And that ought really to have been that — the end of the story of Bazlo Criminale. But of course if it were I should not have been writing this at all, and by the same token you would not have been reading it either. So what happened? Well, as it happens, just a few more small things, rather chaotic in nature, that did change the situation quite considerably. Soon after my Brussels trip, and in the confused and nonsensical midsummer of 1991, I moved over to work on the Sunday Times, a much more suitable home for those articles that connect everything up with everything else — art with money, sex with style, who’s in with what’s in — in which I was now beginning to specialize. Just a few weeks later there took place in Southern, Swabian Germany, the natural home for this sort of thing, a high-powered international seminar rather ambiguously entitled ‘The Death of Postmodernism: New Beginnings’. The event was to unfold at some small, upmarket archducal hunting lodge near Schlossburg, a spa town that was once the summer home of the Archdukes of Wurttemberg, in the days when Germany had been a series of federal principalities, or in other words an early European Community.
This captured the eye of my style editor, a very smart-thinking girl from Oxford and Cardiff who was shocked to her cleavage to discover that a whole major movement in art style and culture had been born, had flourished, and had now apparently dropped dead while she’d been keeping her eye on the fringe events of the Edinburgh Festival and the sex-life of the Royals. She wandered over to my desk in my yet more open open-plan office to consult me about it. She had attended some party the night before where someone — I believe it was Richard Rogers yet again — had told her that Postmodernism, or Po-Mo as he called it, had been in for some time and she had Better get into it before it was entirely out. As a result, she had conceived the exciting notion of an entire Po-Mo supplement, and she wanted to know if an article on the Schlossburg Seminar would make suitable fodder.
I glanced down the programme, and saw at once that it was an unmissable event. From all over Eastern Europe, writers, scholars and intellectuals, deprived for four decades of access to parody, pastiche, blank irony, narrative indeterminacy, new history, chaos theory, and late modern depthlessness, were being invited to make up the time-lag. Various far-sighted German industrial foundations, like Mercedes and Bosch, had put up the money to bring them to Schlossburg. Several of the great American postmodern writers, like John Barth and William Gass, Raymond Federman and Ihab Hassan, were to be hefted onto the virtual reality of transatlantic flights and brought in to lecture to them. Various leading European intellectuals and deconstructive thinkers would also come in to give lectures. One of these was none other than Professor Henri Mensonge, world-famous deconstructionist from the University of Paris XIII, famous for never making any personal appearances. Yet even Mensonge had consented to speak, on the topic of the Totally Deconstructed Self. It would be a remarkable occasion.
So when my style editor asked if it was all worth an article, I quickly said yes. I should have known better; by now I was older, wiser, indeed cleaner, and above all, during my quest for Criminale, I had had a glut of foreign conferences. But sure enough, two days later, I found myself strapped in at twenty thousand feet, complimentary g-and-t in one hand, on Lufthansa to Stuttgart, the nearest point of access to Schlossburg, with two thousand words of sparkle to write on the topic of What Happened to Po-Mo. And it was then, only then, that I had time to look at the Schlossburg programme properly: then that I saw I had overlooked the name of one of the great intellectual figures who was flying in to give a single keynote lecture. It will not surprise you in the least — though it did me — to learn that this was Doctor Bazlo Criminale.
I checked again; his name was definitely there. My heart sank; I had no wish, no wish at all, to meet the great man again. I was through and right out the other side of the quest for Bazlo Criminale. The evening (possibly more, but who knows?) I had spent with Cosima Bruckner in Brussels had finally settled the matter. Great hero he might be; moral disappointment he definitely was. He might have been more sinned against than sinning, but I knew now he had sinned too. He had betrayed himself and others; what’s more, in doing that he had somehow obscurely betrayed me. I had started out suspecting him; I had come round to admiring and valuing him; now I saw him as tainted again. Despite that, I had maintained my vow of silence. I wrote nothing about him, and I wished to write nothing now.
Each day when I opened the newspapers I half-expected to find something; new revelations, sudden exposures — the papers were full of that kind of thing. But there was nothing, except for more of those glitzy and somehow old-fashioned articles about how famous he was for his fame. Vanity Fair showed him as guest of honour at some thousand-dollar-a-plate dinner for the world’s starving, held at the Westin Bonaventure in LA; beside him, cloven down to the midriff, was Valeria Magno. I knew it would only be a matter of time before the big news came. Perhaps the great and the good, the rich and the powerful, the publishers and the proprietors, had decided to spare him; but they themselves were going down, one by one. Still, there was nothing either about Otto Codicil; some manage to look after their own. But I wanted no responsibility, no encounter; sitting up there in Europe’s crowded airways, I began planning ways of foreshortening my visit and so avoiding him. Then I realized this would simply be another of those truly flying visits in which he specialized. He would be here today and gone tomorrow, if not the same night. If, like Ildiko in Lausanne, I remained in the background while he was in the foreground, he would not, in his famed philosophical abstraction, even recognize me. Reassured, I shifted my mind to a far more difficult late modern problem: unpackaging the shrinkwrapped airline food on the tray in my lap.
Soon I was landing at Stuttgart, city of Schiller and Hegel, Mercedes-Benz and Bosch. A strange foetid heatwave had fallen across Southern Germany all that summer, no doubt thanks to the universal atmospheric pollution that was beginning to cloud the entire world. Car fumes flickered in the urban air, sticky heat hung in the pedestrianized streets, clothes filled with sweat. Following my brief, I crossed the city through its great squares and well-stocked commercial passages, and found my way to the famous postmodern Staatsgalerie (britische Architekt), James Sterling’s sloping sandstone building, a tease of hidden entrances and shifted hierarchies. A Malaysian bride in white, gown thrown high above her thighs, sat astride a Henry Moore statue for her nuptial photographs. Inside, where I hovered for a while in front of the frantic moderns, Nolde and Kirschner, wealth and art sat easily side by side. I talked to a reverential guide who explained to me that everything in the building was the quotation of a quotation, the pastiche of a pastiche, and then I went outside to find a taxi to take me to Schlossburg.
