Common and Uncommon Sense
Brian Fawcett, Books in Canada, October 1994
In The Doubter's Companion: A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense, Saul gives us a substantial part of the lexicon. I'm not sure whether it will help make him the Voltaire of the late 20th century that he'd like to be, but I'm dead sure he's written the most entertaining and useful book of this publishing season, and maybe well beyond that. It's meant to be the clarifying footnotes to Voltaire's Bastards, but without the general theme that tried to pave every detail into a single road. The Doubter's Companion is much easier to follow and sharper in its detail. Actually I can't recall ever having as much fun with a book as I did with this one, leaping from definition to definition to see what indignity Saul would perpetrate on which set of fools next - or what new insight he was going to deliver.
Some of his 300 or so definitions, which run from one sentence to several pages in length, are just plain witty, like his explanation of where croissants come from, and the circumstantially hilarious discussion of dandruff. But Saul's wit is always laced with acid. This occasionally leads him to the politically incorrect, but more often to the uproariously funny. Yet most of the time - even when he appears to be indulging his own wit - he is penetratingly accurate. And on the crucial subject of economics, he is dead on.
Saul's greatest gift is a first-rate nose for large-scale bullshit, and in The Doubter's Companion he uses it to sniff out the vast lies that he seemed merely to cast a reasonable light on in Voltaire's Bastards. His is a rare gift in this country, which has, arguably, fewer than a dozen writers who possess this kind of nose at all. And none of them quite have his nose for the big stuff.
The Doubter's Companion isn't perfect. One would have to share Saul's remarkable and unorthodox intellectual range to edit him properly, and this may be why some of the writing is less than translucent. In addition, he can be impatient and arch, and a few of his gags ends up being smothered by the irritable cognitive shorthand he uses to move ideas from one place to another. He also suffers from a vaguely Oedipal hatred of Margaret Thatcher, one that leads him to some frivolous - or at leas excessively fanciful - definitions whenever the subject of Great Britain appears on the horizon. And of course he isn't exactly qualified to make the sweeping pronouncements he does.
Which brings me to the purpose of this rave, and my assignment as Books in Canada culture cop. The mission of an expertocracy like ours is to prevent the sterile web of addled ideas and intellectual habits that experts and their masters have used to construct the present insanity. Close to the core of both Voltaire's Bastards and The Doubter's Companion is the idea that our present societal reliance on expertise is the most malevolent outgrowth of the covert inscription of assumptive knowledge. What Saul is practising in these books - and implicitly demanding of us - is a return to common sense. By "common sense" he doesn't mean quaint folklore and cracker-barrel truisms, but a more deliberate and civic-minded generalism that we rarely see nowadays. The Doubter's Companion is, first and finally, a civic-minded work - exactly what an artist in a democracy is bound by the terms of citizenship to produce in a time of crisis. Saul's generalism is also precisely what the great writers of the past practised, and a sharp rebuke to the specializations that conventional novelists, poets, and playwrights have settled for. That The Doubter's Companion (and for that matter, Voltaire's Bastards) is much more exhilarating to read than 99 per cent of our novels and poems is perhaps the best proof of just how successful Saul's project is as art.
Still, let me go a step beyond that and be brutally clear about what I'm suggesting here. Expertise and art are natural enemies. They are so because expertise operates by secrecy while seeking control and power, and art operates by clear, public language in the service of free expression and wholeness.
It seems to me that most of today's writers are all too prepared to plead specialist's rights for what they do - and to punish anyone who transgresses the declared boundaries of the specialty. They take it as a given that the purpose of "serious" literary art is to illustrate the range and fragility of human sensitivities, and nothing much more than that. It makes most of our tired-out fiction not much more than a quick, cheap holiday from the mess looming over our collective heads, and our poetry little more than soulful drool.
Of course, these same writers can be heard whining about how insensitive the instruments of political control have become, and they whine much louder about the plight of suffering authors. Evidently it never occurs to them to do what Saul has done by insisting that the world is comprehensible through a renewed common sense, and by refusing to step into the trap of specialization. Maybe they should reconsider what they're doing. And lo, The Doubter's Companion just happens to be an excellent place to start.
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