Bears that Dance, Bears that Don't
Bears that Dance, Bears that Don't
You speak truer than you know.
(I had originally planned to release this essay, on the parallels between Heinrich von Kleist and Cormac McCarthy, sometime in December or January, to coincide with seasonal references in the material. McCarthy’s death yesterday, at the age of 89, rushed publication. The parallels discussed here were not discovered by me but rather provided by, as they style themselves, “an independent research consortium, with offices in Te Waipounamu and Prussia.” Any claim to readerly insight, such as it is, rests with this so-called consortium; their services come highly recommended. The translations of Kleist are my own.)
The Germans celebrate various festivities, some of which have found, through the growth of mass media and mass travel, general adoption throughout the world, regardless of confession or religious observance. One of the most longstanding, going back to at least the Middle Ages, has been the tradition of the Christmas market. Throughout the Advent season, lights are strung and stalls erected, “zusammengezimmert”, along village squares, along town squares and city squares, for the vending of seasonal beverages and confections:—then as now, you can imagine the usual fruitcake, the usual gingerbread, the usual mulled wine steaming in caldrons, an exchange of brief commercial pleasantries, said in dialect or else—sometimes it can’t be helped—said in English, for the benefit of the tourists and the expats.
There were far fewer tourists in Berlin, far fewer expats, far fewer inhabitants in general, in early December 1810, when a serialized essay in the Abendblätter, the city’s first daily newspaper, appeared in the evening, as its name of the paper suggested, for aristocrats and bureaucrats, for merchants too—the bourgeois is always on the rise—to read and to discard on their way home, for use as supplemental insulation for a drafty apartment, or maybe as a napkin at one of the market stalls, dabbing up sausage grease or jets of spilled wine, or maybe as kindling for a seasonal bonfire. This would have been unfortunate, since, in the space of those few evenings, from December the 12th to 15th, this essay, more accurately, this philosophical dialog, would establish an argument subsequently important to the philosophy of the mind, that somewhat tautologously named subdiscipline of the discipline.
This essay or dialog, signed “H.v.K.”, describes the author meeting a dancer for the opera at a public garden the year previous. The season is the same but the setting is different, an anonymized “city of M…”; (the leaves, rimed with frost, have settled beneath the trees.) Sometimes the author of this essay or dialog, “H.v.K.”, claimed to have visited places he never visited, or else he pretended to be some other writer or correspondent, reporting from places where the actual person had actually lived or visited. In any case, it is the dancer, rather than “H.v.K.”, that articulates the views of Heinrich von Kleist. Like Plato with his Socrates, a fictional, or at least fictionalized, interlocutor is created to articulate the author’s views.
The narrator, having seen this dancer about town, sits down with him and they chat, as you do, about the nature of volition and consciousness, illustrated by the example of marionette shows, which the dancer consumes with interest and enjoyment. A lot can be learned from marionettes, he says, namely that consciousness is a burden and volition a fantasy. Human beings would regain their grace, both in a physical and theological sense, by dispensing with both. Thought hinders action rather than directing it. The marionettes, with their complex expressive movements, appear graceful by dint of their mindlessness, by their total lack of independence and intentionality.
The dancer cites other examples, quoting from scripture (Genesis: 2-3) and relating various personal anecdotes, from a vain boy embarrassed at the public baths to a captive bear that can fence better than any human:
On a trip to Russia, I found myself on an estate belonging to a Herr von G..., a Livonian nobleman, whose sons practiced fencing rigorously at that time. The older one in particular, who had just returned from university, acted the virtuoso and, when I was in his room one morning, offered me a rapier. We fought; but it so happened that I was the superior; passion confused him; almost every thrust I wielded made a hit, and at last his rapier flew into the corner. Half in jest, half in pique, he said, retrieving his rapier, that he had found his master: but everyone in the world will eventually find his, and henceforth he would lead me to mine. The brothers laughed out loud and cried: Away! Away! Down to the woodshed! and with that, they took me by the hand and led me to a bear, which Herr von G…, their father, had raised on the estate.
