of a man, but more purely as a literary phenomenon, an allegory of hubris, in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, and in Jorge-Luis Borges’ short story “The Circular Ruins.” In the literary formulations of this myth is a strange and haunting warning against the hubris of attempting to become like the Divine in duplicating His creation. Rousseau touches on the possibility of hubris, but remains grounded in his faults and foibles enough to simply relate his tale in earnest.
Why the fourteen-hundred years between Augustine and Rousseau? Had nobody else published a book or text revealing their hidden sins? Had we given up all our sins before this perfectly to our Christian “Father-Confessor,” and because of the Church “confessional” we no longer had any need to state them publicly, before the rabble and its insatiable greed. Perhaps Augustine and Rousseau in this respect are bookends on the long dilemma of the “personal confessor” in Western Literature. The rupture of the personal container of the Roman Catholic Church was finally becoming complete. Had Augustine confessed as a “rule” and a model (the “model of confession,” exemplum, from the “model confessor”) for how confession should be done, and had this confession been enough for every human in the western world for fourteen-hundred years? With Rousseau was the container broken? Did once more a seemingly innocent man have to expose himself to scandal in the outraged public?
Rousseau still speaks to some sort of “God,” a “Power Eternal,” so for him in a sense this god is not dead, but rises above the contest of “the innumerable throng of my fellow mortals.” God is not dead, but it is a strange and unseemly listener, perhaps the originator of the paranoid sense of persecution in the sordid affair of Rousseau’s Confessions.
Countless times, during my apprenticeship and since, I have gone out with the idea of buying some dainty. As I come to the pastry-cook’s I catch sight of the women behind the counter and can already imagine them laughing amongst themselves and making fun of the greedy youngster. Then I pass the fruiterer’s and look at the ripe pears out of the corner of my eye; the scent of them tempts me. But two or three young people over there are looking at me; a man I know is standing in front of the shop; I can see a girl coming from the distance. Is she not our maidservant? My short sight is constantly deceiving me. I take everyone who passes for someone I know. I am frightened by everything and discover obstacles everywhere. As my discomfort grows my desire increases. But in the end I go home like an idiot, consumed by my longing and with money enough in my pocket to satisfy it, but not having dared to buy anything. (Cohen, 1953, p.45)
This is good because while Rousseau wants to blithely accept his fate as a hungry young man going to buy some fruit, he realizes he “can’t go on” to the stall to actually buy it. He is stalled before the stall. While this for Rousseau appears as the confession of a mere idiosyncrasy, for the reader it may be extended to a complete metaphysics contending with the rationalist and romantic schemes of his time. The importance of this subtle ailment, Rousseau’s myopia, coupled with the sense that at any moment he could be taken unawares, reported upon as a spendthrift or a wastrel, heightens the sense that there is something integral that he does not see. The hidden taboo is more potent than the stated one. The facile semblance of desire and (capitalist) consumption is somehow hidden and rarefied in the simple political act of buying a pear or a pastry. The act becomes intolerable, on a paranoid level rending the fabric and stability of the universe that holds to its creeds of tact and immunity from blame. While my interpretation here is hyperbole and an exaggeration, it is only through this exaggeration that we see a possible re-coupling that moves from frank admission to reading a barely concealed “scream” held in Rousseau’s text. The “scream” is at the same time a song and a parable: a parable of the senseless of continuing to do anything, which in fact one must simply continue to do.
Section 8: Does Jean Jacques Rousseau Dream? (Memories, Dreams and Ridicule)
The answer seems to be “no,” he does not dream in the way C.G. Jung for instance documented his dreaming in Memories, Dreams, and Reflections. This does not mean that Jean-Jacques has no relation to the unconscious. He seems to attain some relation to the unconscious through his intrigues with women or men, particularly through scandal and ridicule.
