While cruising the Mediterranean in October, I befriended a Brazilian crew member, Evandro, who told me that one of his favorite books is Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. I'm not sure I can adequately convey the craziness of this meeting.
The cruise ship was a Vegas hotel on water. It had nearly 3,000 guests and 1,200 employees, as well as an ice skating rink, climbing wall, casino, theater, bars, night club and so on. Marshall Berman is a professor of political science at City College of New York. Evandro, a former high school history teacher with a masters in social memory, was working at the ship's 24/7 cafe. I was being a dutiful and spoiled daughter.
We started talking because I was at the cafe reading a translation of the brilliant Brazilian novel, Dom Casmurro, by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis. Evandro launched into a mini-lecture about how the lead female character represents the emerging modern woman in Brazil and how Machado reveals her contradictions and society's ambivalence. I almost dropped my cup of tea.
So we talked about books. And we talked about my despair in the face of gluttonous consumerism and his calm curiosity. He played the anthropologist and I the disillusioned laborer. (There was no shortage of irony on this oceanic adventure.) I apologized for America's hubris and he replied, "Hey, don't worry, I want to go to America."
Fast forward. I finally read Berman's masterpiece on modern experience and am beginning to understand Evandro's hope in the face of his particularly surreal environs. Berman urges us to embrace the dynamism and possibility of modernity: "If we think of modernism as a struggle to make ourselves at home in a constantly changing world, we will realize that no mode of modernism can ever be definitive....I have argued that modern life and art and thought have the capacity for perpetual self-critique and self-renewal."*
Berman argues that in the twentieth century, visions of modernity became flattened, constrained, closed off: Both/And gave way to Either/Or. Where, after all, was the dynamism in the hypnotizing lights and coma-inducing meals of the super-sized cruise ship? But Evandro still saw the possibilities. Not only in the higher salary and chance to see cities around the world, but also within the confines of the ship itself. Where I saw a Vegas hotel, he saw a miniature United Nations, just with tropical cocktails. The cruise both showcased inequality and excessive consumption and provided opportunity for self-transformation and Track II diplomacy. In our brief encounter, I realized that I'm often too heavy on critique, too light on renewal. (To paraphrase my friend Jody, "Welcome to graduate school!")
Yesterday, Evandro emailed me to say that he's back home. During the ship's week-long sail across the Atlantic, he concluded, "I liked this experience! But it's enough for me!"
*Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (Penguin, 1988), pp. 6, 9.
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4 comments:
Yeesh, your cruise experience and mine were vastly different. I went with the Webers though. Mike Weber once tried to bring up Joaquim Maria Machado but I told him "dude, you're just going to have to save this discussion on the greatest Brazilian novelist of our time for the plane ride home." Luckily, I was on a different flight.
Was Evandro wearing a turtleneck? Because I'm totally picturing him as a dude that wears a ton of turtlenecks.
I also despaired the gluttonous consumerism on the cruise ship. The cruise brochure specified meals of thin gruel and heavy labor that would force me to contemplate the inequities of society but my damn travel agent must've screwed up my booking.
I completely deserve this mocking. See previous post re: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Admit it, you're glad :)
i love machado de assis - he kind of taught me portuguese - his book o alienista is a great little story about an insane psychiatrist who thinks everyone around him is insane and systematically locks everyone up.
and berman's book is one of the books that has helped me survive through grad school. though its a bit racist (he claims that modernity is defective in the east) the premise is still wonderful and true much of time in my experience. here's to all the destabilizing transformative contradictions of modernity!
Hi Sapana,
Thanks for reading! You speak Portuguese too? I'm impressed.
I'm still meditating on which contradictions to embrace and which to try and nudge a bit. I'm sure I'll have more to say about that once I've finished the PhD and started...working.
Cheers!
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