The bear, as I approached him with astonishment, stood on his hind feet, his back leaning against the post to which he was tied, his right paw raised for the strike, and looked me direct in the eye: this was his fencing stance. I thought I must be dreaming to face such an opponent; but Herr von. G… called out Strike! Strike!... and see if you can teach him anything! Having recovered a little from my astonishment, I lunged at the bear my rapier; the bear made brief swipe with his paw and parried the thrust. I tried to ensnare him by feints; the bear did not move. I lunged at him again, with instant dexterity, and, had he been a man, I would have stuck his chest without fail: the bear made another brief swipe with his paw and parried the blow. Now I was almost in the same predicament as the young Herr von G…. The solemnity of the bear further robbed me of my composure, thrusts and feints alternated, I was dripping with sweat: in vain! For not only did the bear, like the firstborn fencer in the world, parry all my thrusts; he didn't even bother (no fencer of this world could imitate him) with feints; he stood me face to face, as if he could read my very soul in these maneuvers, his paw raised for the strike, and did not stir from his place, as though my thrusts were not meant in earnest.
Do you believe my story? he asked me.
Utterly, I cried, with delighted applause. It is so plausible, I would believe it of any stranger, all the more so from you.
In less than a year, both the newspaper and its head contributor would be dead. The Abendblätter closed in March 1811, a victim of official censorship and declining sales. Kleist himself did not help matters, challenging a senior Prussian civil servant to a duel; he then went on to kill himself in a spectacular double suicide with a friend, Henriette Vogel, on the Wannsee, a lake in the forested outskirts of Berlin. Regarded as talented but vulgar and undisciplined by his peers, with a string of failed periodicals and dramatic productions, it was not until after his death he gained widespread recognition, or even critical acclaim, both coming rather slowly; the sympathetic obituaries only appeared in the foreign press.
In 1992, in advance of his novel All the Pretty Horses, a profile on the now-late novelist Cormac McCarthy appeared in The New York Times, a publication with a considerably longer run than Kleist’s Abendblätter. The standard line about his career—that he came late into success, at the age of 58—seems to have emerged fully formed in the article, courtesy, as the journalist acknowledges, of his publisher, A.A. Knopf. Also acknowledged are certain biographical details—a privileged childhood, the mentorship of an esteemed editor, connections to Hollywood, grants and fellowships and honorary banquets—that could be regarded as success also. Wives and girlfriends type his manuscripts.
In the interview, McCarthy is candid about his influences—“books are made with other books”, he says of Faulkner—but only to a point. His reading as a journeyman writer is passed over in silence. Regardless, the author and journalist both consider his novel quintessentially American, like the cowboys and Indians the populate them, whatever virtues they have being a result of that. But an epigraph in his 1985 novel, Blood Meridian, by the Protestant mystic Jakob Böhme, betrays a deep appreciation, or at least good working knowledge, of German literature. “It is not to be thought that the life of darkness is sunk in misery,” reads the epigraph, “and lost as if in sorrowing. There is no sorrowing. For sorrow is a thing that is swallowed up in death, and death and dying are the very life of the darkness.”
The lines come from Böhme’s Six Theosophic Points, not his best-known work; the version McCarthy quotes from is obscure. But there are other, less acknowledged influences on Blood Meridian, elided for whatever reason. McCarthy, as is now well known, based much of the novel, sometimes word for word in passages, on My Confession, a memoir by the frontiersman and Civil War general Samuel Chamberlain. That this work is considered somewhat embellished by historians, rather than fictionalised outright, tells you something of the violence present on the American frontier.
