August 21, 2019 Arts & Culture Sartre’s Bad Trip By Mike Jay Beyond their visual qualities, mescaline’s hallucinations posed profound philosophical questions. During the mid-1930s three prominent writers and thinkers left records of their experiments with it. In 1934 and 1935 respectively, Walter Benjamin and Jean-Paul Sartre participated in the now-familiar modus operandi of private session between psychiatrist and artist, with the scientific gaze and the philosopher’s insights informing—or, more often, pitted against—one another. And in 1936, Antonin Artaud, having already cut himself loose from the strictures of Breton’s Surrealist movement and the precepts of scientific materialism, abandoned the Old World for the New and the narcotics of western pharmacy for the ancient sacrament of the cactus, and launched himself into a self-experiment without limits. Sartre was injected with mescaline by his old school friend, the psychiatrist Daniel Lagache, at Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris in January 1935 in the course of his researches into phenomenology, Edmund Husserl’s radically reconceived form of philosophy, which Sartre had encountered in 1933 and relocated to Berlin over that summer to study more deeply. Mescaline was a tool of obvious relevance to Husserl’s injunction that “a new way of looking at things is necessary.” Phenomenology aimed to describe reality purely as it was perceived, stripped of all theories, categories, and definitions: turning attention exclusively, in Husserl’s famous dictum, “to the things themselves.” Much of the mescaline literature to date, from the early peyote reportage of Silas Weir Mitchell and Havelock Ellis to the stream of consciousness dictated by Witkacy, had tended in this direction: in aiming simply to describe its visions and sensations without imposing definition or meaning on them, it had in a sense been phenomenology avant la lettre. Sartre wrote little directly about his experience, describing it briefly in notes that later found a place in L’imaginaire, his 1940 study of the phenomenology of the imagination. He found its effects elusive and sinister. “It could only exist by stealth,” he wrote; it distorted every sensation, yet whenever he attempted to perceive it directly it withdrew into the background or shifted shape. Its action on the mind “inconsistent and mysterious,” offering no solid vantage point from which to observe it. In contrast to previous descriptions of the “double consciousness” or état mixte, in which the normal self was able to observe its hallucinations dispassionately, Sartre found it impossible to be a spectator of his own experience. On the contrary, he felt submerged against his will in a miasma of sensations that assailed him viscerally at every turn, a world of grotesque extreme close-ups in which everything disgusted him. Read More
August 21, 2019 At Work Dislocated Realities: A Conversation between Helen Phillips and Laura Van Den Berg By Helen Phillips and Laura Van Den Berg Helen Phillips (left) and Laura Van Den berg (right) When an early copy of Helen Phillips’s new novel, The Need, turned up at my apartment, I had not read a book in two months. I had been unable to read, in fact. My father had died recently and each time I tried to open a book, longing to slide into an alternate present, I instead hit a wall. The Need broke that wall for me. The novel concerns a woman named Molly, a paleobotanist who is home alone with her children when she thinks she hears an intruder in the house—and the events that follow upend her understanding of her world. The book is written in short and thrilling chapters, at once a cat-and-mouse tale of suspense and a profound exploration of identity and reality, of fate and time. I had the great pleasure of interviewing Helen at the Harvard Bookstore recently and as we talked we discovered some intriguing overlap between our most recent projects. So we decided to keep talking. This conversation took place over email, over the course of several weeks in August. We discussed The Need, published by Simon & Schuster in July, and The Third Hotel, out in paperback from Picador this month, plus dislocated realities, genre, maternal love, and endings. PHILLIPS On the first page of The Third Hotel, your protagonist Clare admits, “I am experiencing a dislocation of reality,” a sentence that stayed with me as I read the book. The sands of reality do seem to be shifting under Clare’s feet in each scene, which brings me to a perhaps unanswerable question that arises for me in many of my favorite works of fiction. Do you consider your protagonist to be an unstable narrator in a stable world, or a stable narrator in an unstable world? VAN DEN BERG I am inclined to claim both, if I may. Clare is wild with grief of various sorts, which creates instability in her own perspective. At the same time, I do think the world—her world, our world—is inherently volatile. To make an obvious point, there is just so much we don’t know and can’t explain. I was just reading about the physicist Leah Broussard’s work on mirror matter, which is bananas, and a concept that is certainly relevant to The Need. After my father died, I thought on several occasions that he was speaking to me through my sister’s dog. I know how that sounds, and yet after a series of deeply uncanny occurrences, such a thought not only seemed possible but also like the obvious and logical conclusion. Was that instability coming from my own grief-deranged self or from some other cosmic force or a collaboration between us? Who can say? I would love to ask the same question of your protagonist, Molly. The novel opens with a dawning awareness that there is an intruder in her home—and, without veering into spoilers, the intruder’s identity introduces major questions about Molly’s grasp on reality. The intruding force is a wholly real element in the book, it’s not a dream or a fantasy, and at the same time, the novel could also accommodate a reading more grounded in psychological realism—that Molly unconsciously conjured this threat. Do you see the instability as rising from the world around Molly or more from Molly herself? Or both? Read More