It was a long, expensive ride, out of the booming post-industrial city and out into the Swabian countryside, but I was on expenses. Economic-miracle-unified Germany looked as economic-miracle-unified Germany does: very neat. The streets of Stuttgart, old and new locked firmly together, were neat. The new towns spreading out endlessly over the hillsides were neat. The grey concrete shopping centres rising everywhere were neat. The wealthy, solid Swabian villas were neat. The well-tilled fields were neat. The long strips of vineyard that descended down the steep banks of the River Neckar were definitely neat. The Autobahns were neat (and packed); the cars were neat (and expensive); the people were neat (and well-dressed). When I got to the small town of Schlossburg, with its great baroque palace and its formal French gardens, all was neat. And when I reached the Gothic romantischer hunting lodge on a craggy hill in wild woods over a deep cleft of river, even that wilderness was neat too.
Though the Archdukes of Wurttemberg had been famed for their philosophical reverence for nature, this had plainly not prevented them attacking it violently from time to time. The tusked heads of angry boar, the soft eyes of tender does, the beady gaze of predatory buzzards, stared down from the gothic walls beside the weaponry that had engineered their slaughter. Down below the Postmoderns were already gathering: dusty Eastern Europeans, exhausted from their journeys on wandering Mitteleuropean trains or obscure airlines that timed their departures not by the minute but the day; our feisty Americans, filled with jouissance and clad in the designer sports clothing that tells us ours is an age of play. The heat hung heavy, but there were tables in the courtyard where you could battle dehydration with good Swabian wine.
We started that night with a candelit dinner in the great hall. There were no candles, thanks to strict German fire regulations, but the East Europeans did not mind. As one of them explained, what they usually have is a candlelight dinner with no dinner. They were just as pleased over the following days, as the lectures and seminars unfolded. As they told me, when I interviewed them, after forty-five years of grim old unreality they were delighted to learn of the bright new unreality. Our postmodern Americans did truly Sterling work: we covered everything, Chaos Theory and commodity fetishism, glitz architecture and depthless art, computer culture and cyberpunk, dead irony and global gentrification, the literature of exhaustion and the literature of replenishment. And when we, too, were exhausted, we replenished ourselves, out in the courtyard, drinking the Swabian wines in the unending heat.
There were blips and aporias, of course. Professor Henri Mensonge failed to arrive, even though when his office was phoned we were told he had left. No message of explanation ever came, though his name remained in the programme as the sign of his absence. In the event, a jolly boat-trip down the Neckar River proved an effective substitute, a relief from the deeply unpleasant weather. It remained too hot to sleep at night (but who, at a congress, wants to?), too hot to think, too hot to shave. Then, on the fourth day, when the sun rose yet again in the murky sky like, well, why not a bright and unburnished shield (simile was not entirely an acceptable trope at Schlossburg), deliverance came, and Bazlo Criminale stepped among us.
He arrived, alone, in a taxi, clad in one of his shining blue suits, hair splendidly bouffanted, mopping his brow. By the time he was out and climbing the lodge steps, a small but deeply admiring crowd had gathered to greet him. I looked, and thought him decidedly jaded; the bounce had gone somehow from his step, there was weariness in his manner. Then I learned what was wrong. At Frankfurt airport, where Otto Codicil had come to grief, as have others in the past, Criminale had lost touch with his luggage. Lufthansa had invented a whole new concept of airline travel, a new aircraft that has no wings, never leaves the ground, runs on tracks and is tugged by an engine. Naive people might call it a train, but it had an airline flight number, boarding passes, and flight attendants who served microwaved food. Flying in from LA, Criminale, being human, had successfully made this unusual change of craft. His baggage, being inanimate and dumb, had not. Even now it was either shuttling back home to LA or being blown up by the anti-terrorist squad as unattended luggage.
I looked at Criminale, and felt sorry for him: even sorrier, for him and all of us, when I learned that his suitcase not only contained more fine suits and distinguished shirts, eventually replaceable, but notebooks holding his work of the last weeks, the draft of a new novel, successor to Homeless, which was not. Angry calls flew here and there; the airport reported that nothing had been found. Criminale retired furiously to his upstairs suite; I learned from the conference organizers that he was cancelling all his onward engagements — his lectures in Belgrade and Macerata, his honorary degree in Stockholm, and several diplomatic treats. He had decided to remain at Schlossburg, close to his German publisher, for as long as his missing luggage took to reappear, which could well be many days, if at all. Dismayed for him, I now suddenly felt dismayed for myself. We were a small group, of around thirty, who breakfasted, lunched, and dined together; I could not go on avoiding him for ever.
My first thought was to leave, but something stopped me. Now Criminale was back in my sightlines, now he was writing fiction again, my curiosity revived. I wanted to find out how it was with him, what he was up to, how he thought these days. In the end I chose the Ildiko strategy. Let him hold the foreground, where he liked to be; I would keep to the background, remaining as obscure as I naturally was. And so when, later that afternoon, Criminale reappeared, and stood up on the podium in the gothic hall to give his keynote lecture, simply and purely entitled ‘The Postmodern Condition’, I was there, face in shadow, in the darkest flange of the very back row.
Criminale started seriously enough, singing the song of the names that always toll on these occasions: Habermas and Horkheimer; Adorno and Althusser; De Man and Derrida; Baudrillard and Lyotard; Deleuze and Guattari; Foucault and Fukuyama. He reflected on all those things that cheer thinking spirits up these days — the end of humanism, the death of the subject, the loss of the great meta-narratives, the disappearance of the self in the age of universal simulacra, the depthlessness of history, the slippage of the referent, the culture of pastiche, the departure of reality, and so on. Then his manner grew more personal, his tone more sharply ironic; it had always struck me at Barolo that, for a philosopher, Criminale was somehow peculiarly personal. He reminded us of his own famous phrase, that in such a time philosophy itself could only be ‘a form of irony’.
As he turned to this, I felt something was affecting him. Maybe it was the loss of his suitcase, and the manuscript with it; possibly it was the presence of so many of his fellow Eastern Europeans in the audience in front of him. At one point I thought perhaps it was even my own presence there; several times in the lecture I thought I caught him staring straight at me, in what seemed a questioning way. The postmodern condition, he now started to say, was something more than a post-technological situation, a phenomenon of late capitalism, a loss of narratives, or whatever the interpreters called it. What it most resembled, he said, was his own situation now—jet-lagged, culture-shocked, stuffed with too much inflight food and too much vacant inflight entertainment, mind disordered, body gross, thoughts hectic and hypertense, spirits dislodged from space and time, baggageless, without normal possessions.