Kleist also borrowed freely from historical sources, using the newspapers and university humanities departments—then a new kind of institution—to supplement his own material. Writing at the beginning of the 19th century, Kleist frequently looked back to the 16th and 17th centuries, with their constant religious schisms and apocalyptic warfare, and saw parallels in Europe during his own time, the age of Napoleon. McCarthy set his epic western in the 19th century borderlands of the United States and Mexico, with its genocide of the native population and decimation of the environment through mining and railroad building. A student of recent history can find their own particular parallels.
Blood Meridian follows the kid—(his name, in an unintentional bid for contemporary relevance, goes uncapitalized)—a violent cypher, a literal child from Tennessee, who joins up with a gang of scalphunters working along the newly formed border. They take bounties for dead Apache and Comanche, and not caring one way or another where the scalps come from, only if their bounties can be redeemed. The gang begins killing indiscriminately in their zone of operation. The murderous leader, John Joel Glanton, was a documented historical character, as was, it appears, his second in command, Judge Holden, a huge charismatic man, according to Samuel Chamberlin, and hairless.
Soldiers can’t question their orders. Neither can paramilitaries. That’s the privilege of civilians, regardless of what comes after the questioning. Causes and motives are uncertain, unknowable until the end of the world. The watchmaker god of Kleist in McCarthy is not so much blind as he is deranged. From a set of simple initial conditions, the simple physical forces—steel and gunpowder, sun and wind—sets the various players in motion, producing intricate movement, like puppets on a string.. Psychology is present only in diction, a specificity towards the material world, present in the various words used to describe various landscapes, various fatal encounters. Development, both in a literary and psychological sense, is finished off early, with a few terse lines.
Let’s compare three beginnings:
During the winter of 1801, which I spent in the city of M…, I chanced to meet one evening, at a public garden, Herr C., who had recently been employed as first dancer for the opera, and who had found extraordinary success with the public there.
and
On the banks of the Havel, about the middle of the sixteenth century, there lived a horse dealer by the name Michael Kohlhaas, son of a schoolmaster, one of the most upright but at the same time most terrible people of his time. – This extraordinary man could have, until his thirtieth year, been considered a model of a good citizen.
and
The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.
The second example, from the beginning of Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas, concerns the titular character, another actually existing (or existed) person, who waged a personal war against the Saxon authorities over the theft of his cattle. Adapted to a North American setting, as it has been several times, the story becomes a straightforward western, give or take certain plot points. Kohlhaas, having waged his campaign of terror, is apprehended at the end of the novella; learning that his suit against the Saxon authorities is successful, he goes on willingly to his beheading, happy that justice has been served. In his last act, he swallows papers relevant to the case. They are no longer useful. Always terrible and upright. The child, dramaturgically speaking, is the father of the man.
The kid meets a more subdued but no less violent fate. He travels among itinerant children, bonepickers on the Texas plain, who harvest the remains of bison for fertilizer. Sometime in late winter, in the town of Griffin, among prostitutes in a tavern, he sees a familiar face: Judge Holden, whose name also goes uncapitalized in McCarthy’s telling. The kid has been seeing him his entire life.
In the tavern, an old man in Tyrolean folk dress parades a dancing bear for the amusement of the crowd. A young girl follows them with a barrel organ. An altercation ensues—no particular reason given—and the bear is shot by some anonymous thug. After the commotion has died down, the kid finds himself alone with the judge, and they have a final conversation, while, in the other room, dancing has begun. “What man would not be a dancer if he could, said the judge. It's a great thing, the dance.” The kid regards him warily. He disavows their long association:
I aint with you.
The judge raised his bald brow. Not? he said. He looked about him in a puzzled and artful way and he was a passable thespian.
I never come here huntin you.
What then? said the judge.
What would I want with you? I come here same reason as any man.
And what reason is that?
What reason is what?
That these men are here.
They come here to have a good time.
The judge watched him. He began to point out various men in the room and to ask if these men were here for a good time or if indeed they knew why they were here at all.
Everbody dont have to have a reason to be someplace.
That's so, said the judge. They do not have to have a reason. But order is not set aside because of their indifference.
