Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
The Nature of Man
It is not natural to see man as a natural product. It is not common sense to call man a common object of the country or the seashore. It is not seeing straight to see him as an animal. It is not sane. It sins against the light; against that broad daylight of proportion which is the principle of all reality. It is reached by stretching a point, by making out a case, by artificially selecting a certain light and shade, by bringing into prominence the lesser or lower things which may happen to be similar. The solid thing standing in the sunlight, the thing we can walk round and see from all sides, is quite different. It is also quite extraordinary, and the more sides we see of it the more extraordinary it seems. It is emphatically not a thing that follows or flows naturally from anything else. If we imagine that an inhuman or impersonal intelligence could have felt from the first the general nature of the non-human world sufficiently to see that things would evolve in whatever way they did evolve, there would have been nothing whatever in all that natural world to prepare such a mind for such an unnatural novelty. To such a mind, man would most certainly not have seemed something like one herd out of a hundred herds finding richer pasture, or one swallow out of a hundred swallows making a summer under a strange sky. It would not be in the same scale and scarcely in the same dimension. We might as truly say that it would not be in the same universe. It would be more like seeing one cow out of a hundred cows suddenly jump over the moon or one pig out of a hundred pigs grow wings in a flash and fly. It would not be a question of the cattle finding their own grazing ground but of their building their own cattle-sheds, not a question of one swallow making a summer but of his making a summer house. For the very fact that birds do build nests is one of those similarities that sharpen the startling difference. The very fact that a bird can get as far as building a nest, and cannot get any farther, proves that he has not a mind as man has a mind; it proves it more completely than if he built nothing at all. If he built nothing at all, he might possibly be a philosopher of the Quietist or Buddhistic school, indifferent to all but the mind within. But when he builds as he does build and is satisfied and sings aloud with satisfaction, then we know there is really an invisible veil like a pane of glass between him and us, like the window on which a bird will beat in vain. But suppose our abstract onlooker saw one of the birds begin to build as men build. Suppose in an incredibly short space of time there were seven styles of architecture for one style of nest. Suppose the bird carefully selected forked twigs and pointed leaves to express the piercing piety of Gothic, but turned to broad foliage and black mud when he sought in a darker mood to call up the heavy columns of Bel and Ashtaroth; making his nest indeed one of the hanging gardens of Babylon. Suppose the bird made little clay statues of birds celebrated in letters or politics and stuck them up in front of the nest. Suppose that one bird out of a thousand birds began to do one of the thousand things that man had already done even in the morning of the world; and we can be quite certain that the onlooker would not regard such a bird as a mere evolutionary variety of the other birds; he would regard it as a very fearful wild-fowl indeed; possibly as a bird of ill-omen, certainly as an omen. That bird would tell the augurs, not of something that would happen, but of some thing that had happened. That something would be the appearance of a mind with a new dimension of depth; a mind like that of man. If there be no God, no other mind could conceivably have foreseen it.
Now, as a matter of fact, there is not a shadow of evidence that this thing was evolved at all. There is not a particle of proof that this transition came slowly, or even that it came naturally. In a strictly scientific sense, we simply know nothing whatever about how it grew, or whether it grew, or what it is. There may be a broken trail of stone and bone faintly suggesting the development of the human body. There is nothing even faintly suggesting such a development of this human mind. It was not and it was; we know not in what instant or in what infinity of years. Something happened; and it has all the appearance of a transaction outside of time. It has therefore nothing to do with history in the ordinary sense. The historian must take it or something like it for granted; it is not his business as a historian to explain it. But if he cannot explain it as a historian, he will not explain it as a biologist.
–G.K. Chesterton/The Everlasting Man (1925).
Now, as a matter of fact, there is not a shadow of evidence that this thing was evolved at all. There is not a particle of proof that this transition came slowly, or even that it came naturally. In a strictly scientific sense, we simply know nothing whatever about how it grew, or whether it grew, or what it is. There may be a broken trail of stone and bone faintly suggesting the development of the human body. There is nothing even faintly suggesting such a development of this human mind. It was not and it was; we know not in what instant or in what infinity of years. Something happened; and it has all the appearance of a transaction outside of time. It has therefore nothing to do with history in the ordinary sense. The historian must take it or something like it for granted; it is not his business as a historian to explain it. But if he cannot explain it as a historian, he will not explain it as a biologist.
–G.K. Chesterton/The Everlasting Man (1925).
Finding the Churchill Gene...at the Bottom of the Bottle
From Prospect in the UK, a story claiming that “more than one in ten Caucasians may have a ‘Churchill gene’ which helps them turn booze into great works”:
Most people use alcohol as a social rather than creative stimulant, banishing cares with a potation or two after work; lubricating discourse rather than inspiring the intellect. Yet a number of our greatest writers, painters and musicians also seem to have relied on it as fuel for their muse. Winston Churchill claimed it crucial for The World Crisis, his six-volume memoirs, stating: “always remember that I have taken more out of alcohol than it has taken out of me.” Novelist William Faulkner drank more intermittently, but claimed not to be able to face a blank page without a bottle of Jack Daniels. Beethoven fell under the influence in the later part of his creative life. Among painters, Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon, and many others liked a drop or two while working.
Such figures make alcohol part of the territory of creativity. An exceptional few seemed to thrive on drink, leading to the idea of a “Churchill gene”: where some have a genetic makeup allowing them to remain healthy and brilliant despite consumption that would kill others. Mark Twain endorsed this view saying: “My vices protect me but they would assassinate you!”
No doubt some real genes—especially those with a high expression of alcohol dehydrogenase and tolerance of alcohol breakdown products such as acetaldehyde, the “hangover” chemical—contribute to this theory. Yet until recently science has had little to say about alcohol and the creative process, confining itself to studies of damage, tolerance and addiction. Over the last few years, however, evidence has emerged that some have, if not a Churchill gene, then a creative cocktail gene....
Most people use alcohol as a social rather than creative stimulant, banishing cares with a potation or two after work; lubricating discourse rather than inspiring the intellect. Yet a number of our greatest writers, painters and musicians also seem to have relied on it as fuel for their muse. Winston Churchill claimed it crucial for The World Crisis, his six-volume memoirs, stating: “always remember that I have taken more out of alcohol than it has taken out of me.” Novelist William Faulkner drank more intermittently, but claimed not to be able to face a blank page without a bottle of Jack Daniels. Beethoven fell under the influence in the later part of his creative life. Among painters, Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock, Francis Bacon, and many others liked a drop or two while working.
Such figures make alcohol part of the territory of creativity. An exceptional few seemed to thrive on drink, leading to the idea of a “Churchill gene”: where some have a genetic makeup allowing them to remain healthy and brilliant despite consumption that would kill others. Mark Twain endorsed this view saying: “My vices protect me but they would assassinate you!”
No doubt some real genes—especially those with a high expression of alcohol dehydrogenase and tolerance of alcohol breakdown products such as acetaldehyde, the “hangover” chemical—contribute to this theory. Yet until recently science has had little to say about alcohol and the creative process, confining itself to studies of damage, tolerance and addiction. Over the last few years, however, evidence has emerged that some have, if not a Churchill gene, then a creative cocktail gene....
Man: Not a Machine
The Global Spiral has an excerpt from John Lukacs’ latest and apparently, last book, Last Rites.
Enjoy this excerpt of the excerpt from one of the truly great historians of the last century:
It is arguable that the two greatest intellectual achievements of the now ended age of five hundred years have been the invention (invention, rather than discovery) of the scientific method, and the development of historical thinking. Towering, of course, above the recognition of the latter stood and stands the recognition of the importance of “science,” because of the fantastic and still increasing variety of its practical applications. Yet there is ample reason to recognize evidences of an increasing duality in our reactions to its ever more astonishing successful and successive applications.
At first (or even second) sight the rapid increase of the variety of the technical applications of “science” are stunning. Most of these have gone beyond even the vividest imaginations of our forebears. That they are beneficial in many fields, perhaps foremost in applications of medicine and techniques of surgery, leaves little room for doubt. That most people, including youngsters, are eager to acquire and to use the ever more complicated gadgets and machines available to them cannot be doubted either. Consider here how the natural (natural here means instinctive but not insightful) ability in dealing with pushbutton mechanical devices is normal for young, sometimes even very young, people who do not at all mind comparing or even imagining themselves as akin to those machines, unaware as they are of the complexity and the uniqueness of human nature.
