Vol. 19 No. 22 · 13 November 1997
pages 14-15 | 3113 words
This jellyfish can sting
Jonathan Rée
- Truth: A History by Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Bantam, 247 pp, £12.99, October 1997, ISBN 0 593 04140 2
Despite his exotic name, Felipe Fernández-Armesto is an upper-class Englishman of the kind who seem to float on a cloud of contentment, perpetually entertained by the oafish antics of the rest of us down below. His press release describes him as ‘a member of the Modern History Faculty of Oxford University’ and Millennium, his blockbuster on the history of the world, as a ‘highly acclaimed’ bestseller, while translations of his monographs and reference books are ‘pending in twenty languages’. But he is not just a historian. He is also something of a philosopher, and his publishers have now given him the chance to address the world in a format that other authors only dream of: a brief and opinionated essay, with a smart design but a popular price, on the epistemological ills of modern civilisation. I shall not try to conceal my feelings: reader, I envy him.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 23 · 27 November 1997
From Felipe Fernández-Armesto
A half-Spaniard of modest life and manners, I have read Jonathan Rée’s piece (LRB, 13 November) about ‘an upper-class Englishman of the kind who seem to float on a cloud of contentment, perpetually entertained by the oafish antics of the rest of us down below’ – an unpleasant man with cranky right-wing prejudices which I do not share and ‘fellow militants’ whom I feel sure I should dislike. This upper-class Englishman is linked with some identifiable (though unnamed) conservative intellectuals, from whose opinions I actively dissent. Disturbingly, he is also tainted by association with funds which ‘propagate the new conservative cause in American universities’. I, on the other hand, would never accept patronage from such sources, nor would I join any institution that did. This corrupt and complacent author, for whom your reviewer admits envy, has the same ‘exotic’ name as I have and two of his books have the same titles as mine. His Truth: A History is made reminiscent of mine by a few apparent quotations which redeploy some of my words. Yet it includes daft views on Kant which I have never held and never expressed. It repeats dreary falsehoods, which I emphatically disavow, about the Western origins of logic and empiricism (whereas readers of the real Truth: A History will find many pages about these techniques in non-literate and pre-classical societies). It attributes to Saussure opinions I ascribe to his interpreters and misdates the start of his First Course on General Linguistics (which in my book is correctly dated to 1907 – see the argument of Eisuke Komatsu in his edition of F. de Saussure, Premier cours de linguistique gènèrale [1907] d’aprés les cahiers d’Albert Riedlinger). It calls Kierkegaard ‘lazy’, whereas I accuse him of affected laziness, and it claims that he ‘published little in his lifetime’ – words I use in the context only of his explicitly existentialist work. It is derided for a mixed metaphor unmixed by me. There are more examples like these. I am grateful for two just reproofs, apparently addressed to an ‘old Oxfordian buffer’, but equally applicable to me. I wrote ‘Paris’ for ‘Geneva’ at one point and a bad sentence which confusingly telescopes Nietzsche’s last years. If I am fairly misunderstood, I take the blame. To be misquoted a little – sometimes playfully, sometimes mischievously – can be part of the fun of getting reviewed. But if I were to fail to write to you now, your readers might be seriously misled: not just about the chronology of Saussure’s lectures or the content of my book but also, more damagingly for me, about the identity of that snobbish reactionary, surrounded in your piece by ‘conservative ideologues’ and political funds. I want it clearly understood that I have no views or associations in common with him.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto
Brown University, Rhode Island