‘How to sum up?’ he asked at last, as we sweated grossly in the foetid hall, ‘Leibniz, a good man, once told the first question of philosophy is: why is there something rather than nothing? We are more lucky, we have proved him wrong. Now we can honestly say: there is much more nothing, so how can you show me something? Here am I, a theoretical nothing, a dead subject. I have travelled three thousand miles through a world of very little to lecture to you from the heartless heart of my nothing on the state of nothing as I understand it. So please, friends, especially East European friends, who are not aware of all these affairs yet: let me welcome you, very personally, to the postmodern condition. Now thank you, one or two questions.’ As a few bemused questions began arising from the floor, I slipped away.
A little later, from the balcony of my room, I looked down at the courtyard and saw Criminale. The usual crowd of admirers was around him; he was mopping his brow, his suit evidently far too heavy for the sultry weather. He went and stood by a wooden balustrade; a group of conferees pressed all round him. Criminale straightened his body nobly, raised his eyes, and seemed to stare directly at the sun. What was happening? Nothing at all significant, I realized. All the conferees had brought their cameras; and Criminale was simply having his photograph taken. I slipped downstairs and went out, to take a quiet, I hoped cooling, walk in the vast romantischer grounds, and gather up some questions for an interview I wanted to do with a Romanian participant just before dinner. The informal gardens quickly gave way to thick trees and wilderness, the rough path sloped down towards the river.
I turned a bend, and there on a rough wooden bench were two people. They too offered a familiar romantischer prospect, sitting close together, male and female. One was Criminale, still in his now sagging blue suit; he was talking warmly with, graciously grasping, now and then, the hand of, one of the more attractive members of our band, a Russian lady. She fluttered at him; he bowed and nodded at her. A sexy bounce had come back into his manner. Remembering the Ildiko strategy, I changed course, through the trees, to pass them by. The Russian lady looked through the branches and saw me. ‘Oh, see, the journalist,’ she said. ‘So sorry,’ I said, ‘Just walking.’ ‘Come,’ said the Russian lady encouragingly, ‘We were just comparing our laptops.’ ‘Really?’ I said. ‘This lady has a German laptop and I have an American laptop,’ said Criminale, looking me up and down. ‘Good, enjoy yourselves,’ I said, and turned to walk off down the twisty path.
‘Wait,’ said Criminale. I turned; he had risen and was staring after me. ‘Excuse me, I was thinking,’ he said, ‘Somewhere in another place we met before, no?’ ‘It’s possible,’ I agreed. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘Barolo, then Lausanne.’ ‘I was there,’ I said. ‘You were in love with Ildiko Hazy,’ he said triumphantly, ‘And why not, it is perfectly natural. A vivid person.’ ‘I didn’t know you’d noticed,’ I said cautiously. ‘Now I know who you are exactly,’ he said, ‘Valeria Magno told me. You are that young man from Britain who likes to make a story of me, yes?’ ‘Once,’ I said, ‘Not now, that whole idea’s been dropped.’ ‘You dropped my life?’ asked Criminale, looking at me, ‘What a thing! I hope you were not influenced by Otto Codicil.’ ‘No, not Codicil,’ I said, ‘In the end it was money.’ ‘Money, that is all?’ he said, ‘We know it is important, but not everything. I hope I am more important than money.’
You should know, I thought, and saw he was looking at me keenly. ‘You are here now,’ he said. That’s pure chance,’ I said. ‘You think chance is pure?’ he asked. ‘I mean our being here together is completely random,’ I said, ‘I just came to write a magazine piece on Po-Mo.’ ‘What is Po-Mo?’ asked Criminale. ‘Postmodernism,’ I said. ‘Ah, what follows Mo,’ said Criminale, nodding, ‘Why do all these people come for it? Are there no women? What is wrong with drink?’ ‘Well, they do have both here,’ I said. ‘So, it is entirely random we meet again,’ he said. ‘Entirely,’ I said. Now Criminale turned with a flourish of courtesy to the Russian lady, seated patiently, contemplatively, on the bench. ‘My dear Yevgenya, may we examine our laptops another time?’ he asked, ‘I like a serious talk with this young man. I will meet you in the lobby in one half-hour, and we will do what we agreed.’ ‘Of course, Bazlo,’ said the lady, rising. ‘It’s all right, I have an interview to do,’ I said hastily. ‘Another time will do,’ said Criminale, putting his heavy arm across my shoulders, ‘Let us turn round the lake.’
A large gloomy lake lay in the centre of the woods> a-piece of artifice. Stone ruins, mostly constructed, stood on little islands and promontories; the water was green and stagnant. Swans and geese swam lazily in the weeds, angry flies buzzed up from the undergrowth as we approached. ‘It is true perhaps your programme was not so good idea,’ said Criminale, ‘A person is not interesting, only his thought. And how can you show such impossible, improbable things with little moving pictures?’ ‘That’s true,’ I said. ‘It is also true,’ said Criminale, ‘that nobody likes to be investigated without his knowledge. Even though where I come from I am used to this, I am surprised. Are there no ethics of these things?’ ‘We were just scouting the programme,’ I said, ‘Going ahead of the story to see if there really was a story.’ ‘Was there?’ he asked, ‘I see there was not.’ ‘Not the kind of story we were looking for,’ I said.
‘No?’ asked Criminale, ‘May we sit down? I have spoiled already your interview, perhaps you have a little time.’ He pointed to a mossed stone bench squatting in the long grass right by the water, we sat down. He took off his jacket, and once more wiped his brow. He was perfectly friendly, more than I deserved; he was also trying to put me firmly in the wrong. I was in it already, of course; I had never really approved of Lavinia’s indirect techniques of investigation, but at that time I was young and job-hungry, though I had always dreaded the moment when Criminale had to be told we were making a programme on him. But now it seemed to me it was he who had no right to the moral ground he was assuming. ‘At Barolo, if you had asked, well, I might have helped,’ he was saying, ‘Now, no. If your programme fails I am not disappointed. My life is not so interesting to deserve the honour, a story of small confusions, mostly.’ ‘I don’t agree,’ I said, ‘I think it’s very interesting.’
Criminale brought out his expensive cigar case, took one, then pointed the case at me. ‘The heat here is terrible,’ he said, ‘You think so, an interesting story? What did you find out?’ ‘A lot,’ I said, taking the cigar. ‘Ah,’ said Criminale, carefully applying his lighter, ‘Who did you talk to? Some people who did not give me such a good portrait?’ ‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘Gertla, for one.’ ‘An envious and difficult woman, I have a fondness for that type,’ said Criminale, ‘Frankly, just to you, I always had problems with the ladies.’ ‘Yes, I know quite a bit about that too,’ I said. ‘You have done a lot,’ said Criminale, ‘You were wise to know Ildiko. So perhaps now you can understand why I do not expect my reputation to last for so much longer.’ He said this with a surprising brightness. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And in all these journalistic pryings just what did you find out?’ he asked.