At the same time consider how the reactions of people to the ever more and more complicated machines in their lives are increasingly passive. Few of them know how their machines are built and how they actually function. (Even fewer of them are capable of repairing them.) Inspired by them they are not. (Compare, for example, the popular enthusiasm that followed Lindbergh’s first flight across the Atlantic in 1927 with the much weaker excitement that followed the astronauts’ first flight to the moon and back forty-two years later.) Machines may make people’s physical lives easier, but they do not make their thinking easier. I am not writing about happiness or unhappiness but about thinking. It is because of thinking, because of the inevitable mental intrusion into the structure and sequence of events, that the entire scheme of mechanical causality is insufficient. Still every one of our machines is wholly, entirely, dependent on mechanical causality. Yes, we employ our minds when—meaning: before, during, and after—we use them: but their functioning is entirely dependent on the very same causes producing the very same effects. It is because of their mechanical causality that computers are more than two hundred and fifty years old, indeed, outdated. In 1749 a French rationalist, De la Mettrie, wrote a famous book: Man a Machine. That was a new proposition then (though perhaps even then not much more than one of those Ideas Whose Time Has Come): dismiss soul or spirit; man may be a very complicated, perhaps the most complicated machine, but a machine nevertheless. Two hundred and fifty years later there is something dull and antiquated in such a picture: a dusty and mouldy model of human nature. Hence, below the surface: our present passive (and sometimes sickish and unenthusiastic) dependence on and acceptance of many machines.
Enjoy this excerpt of the excerpt from one of the truly great historians of the last century:
It is arguable that the two greatest intellectual achievements of the now ended age of five hundred years have been the invention (invention, rather than discovery) of the scientific method, and the development of historical thinking. Towering, of course, above the recognition of the latter stood and stands the recognition of the importance of “science,” because of the fantastic and still increasing variety of its practical applications. Yet there is ample reason to recognize evidences of an increasing duality in our reactions to its ever more astonishing successful and successive applications.
At first (or even second) sight the rapid increase of the variety of the technical applications of “science” are stunning. Most of these have gone beyond even the vividest imaginations of our forebears. That they are beneficial in many fields, perhaps foremost in applications of medicine and techniques of surgery, leaves little room for doubt. That most people, including youngsters, are eager to acquire and to use the ever more complicated gadgets and machines available to them cannot be doubted either. Consider here how the natural (natural here means instinctive but not insightful) ability in dealing with pushbutton mechanical devices is normal for young, sometimes even very young, people who do not at all mind comparing or even imagining themselves as akin to those machines, unaware as they are of the complexity and the uniqueness of human nature.
At the same time consider how the reactions of people to the ever more and more complicated machines in their lives are increasingly passive. Few of them know how their machines are built and how they actually function. (Even fewer of them are capable of repairing them.) Inspired by them they are not. (Compare, for example, the popular enthusiasm that followed Lindbergh’s first flight across the Atlantic in 1927 with the much weaker excitement that followed the astronauts’ first flight to the moon and back forty-two years later.) Machines may make people’s physical lives easier, but they do not make their thinking easier. I am not writing about happiness or unhappiness but about thinking. It is because of thinking, because of the inevitable mental intrusion into the structure and sequence of events, that the entire scheme of mechanical causality is insufficient. Still every one of our machines is wholly, entirely, dependent on mechanical causality. Yes, we employ our minds when—meaning: before, during, and after—we use them: but their functioning is entirely dependent on the very same causes producing the very same effects. It is because of their mechanical causality that computers are more than two hundred and fifty years old, indeed, outdated. In 1749 a French rationalist, De la Mettrie, wrote a famous book: Man a Machine. That was a new proposition then (though perhaps even then not much more than one of those Ideas Whose Time Has Come): dismiss soul or spirit; man may be a very complicated, perhaps the most complicated machine, but a machine nevertheless. Two hundred and fifty years later there is something dull and antiquated in such a picture: a dusty and mouldy model of human nature. Hence, below the surface: our present passive (and sometimes sickish and unenthusiastic) dependence on and acceptance of many machines.
Anton Ego on the Art Critic
"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face is that, in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talents — new creations. The new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new, an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau's, who is, in this critic's opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau's soon, hungry for more."
-Anton Ego
*for some reason, it is cut short at the end.
-Anton Ego
*for some reason, it is cut short at the end.
To Read and to Live (Part 5)
Mikhail Bakhtin once argued that it is in literature, and particularly the great novels, that the most accurate and useful accounts of our moral lives may be found. A perfect example of what he is talking about may be found in that great English novel, George Eliot's Middlemarch. The moral agent here is the physician Lydgate, who is in charge of an infirmary that is in need of a chaplain. Lydgate is on the committee that will decide, by vote, who that chaplain will be. There are two candidates: one, Mr. Tyke, whom Lydgate does not know, but who is strongly supported by Mr. Bulstrode, the man who hired Lydgate and pays his salary; the other, Mr. Farebrother, whom Lydgate knows and likes, but about whose religious calling and moral seriousness Lydgate has some doubts. Now, when Lydgate arrives at the meeting during which the vote will be taken...
But clearly this is not going to work. In my description I have already had to leave out Lydgate's earlier conversation with Mr. Bulstrode on the subject, and though I have said that Lydgate likes Mr. Farebrother I have not explained how he came to know him, or what precisely his doubts about Farebrother consist of; nor have I said anything about what Mr. Farebrother's own attitude toward his candidacy is, or about his understanding of Lydgate's difficult position, or about what he has said to Lydgate on these subjects.
And George Eliot's account of the meeting itself is quite carefully drawn and takes up about a dozen pages, and any mere summary of it would be an injustice too. In the end, I could only use this passage from Middlemarch to illustrate Bakhtin's argument about the ethical power of great novels if I could cite the whole section of the book relating to Lydgate's decision; but of course, my very inability to squeeze Eliot's deep and subtle moral analysis into a few paragraphs of an essay proves as well as anything could Bakhtin's point.
Readers of Middlemarch know that, in the end, Lydgate's conscience cannot survive his society's constant pressure towards compromise and conformity--perhaps his vote for Mr. Tyke marks the beginning of his descent. And this is one of the reasons why another figure in the pantheon of ethical criticism, Robert Coles, assigns Middlemarch to his students at Harvard Medical School. One of his former students, after becoming a doctor, spoke to Coles about his recollections of his reading:
"There are days when I think of George Eliot and her Lydgate, and I come to the conclusion that lots of us doctors fool ourselves very easily, and that's what Middlemarch has to say to me now, just as it did back then. But maybe there's hope. I remember the end of the novel, when she pointed out that you never do know how a life will turn out. (I'm sure paraphrasing!) Well, maybe my friend Lydgate will help me turn the corner-go after what I think is right for me to do, for the sake of my wife and son, and for my own sake, too. I'd hate to end up a driven, driven 'success,' who is bored by what he does, but is always postponing any moral confrontation with himself!"
How easily such a response could be deconstructed. How quickly and surgically could one of those practiced critics expose the naivete of this doctor's unconfronted assumptions about meaning, textuality, and the dysfunctional logic of late capitalism. But the same critics who are so quick to dismantle the way Coles and his student think about literature are exceedingly reluctant to interrogate their own discomfort with and resentment of such naivete. Professors need to think about this: could such discomfort be that of the professional faced with the student "amateur"'s claim to use a book in a way not certified by the professional bureaucracy, such resentment that of the carefully trained specialist faced with Coles the so-called generalist?
These are certainly distinctions for which Coles cares little, and I applaud him for it. Literature for Coles is a wonderfully versatile tool, useful to him in any number of the tasks he takes on in his academic garden: stories can be counted on to stimulate ethical reflection when other texts seem helpless.
Now, the moral pilgrimage of Coles' former student cannot simply be endorsed to be sure: he speaks of what he thinks is right for him to do, but we don't learn what that is, or whether what's right for him is right for others. Nevertheless, it is clear that his comments place us in a wholly different, and far richer, world than the one invoked by Henry Louis Gates' "marionette theater of the political." The ethical, dialogical approach to reading and criticism fostered in their different ways by Booth, Bakhtin, and Coles is far superior to that marionette theater--superior in its comprehension of literary works, superior in its accounts of the human person and of the workings of moral agency.
Yet something may be missing. In the commitment that these writers share to dialogue, to conversation, there is a tendency to forget the matter of ends. Why are we conversing? What purpose will this dialogue serve? Will it even in a minor and indirect way help us to do justly, and love mercy? These are important questions, because even if the dialogical approach is conducive to ethical reflection, how happy can we be with that reflection if it in turn doesn't change the way we act?
This is a problem that Coles seems particularly sensitive to as well. He quotes a magnificent passage from Anton Chekhov's story "Gooseberries," in which the protagonist, Ivan Ivanych, talks about the despair that comes upon him when he confronts a genuinely happy man (who happens to be his brother):
"Behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, and trouble will come to him-illness, poverty, losses, and then no one will see or hear him, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer. The happy man lives at his ease, faintly fluttered by small daily cares, like an aspen in the wind-and all is well."