Rousseau constantly plays in his Confessions with the delectation of scandal. The word “scandal” comes from the Greek skandalon, which means in the earliest a “trap set for one’s enemies,” and later, in Christian times becomes known of as “a stumbling block.” “Ridicule” and “ridiculous” come from ridere, which means to laugh, and it may be akin to the Sanskrit word vridate, meaning “he is ashamed.” The element of Christian shame (with its concomitant splitting into an impossible ideal of “Christian” life which abuses people to this day in its extreme denial of darkness) seems to play into our fascination with the spectacle of having committed the shameful act. This may even be compared to Dante’s late Medieval Christian epic poems on the wages of sin and suffering: the Inferno and the Purgatorio. We seem compelled to look again at what exactly might happen in the after-world, the horrors of sin become a topography of fire and ice torment in the underworld, or unbearable burden in Purgatory. We want to know the place and the topography of sin. It is no mean coincidence that Slattery (1999) connects the construction of the Paris sewer system as a topos of excrement to Rousseau’s writing of the Confessions. Nor is it a coincidence that Dorothy Sayers compares Dante’s Inferno to the sewers of a great city. But the place of rot and refuse is the natural result of the development of the intense structuration and complexity both of the personal ego and of the collective city-state. The ego (as it develops and creates more and more waste) will always feel a sense of loss and nostalgia for what it has “refused.”
Scandal tinged with severe paranoia (the knowledge that Rousseau may be a completely mad, and that these are the ravings of a madman) is what keeps the reader on the edge. Did the severely deluded Rousseau invent the incident where he threw his own children into an orphanage, as some have lead us to suspect? In this dark labyrinth of scandal and persecution, the sense of any transparent transmission of the events of his life takes on a wonderously opaque turn. One is not certain of the truth of one’s conditions, whether Rousseau or the reader is completely mad in the pursuit of reading/writing the Confessions.
Scandal is the discourse of the dark feminine agents, the “furies.” The inner aspect of scandal is “intrigue,” but scandal made public, and therefore “political” is nothing less than revolutionary. This speaks to Rousseau’s lust for the politicization of human life and the desire he has for revolution, overturning the powers that be, on the reverse of his own paranoid lunacy. It is the site of a bitchy and petty drama where the ad hominem controversy rages between his scrupulous honesty and his unscrupulous actions. It is not at all fair, but it is the revenge of a counter discourse, perhaps even feminine discourse (gossip) against the scruples of an altogether too reasonable man. Here Rousseau attempts to bring together this possibly feminine discourse of gossip and scandal against his own hardened rational discussion of politics, liberty and human freedom.
Section 9, Conclusion: Violence, the doctor, and failure of the “Confessional Scheme”
My love she speaks softly,
She knows there's no success like failure
And that failure's no success at all.
(Bob Dylan, 1965, “Love minus zero no limit”)
Failure is a tricky thing. If one can just fail enough, but not fail too much, there is some possibility of success. Failure happens on the institutional level, therefore there is failure in the writings of Augustine and Rousseau on the level of the institution. Augustine’s writing failed insofar as it succeeded in becoming the model of a millennium of confessions that came after him. He was an institutional success, he succeeded in defeating the spirit of the Manichees whose best point was heresy in the face of the institutional church of Rome. At the same time the chief fault of the Manichees was in their own institutional success, they were lead by a “doctor,” Doctor Faustus himself.
The failing point here is that the doctor assumes a dangerous hubris: he pretends to know some part of the universe outside himself, and this he claims it as his own, he then dictates to kings and poor men alike what their actions should be based upon his knowing, the authority of his knowledge as an expert. The “doctor” steals power from the violence of the monarch, king or despot in the name of “universal knowledge.” This is not in itself bad until one discovers that the “doctor” has along with the power subsumed some of the despot’s violence as well. It may be that violence is not altogether a bad thing either, if one is capable of holding the violence with consciousness of one’s sin in doing so. However it is not clear that Augustine was capable of accepting the sin of his own violence. For him all violence had been washed away in the blood of the Lamb, which gave for him carte blanche for the violence to continue in an even more pernicious way.
My love she speaks like silence,
Without ideals or violence,
(Bob Dylan, 1965, “Love minus zero no limit”)
It may be possible for Bob Dylan’s love to speak without ideals or violence that plague the element of “doctoring” throughout (it seems) all time, but it is not entirely possible for the doctor himself to do so, even if he loves this woman, this anima so much. The doctor casts the shadow of “ideals and violence” that is rife in the writings of Saint Augustine. What is this “doctor” anyway? –A doctor is one who “teaches” (Latin: docere), but in the farthest root of the word we see the stem dek, which from Sanskrit means “to take.” Who are these “doctors” then, these “takers” of wisdom (“my love,” “Sophia”), who assume worldly power, “ideals and violence,” under her name? In the Roman Catholic Church the “doctor” became an “eminent theologian.” Once again this is nothing more than the co-opting of power and violence, the subsumption of the “confessional scheme” into the “institutional scheme.”
