Vol. 20 No. 19 · 1 October 1998
pages 33-34 | 2546 words
Ceaseless Anythings
James Wood
- Damascus Gate by Robert Stone
Picador, 500 pp, £16.99, October 1998, ISBN 0 330 37058 8
American realism, once a belief, is now an idle liberty. Writers such as Robert Stone, Joan Didion, John Irving and even Don DeLillo, are praised for their ‘realism’, for the solidity of their plots, the patience of their characterisation, the capillary spread of their social portraits, the leverage of their political insight. Robert Stone is one of the best contemporary realists America has. But it is difficult to read Damascus Gate with anything like the respect it seems to desire, and with which it has been received in the United States. With its carefully mortised scenes, its dialogue intelligently starved, its descriptions shaved down to a familiar stubble, and the squeezed reticence of its prose (hardly a single simile in the book, each word a little hiatus of arrival), Damascus Gate is never dull, and never unintelligent. But it is never literature, either. Instead, it reveals contemporary realism to be only a series of techniques and conventions aimed at the management of simplicity. Realism, in Stone’s hands, is a calm firefighter, able to travel anywhere and put out the fire of complexity at a moment’s notice.
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Letters
Vol. 20 No. 20 · 15 October 1998
From John Sturrock
It was good of Don Miller (Letters, 1 October) to read what I wrote about W.G. Grace as a disguised riposte to the claque whose variously abusive recriminations had earlier been launched against what I wrote about its heroes, Sokal and Bricmont, whose book I’m confident few of them have read. Since I don’t feel that the ‘W.G.’ piece quite confronted any of the arguments arising, I’d like to come briefly out from the pavilion and take up what James Wood says (1 October), his letter having raised the real point at issue. Wood rightly distinguishes between scientific representations and other types of representation, inasmuch as scientific representations represent what we accept to be the true state of things in Nature, whereas other representations do not. Scientific representations, however, can and do enter other discourses than the scientific, and no such representation has done so more dramatically than E=mc2. Because of its nuclear implications, this physical formula has achieved a status such that it has come to stand for both the profound insights of physics and the dangers inherent in the human mastery of natural processes.
To argue, as Irigaray has, that E=mc2 is a gendered equation is not to deny its truth in science, it is simply to draw attention to the multiple ways in which the formula has been used outside a strictly scientific context, one such way having been, I take Irigaray’s case to be, to support the masculinist bias in the practice and exploitation of science which she is far from alone in criticising. As an admirer of Roland Barthes, James Wood could have asked himself what Barthes might have written about the ‘mythology’ of E=mc2 – there’s a splendid essay on ‘Einstein’s Brain’ in his Mythologies; he would indeed have exaggerated but to very good purpose, in refusing to allow the Sokals and Bricmonts to pretend that they deal exclusively in scientific facts, even when, as in their book, they are putting those facts to an extra-scientific use.
John Sturrock
Lindfield, West Sussex
Vol. 20 No. 21 · 29 October 1998
From Nick Bozanic
Commenting on Robert Stone’s assertion that ‘the interior of the hostel was redolent of France,’ with aromas of floral soap, sachet, varnish, Gauloises etc, James Wood (LRB, 1 October), snidely dismissive, observes: ‘apparently "French" just means nice French smells.’ Well, of course ‘French’ means nothing of the sort – or, at least, a good deal more and other. But Stone didn’t write ‘French’, he wrote ‘redolent of France’ and ‘redolent’, according to the dictionary I’m looking at, does mean ‘smelling (of) … hence, suggestive (of)’. So, apparent ly, ‘redolent of France’ would mean something like permeated with ‘nice French smells’ – though that ‘nice’ is, no doubt, arguable.
Nick Bozanic
Honor, Michigan