Confronted with Ivan Ivanych's wish, Coles asks: "How do we find that 'hammer' for ourselves?...Perhaps (and this is a gloomy thought) the best of us are in the tradition of...Dr. Chekhov: we are seized by spasms of genuine moral awareness, but we are pliant as aspens in our capacity to accommodate to the prevailing rhythms of the world we inhabit." And one danger of the dialogical/ethical approach to literature is just its tendency to accommodate itself to those "prevailing rhythms." We may enjoy the ethical conversation so deeply, and feel so strongly the need to defend the values of dialogue and conversation, that we forget to ask whether the conversation has a point other than its own continuation.
This is a question that we need to ask Wayne Booth, who, despite the importance of his defense of ethical criticism, has a distressing tendency to back away from the natural consequences of his own approach. As far as I know, and for many years, Booth has been an articulate and determined advocate of critical pluralism against what he believes to be the very powerful temptations to narrow-mindedness and dogmatism in literary criticism.
But, as Martha Nussbaum has pointed out, "pluralism" is a word with many meanings, and she contends that Booth uses the word in at least five different ways in The Company We Keep. Some of these usages Nussbaum finds acceptable, even admirable: for instance, Booth's claim that we should not try to limit the potential ways in which certain books can be good for us, because there are many different goods which it is legitimate to pursue. But Booth conceives of pluralism in other ways that Nussbaum finds troublingly inconsistent with Booth's emphasis on ethics. For instance, he is so careful not to appear dogmatic that he seems to refer even to his critique of racism as mere elements of his personal "ideology." To this tendency Nussbaum replies, quite rightly: "First of all, it will not work. Many people will hate this book and will call Booth a reactionary; that is the price he will pay for his defense of reason. Second, it sells out his position. Anti-racism, by Booth's own account, is not just his 'ideology.' It is an ethical position both defensible and defended by rational argument."
Perhaps one of the reasons both Nussbaum and Coles see the dangers of an overly pluralistic, a merely conversational, ethical criticism better than Booth does is that, quite simply, they are not English professors: Coles is a doctor, Nussbaum a philosopher. Neither of them has a professional investment in maintaining the reputation of literature or literary studies as such, and this is important: literature for each of them is a resource, a very valuable resource to be sure, but essentially a help, an aid--something to help them in their quest to think better about goodness and to act upon what they think.
This way of considering literature can make some English professors and students uncomfortable: they may feel that it debases literature, makes it the mere handmaiden of other academic disciplines. But is such service really so bad guys? What would George Eliot have preferred: to be the subject of more professional "readings" or to be read by medical students who find themselves confronted (perhaps for the first time) with the real moral consequences of their professional choices? What Nussbaum and Coles remind us is that literature is simply too important to be left only in the hands of literature professors and students!
Is there an inconsistency in that last paragraph? At one moment to call literature a mere "tool" and at the next to pronounce it too important to be left to literature professors? The contradiction is only apparent. W.H. Auden was right when he claimed that if a poet could make poems both beautiful and useful, he or she would be fulfilling a higher calling than any imagined by the priests of the autonomous imagination.
Similarly, Nussbaum contends not only that moral philosophy needs literature, but also that there is a very important sense in which literature needs moral philosophy, or rather, needs for its own fulfillment to be taken seriously as a vehicle of moral knowledge. Thinking of a favorite passage of hers, one in which David Copperfield remembers his unhappy childhood and the time he spent "reading, as it were, for life," Nussbaum writes:
"We do 'read for life,' bringing to the literary texts we love...our pressing questions and perplexities, searching for images of what we might do and be, and holding these up against the images we derive from our knowledge of other conceptions, literary, philosophical, and religious. And the further pursuit of this enterprise through explicit comparison and explanation is not a diminution of the novels at all, but rather an expression of the depth and breadth of the claims that those who love them make for them."
In other words, the best way we can demonstrate our love for great books is to use them in our search to discover "what we might do and be." Paradoxically, the elevation of literature to a quasi-sacred status, protected from the messiness of our historical lives and severed from "the great human family," diminishes literature just as much as the severely prosecutorial power-criticism of Scholes and Froula.
But Nussbaum's ethics makes no room for religious experience and belief; thus it too must be supplemented. Consider, therefore, a passage from the first book of Augustine's On Christian Doctrine:
"Some things are to be enjoyed, others to be used, and there are others which are to be enjoyed and used. Those things which are to be enjoyed make us blessed. Those things which are to be used help and, as it were, sustain us as we move toward blessedness in order that we may gain and cling to those things which make us blessed. If we who enjoy and use things, being placed in the midst of things of both kinds, wish to enjoy those things which should be used, our course will be impeded and sometimes deflected, so that we are retarded in obtaining those things which are to be enjoyed, or even prevented altogether, shackled by an inferior love."
The love of books is, in Augustine's scheme, an inferior love, but that does not mean it must be an inappropriate one. It is only when that love loses sight of its inferiority, and becomes an end in itself, that it "shackles" us. When we use that love and those books to pursue a better life, indeed to pursue blessedness--and there are many and varied ways in which we may use them in that pursuit--then our reading may be wondrously healthy and life-giving. The rigid orthodoxies of current political criticism, the obsessive wrestling over textual power by writers and readers, may seem to aid in that quest, but in fact they only impede it. The ethically-impelled reading championed by Booth and Coles and Bakhtin and Nussbaum is sloppy, uncertain, and often confusing, I know; it has no specific theoretical program nor a precisely calibrated methodology. But until literary theory produces its own Augustine, or until we start paying attention to the old one, these are our best instructors in the difficult art of "reading for life."
But clearly this is not going to work. In my description I have already had to leave out Lydgate's earlier conversation with Mr. Bulstrode on the subject, and though I have said that Lydgate likes Mr. Farebrother I have not explained how he came to know him, or what precisely his doubts about Farebrother consist of; nor have I said anything about what Mr. Farebrother's own attitude toward his candidacy is, or about his understanding of Lydgate's difficult position, or about what he has said to Lydgate on these subjects.
And George Eliot's account of the meeting itself is quite carefully drawn and takes up about a dozen pages, and any mere summary of it would be an injustice too. In the end, I could only use this passage from Middlemarch to illustrate Bakhtin's argument about the ethical power of great novels if I could cite the whole section of the book relating to Lydgate's decision; but of course, my very inability to squeeze Eliot's deep and subtle moral analysis into a few paragraphs of an essay proves as well as anything could Bakhtin's point.
Readers of Middlemarch know that, in the end, Lydgate's conscience cannot survive his society's constant pressure towards compromise and conformity--perhaps his vote for Mr. Tyke marks the beginning of his descent. And this is one of the reasons why another figure in the pantheon of ethical criticism, Robert Coles, assigns Middlemarch to his students at Harvard Medical School. One of his former students, after becoming a doctor, spoke to Coles about his recollections of his reading:
"There are days when I think of George Eliot and her Lydgate, and I come to the conclusion that lots of us doctors fool ourselves very easily, and that's what Middlemarch has to say to me now, just as it did back then. But maybe there's hope. I remember the end of the novel, when she pointed out that you never do know how a life will turn out. (I'm sure paraphrasing!) Well, maybe my friend Lydgate will help me turn the corner-go after what I think is right for me to do, for the sake of my wife and son, and for my own sake, too. I'd hate to end up a driven, driven 'success,' who is bored by what he does, but is always postponing any moral confrontation with himself!"
How easily such a response could be deconstructed. How quickly and surgically could one of those practiced critics expose the naivete of this doctor's unconfronted assumptions about meaning, textuality, and the dysfunctional logic of late capitalism. But the same critics who are so quick to dismantle the way Coles and his student think about literature are exceedingly reluctant to interrogate their own discomfort with and resentment of such naivete. Professors need to think about this: could such discomfort be that of the professional faced with the student "amateur"'s claim to use a book in a way not certified by the professional bureaucracy, such resentment that of the carefully trained specialist faced with Coles the so-called generalist?
These are certainly distinctions for which Coles cares little, and I applaud him for it. Literature for Coles is a wonderfully versatile tool, useful to him in any number of the tasks he takes on in his academic garden: stories can be counted on to stimulate ethical reflection when other texts seem helpless.
Now, the moral pilgrimage of Coles' former student cannot simply be endorsed to be sure: he speaks of what he thinks is right for him to do, but we don't learn what that is, or whether what's right for him is right for others. Nevertheless, it is clear that his comments place us in a wholly different, and far richer, world than the one invoked by Henry Louis Gates' "marionette theater of the political." The ethical, dialogical approach to reading and criticism fostered in their different ways by Booth, Bakhtin, and Coles is far superior to that marionette theater--superior in its comprehension of literary works, superior in its accounts of the human person and of the workings of moral agency.
Yet something may be missing. In the commitment that these writers share to dialogue, to conversation, there is a tendency to forget the matter of ends. Why are we conversing? What purpose will this dialogue serve? Will it even in a minor and indirect way help us to do justly, and love mercy? These are important questions, because even if the dialogical approach is conducive to ethical reflection, how happy can we be with that reflection if it in turn doesn't change the way we act?