August 20, 2019 Redux Redux: Another Joke-Legend By The Paris Review Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter. Arthur Miller. This week, we’re perusing our summer-vacation reads. Read on for Arthur Miller’s Art of Theater interview, J. Jezewska Stevens’s short story “Honeymoon,” and Jacqueline Osherow’s poem “Eight Months Pregnant in July, High Noon, Segesta.” If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door. Read More
August 20, 2019 Arts & Culture Yukio Mishima in Ichigaya By Anna Sherman Yukio Mishima delivers a speech shortly before his death. Via Wikimedia Commons. A city always keeps part of itself back. If Tokyo were a clock, then the hours between ten and midnight—the arc running from Shinjuku through Ikebukuro to Tabata—and I were strangers. These are the northern wards, in what was the old High City. The gardens of Rikugi-en and Koishikawa. Remnants of the great estates owned by temples and the nobility: now university enclaves and “soaplands”—red-light districts—and apartment blocks for salarymen. In Ichigaya, I passed concrete office block after drab office block—Sumitomo Insurance, Snow Brand Milk, the Salvation Army, the Vogue Building—when suddenly the landscape cracked open. I came to a halt on Yasukuni dōri and rocked backward, as if I had almost tripped at the edge of an abyss. A natural amphitheater. A circle that drew the sky down and threw the earth upward. A place for performances, for high theater, for cinema. What it was, I didn’t know, and my map was blank, showing only a few scattered rectangles and unnamed roads that looped into each other and out again. Read More
August 20, 2019 Notes on Pop On Breakups By Hanif Abdurraqib Hanif Abdurraqib’s monthly column, Notes on Pop, muses on the relationship between songs and memory. Read more here. Still from HAIM’s “Want You Back” During my craft talk about poems and sound, I play small parts of songs or music videos. I’m giving away the secret here, but it’s to distract from the fact that I don’t know what I’m talking about. Or, I do know what I’m talking about, but I can’t articulate it in any way that makes sense outside of the hamster wheel of my own brain. In some spaces, there is the assumption that anyone who writes poems wants to talk about the writing of them in front of people, and is equipped to do so. But some of us are just fumbling around dark rooms, occasionally lucky enough to find a light switch. And so, to not give away my fumbling, when I give a craft talk, I play songs. I play spirituals and gospel, and I play the rap songs that have sampled the spirituals and gospel. To talk about the magic trick of pace—of suggesting a big moment only to later reveal an even bigger moment—I play the iconic video of the Who performing “Baba O’Riley.” The one you’ve maybe seen, where the intro swells and swells until it feels like it could fill an entire stadium, and you might think, How can we ever climb atop this? But then Pete Townshend tosses his tambourine, steps back from the microphone, and windmills his arm around his guitar and shakes his ass in white pants while Roger Daltrey holds a microphone to the heavens with both hands. But first, I play HAIM’s “Want You Back.” A specific part, around the 2:20 mark. All of the instruments drop out for about fifteen seconds and all that remains is the layering of voices, singing out “just know / that I want you / back” before the drums enter and the song rebuilds itself from the vocals up. In the talk, the point is about silence, I think. Or the point I’m trying to make is about how the voice itself isn’t the instrument. That language is the instrument and voice is just the vehicle, like a speaker or an amplifier. The point is about silence and the things we deem as percussion. How, along the landscape of silence, any sound that interrupts can be percussive. I make the point by pulling up a poem that has one word drowning in the otherwise white space of a page. That’s percussion, I say. In the poem “Katy,” Frank O’Hara writes, “I am never quiet / I mean silent,” and I assume people who have been lonely enough or isolated enough know the difference. Percussion can be even the gentlest interruption. Here’s a concrete example I give: two people on the telephone, near the end of a conversation, when the line between them falls into the depths of soundlessness. Even one person saying the words “I love you” is percussive. All our affections, coming on the backs of drums. Read More
August 19, 2019 Department of Tomfoolery Mistranslated Book Titles Contest By The Paris Review Elaine Steinbeck, John Steinbeck’s widow, was once in a bookstore in Yokohama. Unable to parse the Japanese alphabet, she asked the owner if he had any books by her late husband. He thought for a moment, then said, yes, he had The Angry Raisins. This anecdote so amused us here at The Paris Review that we began to mistranslate other titles, challenging each other to decipher them. Can you guess the correct titles for Tiny Ladies or Interminable Funnies? Sign up with your email below, and see how many you can solve. Winners will be entered to receive our brand new (and, if we do say so, very stylish) Paris Review bag. a Rafflecopter giveaway