On the other hand Rousseau writes his confessions with the singular consolation that he is mad, utterly insane, a paranoid lunatic. He rambles through endless details of his existence, toying with his mistress, who is not the literal Therese but “Scandal” herself. Rousseau’s mistress, psyche, the cold draft of the maw of the gates of hell, for his crimes, real or imagined, are not the crimes of passion but the cold seeds of betrayal.
Rousseau speaks of his betrayal of his own children, real or imagined. He speaks of the seeds of dissent sewn by those he once thought were friends but are now his enemies. There is no humor in this work, a humor or grace that would seem to say that after all they are “just friends,” and nothing more could be asked of them. Did he make himself sick by wandering into the nether regions of “object constancy?”
Rousseau contributes the literature of “betrayal and scandal” to the modern conception of humanity in the negative light of Reason. Already central to his beliefs was the semi-psychological statement, “man is born free, but everywhere is in chains,” positing a “state of nature” (pre-figuring “developmental psychology” in Emile, for example, a work that forced his exile) that is absolutely, radically free. This “state of nature” is in fact a double statement: “you are free to live and thrive, under our protection,” and “you are free to die, abandoned.” The infant is free but helpless, always brought up in the company and care of others who take care or her/him at the expense of her/his freedom. It is small wonder then that Rousseau struggled under the yoke of religious dogma in countries that allowed him to survive so long as he did not “cross” them. When he actually did so, he was abandoned, principally a figure of European intellectual greatness who belonged nowhere in Europe and would sink into oblivion outside of Europe if he chose to leave. He did not leave the European arena however, but moved furtively at the edge of European whim with his longing for freedom, his paranoia, and his will to survive.
What Rousseau and Augustine have contributed, both in success and failure, is an important discussion of what it means when the author, the “researcher,” takes on the task of taking stock of their own life in the “research” project. The results lead to conundrums round the issue of either alienating or perpetuating masculine authority itself in the person of “the Church.” Augustine uses his biography to perpetuate and glorify the “body of the Church,” and Rousseau discovers to his chagrin (but possible saint-hood) what happens when you do not.
These writers both contributed to a sense of the autobiographical subject, both in the sense of subjectivity, the “I” or “ego,” and in the sense that the “subject-matter” of one’s personal experience is a “thing” or “topos” that should be talked about. They both saw their lives as a chronological and developmental series of steps leading to some inevitable “truth” or “reality.” Augustine saw his life as leading up to an ultimate conversion experience into the hallowed “authority” of the Church, and Rousseau saw his life leading up to the hounded “authority” of none other than his paranoid isolation and “individualism.”
Part of the error of these projects was to conceive of there being “one life” which had its concrete development and realization in the ego and its personal history. However their writings prefigure later works by Kafka and Kleist, even Joyce. Later fiction and literature will conceive of the ego as being nightmarishly imposed upon or removed from consciousness: one wakes up one day and finds they do not know who or what they are, or a fate has been imposed which they find impossible yet necessary to relate. And to some extent Augustine and Rousseau achieve this through their fumbling assimilation or excommunication from the essentially alien, horrifying structure of the Church and its “authority” in their works. In this sense they embody the words of Samuel Beckett when he writes, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”
Reference can be made to the Western canonical version of the Bible (“King James,” 1611) at this point. Luke 12:8 uses the term “confession” as an “open profession of faith.” Whereas the other versions refer to confession as a kind of admission of sin to God (Lev. 16:21; Ezra 9:5-15; Dan. 9:3-12), and to a neighbour whom we have wronged (James 5:16; Matt. 18:15). The sense here is that confession is a religious act that is irrational or beyond reason, whose very potency resides in these strata of consciousness that resist the rational point of view. The attempt to be “reasonable” about this approach to research would leave one miles away
He was in the habit of saying that what he was waiting for was the fall of the world; then, probably, a quiet moment would yet be granted in which, just before the end and after having checked the last row of figures, he would be able to make a quick little tour. (online web source: http://zork.net/~patty/kposeidon.html)
Genesis 28:12: “And he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it.” (King James Bible)
[1076:] "Our Catholics talk loudly of the authority of the Church; but what is the use of it all, if they also need just as great an array of proofs to establish that authority as the other seeks to establish their doctrine? The Church decides that the Church has a right to decide. What a well-founded authority! Go beyond it, and you are back again in our discussions.