This is a problem that Coles seems particularly sensitive to as well. He quotes a magnificent passage from Anton Chekhov's story "Gooseberries," in which the protagonist, Ivan Ivanych, talks about the despair that comes upon him when he confronts a genuinely happy man (who happens to be his brother):
"Behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, and trouble will come to him-illness, poverty, losses, and then no one will see or hear him, just as now he neither sees nor hears others. But there is no man with a hammer. The happy man lives at his ease, faintly fluttered by small daily cares, like an aspen in the wind-and all is well."
Confronted with Ivan Ivanych's wish, Coles asks: "How do we find that 'hammer' for ourselves?...Perhaps (and this is a gloomy thought) the best of us are in the tradition of...Dr. Chekhov: we are seized by spasms of genuine moral awareness, but we are pliant as aspens in our capacity to accommodate to the prevailing rhythms of the world we inhabit." And one danger of the dialogical/ethical approach to literature is just its tendency to accommodate itself to those "prevailing rhythms." We may enjoy the ethical conversation so deeply, and feel so strongly the need to defend the values of dialogue and conversation, that we forget to ask whether the conversation has a point other than its own continuation.
This is a question that we need to ask Wayne Booth, who, despite the importance of his defense of ethical criticism, has a distressing tendency to back away from the natural consequences of his own approach. As far as I know, and for many years, Booth has been an articulate and determined advocate of critical pluralism against what he believes to be the very powerful temptations to narrow-mindedness and dogmatism in literary criticism.
But, as Martha Nussbaum has pointed out, "pluralism" is a word with many meanings, and she contends that Booth uses the word in at least five different ways in The Company We Keep. Some of these usages Nussbaum finds acceptable, even admirable: for instance, Booth's claim that we should not try to limit the potential ways in which certain books can be good for us, because there are many different goods which it is legitimate to pursue. But Booth conceives of pluralism in other ways that Nussbaum finds troublingly inconsistent with Booth's emphasis on ethics. For instance, he is so careful not to appear dogmatic that he seems to refer even to his critique of racism as mere elements of his personal "ideology." To this tendency Nussbaum replies, quite rightly: "First of all, it will not work. Many people will hate this book and will call Booth a reactionary; that is the price he will pay for his defense of reason. Second, it sells out his position. Anti-racism, by Booth's own account, is not just his 'ideology.' It is an ethical position both defensible and defended by rational argument."
Perhaps one of the reasons both Nussbaum and Coles see the dangers of an overly pluralistic, a merely conversational, ethical criticism better than Booth does is that, quite simply, they are not English professors: Coles is a doctor, Nussbaum a philosopher. Neither of them has a professional investment in maintaining the reputation of literature or literary studies as such, and this is important: literature for each of them is a resource, a very valuable resource to be sure, but essentially a help, an aid--something to help them in their quest to think better about goodness and to act upon what they think.
This way of considering literature can make some English professors and students uncomfortable: they may feel that it debases literature, makes it the mere handmaiden of other academic disciplines. But is such service really so bad guys? What would George Eliot have preferred: to be the subject of more professional "readings" or to be read by medical students who find themselves confronted (perhaps for the first time) with the real moral consequences of their professional choices? What Nussbaum and Coles remind us is that literature is simply too important to be left only in the hands of literature professors and students!
Is there an inconsistency in that last paragraph? At one moment to call literature a mere "tool" and at the next to pronounce it too important to be left to literature professors? The contradiction is only apparent. W.H. Auden was right when he claimed that if a poet could make poems both beautiful and useful, he or she would be fulfilling a higher calling than any imagined by the priests of the autonomous imagination.
Similarly, Nussbaum contends not only that moral philosophy needs literature, but also that there is a very important sense in which literature needs moral philosophy, or rather, needs for its own fulfillment to be taken seriously as a vehicle of moral knowledge. Thinking of a favorite passage of hers, one in which David Copperfield remembers his unhappy childhood and the time he spent "reading, as it were, for life," Nussbaum writes:
"We do 'read for life,' bringing to the literary texts we love...our pressing questions and perplexities, searching for images of what we might do and be, and holding these up against the images we derive from our knowledge of other conceptions, literary, philosophical, and religious. And the further pursuit of this enterprise through explicit comparison and explanation is not a diminution of the novels at all, but rather an expression of the depth and breadth of the claims that those who love them make for them."
In other words, the best way we can demonstrate our love for great books is to use them in our search to discover "what we might do and be." Paradoxically, the elevation of literature to a quasi-sacred status, protected from the messiness of our historical lives and severed from "the great human family," diminishes literature just as much as the severely prosecutorial power-criticism of Scholes and Froula.
But Nussbaum's ethics makes no room for religious experience and belief; thus it too must be supplemented. Consider, therefore, a passage from the first book of Augustine's On Christian Doctrine:
"Some things are to be enjoyed, others to be used, and there are others which are to be enjoyed and used. Those things which are to be enjoyed make us blessed. Those things which are to be used help and, as it were, sustain us as we move toward blessedness in order that we may gain and cling to those things which make us blessed. If we who enjoy and use things, being placed in the midst of things of both kinds, wish to enjoy those things which should be used, our course will be impeded and sometimes deflected, so that we are retarded in obtaining those things which are to be enjoyed, or even prevented altogether, shackled by an inferior love."
The love of books is, in Augustine's scheme, an inferior love, but that does not mean it must be an inappropriate one. It is only when that love loses sight of its inferiority, and becomes an end in itself, that it "shackles" us. When we use that love and those books to pursue a better life, indeed to pursue blessedness--and there are many and varied ways in which we may use them in that pursuit--then our reading may be wondrously healthy and life-giving. The rigid orthodoxies of current political criticism, the obsessive wrestling over textual power by writers and readers, may seem to aid in that quest, but in fact they only impede it. The ethically-impelled reading championed by Booth and Coles and Bakhtin and Nussbaum is sloppy, uncertain, and often confusing, I know; it has no specific theoretical program nor a precisely calibrated methodology. But until literary theory produces its own Augustine, or until we start paying attention to the old one, these are our best instructors in the difficult art of "reading for life."
Out of Great Silence
“Only someone who is silent is listening. And only the invisible is transparent. To be sure, a deeper silence than mere abstention from speech and utterance is required. There is also interior speech which must also become mute, so things might find their proper utterance.
Thus, one who is truly listening is not “deadening” himself into an unnatural and unintellectual dumbness. His silence is also by no means an empty and dead soundlessness. In this silence there is not only listening but also answering. What the true listener forbids himself is simply this: neither to obscure the radiance of his own eye that gazes on the sun nor to allow the soul’s ability to answer (wherein lies its closest cor-”respondence” to the Source of Being) to lapse into words.
Thus, the world reveals itself to the silent listener and only to him; the more silently he listens, the more purely he is able to perceive reality.
Since reason is nothing else than the power to understand reality, then all reasonable, sensible, sound, clear, and heart-stirring talk stems from listening silence. Thus all discourse requires a foundation in the motherly depth of silence. Otherwise speech is sourceless: it turns into chatter, noise, and deception.”
- Josef Pieper, A Brief Reader on the Virtues
Thus, one who is truly listening is not “deadening” himself into an unnatural and unintellectual dumbness. His silence is also by no means an empty and dead soundlessness. In this silence there is not only listening but also answering. What the true listener forbids himself is simply this: neither to obscure the radiance of his own eye that gazes on the sun nor to allow the soul’s ability to answer (wherein lies its closest cor-”respondence” to the Source of Being) to lapse into words.
Thus, the world reveals itself to the silent listener and only to him; the more silently he listens, the more purely he is able to perceive reality.
Since reason is nothing else than the power to understand reality, then all reasonable, sensible, sound, clear, and heart-stirring talk stems from listening silence. Thus all discourse requires a foundation in the motherly depth of silence. Otherwise speech is sourceless: it turns into chatter, noise, and deception.”
- Josef Pieper, A Brief Reader on the Virtues
Fwd: Call for Papers
If all goes to plan, I'll be at this conference:
Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association
Annual Conference – Thursday, November 5 - Saturday, November 7, 2009
Hilton Boston Logan Airport
Special Session: G.K. Chesterton
Contact Jill Kriegel
Florida Atlantic University
The Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association (MAPACA) invites academics, graduate and undergraduate students, independent scholars, and artists to submit papers for the annual conference as listed above. An inclusive professional organization dedicated to the study of Popular Culture and American Culture in all their multidisciplinary manifestations, MAPACA hosts presentations in a wide range of areas. Please send by e-mail a one-page abstract to the appropriate area chair by June 15, 2009. Include a brief bio with your proposal. Single papers, as well as 3- or 4-person panels and roundtables, are encouraged. Sliding scale registration fees apply.
