Quisling

Vidkun Quisling

Mitt Romney may not really laugh but Gary Wills is really brilliant. Why has Wills never been nominated for elective office? And is he the potential number #2 man, the dark horse that Romney has been looking for? Perhaps you are smiling in the confused nervous way that people do when they are being confronted with nonsense. In his short piece in the June 21^st New York Review of Books, “Why Is This Man Laughing?” Wills attempts to analyze Romney’s “non-laugh laugh,” as either a defense, an attempt to fit in, an offense, “comic rictus as a non-sequitur,” or as subterfuge. In his attempt to understand the laughter Wills invokes the author of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, a seemingly logical step, that is probably sui generis in the annals of Romney scholarship. Even followers of string theory which gives eleven possible dimensions in which one could exist will find it hard to locate Kundera and Romney in the same universe. Wills’ reference point is actually not the novel itself but an essay entitled “The Comical Absence of the Comical (Dostoevsky, The Idiot).” Wills then attempts to account for Romney’s symptoms with the “etiology and taxonomy of senseless laughter…in examples of humorless humor in the defensive-aggressive response of Prince Mishkin to other people’s senseless laughter.” But it’s not Kundera’s analysis of Mishkin that provides the most stirring insight in Wills’ search for gold. It’s from an aside of Kundera’s about “a man standing uncomfortably in a crowd.” “I was seeing a person laugh who had no sense of the comical and was laughing only to keep from standing out from the crowd, like a spy who puts on the uniform of a foreign army to avoid recognition,” Wills quotes Kundera as saying. Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian politico who seemed to be defending his own country, but was really a Nazi collaborator.  The London Times made a noun out of his behavior. Wills description of Romney’s uneasy laughter is that of the quisling who is trying to appear like one of his people, but whose allegiances lie elsewhere. The question is where?

All Things Shining

More than occasionally, one comes across a review that makes one disinclined to read the book under consideration. Such is the case of Robert M. Wallace’s review of Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly's All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (TLS, 7/8/11). Dreyfus and Kelly teach philosophy at Berkeley and at Harvard, respectively, and Gary Wills’s earlier critical review in The New York Review of Books has already initiated a spirited back and forth in the letters column of that journal. Here is how Wallace describes the book: “Dreyfus and Kelly share Friedrich Nietzsche’s view that the central error in Western thought was the turn to monotheism. Associated with this turn is the broadly Platonic tradition in philosophy including St. Augustine, Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant, who all give a central role to intellectual abstraction. These two traits result in separating us from ‘the shining things.’” In answer to the question, what are “the shining things?” the reviewer tells us, “This book is about ecstasy, which the authors refer to metaphorically as ‘shining” or ‘whooshing up.’” The world that Dreyfus and Kelly seem to want to renew is one in which there were heroes who stood between men and gods. Literary creations like Odysseus exemplify the kind of grand engagement that mankind is now missing. Perhaps it’s something that the early Christians had, the yearning after which accounts for the popularity of a book like Elaine Pagels’s The Gnostic Gospels. Hallucinogens, fascism and the cult of Jim Jones have provided transcendence for some. Words like  “shining” and “whooshing” can be red flags for those who believe that the highest aspiration of consciousness resides in the ideal of responsibility for the self. Isn’t there enough historical precedent to convince us that ecstasy is a dubious proposition/aspiration, and one that is often purchased at the price of reality?