‘Well, the Party, the KGB, the nomenklatura, used your accounts for all kinds of deals in the West,’ I said. ‘Oh, the missing millions,’ said Criminale, ‘To me this was no great concern. Money is not an important thing with me. Those Party people loved capitalist games, why not let them, maybe that is when they learned something.’ ‘You worked for the Party and reported on people abroad through Gertla,’ I said. ‘She said this?’ asked Criminale, ‘Not quite true. I was a two-way channel. I passed things to both sides. This was known perfectly well in a number of places. Messages could always come and go through me. People like myself were essential. You would be surprised how complicated these games could get.’ ‘So you didn’t really betray anyone?’ I asked. ‘I have good conscience,’ said Criminale. I could have left it there; I didn’t. ‘What about Irini?’ I asked.
Criminale, breathing hard on the bench beside me, wiped his brow again. ‘Yes, I was not allowed my life with Irini,’ he said, ‘History came and took her away from me.’ ‘History?’ I asked, ‘Why is it that abstract nouns do so much?’ ‘But they do,’ said Criminale, ‘Impersonal forces are more powerful than personal forces.’ ‘Surely you could have done something,’ I said, ‘You had a lot of influence, friends everywhere.’ ‘In a state of chaos no one has influence,’ said Criminale, ‘Nagy had influence, they took him and shot him. Do you think you would have done better?’ ‘I don’t know, I can’t imagine,’ I said. ‘Why have you come?’ asked Criminale, ‘Is this your journalist’s set-up? You like to accuse me of something?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘It’s true, I’m here completely by chance.’ ‘Entirely random!’ said Criminale, ‘You intend to tell this story.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t.’ He looked at me in bewilderment. ‘Then what do you really want of me?’ he asked. ‘Nothing, nothing at all,’ I said, ‘Except perhaps for a quote on Po-Mo.’ He sat for a moment, almost as if this dismayed him more than its opposite. ‘Excuse me if I am not grateful,’ he said then, ‘I know journalists, I am one myself. Like secret policemen they keep a record of everything, and then one day . . . For a journalist to succeed, in here must be a bit the dishonest person.’ ‘And for the philosopher?’ I asked. Criminale looked at the lake, and then said, ‘This is an interesting question. Yes, I think so. Remember, the philosopher is only the clown of thought. He is granted the role of wisdom, he must appear wise. Every age, every idea comes along and demands him, give us a describable portrait of reality. He tries, he considers, he picks up the tools of thought. But he is no different from anyone else. Dirty with history, a man after all. Perhaps against his intention, the thought betrays.’
‘But what betrays, the thought or the person?’ I asked. ‘Another very interesting question,’ said Criminale, not answering it, but staring down at the weed-filled water, ‘Please give me your view.’ ‘I remember a phrase I read somewhere, was it in George Steiner?’ I said. ‘It might be, if you read him,’ said Criminale. ‘He remarked how often it is that the great scholar-thinker is also the great betrayer,’ I said. ‘The great betrayer,’ said Criminale, looking at me ironically, ‘You mean myself? Please, in 1956 I was young, and I misread history, a very difficult book. It is easy, let me warn you, you will do it too. One thing I have learned, my friend, there is no such thing as the future. The future is just what we invent in the present to put an order over the past. Don’t live for the future, you will only find the wrong faction and make the wrong friend. I made the usual mistake, I thought I knew what was bound to happen. You will make it too.’
‘But you make your mistakes in public,’ I said, ‘A philosopher, people read and believe you.’ ‘I have written big books, yes, contributed to philosophy, made novels too, you know,’ he said, ‘What now? Do I tear up my books because I looked at the clock and saw the wrong time there? All books are like that. You know, if my bedroom life had been just a little different, in 1956 I would have come to the West. Then I would go to America, write just those same books. Would you talk of betrayal then? Would you doubt the words? I made a mistake, I shared it with millions. Let us agree that, and say no more about it. It is not betrayal.’ ‘You didn’t just get history wrong,’ I said, There was Irini.’ ‘Well, let me tell you, because you clearly know nothing about it,’ said Criminale, ‘In certain rimes, maybe all times, love and friendship become impossible. If for forty years you too had lived a double life, you would understand.’
‘A double life?’ I asked. ‘A double life of course,’ said Criminale, ‘Over there in those days we lived in a time when the only rule was to lie. By the wrong emotion, the wrong gesture, you betrayed yourself. But if you knew how to lie, if you supported the regime in public, you were allowed your thoughts in private. If you allowed them to use your reputation, you were not called to the police station. If you stood up for their history, they permitted you your irony. We were a culture of cynics, we were corrupt and base, but it was the agreed reality. Those people loved great political thoughts, they loved Utopia, totality. The revolution of the proletariat, a madhouse. I had a higher life, I was better than that. But cynicism moves everywhere, even into love.’ ‘And thought too,’ I said. ‘Possibly,’ he said, ‘I see now what you want me to say. That my work is wrong, as corrupt as my world. Well, I cannot. Maybe the experience of a bad world also makes us think.’
‘I ought to go,’ I said, getting up, ‘I really do have an interview.’ ‘Wait,’ said Criminale, taking my arm, ‘You escape too lightly. I will teach you about betrayal} Let me tell you this: we all betray each other. Sometimes from malice, or fear. Sometimes from indifference, sometimes love. Sometimes for an idea, sometimes from political need. Sometimes because we cannot think of a good ethical reason why not to. Are you different?’ ‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘But don’t you think betrayal is all round us now?’ asked Criminale, ‘Isn’t this also a time of j’accuse, j’accuse?’ ‘I’m sorry?’ I said. ‘J’accuse, my father abused me, my mother failed me,’ said Criminale, ‘J’accuse, he invaded my sexual space, he made me an innuendo. J’accuse, I am his lover, he owes me a fortune. Go to America now. Three hundred million naked egos all trying to make a claim. Even rich celebrities like to be victims. What their parents did to them, terrible, they could even have become failures in life. No, as Nietzsche said, when an epoch dies, betrayal is everywhere. To make ourselves heroes of the new, we must murder the past. He also told us each time we try to become authors of ourselves, we become only the more alone. So my story is not perhaps so far away from your story.’