More Info:
G. K. Chesterton, certainly one of the most voluminous writers of the early twentieth century, was well-known for his work as a literary and social critic, a novelist, a poet, and Catholic apologist. As a forerunner of the reawakening of Chesterton interest, Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society, refers to G. K. Chesterton as “the apostle of common sense,” for he was a man eager to shepherd the people of his time, a heyday of secular humanism and the rise of postmodernism. His gifted use of paradox has the unique ability to evoke smiles and awaken faith. His famous debates with George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells created an intense but friendly and respectful forum for discussion of opposing views on science, materialism, and religion. Without doubt, Chesterton can engage equally well in such discussions with thinkers of our day.
In his literary criticism, Chesterton salutes those Victorian writers, such as Charles Dickens, who so clearly delineate between good and evil, promote the necessity for social and moral change, and portray the joy ever-present in the company of absolute truths. These same values are evident in his apologetic works, such as Orthodoxy, and his fiction, such as The Man Who Was Thursday. Such literary contributions bestow us with lifelong gifts, for in the early 20th Century, they supported and encouraged the enormously influential works of, among others, C.S. Lewis and J.R. R. Tolkien. Indeed, Chesterton's work enthusiastically encourages dialogue across centuries. This Chesterton panel eagerly invites proposals for papers of comparative literature as well as those of social and cultural commentary.
Click here for conference information.
Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Association
Annual Conference – Thursday, November 5 - Saturday, November 7, 2009
Hilton Boston Logan Airport
Special Session: G.K. Chesterton
Contact Jill Kriegel
Florida Atlantic University
The Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association (MAPACA) invites academics, graduate and undergraduate students, independent scholars, and artists to submit papers for the annual conference as listed above. An inclusive professional organization dedicated to the study of Popular Culture and American Culture in all their multidisciplinary manifestations, MAPACA hosts presentations in a wide range of areas. Please send by e-mail a one-page abstract to the appropriate area chair by June 15, 2009. Include a brief bio with your proposal. Single papers, as well as 3- or 4-person panels and roundtables, are encouraged. Sliding scale registration fees apply.
More Info:
G. K. Chesterton, certainly one of the most voluminous writers of the early twentieth century, was well-known for his work as a literary and social critic, a novelist, a poet, and Catholic apologist. As a forerunner of the reawakening of Chesterton interest, Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society, refers to G. K. Chesterton as “the apostle of common sense,” for he was a man eager to shepherd the people of his time, a heyday of secular humanism and the rise of postmodernism. His gifted use of paradox has the unique ability to evoke smiles and awaken faith. His famous debates with George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells created an intense but friendly and respectful forum for discussion of opposing views on science, materialism, and religion. Without doubt, Chesterton can engage equally well in such discussions with thinkers of our day.
In his literary criticism, Chesterton salutes those Victorian writers, such as Charles Dickens, who so clearly delineate between good and evil, promote the necessity for social and moral change, and portray the joy ever-present in the company of absolute truths. These same values are evident in his apologetic works, such as Orthodoxy, and his fiction, such as The Man Who Was Thursday. Such literary contributions bestow us with lifelong gifts, for in the early 20th Century, they supported and encouraged the enormously influential works of, among others, C.S. Lewis and J.R. R. Tolkien. Indeed, Chesterton's work enthusiastically encourages dialogue across centuries. This Chesterton panel eagerly invites proposals for papers of comparative literature as well as those of social and cultural commentary.
Click here for conference information.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
The largest idea of all
It is regarded as a liberal and enlightened thing to say that the god of the stranger may be as good as our own; and doubtless the pagans thought themselves very liberal and enlightened when they agreed to add to the gods of the city or the hearth some wild and fantastic Dionysus coming down from the mountains or some shaggy and rustic Pan creeping out of the woods. But exactly what it lost by these larger ideas is the largest idea of all. It is the idea of the fatherhood that makes the whole world one.
-G.K. Chesterton/The Everlasting Man (1925)
-G.K. Chesterton/The Everlasting Man (1925)
To Read and to Live (Part 4)
Continued...see Parts 1, 2 and 3.
In discussing ethical criticism, we might begin with Wayne Booth and his book, The Company We Keep, an excellent starting point for any serious reflection on this subject. It provides quite a storehouse of information about this often neglected exploration in literature. In fact, the most important thing to note about it is precisely that, that it is a storehouse. You see, The Company We Keep is a big book, over five hundred pages. Its chapters vary widely in theme and scope. There is a general defense of ethical criticism, an excursion on myths, and reflections on several controversial authors.
In addition, the book contains a virtual anthology of quotations about the ethical implications of reading and writing, along with a positively enormous bibliography (in fact, by my count, the quotations and bibliographical entries combined take up a full ninety-six pages in the book). Booth seems to be attempting to provide as full a representation as he can muster of what he calls "a banned discipline," ethical criticism. The literature of this discipline is so scattered and neglected that Booth has taken it upon himself to gather up the scatterings and bind them together, so that the lengthy and impressive history of ethical reflection about literature can be seen in proper perspective. The apparent sloppiness and patched-together look of the book masks what is in fact its fundamental purpose: not to sustain a single argument, but to give new life to an often neglected, yet valuable way of thinking about literature.
This is not to say that Booth does not have arguments to make, and important ones, too. One position he explores, for example, to provide a way around the impasse of sheer power versus sheer piety is an argument for the notion of books as friends. Now, one of the things especially admirable about Wayne Booth is his willingness to present this notion quite seriously--though he is no doubt perfectly aware that many of us will immediately recall first-grade teachers admonishing us in gentle tones: "Books are our friends, so let's take good care of them." Well, Booth seems to be saying, books--many books, anyway--are our friends. But this is no sentimental notion of friendship: it is, to the contrary, grounded in Aristotle's complex and sophisticated analysis of the motives for and consequences of friendship; it is constantly aware of the many varieties of friendship and our ways of assessing good and bad friends; and it acknowledges that friendships may develop, or end, unexpectedly.
Booth's notion of books as friends is important for our concerns here because, as I suggested earlier, it teaches us that we don't have to think of our reading solely as a power struggle for control of our minds. His model of reading and criticism is, in a word, dialogical, because each party brings something to the meeting: statements and counterstatements are made, proposals are examined and discussed, gifts are offered and accepted or declined. And just such a dialogical approach is necessary if genuine and meaningful ethical reflection is to arise from our reading experiences.
As the Russian genius Mikhail Bakhtin has pointed out, literature particularly invites such dialogical response, and therefore literature particularly invites ethical reflection. Booth's book tells us how we might bring ethical reflection into the classrooms in which we study, or the papers in which we write about, literature. But we can turn that idea around, and in the process turn the argument of this essay around: Bakhtin's ideas suggest that we also need to bring literature into whatever ethical thinking we already do.
There are many little stories brought up in college Ethics courses, intended to illustrate ethical conflict. In my experience, the professor would break us up into small groups in which we would argue about how to solve the problem at hand. The sorts of scenarios he used are well-known: there are twelve people in a lifeboat but only enough food and water for six, so how do we decide who should live and who should be tossed overboard? Do we save the welfare mother of five or the neurosurgeon? I can't say I particularly enjoyed arguing about these scenarios (I hated it), but on the other hand, I can understand the excitement in the offer to play God, to separate Those Who Shall Live from Those Who Shall Die?.
And it is, perhaps, for that reason, that it never occurs to many students to ask why these scenarios so little resemble the ethical decisions made in real life. How often is any of us faced with an ethical choice in which we know (or even think we know) all the relevant information necessary to make a decision? In real life our choices are much more complex: our information is neither complete nor certain, and our understanding of the potential consequences of our decisions tends to be pretty shaky. For these reasons, Bakhtin has argued, it is in literature, and particularly the great novels, that the most accurate and useful accounts of our moral lives may be found. In the words of Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, "If ethics were an object of knowledge, then philosophy would be the best moral education. But ethics is a matter not of knowledge, but of wisdom. And wisdom, Bakhtin believed, is not systematizable." The great novels are an education in just such wisdom.
To be continued with the help of George Eliot's Middlemarch.
In discussing ethical criticism, we might begin with Wayne Booth and his book, The Company We Keep, an excellent starting point for any serious reflection on this subject. It provides quite a storehouse of information about this often neglected exploration in literature. In fact, the most important thing to note about it is precisely that, that it is a storehouse. You see, The Company We Keep is a big book, over five hundred pages. Its chapters vary widely in theme and scope. There is a general defense of ethical criticism, an excursion on myths, and reflections on several controversial authors.
In addition, the book contains a virtual anthology of quotations about the ethical implications of reading and writing, along with a positively enormous bibliography (in fact, by my count, the quotations and bibliographical entries combined take up a full ninety-six pages in the book). Booth seems to be attempting to provide as full a representation as he can muster of what he calls "a banned discipline," ethical criticism. The literature of this discipline is so scattered and neglected that Booth has taken it upon himself to gather up the scatterings and bind them together, so that the lengthy and impressive history of ethical reflection about literature can be seen in proper perspective. The apparent sloppiness and patched-together look of the book masks what is in fact its fundamental purpose: not to sustain a single argument, but to give new life to an often neglected, yet valuable way of thinking about literature.
