Epilogue: Go Litel Boke amidst a Flurry of Auto-Antonyms

This chapter is a commencement address the author gave to graduating law students. It deals with the words graduation, degree, and gray. Degree is simply ‘degrade’ in a Frenchified form. Just as commencements can mark a beginning as well as an end, so reflexes of Latin gradus (step) can indicate going down, going up, or being leveled out. Gradus plays an outside role in the punning and word games in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. So the author meant to give an anti-commencement address by pointing to the down as well as up sense of the degree the students were getting. This provides a fitting end in this book to the number of auto-antonyms that figured in many of the preceding chapters.

Odds and the End

This chapter ties up many of the themes of the book. It looks back to the discussions of luck by discussing the various uses of ‘odd’ or ‘odds’ in the book, where it especially figures outside the luck chapters in the chapter on the messenger as the third party, the odd man. This leads to a discussion of the collocation of ‘odds and ends’ and then to three stories that are odds and ends. The first deals with two six-year-old girls on their first day of school who engage in a verbal fight to the death that rather brilliantly deals with Austin’s performatives better than most academic literature. The second is a tale of the author as a father to a woebegone nine-year-old son who discerned that day that life has no point as he sobbed uncontrollably, which leads to a brief discussion of Gloucester in Lear and a powerful Middle English lyric and the pointlessness of everything. The third story is short and is a tale of what the author is left to at his end: rereading and being discovered by his daughter to be both knave and fool.

Competition

This chapter discusses the unavoidability of competition, even among those who renounce the more common forms of competitions for honor, wealth, and so forth. It starts with a discussion of the Garden of Eden and conditions of zero scarcity therein, with but one scarce item: the forbidden fruit. Then the chapter goes on to positional goods, rank-ordering people, which leads to a discussion of seating arrangements, musical chairs, and the failure of King Arthur to resolve the matter with a round table. It then provides a treatment of Christian attempts to avoid honor competitions by elevating humility to the status of one of the chief virtues. But that ends in humility contests and we are back to square one. The chapter ends with a sublime text from Gregory of Tours about a truly humble miracle-working young monk and the efforts to keep him humble despite his miracle-working powers.

A Somewhat Dour Introduction

This introduction offers an overview of the basic themes of the book, highlighting the author’s sense of gloom and doom, his view of life as a series of failures in a game of humiliation as the score gets evermore lopsided as one ages. It also provides some autobiography. The chapter’s centerpiece is an account of an embarrassing incident at All Souls College where the author, as in Thor’s visit to Útgarðaloki, found his wine glass connected to the sea. He made a drunken fool of himself before portraits of some of his heroes that graced the walls of the room where the event occurred.

Lord of the Table: Judges 19 and the Last Supper

This chapter provides an extended treatment of how giving and receiving food is perhaps the primal obligation-creating and -discharging of social actions. The chapter deals with what it means to be host and guest, two sides of the same Indo-European verbal root, yielding also opposites like hospitality and hostility. The chapter also deals with adoption, grafting a person into one’s kin group as an heir by means of rituals where drinking and eating figure as the sine qua non of offializing the new relation. One ceremony is of Salian Frankish origin, another one old Norwegian. The chapter ties these in with baptism and circumcision and covenant formation by means of mixing blood, or cutting flesh, human and animal. This leads to a discussion of the dismemberment of the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19. After she had been gang-raped to death her husband cuts her into twelve parts which are sent out to summon the nation and oblige them to take revenge on the tribe of Benjamin, the tribe of the inhospitable rapists. The argument is that Jesus is referring directly to Judges 19 when he divides his body into twelve parts just as the Levite did his concubine, the ceremony obliges one to carry out his mission, in effect, to take revenge.

The Law of Conservation of Good Things

This chapter examines people’s deep set of beliefs about the scarcity of the good, that so much of what one calls happiness is of doubtful virtue, a good portion of it being comparative, requiring the misery of others. One may experience it either as overt delight, as in some kinds of Schadenfreude, or merely as relief that an expected bad thing did not materialize; even much of this relief depends on the misfortune of others, as when one experiences “that there but for the grace of God go I” sense of your good fortune prompted by another’s misfortune. Even the pleasure of sex might sum out at zero, depending on when the calculation is made, it being too a form of the pleasure of relief, and then there is the tristesse afterwards. This chapter treats heaven as an attempt to provide a plenitude of happiness, still however by some accounts depending on enjoying the spectacle of the damned in hell and then too the joy of heaven is more than balanced out negatively by the larger numbers of souls in hell, universal salvation being a heresy. The chapter also discusses smiles, laughter, and smirks and deals with happy, dour Danes, who always win those happiest of people silly studies, perhaps because they can congratulate themselves on not being Hungarians or Americans.

A Jaundiced View of Authenticity (and Identity)

This chapter is based on a keynote lecture the author gave at a conference on authenticity in Konstanz, Germany. The chapter takes a dubious view of the personal quests for “authenticity,” which generate little more than phoniness and hypocrisy in the pursuit of Polonius’s ‘this above all to thine own self be true,’ whatever that might mean. But the talk went south on the author, and that story makes up a good portion of the chapter. The author got caught out making an argument when discussing the anti-Semitism that is at the core of a supposed European authentic identity, relying on an English translation of a Freudian text that turned out, as the author was reminded by a German participant, misreading a joke in Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. So the discussion revisits humiliation, attempts at apology, and discusses shamefacedness and the sheer irony of being found out to be an utterly inauthentic scholar. Nonetheless the last third of the piece is sourly devoted to the fears in the Christian West of having a Jew at its core.

The Messenger

This chapter provides a discussion of the messenger as the Ur-mediator, the go-between par excellence. He is often a double agent of sorts and cannot help but be a spy even against his will. The chapter deals with him both in his more sacred form as angels, Christ, and the prophets and in his most mundane form as a simple courier. It mostly draws on ancient Near Eastern materials with expansive reading of some biblical texts, from Ehud to messengers sent by Saul, David, and Joab. There are classical and medieval instances, as well as early modern examples. The deep issue is the importance of the ‘third party’ as he begins to emerge fully embodied from merely being an agent of a first and second party. There is an extended discussion of killing the messenger bearing evil tidings, and even not so evil tidings, and the work of intercessors between an angry Deity and sinful mankind.

Vile Jelly

This chapter reproduces some of the claims in darkly comic form of the author’s Anatomy of Disgust. The presentation is new, but the ideas are much the same. At issue is a less than celebratory view of human embodiment. The chapter uses the Duke of Cornwall’s sickening description of the human eye as a starting point: People are something of a goopy pond held together by skin that can itself be a site of horror. People are a feeding tube that connects them to a longer tube built at taxpayer expense to send their food remade down to a sunless sea when they flush the toilet. Submerged imagery from Hamlet oozes through the discussion to justify the positions and show their well-attested commonplaceness.

May You Have My Luck

This chapter offers a treatment of why good luck seems to many people, and as an ancient widespread folk belief has it, to be the very manufactory of bad luck. It takes a look at the apotropaic rituals people undertake not to have their good luck count against them. It also examines why it seems people’s merest wishes and desires provoke the gods to thwart them. The chapter provides an excursus on the negative causal powers people attribute to themselves, what the author calls the narcissism of negativity. The chapter features an extended discussion of hope as opposed to feeling lucky.