But that seemed far too easy. The past has to answer,’ I said, ‘In your story-real crimes were committed.’ ‘Yes, wrongs were done, but how is it now?’ said Criminale, ‘You tell me, you come from a-media-world.’ ‘Not any more,’ I said, ‘Actually I find I’m a verbal person not a visual person.’ ‘That is not how I mean,’ said Criminale, ‘You live in the media age, the age of simulation, as they all say at that congress. The age of no ideology, only hyperreality. Well, go to New York now, the Beirut of the Western world. The streets are filled with gangs and terrorists, the women rage with anger, everyone lives for themselves. You sit high in some fine apartment, great paintings on the walls, and down in the street people kill for drugs and kicks. Too little reality, also too much. Everywhere, wild fantasies, everyone wants a violent illusion. Life is a movie, death is a plot ending, no stories are real. And even the philosophers think in unrealities, they describe a world of no ethics, no humanism, no self. I know my age had bad ethics, now show me yours.’
‘You remember in your quarrel with Heidegger . . .’ I said. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘You said his mistake was thinking thought could evade history and stay pure. But if it can’t, what then?’ ‘Of course, if you like to think so, thought is corrupt, and nobody wins,’ said Criminale, Then of course there are no ethics, no realities, no philosophies, no myths, no art. The world is as empty as some people say, only chaos and randomness. We are non-existent selves, we start at the beginning again, with nothing at all. There is no Criminale, no one to blame, no anyone. But that is your problem,-not mine. Excuse me, I must go, I have lost my luggage. But I have met this very nice Russian lady who likes to take me shopping. See you about, as they say.’ He stood up and pulled on his jacket; I watched him go off, down the bendy path and through the clotted woods. I despised him, I admired him. I hated him, I loved him. I was outraged, I was charmed. When he spoke, I still wanted to listen.
As it happened, I didn’t talk to him again. There he was at the seminar dinner that night; his shopping trip had plainly gone well. He wore a very expensive new lightweight suit, a smart new shirt, gold cufflinks that had not been on his wrists that afternoon. Despite, maybe even because of our conversation then, or perhaps because of the companionship of the Russian lady, he was in excellent humour. His form was back; the Russian lady was at his side at table, touching his arm from time to time. I passed him as I moved towards a table in the further corner. The great trouble in Russia, you know, is their condoms are too thick,’ he was saying, ‘You need Western aid immediately.’ Later I saw him talking on and on, as he did, no doubt flitting, as he also did, from Plato to Gramsci, Freud to Fukuyama. The usual respectful crowd sat silent round him; I never saw him again.
In the morning, when I checked at the desk, Criminale’s luggage had still not been traced. He would not be leaving quickly, I had enough for my article, and now I could not keep on avoiding him. I left Schlossburg that morning and flew off home. I wrote my Po-Mo piece, which appeared in the Po-Mo supplement, which is why in their cottages in Provence everyone chatted Postmodernism over the Piat d’Or that summer. Then I thought again about whether I should write about Criminale. I had said I would remain silent, but what I had in mind now was not exactly about Criminale at all. The Schlossburg conversation half changed my mind. He had said his story was, perhaps, not so very far away from being my own story, though of course his story seemed to stop more or less where mine started; that was what I thought about.
And Bazlo Criminale’s story did stop, just about a week after the end of the Schlossburg seminar. For, back in Santa Barbara, California, where he had returned, Criminale died — knocked over by a helmeted bicyclist in a Sony Walkman, so engrossed in some orgasmic peak of the latest Madonna hit that he failed to notice the great philosopher abstractedly crossing the green campus path in front of him. Criminale was struck in the temple by the rim of the cyclist’s safety helmet; they took him to the finest of hospitals, but he never regained consciousness. The best that can be said about it is that he died with his lapel badge on — for he was, of course, attending a conference, on ‘Does Philosophy Have a Future?’, which was at once abandoned as a mark of respect for a great late modern thinker.
You may well remember the obituaries, which were plentiful and generally very respectful. The usual confusions surrounding him survived; several quite different dates and places of birth were given, and his career, fame, and his political views and ideological attitude explained in quite contradictory ways. His public celebrity was, well, celebrated, and much was said about the greatness of his literary work. Less was said about the philosophy, except that it was both advanced and obscure. ‘The Philosopher King Is Dead: Who Is the King?’ asked one piece, speculating about the succession. Very little was said about his personal life, except in very general terms. And nothing at all was said directly about any feet of clay. Even so, there was a general note of caution, as if there might be worse things to come out.
Someone who knew him better than most wrote the piece in the London Times. ‘His birthplace was Bulgaria, his passport was Austrian, his bank account Swiss, and his loyalty perhaps was to nowhere,’ it said — pointedly, I thought, There is no doubt he was a great man, amongst the leading European philosophers of the postwar era, but at times a flawed one. He was a thinker of genius and a pillager of women. He was loved by many for his charm and presence, and made friends in high places everywhere in the world — a friendship he sometimes exploited, in a familiar Mitteleuropean way, though those who knew him best well understood how to forget and forgive. He once famously described philosophy itself as “a form of irony”, and that quality is what we will continue to find in his quite probably enduring work.’ These were the only real hints, if they really were hints, of trouble to come. However in various small American papers there were a few rumours that his death was not entirely accidental, that reactionary Eastern European forces had decided he was a liability. But, as you know, we live an an age of conspiracy theories, some people preferring to believe that nothing is ever what it is but an elaborate plot by powers elsewhere.
A week after that came the attempted coup against Gorbachev and reform in the Soviet Union; three days, as the press said, that shook the late modern world. The hands of the coup leader, Gennady Yanayev, visibly shook on the television screens as he announced the taking of emergency powers and the ‘illness’ of Mikhail Gorbachev, isolated at his holiday dacha in the Crimea. It was not only Yanayev’s hands that shivered; a whole era, a whole epochal direction of history (my history, by the way — yours too, perhaps), a whole set of promises and half-curdled hopes, seemed to be shaking too. Even some of those who had taken the brave step beyond the old imprisoning world began to fear and doubt, as they saw the age turning backwards again. The rules of blame and confession, of guilt and betrayal, seemed once again to go into reverse.
