Alias Arts

­­­­­­­­By the last decades of the nineteenth century, an
obscuring perplex of ideas regarding dust hung above the inhabitants of the European
city like overlapping clouds, variously threatening or inspiring with the weight of
knowledge, quantity of filth, or degree of infection they contained. London,
especially—having only lately escaped a mid-century cholera season that had
devastated parts of the inner city—seemed to exist in a miasmic haze of dirt,
disease, and curiously aestheticized industrial pollution. As early as 1661, in th­e
pages of his Fumifugium: Or, The Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoake of London
Dissipated, the diarist and polymath John Evelyn had complained that citizens
breathed “nothing but an impure and thick Mist, accompanied by a fuliginous and
filthy vapour,” which concoction scoured their lungs and disordered the entire body,
so that coughs, catarrhs, and consumption raged more in London alone than in the
whole of the rest of the world. The poison fug was partly attributable to domestic
fires, but Evelyn blames brewers, dyers, lime-burners, and salt- and soap-boilers
for the most noxious emanations:

­THE PROBLEM

In his brief essay “Gli
scacchisti irritabili” (“The 
Irritable Chess Players”) of 1985, Primo
Levi elaborates a set of symmetries between the act of literary creation
and the playing of a game of chess. Both a work of literature and the
royal game, he suggests, unfold in time within strictures that
inexorably invoke “life and the struggle for life.” There is, as he puts
it, a “symbolic shadow” that lengthens over a chess board, since 
the
way to the end is the way to a death, “a death for which you yourself
are guilty.” The novel, of course, 
is the literary form that has
evolved precisely to afford 
language the means of erecting and
choreographing such a metaphorical life space. And thus it is no
surprise that the novel, too, is haunted by a long shadow: all plots, as
Don DeLillo memorably put it, end in death. Moreover, en route to their
respective endgames, both chess and the novel offer powerful arenas in
which to investigate the question of questions: the ever-vexatious issue
of the relationship between fate and agency, between necessity and
freedom. Every move is our own, except when it’s not. Either way, the
board thins, the sheaf of paper in the right hand dwindles, sifting

left as if blown by an inexorable wind—though of course, we turn every
page. Chess, in this sense, is the opposite of dice, just as the novel
is the opposite of Scripture (the exact difference between chance and
providence has never been clear, but they share an antithesis in
deliberative subjectivity, and this may be 
a clue).