This is not to say that Booth does not have arguments to make, and important ones, too. One position he explores, for example, to provide a way around the impasse of sheer power versus sheer piety is an argument for the notion of books as friends. Now, one of the things especially admirable about Wayne Booth is his willingness to present this notion quite seriously--though he is no doubt perfectly aware that many of us will immediately recall first-grade teachers admonishing us in gentle tones: "Books are our friends, so let's take good care of them." Well, Booth seems to be saying, books--many books, anyway--are our friends. But this is no sentimental notion of friendship: it is, to the contrary, grounded in Aristotle's complex and sophisticated analysis of the motives for and consequences of friendship; it is constantly aware of the many varieties of friendship and our ways of assessing good and bad friends; and it acknowledges that friendships may develop, or end, unexpectedly.
Booth's notion of books as friends is important for our concerns here because, as I suggested earlier, it teaches us that we don't have to think of our reading solely as a power struggle for control of our minds. His model of reading and criticism is, in a word, dialogical, because each party brings something to the meeting: statements and counterstatements are made, proposals are examined and discussed, gifts are offered and accepted or declined. And just such a dialogical approach is necessary if genuine and meaningful ethical reflection is to arise from our reading experiences.
As the Russian genius Mikhail Bakhtin has pointed out, literature particularly invites such dialogical response, and therefore literature particularly invites ethical reflection. Booth's book tells us how we might bring ethical reflection into the classrooms in which we study, or the papers in which we write about, literature. But we can turn that idea around, and in the process turn the argument of this essay around: Bakhtin's ideas suggest that we also need to bring literature into whatever ethical thinking we already do.
There are many little stories brought up in college Ethics courses, intended to illustrate ethical conflict. In my experience, the professor would break us up into small groups in which we would argue about how to solve the problem at hand. The sorts of scenarios he used are well-known: there are twelve people in a lifeboat but only enough food and water for six, so how do we decide who should live and who should be tossed overboard? Do we save the welfare mother of five or the neurosurgeon? I can't say I particularly enjoyed arguing about these scenarios (I hated it), but on the other hand, I can understand the excitement in the offer to play God, to separate Those Who Shall Live from Those Who Shall Die?.
And it is, perhaps, for that reason, that it never occurs to many students to ask why these scenarios so little resemble the ethical decisions made in real life. How often is any of us faced with an ethical choice in which we know (or even think we know) all the relevant information necessary to make a decision? In real life our choices are much more complex: our information is neither complete nor certain, and our understanding of the potential consequences of our decisions tends to be pretty shaky. For these reasons, Bakhtin has argued, it is in literature, and particularly the great novels, that the most accurate and useful accounts of our moral lives may be found. In the words of Gary Saul Morson and Caryl Emerson, "If ethics were an object of knowledge, then philosophy would be the best moral education. But ethics is a matter not of knowledge, but of wisdom. And wisdom, Bakhtin believed, is not systematizable." The great novels are an education in just such wisdom.
To be continued with the help of George Eliot's Middlemarch.
A Tense and Secret Festivity
"To sum up the whole matter very simply, if Mr. McCabe asks me why I import frivolity into a discussion of the nature of man, I answer, because frivolity is a part of the nature of man. If he asks me why I introduce what he calls paradoxes into a philosophical problem, I answer, because all philosophical problems tend to become paradoxical. If he objects to my treating of life riotously, I reply that life is a riot. And I say that the Universe as I see it, at any rate, is very much more like the fireworks at the Crystal Palace than it is like his own philosophy. About the whole cosmos there is a tense and secret festivity — like preparations for Guy Fawkes’ day. Eternity is the eve of something. I never look up at the stars without feeling that they are the fires of a schoolboy’s rocket, fixed in their everlasting fall."
- G.K. Chesterton/Heretics (1905)
- G.K. Chesterton/Heretics (1905)
Craft on Stravinsky
Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship
Robert Craft (Vanderbilt, 1994)
588 p. First reading.
Robert Craft first met Stravinsky in the late 1940s, and for the next 23 years, until Stravinsky’s death in 1971, they saw one another almost daily. Craft served as conductor, collaborator, travel companion, amanuensis, manager, care-giver, and friend. Over those years he kept this journal of his life with the Stravinskys, and it is a document unique in the history of music, containing observations of the composer, his conversation, his dinner companions, his family life, his music and creative process. It makes for fascinating reading.
Stravinsky was already in his 60s when Craft entered his life. After their first meeting, Craft penned this description of the composer:
"He is physically so extraordinary, in any case, that nothing less than a life-size statue (not merely a head or bust), or scaled to life drawing … could convey his uniqueness: the pygmy height, bandy knees, fleshlessness, football player’s shoulders, large hands and wide knuckles, tiny head with recessive frontal lobes, sandy hair (black in photographs), smooth red neck and high, Woody Woodpecker back hairline. He is so absorbing to watch that to attend to what he says requires an effort." (31 March 1948)
A touch of star-struck sycophancy in there, perhaps, but it’s a vivid (and accurate) description. At this time Stravinsky was already the world’s most famous composer, and probably most listeners would agree that this best music--certainly the music that has thus far proved most popular and enduring--was already behind him. But he remained an immensely energetic, adventurous, and fertile creative artist, yet to undergo a revolution in his compositional style (under Craft’s influence, it has sometimes been said), and Craft’s insider’s view of Stravinsky at work was of absorbing interest to this music lover. Here he reports on his first visit to Stravinsky’s composing studio:
"His piano is a tacky-sounding and out-of-tune up-right dampened with felt. A plywood board is attached ot its music rack, and quarto-size strips of thick manila paper are clipped to it. All the staves are drawn with his styluses. To the side of the piano is a kind of surgeon’s operating table on which the cutlery consists of an electric pencil-sharpener, an electric metronome, four different sizes of styluses, colored pencils, gums, a stopwatch. “Singing” all the time, facial muscles swelling, mouth quivering, veins bulging, he skips from part to part, searching for notes on the piano and groaning until he finds them, or, when the reach is too wide, asking me to play them. All of this is animal-life, or at least very physical, especially the grunts of satisfaction when the right chord is sounded exactly together. At the end, covered with perspiration, he mops his face with a towel from the table by the piano. The surprising part of the audition is the discovery that he wants reassurance." (31 July 1948)
Craft has been called Stravinsky’s Boswell, though he himself explicitly rejects the label. The two chroniclers did share, however, a penchant for recording the memorable sayings of their subjects. Stravinsky was not nearly as prolific as was Johnson in the generation of these aphorisms and witty ripostes--who could be?--but Craft did capture a few. “Tradition carries the good artist on its shoulder as St. Christopher carried the Lord,” he said on one occasion (14 February 1952), and it is true, despite his reputation as a modernist innovator, that Stravinsky profoundly honored the tradition to which he was heir: we learn that on the wall of his studio were hung portraits of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. That is not to say that he didn’t have a harsh word now and then for his fellow composers; it is well-known that he disliked Schoenberg (who lived in the same neighborhood but whom Stravinsky rarely met), and, on one occasion when asked “what specifically” he disliked in the music of Richard Strauss, he responded, “I do not like the major works, and I do not like the minor works.” (11 June 1966)
Craft was himself a talented musician--to this day he remains one of the world’s great interpreters of Stravinsky’s music--and now and then he offers his own thoughts on the music of other composers. Upon attending a music festival dedicated to Iannis Xenakis, Craft offered this delightful appraisal of Xenakis’ Bohor:
"The program’s centerpiece is an avalanche of electronic noise called Bohor, which, pronounced as one syllable, partially describes its effect. An experiment in sonic sadism, Bohor is inflicted by “quadruple stereophony,” bruited, in other words, by eight loudspeakers shaped like dryers in a beauty salon and aimed at the audience like death-ray machines. A jet motor seems to switch on in one’s penetralia." (26 October 1968)
Craft’s chronicle coincides with Stravinsky’s late period, and especially with his unexpected adoption of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone techniques. This was scandalous at the time, for much as the music world had divided into “Brahmsians” and “Wagnerians” in the nineteenth century, the early twentieth century had seen camps of “Schoenbergians” lining up against the “Stravinskians”, and Stravinsky’s adoption of Schoenberg’s methods seemed an abdication. Craft has sometimes taken the blame for the change, it being alleged that he corrupted the composer with his influence, but others have argued, fairly convincingly, that Stravinsky’s own native philosophy of music--that compositions are musical objects that express thoughts, not emotions--is well-served by the techniques of dodecophony. The major works written during this period are the opera The Rake’s Progress, Canticum Sacrum (written for and premiered at San Marco in Venice), and Requiem Canticles, among others. Craft often premiered these pieces, and it was interesting to read his reports of those occasions. (They were less dramatic than the premiere of The Rite of Spring.)