Three days later, it was the coup itself that died — of courage and determined human spirit, of incompetence and contradiction. So did two of its leaders, and more followed after. Then came the obscure days of defiance and confession, as those arrested proclaimed their error, their deception by others, their absence on the day, their historical mistake. To me, as they were filmed, talking, it seemed, without coercion, they all seemed strangely innocent, people from a simpler world. Nobody had told them to blame their parents, discrimination, PMT or passive smoking for what had gone wrong. They said I as if they meant it; they said they did it. They had made an error and they announced it. Then as they fell, as others did after them, the statues of the long century once more began to tumble. Tall, black, phallic Felix Dzherzhinsky came down from his slim pedestal outside the Lubyanka. Stalin toppled, Lenin was swung upside-down, the bust of squat-headed Karl Marx came off the stand.
Three weeks after that, I attended yet another conference: in Norwich, England, ‘a fine city’, as the signs said as you drove in (and so it had better be, after you’ve struggled for hours across heath, fen, and breckland to reach it). This was the summer’s big one: 650 teachers of English from universities across Europe were gathering in the University of East Anglia’s Sixties concrete bunkers to found a truly European association. Most came from the European Community; some were from Eastern Europe, highly relieved to be there at all. George Steiner spoke, and Frank Kermode. Seamus Heaney read from his poems, and three British novelists read sections from their novels in progress, new stories whose ends they seemed not to know. And this time I spoke myself, in the small section on ‘The Writer as Philosopher’. I had been invited along to make my address at the very last moment. My topic, topical of course because of his death, was Bazlo Criminale.
Quite honestly I had no wish at all to turn up at the event. As you know, I’d been to far too many of that kind of thing lately, and, whatever the impression you might have, I have never been all that keen on solemn gatherings of studious specialists. In fact I had firmly decided to refuse the invitation of the organizers when a slightly disconcerting thing occurred. A few days before the congress began, an odd little letter came through the post. It had a Hungarian stamp on it, and was stuffed with newspaper cuttings. Of course I could not read these, since they were in Hungarian, which really is one of the world’s more obscure languages, but it was clear enough from the headlines and the photographs that they were the Budapest obituaries of Bazlo Criminale. With them was a brief handwritten letter. It said: ‘So he has gone now, our great philosopher. I hope it will make you like to write something about him. You know about him — perhaps not such a big lot, but more than most of those in the West. And now I hear you will go to this big Norwich congress to speak of him. I hope you speak well. Remember, he was a good man, of course a little bit flexible like I told you, but he did always his best. I am going to come there too. I like very much to see you again, and I think in Norwich they do not have goulasch. Are you still just a little bit Hungarian? I hope so. I tried hard to show you how. Love + kisses from Ildiko H.’
Of course, I was wildly delighted to get a letter from Ildiko. I was also surprised and mystified. For one thing, I couldn’t imagine how she could possibly have got my home address. Admittedly she’d had plenty of time working with the contents of my wallet, and could have found one. But since then, my career improving, I’d moved, to Islington — so far into Islington that I can’t tell you how we despise Camden. And then I couldn’t imagine how she knew I had been asked to the conference. I’d been approached late, I hadn’t even accepted, and my name wasn’t on the advance conference programme. It’s true that, when I got the telephone call inviting me to speak, I’d been told my name had been suggested by a Hungarian delegate, who called me one of the few people in Britain equipped to speak on Criminale. Perhaps this had become the chatter of the Budapest bars and bazaars. The letter bewildered me, but it did settle one thing. I picked up the telephone, called Norwich, and left a message on a machine to say I accepted their invitation.
In my opinion a university campus is a rather strange place, out of time, into space, away from the drab urban grey, in the lush urban green, caught in a separate world that seems to have little to do with everyday history. In fact it all seemed rather like the strange, happy timeless time Ildiko and I had spent together at Barolo, until at last we were ejected from paradise and thrown back on real things again. But this one was a strange form of paradise. Not so long ago, in a lush river valley some pre-postmodern architect had started pouring concrete; great staggered residence blocks, huge teaching towers, rose from the grass, speaking of mass and monumentalism and eternity. Maybe it was home to some; it was not to me. It was already history, the white cement slowly pitting and greying with age — just like the hundreds of professors of English whom I found at the opening conference reception. There they were, pressed tightly together amid breeze-block walls, looking mystified at one another, as if they had never understood before they belonged to a species that had been replicated so often, all clutching their conference wallets, inspecting each other’s lapel badges, sipping fizzy Bulgarian Riesling, and chattering extremely loudly. I pushed my way through, past fat structuralists and thin deconstructors, denimed feminists and yuppified postculturalists, past the great bookstalls and the long publishers’ tables, past the bulletin boards fluttering with news of yet more conferences, looking everywhere for Ildiko. But, though there was a sign for everything else, there was no sign of her, not a sign at all.
Every new morning I checked the mailbox in the lobby; her pigeonhole, H., was conveniently placed close to mine, J. Only an empty I. intervened. She hadn’t arrived; her conference wallet and lapel badge, her ticket for the conference trip, her gilt-edged invitation to the final conference dinner, the little touches of identity that such events are kind enough to confer on us, stayed lying there uncollected. And she certainly didn’t appear at my lecture, which frankly went quite well and attracted a small but reasonably interested audience. I rather enjoyed standing up there and giving it. As I told you, I’m a verbal person, not a visual person. Criminale at Schlossburg was perfectly right; there is no way a small flickering screen can ever really bring mental deeds to life. But perhaps, up to a point, words can. I was no scholar, and I certainly didn’t know him all that well. I had read him in snatches, seen him in brief glimpses, and I was not a literary theorist. I did not entirely understand; but I did have something to say.
What did I say? I didn’t, as I might have done a year before, talk about his mystery, his deceptions, or betrayals. I spoke about his work — the great fiction, above all Homeless, the fine drama, the elaborate gestures of his philosophy. One advantage of my travels was that I now had some useful words (like Foucault and Derrida, Horkheimer and Habermas) that are calculated to unlock the hard hearts of academics. I pointed to his place of historical importance, describing him as the philosopher not of the age of the Cold War and the atomic spy, but of the time of chaos theory, the rock video, and the Sony Walkman. In fact, I described him as a Great Thinker of the Age of Glasnost. No one better expressed, I claimed, the problematics of contemporary thought, the collapse of subjectivity, the crisis of writing, the self-erasure and near-silence of the era after humanism (a fate academic audiences always take gladly in their stride). I spoke of his great gift of irony, the final bridge for healing the contradictions and emptinesses the world has left us. I hinted, but only vaguely, as another form of irony, at his own flawed self, the head in the sky, the feet in the mire, the gap between thought and historical need, the irony that, I said, so often strikes us when we consider all the modern and postmodern masters.