The judge enumerates their dead comrades, fellow scalphunters, who have all died to a man. Among them, it was the kid the judge liked the best, and his rebuke comes as a disappointment. The kid no longer delights in violence, if he ever did. His membership in the Glanton gang was a matter of aptitude and circumstance. The kid had been, and still is, at this late date, good at killing, but “wearies of his life”, as Kleist would often say of his characters, before they meet their own particular ends. Roped into one last tedious conversation, he rebukes the judge, rebukes his whole philosophy, his existence:
You aint nothin.
You speak truer than you know. But I will tell you. Only that man who has offered up himself entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his inmost heart, only that man can dance.
Even a dumb animal can dance.
The judge set the bottle on the bar. Hear me, man, he said. There is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps. Bears that dance, bears that dont.
At the end of Kleist’s dialog, the dancer, Herr C., describes his own vision of sin and redemption. Having a gained a mind, paradise has been shut and bolted to humanity. Only by losing consciousness, by surrendering volition, will it regain that paradise. Convinced by the anecdote of the bear, and having never offered anything but perfunctory objections, “H.v.K.” now fully concedes to the argument. The dancer is delighted, having found a willing, that is to say inert, speaking partner, and one that never existed in the first place, the narrator himself being just another emanation of the dancer’s own self, that is to say the self of Heinrich von Kleist, arranged on the stage—Kleist was a brilliant dramatist—and on the page for his own delight:
Now then, my excellent friend, you are in possession of all you require to understand my point. We see how, in the organic world, as reflective thought grows dimmer and dimmer, grace emerges ever more radiant and supreme. — But just as two intersecting lines, converging on either side of a point, intersect once more, after having passed through infinity, and just as our image, as we approach a concave mirror, vanishes into infinity, only to reappear before our very eyes, so will grace, having likewise traversed the infinite, return to us, and so appear in a bodily form that has either no consciousness at all or an infinite amount of it, which is to say, either a puppet or a god.
(As of the writing this post, Cormac McCarthy has been dead for a day, his publisher and family having promptly announced the event, the author passing at the age of 89. I had been working on this essay, not knowing its timeliness, in piecemeal fashion, a paragraph here, a sentence there. Then I took a trip to Lake Powell with my family, to celebrate me and my twin sister’s 40th birthday. We were born on the high desert of the Colorado Plateau, in the vancity of where much Blood Meridian takes place. One of my first memories is of Halley’s Comet as it passed over Mesa Verde, home to the Ancestral Puebloan culture, or Anasazi as they used to be called.
(In middle of the novel, the Glanton gang camps near these Anasazi ruins and the judge collects various artifacts from them, clay pots and Spanish helmets, sketching them in his journal, which is a documentation of all things, he says, a sort of cosmos unto itself. He praises the masonry of the Indians: “But who builds in stone seeks to alter the structure of the universe, and so it was with these masons, however primitive their works may seem to us.” Whether these people led long charmed lives or brief unfortunate ones, the judges does not say. He smashes the artifacts at the end of his disquisition.
(I thought, when I heard the news of McCarthy’s death, about the comically unseasonal opening to this essay, but the occasion ruled out any writerly embarrassment. In the high country, after all, where the Colorado Plateau meets the Rocky Mountains, snow can come at any time of the year, and the day of the nativity is never specified in the scriptures. McCarthy wrote about hard men living hard lives, but real hardship never seemed to touch him. He ascribed his station in life, with a turn of aristocratic grace, to luck, giving that answer to Oprah on her daytime television show. But men must come to rest, regardless of how good they’ve lived, bears also, regardless of how well they can fence. Marionettes dance on and on, revived by the lightest touch of the ground; the living have the weariness of thought and suffering that attends it. “Sie müssen schlafen aber Ich muss tanzen” says one of final chapter headings of Blood Meridian. The phrase is somewhat more elegant in English: “You must sleep but I must dance.” So it goes with writers and the figures they trace.)