Much of their time was spent traveling the world giving concerts, and the journal sometimes reads like a geographic pinball game: Rome, New York, Paris, Berlin, Venice, Florence, Los Angeles, Toronto, Hamburg, back to Rome. Often the city name is simply noted along with one or two observations about the concert, but on a few special occasions Craft slows down and focuses his attention on their environs. His lengthy observations about Israel in the 1960s, for instance, are fascinating, as are his thoughts during the Stravinsky’s long awaited return to Moscow in late 1962.
For the last four years of his life, from late 1967, Stravinsky’s health was failing and he was in and out of hospital. He continued to travel, but he did not conduct, nor did he complete any new works. Craft’s account of his decline and eventual death is quite moving. On 4 April 1971 Craft made this thought-provoking entry: “I do not want him to die--or, of course, want him to suffer; but if the choice were mine, it would be for more suffering, and I would take the responsibility for it on pain of perdition because I know there is more life in him still, life of the most precious kind.” The suffering did not last: Stravinsky died just two days later. His funeral and burial were in Venice, and Craft’s account of the ceremony and its aftermath, as the tomb turns into a pilgrimage destination for lovers of Stravinsky’s music, closes the journal on a high note.
A case could be made that the most interesting people in this chronicle are not the Stravinskys, but rather their dinner guests and friends. Many of the great artistic and cultural figures of the twentieth century wander across these pages: Jorge Luis Borges (”Nervous and shy as a ferret, he continually folds and unfolds his napkin, realigns the silverware, traces the creases in his trousers [31 August 1960]“), Ingmar Bergman (”His English, resourceful if not flawless, is abetted by hand movements that become livelier and increasingly expressive the more he speaks. Everything he says, moreover, is clear, formed by a well-tailored mind, and nothing about him is tentative. [16 September 1961]“), Robert Oppenheimer, Salvador Dali, Edwin Hubble, Graham Greene, Maria Callas, Evelyn Waugh, Thomas Mann.
The Stravinskys were long-time friends of W.H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, and T.S. Eliot, and all make numerous appearances in the journal. Auden comes across as a puritanical Englishman (but Craft is only able to address religion in an ironic tone, so his judgement in this matter may be untrustworthy) who dashes off poems like memos and has a prodigious capacity for drink. Some will smile at his assessment of Tolkien: “J.R.R. is ‘in’ with the teenage set, you know, and is no longer the exclusive property of dotty school teachers and elderly cranks” [16 January 1966]. It remains the view of the literati to this day!
Craft describes T.S. Eliot this way: “He is a quiet man, slow in formulating his remarks, which trail off in diminuendo, and the life in him is not in his voice [a voice which Craft describes as "weary, mournful, and as bleak of this December afternoon"], but in his clear, piercingly intelligent gray eyes. He breathes heavily, wheezes, and harrumphs a great deal, ‘Hm, hmm, hmmm,’ deepening the significance, it seems, with each lengthening ‘m’. [8 December 1958] If you've heard recordings Eliot reciting "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, than you'll know he is spot on--I can hear him in my mind's ear. It might seem an unappealing portrait, but consider Stravinsky’s own comment on Eliot: “He may not be the most exuberant man I have ever known, but he may be the purest.”
Aldous Huxley was a good friend of the Stravinskys through the late 1940s and early 1950s, and they saw one another nearly every week. A casual reader of Huxley (like myself) may not know that Huxley was a polymath who routinely astounded his friends with his ability to discourse, at length, on just about anything. Craft: “And what does he talk about? The finding of bacteria at ocean depths; the heightening of erotic sensibilities through breathing exercises; the greater sexual appeal of the larger and lower-voiced male Tingara frog (the Physalaemus pustulossus); Baudelaire’s Latin poems, which “demonstrate wide reading in the type of poem but complete ignorance of stress, merely duplicating the number of syllables”; problems of multiple meanings in Pali, “which is not a subtle language, but his thirty different words for ‘knowledge’”; Augustus Hare (whose taste for oddity seems to me rather like Mr. H.’s own); the possibility of flights to the moon within a decade if enough money were to be diverted to the project, although Mr. H. says that his only interest in visiting another planet would be to establish contact with an older civilization. This river of learning is continually nourished by tributaries of quotations--a clerihew, the whole of La vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui, which he recites as though he were reading from an oculist’s chart, except for one small stumble of memory, from which he picks himself up with an air of surprise that none of us had caught him as he tripped. [27 July 1949]“
On another occasion, Huxley offered this analogy for T.S. Eliot’s criticism: “A great operation that is never performed: powerful lights are brought into focus, scalpels are laid out, anesthetists and assistants are posted, instruments are prepared. Finally the surgeon arrives, opens his bag, then closes it again and goes off [24 March 1952]." I don’t know Eliot’s criticism well enough to know if this contains a truth, but it’s certainly a good description of some criticism. On the same day, he uttered this oracular jewel: “Cerebrotonics should eat bananas every day”.
An interesting book, then, with a good portion of the interest being extra-musical. For those who delight in such anecdotes, this is a treasure-trove.
* * * * *
Here is the conclusion of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, with Valery Gergiev leading the London Symphony Orchestra in 2007:
Here is some amazing footage of Stravinsky himself, at age 82, conducting The Firebird. This would have been one of this last appearances as a conductor:
The Firebird scene from Disney's Fantasia 2000:
Robert Craft (Vanderbilt, 1994)
588 p. First reading.
Robert Craft first met Stravinsky in the late 1940s, and for the next 23 years, until Stravinsky’s death in 1971, they saw one another almost daily. Craft served as conductor, collaborator, travel companion, amanuensis, manager, care-giver, and friend. Over those years he kept this journal of his life with the Stravinskys, and it is a document unique in the history of music, containing observations of the composer, his conversation, his dinner companions, his family life, his music and creative process. It makes for fascinating reading.
Stravinsky was already in his 60s when Craft entered his life. After their first meeting, Craft penned this description of the composer:
"He is physically so extraordinary, in any case, that nothing less than a life-size statue (not merely a head or bust), or scaled to life drawing … could convey his uniqueness: the pygmy height, bandy knees, fleshlessness, football player’s shoulders, large hands and wide knuckles, tiny head with recessive frontal lobes, sandy hair (black in photographs), smooth red neck and high, Woody Woodpecker back hairline. He is so absorbing to watch that to attend to what he says requires an effort." (31 March 1948)
A touch of star-struck sycophancy in there, perhaps, but it’s a vivid (and accurate) description. At this time Stravinsky was already the world’s most famous composer, and probably most listeners would agree that this best music--certainly the music that has thus far proved most popular and enduring--was already behind him. But he remained an immensely energetic, adventurous, and fertile creative artist, yet to undergo a revolution in his compositional style (under Craft’s influence, it has sometimes been said), and Craft’s insider’s view of Stravinsky at work was of absorbing interest to this music lover. Here he reports on his first visit to Stravinsky’s composing studio:
"His piano is a tacky-sounding and out-of-tune up-right dampened with felt. A plywood board is attached ot its music rack, and quarto-size strips of thick manila paper are clipped to it. All the staves are drawn with his styluses. To the side of the piano is a kind of surgeon’s operating table on which the cutlery consists of an electric pencil-sharpener, an electric metronome, four different sizes of styluses, colored pencils, gums, a stopwatch. “Singing” all the time, facial muscles swelling, mouth quivering, veins bulging, he skips from part to part, searching for notes on the piano and groaning until he finds them, or, when the reach is too wide, asking me to play them. All of this is animal-life, or at least very physical, especially the grunts of satisfaction when the right chord is sounded exactly together. At the end, covered with perspiration, he mops his face with a towel from the table by the piano. The surprising part of the audition is the discovery that he wants reassurance." (31 July 1948)
Craft has been called Stravinsky’s Boswell, though he himself explicitly rejects the label. The two chroniclers did share, however, a penchant for recording the memorable sayings of their subjects. Stravinsky was not nearly as prolific as was Johnson in the generation of these aphorisms and witty ripostes--who could be?--but Craft did capture a few. “Tradition carries the good artist on its shoulder as St. Christopher carried the Lord,” he said on one occasion (14 February 1952), and it is true, despite his reputation as a modernist innovator, that Stravinsky profoundly honored the tradition to which he was heir: we learn that on the wall of his studio were hung portraits of Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. That is not to say that he didn’t have a harsh word now and then for his fellow composers; it is well-known that he disliked Schoenberg (who lived in the same neighborhood but whom Stravinsky rarely met), and, on one occasion when asked “what specifically” he disliked in the music of Richard Strauss, he responded, “I do not like the major works, and I do not like the minor works.” (11 June 1966)
Craft was himself a talented musician--to this day he remains one of the world’s great interpreters of Stravinsky’s music--and now and then he offers his own thoughts on the music of other composers. Upon attending a music festival dedicated to Iannis Xenakis, Craft offered this delightful appraisal of Xenakis’ Bohor:
"The program’s centerpiece is an avalanche of electronic noise called Bohor, which, pronounced as one syllable, partially describes its effect. An experiment in sonic sadism, Bohor is inflicted by “quadruple stereophony,” bruited, in other words, by eight loudspeakers shaped like dryers in a beauty salon and aimed at the audience like death-ray machines. A jet motor seems to switch on in one’s penetralia." (26 October 1968)
Craft’s chronicle coincides with Stravinsky’s late period, and especially with his unexpected adoption of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone techniques. This was scandalous at the time, for much as the music world had divided into “Brahmsians” and “Wagnerians” in the nineteenth century, the early twentieth century had seen camps of “Schoenbergians” lining up against the “Stravinskians”, and Stravinsky’s adoption of Schoenberg’s methods seemed an abdication. Craft has sometimes taken the blame for the change, it being alleged that he corrupted the composer with his influence, but others have argued, fairly convincingly, that Stravinsky’s own native philosophy of music--that compositions are musical objects that express thoughts, not emotions--is well-served by the techniques of dodecophony. The major works written during this period are the opera The Rake’s Progress, Canticum Sacrum (written for and premiered at San Marco in Venice), and Requiem Canticles, among others. Craft often premiered these pieces, and it was interesting to read his reports of those occasions. (They were less dramatic than the premiere of The Rite of Spring.)