As, afterwards, I gathered my notes and left the grey seminar room, a small dark-haired woman came up and shyly suggested we might take a plastic cup of coffee together. I checked out her bosom — this is a well-accepted convention in the conference world — and grasped from her lapel that she was Dr Ludmilla Markova, from Veliko Turnovo in Bulgaria. The name — of the place, not the person — rang bells; I accepted at once. She walked me off to some far more buoyant and postmodern building overlooking a pleasant broadland view, and we sat under indoor trees in the coffee bar together. ‘Yes, very good lecture, quite deconstructive, I think,’ said Miss Markova, ‘Only one thing. You understand nothing.’ ‘Very likely,’ I said, ‘I see you come from Veliko Turnovo, where he came from. Did you know him?’ ‘I am so much too young,’ said Miss Markova sharply, ‘But yes, you are right, he was born there, son of a metalworker, in a time of terrors.’ ‘Do they remember him?’ I asked. ‘Not so well,’ said Miss Markova, ‘Father supported the Nazis, so was shot for fascist after the war. After this his family was not so happy. His mother paid him to go to Budapest, to make a new life. I think he never came back.’
‘You think that helps to explain his books, his mind?’ I asked. ‘Of course,’ said Miss Markova, ‘Nobody understands Bulgaria, it is too small country, only eight million. Nobody thinks of us, our image is negative, we are always the coy of others. But Criminale is ours, someone who struggled to exist in a world of forces no one can stop. He was born in chaos, he lived in chaos. He expected chaos, he wrote of chaos. He saw the chaos that is hidden in all things, reason, history. Remember his great book is called Homeless. He had no certainties to live by, nowhere safe to go. He did not only play with nothingness. He knew it. For us chaos is not a theory, it is a condition. We do not like him so much, but he is very Bulgarian writer.’ ‘And that’s what I didn’t understand?’ I asked. ‘Oh, your lecture is like all lectures, everything about you, nothing about him,’ said Miss Markova, ‘You need a Criminale, but it must be your Criminale, not our Criminale.’ ‘He belongs everywhere,’ I said. ‘Not quite,’ said Miss Markova, ‘You talk about crisis and you mean some death of the subject or how hard it is to understand some book. You talk of the end of self and meanwhile you have very nice one, good suit and everything. You speak of disaster and despair with such confidence and hope. Perhaps you do not see what seeds you are sowing.’
‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ I said. ‘What happens to all of you here?’ asked Miss Markova, ‘Why do you want the end of humanism, a great new collectivity? I wish one day you would visit my country, very nice, also sad. Nothing works, chaos comes again, we are not Europe and cannot live like Europe. You see now what happens in Yugoslavia, not a country, by the way, just lines on the wrong map. Or Russia, anywhere. But I suppose you are much too busy in your busy nice world to come and see how life is really.’ ‘I do have to earn a living like everyone else,’ I said. ‘Of course, you cannot look at life when you must have a living,’ said Miss Markova, ‘Well, as I say to you, very good lecture, just this one criticism, you don’t mind? Where do you publish? Promise, send me a copy, or I will never see it.’ ‘I don’t think I will publish it,’ I said, ‘I’m not really an expert on Criminale.’ ‘You will,’ said Markova, ‘Send it to me when you do it, and I will criticize you, in a very friendly way. Now, don’t you want to go and hear all those angry feminists?’
Why not? Conferences go on and on; one interesting new thought, one interesting new face, at once gives way to another. I thought no more about Markova, and Ildiko I never saw at all. Her conference papers remained uncollected, still lying in the pigeonhole when we all left Norwich for the so-called ordinary world. So, I didn’t see her then, and I haven’t seen her since — not to this day, this very day. I can’t imagine quite what happened. Maybe something detained her in London; there was sharp high-street recession in Britain that summer, and all the stores were filled with cut-price bargains. Maybe at the last minute she remembered how little she liked conference lectures, and decided to stay in Budapest. Or maybe something else came up; perhaps she met someone, over a lunch for instance, and some other foreign journey called. I sat down to reply to her letter, and find out what had gone wrong, but when I looked at it I saw there was no address.
This made me wonder why she had sent it at all, and I read right through it again, hunting for clues. I picked up the press cuttings and shuffled through those. There was one vague hint of something, though I’m not at all sure what it meant, or means. Beside some complex and unreadable Hungarian text, a photograph caught my eye. It was a bright summer shot of Bazlo Criminale, taken perhaps five years before; at least the hair was darker and more luxuriant, the expensive suit cut differently from today, the tie wider. He had just stepped out of a yellow cab, in what must have been New York, in fact somewhere in SoHo or Greenwich Village, because the storefronts behind him were mostly art galleries. Photographs are random, and much harder to read than books. But the main point of this, if it had one, was that he was carrying a large framed photograph, one of his own erotic nudes. The unclothed model was, I recognized from detailed experience, Ildiko. The same model, but very expensively clothed, also hung on Criminale’s arm, smiling warmly at the camera. Criminale simply stared expansively, just as he had at Schlossburg.
Yes, photographs are hard to read. But the two looked happy, definitely happy, together (‘Aren’t they happy, I remember this before,’ I recalled from Lausanne, ‘When he left Gertla for Sepulchra’). Was this why Ildiko had sent it, to show me she had cared for Criminale much more than I might think? Or was the reason rather more Hungarian? Was she telling me that people who have once been happy together — as the two of us had — later do strange things to each other, maybe betray each other? Then something odd struck me; in Budapest, I remembered, Ildiko had made a lot of the fact that she had never been in the West, and that I was taking her there on her very first journey. But this New York photograph clearly dated from well before our trip. It all seemed very meaningful but very baffling, like quite a lot else in the story of Criminale. Maybe the point was somewhere else, not in the letter, not in the photographs, but in the simple fact that she had written it at all. For what the letter had done was to send me off to Norwich, make me lecture, and so start telling the story of Bazlo Criminale. And if that was what she wanted, well, it worked, and has kept on working — as you can now see very well.
