The current issue of The New Yorker features a superb essay by Kelefa
Sanneh, concerning the POTUS-to-be (currently just the PEOTUS, though acting
more like an emperor). There are
too many fine passages for us to cite just one or two -- best to go read the
whole article on their website.
Nor is there any point in my indulging in political commentary of our
own: I am not a credentialed
politico, our Junior Woodchuck Blogger’s License© being restricted to topics of Theologia mathematica, penguins,
and pataphysical incunabula (qq.v.). Yet I shall venture two remarks, the first in the
capacity of someone who has subscribed to that magazine for over half a century
by now (and once, as a teen, spent a week at the New York Public Library
reading back-issues beginning with 1925);
the other qua philologist.
(1) The New Yorker began as a magazine of gentle humor
and amused observation. Over the decades,
it has grown more serious, more spare, and focusing more on nonfiction. Even The Talk of the Town, the
opening section, and long the precinct of the badaud and the flâneur, now typically opens with a political
piece (as it does this week, though Sanneh’s offering quite puts it in the shade). Yet in the course of his discussion, Sanneh observes,
in passing, one of the oldest characteristic tics of the Talk of the Town
style: the small, telling detail
that, without trespassing at all upon snark, nor overtly satirizing the person
in question, does present the reader with an opportunity of drawing his own
conclusions. Describing a conclave
at the Heritage Foundation:
Every seat in the auditorium was
taken, one of them by Edwin Meese, Attorney General under President Reagan, who
was in the front row, and whose phone was almost certainly the source of a
pleasant symphonic ringtone that briefly intruded upon the proceedings.
(2) Towards the
end of the discussion, the author asks:
“Is Trump a Trumpist?” The sense of that deliberately paradoxical
formulation is that the kaleidoscopic sequence of Mr. Trump’s obiter dicta may not cohere into any firm worldview
(some observers called him “a powerful but inconstant champion of his namesake
philosophy). But the form of the formulation harks back to a tradition of similar
epigrams, whose ancestry we traced in an earlier note, reprinted for convenience here.
~
~ ~
Freud once smilingly said to me: “Moi, je ne suis pas un Freudiste.”
(Why did he say it in French? It is perhaps a variation of a French quotation that is unknown to me.)
Theodor Reik, Listening with the Third Ear (1948), final chapter
A clue lies in the morphology. The usual adjective in French is not Freudiste, but freudien. Freud was quite clearly alluding to an analogous quote -- again in French, yet again from a native speaker of German: Karl Marx, who, towards the end of his life, famously stated “Je ne suis pas un marxiste.”
In both cases, these major thinkers were rejecting the excesses of their acolytes.
Naturally the philologer cannot stop here. Why the devil would Marx have said the thing in French? Clearly he must be echoing yet another quotation, one which eventually must be set in a purely francophone context.
With a bit of research and some help from Google, we were able to determine the source: Napoleon, in exile on Elba, is reported to have said (shaking his head),
“Je ne suis pas bonapartiste.”
Here the semantics is rather different: He has not retrospectively rejecting those who followed him in his prime, but recognizing how far he himself has fallen.
Surprisingly, the trail does not end there. Although
this is the earliest recording such French quotation, it exactly echoes
an earlier quotation from King Alfred (Ælfrēd se Grēata),
“Ech nam Ælfrēdsmann.”
And there the trail goes faint: yet it winds down through the dark ages, all the way back to Athens, where Plato was once heard to state:
“Ego ouk eimi Platonistes.”
(We could go further, but suspect that our readers have been neglecting their Hittite.)
Bravo
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