Affirmation in the Dark: Racial Slavery and Philosophical Pessimism

… what suffers always conceals itself.

Arthur Schopenhauer

1

Pessimism is as old as philosophy itself and profoundly shapes the latter's coeval development with a whole range of literary forms, whether prose, poetry or drama. And all of these aspects of expressive culture seem to bear an indelible relationship to the long history of enslavement, from ancient to modern; sustaining perennial attempts to broach and formulate the question of freedom by means creative and critical. One of the first known pieces of world literature is, of course, the list of Zuisudra, a short letter written in cuneiform script on clay tablets handing down the wisdom of the last king of Sumer prior to the devastation of the Great Flood some 5,000 years ago. For John D'Agata, editor of the three-volume series A New History of the Essay, this antediluvian text at the heart of the Eridu Genesis myth, dated several centuries before the first known stories or poems, is much more than the historical origin of literature established by previous scholars. If literature emerges in this history of writing as a departure from "the worst kind of nonfiction," i.e. the writing of "administrative function" (accounting, contract, trade, etc.); then "Ziusudra's list is the first essay in the world: it's a mind's inquisitive ramble through a place wiped clean of answers. It is trying to make a new shape where there previously was none" (4).

On this account, the essay—what Aldous Huxley famous described as "a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything"—is that form that, ironically and from the beginning, challenges from within the distinction between fiction and nonfiction as a matter of veracity and verisimilitude or certainty and certitude (quoted in Corrigan 14). It is "a form that's not propelled by information, but one compelled instead … by inquiry, by wonder, by doubt" (D'Agata 4). An ur-text of the literary imagination, whose origins are rightly lost to contemporary readers subsumed by the spectacle, the essay indicates "an alternative to commerce" (D'Agata 3). Departing from the thoughtlessness of calculation, it is the attempt or endeavor par excellence. That non-commercial alternative arises immanently, then, from the ruins or underside of the cradle of civilization, the end of business of usual; it is the writing of its earliest discontents, a writing that, while it has historicity, cannot for all that develop as a tradition without, in some sense, betraying itself. The king of no one, the sole survivor, the impossible witness may carry forward prehistoric clichés of health and prosperity in service of the very hierarchy and stratification that damned the preceding social order to undergo the violence of the tabula rasa ("no more water, the fire next time"). Nonetheless he alights, at last, upon a genuine truth: "For fate, dear friends, is like a wet bank. It is always going to make you slip" (D'Agata 8). Thus spoke Ziusudra.

In the next millennium, we encounter on this score the tale of Ennatum of Akkad sometime around 1500 BCE, not far from a now rebuilt Sumer in the Mesopotamian region. Dialogue of Pessimism, or arad mitanguranni in the original Akkadian, records a series of exchanges between an anonymous master and his slave, employing a contrapuntal format in which the master begins each of the eleven stanzas by calling out, "Slave, listen to me!" Once the slave replies, the master issues a statement of purpose followed by the slave's expected affirmation and rationale for that course of action. However, once the slave affirms and rationalizes the master's initial wish, the master upon further consideration cancels his plan and withdraws his command, after which the slave affirms and rationalizes that change of mind as well, over and over again.

The master in this brief dialogue is stuck in his dwelling, gripped by a structure of prevarication wherein he cannot decide upon any action whatsoever; the logic of the decision confounds him in the face of vanity. He encounters not only the ambiguity of the situation before him or the ambivalence of...