That brings me more or less to this day, this very day — or rather to the day I sat down to start recording this Criminale story, not, of course, this day now when, with the world still changing, I finish it, certainly not the day when you choose, in your own good time, to read or deconstruct it. A few late if not last things are probably worth saying. Re Criminale: his lost suitcase never was recovered, I believe, which means that every trace has been lost of the novel that should have followed Homeless. The series about the Great Thinkers of the Age of Glasnost was never made, and I suppose never will be. Eldorado TV failed to pass the so-called ‘quality threshold’ and lost its broadcasting franchise to the Australians in October 1991. Nada Productions returned to the nothingness from which, I imagine from its name, it must have been born, having mislaid quite a lot of several people’s money over the course of the Criminale project. On the other hand the Vienna Staatsoper is flourishing, especially after Lavinia’s visit to the city. Lavinia in fact did quite well, getting a job in Munich with the European Television Union. Ros, I see from my TV screen, is working regularly for the ‘Late Show’. In fact I saw her name roll on the credits for the 1991 Booker, which this time I watched in the comfortless comfort of my own homeless home.
In the matter of Euro-fraudulence, as on other things, Cosima Bruckner proved completely correct. On the high, beflagged thirteenth floor of the Berlaymont Building, it was officially agreed that — with 1992 at stake, a difficult summit coming at Maastricht, currency union and a new era beginning, the Eastern European dimension coming to the boil, and so on — certain small financial problems of the past were much better forgotten. Otto Codicil’s name was briefly touched with scandal, but it did him no harm at all, or maybe some good, in Vienna, where he still teaches, or does not teach, his students. His book, Empirical Philosophy and the English Country House, appeared this year and caused a small stir in Oxbridge mental circles. It was also held responsible for a significant upsurge in British tourism; apparently people really like to see where other people think. I gather that Gerstenbacker, his great work, which will never be known as his, finished, has been looking for a post in some European university where he can find some obliging assistants who will do for him what he has so selflessly done for others. Professor Massimo Monza’s famous, flamboyant column still flourishes in La Stampa, where his late-Marxist readings of such things as the films of David Lynch or the rise of the miniskirt attract great attention. Gertla Riviero’s work has an ever-rising reputation in Argentina, both as avant-garde discovery and a sound hedge against inflation.
Cosima Bruckner’s talents were not entirely neglected at the Euro-centre of things. In the city of setaside, her fraud investigations were indeed set aside, but it proved an important step towards Euro-promotion. As she says herself, fraud is simply a sideshow in the European bureaucratic programme, and she has risen to far greater heights. Working from the cabinet of the Deputy-President (Jean-Luc Villeneuve), she has become responsible for many matters to do with the successful implementation of the year 1992: the year of elections everywhere, of world upheavals, of the Barcelona Olympics, of Expo 92 and the Seville celebrations of the great discoveries of Columbus, who found a New World order just 500 years ago. No wonder, as Spain booms, and Portugal takes over the presidency of the European Community, Iberia has become the centre of current attention. The Heads of State are meeting in Lisbon soon, and don’t worry, I shall be there.
This brings me to a matter I am not too keen to discuss, for obvious reasons: my improving relations with Cosima Bruckner. I’m on a Euro-beat these days, and I actually visit her quite frequently. She has rented a fine (if under-furnished) apartment in Lisbon, up in the old town, under the castle of São Jorge and with a fine view of the River Tagus and Pombal’s glorious neo-classical city. About Cosima I now see I made a good many mistakes — but then I did about a large number of things. For instance, in my own contemporary opinion, there is nothing wrong with black leather trousers, or her sternly shy ways. As for Cosima’s conspiratorial vision of life, which I once found excessive, I now have another view; we have conspiracy theories because people conspire, just as we have plots because people plot, and fictions because people are always inventing things, if only to put life in some imaginary yet necessary order. So I’ve now come to agree with her that our two worlds, mine of books and late-modern thinkers, hers of power and fraud, are not so far apart after all. In the obscure, unstable world of the Age of Glasnost, unlikely things interconnect, interface and intercourse far more often than I imagined. I can even see it in myself.
But I shouldn’t like you to think that these odd snatches of event and these poor scraps of wisdom are all I took away from my confused, confusing quest for Bazlo Criminale. How to explain? The problems of an ordinary young man, not particularly good at life, not much good at love either, pretty ignorant of the past, rather too soaked in living in the present, not greedy but needing to earn a crust, should not be under-estimated. Times change, and I suppose we all live between two worlds — the old bitter human history with its fair share of crimes and wrongs, the bland and apparently historyless present, which serves us well enough. Our own times never seem to have a name, but we are all made by something: we find and fight the particular ghosts of our day. They say we live in a renascent period, a time of quickening, an age of the new. Well, here I am, ready, a good Euro-person, in my green tracksuit and my Reebok trainers.
One day I met a good and famous man who was almost certainly bad. He came from somewhere in the past to tell one kind of story, and I am here to tell another. He was the writer, and I was the reader — though, as I read him, I couldn’t help thinking he was reading me. He was a doyen of culture; I was an on-the-hoof consumer of it. When he spoke, he summoned great powers; I tried to listen, but I heard only so much, for ours, you know, is an age of noise. He was a monumental statue; I was a pigeon in the park. He belonged to a finished era; I come from one that seems hardly to have got started yet. I chased him, for a time, but there are other things to do with life than walk in the dirtied tracks of other people’s stories. I can’t say I’ve totally given up the quest for Bazlo Criminale. Perhaps that is because, as he told me, his story’is also somehow mine. Now and then I wonder, if I was ever put to it, whether I or anyone like me could summon up greater moral powers than he did and didn’t in his own particular day. I know at best this is doubtful, at worst a vain delusion, usual in every new generation before it really sees the size of its job. If history (which we now call life-style) should happen to come calling, demanding a signature or a commitment, I should probably sign anything, like most of us. As far as I can see (which is not very far), few of us have worked up enough of a self to resist giving in, giving up, going over. Naturally I would always be tolerant, sceptical, permissive, pragmatic, good-hearted, open, late liberal. I would also assume nothing is true or certain; no ideology, philosophy, sociology, theology any better than any other. Life for me would therefore be a spectacle, a shopping mall, an endless media show, in which everything — amusing or grotesque, erotic or repulsive, heroic or obscene, sentimental or shameful — is an acceptable world-view, and anything could happen. There would be no great wisdom, and no great falsehood. A mule would be the equal of a great professor. Or so, I seem to remember, they say in Argentina.