Much of their time was spent traveling the world giving concerts, and the journal sometimes reads like a geographic pinball game: Rome, New York, Paris, Berlin, Venice, Florence, Los Angeles, Toronto, Hamburg, back to Rome. Often the city name is simply noted along with one or two observations about the concert, but on a few special occasions Craft slows down and focuses his attention on their environs. His lengthy observations about Israel in the 1960s, for instance, are fascinating, as are his thoughts during the Stravinsky’s long awaited return to Moscow in late 1962.
For the last four years of his life, from late 1967, Stravinsky’s health was failing and he was in and out of hospital. He continued to travel, but he did not conduct, nor did he complete any new works. Craft’s account of his decline and eventual death is quite moving. On 4 April 1971 Craft made this thought-provoking entry: “I do not want him to die--or, of course, want him to suffer; but if the choice were mine, it would be for more suffering, and I would take the responsibility for it on pain of perdition because I know there is more life in him still, life of the most precious kind.” The suffering did not last: Stravinsky died just two days later. His funeral and burial were in Venice, and Craft’s account of the ceremony and its aftermath, as the tomb turns into a pilgrimage destination for lovers of Stravinsky’s music, closes the journal on a high note.
A case could be made that the most interesting people in this chronicle are not the Stravinskys, but rather their dinner guests and friends. Many of the great artistic and cultural figures of the twentieth century wander across these pages: Jorge Luis Borges (”Nervous and shy as a ferret, he continually folds and unfolds his napkin, realigns the silverware, traces the creases in his trousers [31 August 1960]“), Ingmar Bergman (”His English, resourceful if not flawless, is abetted by hand movements that become livelier and increasingly expressive the more he speaks. Everything he says, moreover, is clear, formed by a well-tailored mind, and nothing about him is tentative. [16 September 1961]“), Robert Oppenheimer, Salvador Dali, Edwin Hubble, Graham Greene, Maria Callas, Evelyn Waugh, Thomas Mann.
The Stravinskys were long-time friends of W.H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, and T.S. Eliot, and all make numerous appearances in the journal. Auden comes across as a puritanical Englishman (but Craft is only able to address religion in an ironic tone, so his judgement in this matter may be untrustworthy) who dashes off poems like memos and has a prodigious capacity for drink. Some will smile at his assessment of Tolkien: “J.R.R. is ‘in’ with the teenage set, you know, and is no longer the exclusive property of dotty school teachers and elderly cranks” [16 January 1966]. It remains the view of the literati to this day!
Craft describes T.S. Eliot this way: “He is a quiet man, slow in formulating his remarks, which trail off in diminuendo, and the life in him is not in his voice [a voice which Craft describes as "weary, mournful, and as bleak of this December afternoon"], but in his clear, piercingly intelligent gray eyes. He breathes heavily, wheezes, and harrumphs a great deal, ‘Hm, hmm, hmmm,’ deepening the significance, it seems, with each lengthening ‘m’. [8 December 1958] If you've heard recordings Eliot reciting "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, than you'll know he is spot on--I can hear him in my mind's ear. It might seem an unappealing portrait, but consider Stravinsky’s own comment on Eliot: “He may not be the most exuberant man I have ever known, but he may be the purest.”
Aldous Huxley was a good friend of the Stravinskys through the late 1940s and early 1950s, and they saw one another nearly every week. A casual reader of Huxley (like myself) may not know that Huxley was a polymath who routinely astounded his friends with his ability to discourse, at length, on just about anything. Craft: “And what does he talk about? The finding of bacteria at ocean depths; the heightening of erotic sensibilities through breathing exercises; the greater sexual appeal of the larger and lower-voiced male Tingara frog (the Physalaemus pustulossus); Baudelaire’s Latin poems, which “demonstrate wide reading in the type of poem but complete ignorance of stress, merely duplicating the number of syllables”; problems of multiple meanings in Pali, “which is not a subtle language, but his thirty different words for ‘knowledge’”; Augustus Hare (whose taste for oddity seems to me rather like Mr. H.’s own); the possibility of flights to the moon within a decade if enough money were to be diverted to the project, although Mr. H. says that his only interest in visiting another planet would be to establish contact with an older civilization. This river of learning is continually nourished by tributaries of quotations--a clerihew, the whole of La vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui, which he recites as though he were reading from an oculist’s chart, except for one small stumble of memory, from which he picks himself up with an air of surprise that none of us had caught him as he tripped. [27 July 1949]“
On another occasion, Huxley offered this analogy for T.S. Eliot’s criticism: “A great operation that is never performed: powerful lights are brought into focus, scalpels are laid out, anesthetists and assistants are posted, instruments are prepared. Finally the surgeon arrives, opens his bag, then closes it again and goes off [24 March 1952]." I don’t know Eliot’s criticism well enough to know if this contains a truth, but it’s certainly a good description of some criticism. On the same day, he uttered this oracular jewel: “Cerebrotonics should eat bananas every day”.
An interesting book, then, with a good portion of the interest being extra-musical. For those who delight in such anecdotes, this is a treasure-trove.
* * * * *
Here is the conclusion of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, with Valery Gergiev leading the London Symphony Orchestra in 2007:
Here is some amazing footage of Stravinsky himself, at age 82, conducting The Firebird. This would have been one of this last appearances as a conductor:
The Firebird scene from Disney's Fantasia 2000:
Saturday, May 16, 2009
The Green Monster
I’ve been seeing more and more advertisements for, and articles about, absinthe. I speculated that it was making a comeback, and now I know why: The United States lifted its ban in 2007 (though I assume some states still ban it within their borders). The New York Times had a good absinthe piece earlier this week:
"Since absinthe was legalized in the United States in 2007, it has gone from forbidden fruit to virulent weed. Once smuggled from Eastern Europe or procured from back-alley producers, absinthe is now just another bottle on the bar. Yet mystique continues as marketing. . . .
Without water, though, almost any absinthe would be difficult to endure. Absinthe in general is simply too strong to drink undiluted. Of our 20 bottles, 13 were 60 percent alcohol or more. Not only do they require water, they require just the right amount, anywhere from three to five parts water to one part absinthe, the amount rising — usually but not always — in tandem with the original strength of each bottle."
Ernest Hemingway used to call it "Death in the Afternoon." G.K. Chesterton hated absinthe too, and referred to as a “bad drinking.” I think he would have considered it closer to cocaine than a fine bottle of rum.
I’m not sure what Dorothy Parker thought of it. The NYT article ends with one of her drinking poems:
I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table,
after four I’m under my host.
If you’re not acquainted with Parker, look her up. She was a fiery and entertaining journalist with a quick wit. While on her honeymoon, her editor called about a deadline. She yelled, “I’m too fucking busy! And vice-versa!”
Friday, May 15, 2009
The Habit of Being
"I have a biography of St. John of the Cross and one of Rabelais. I read a little of one and then a little of the other; edifying contrast."
* * * * *
"Yesterday I sold a pair of [peacocks]...These people showed up in a long white car...The man was a structural engineer. He said he had a friend who was a writer in Mississippi and I said who was that. He said, 'His name is Bill Faulkner. I don't know if he's any good or not but he's a mighty nice fellow.' I told him he was right good..."
* * * * *
"As between me and [Graham] Greene there is a difference of fictions certainly and probably a difference of theological emphasis as well. If Greene created an old lady, she would be sour through and through and if you dropped her, she would break, but if you dropped my old lady, she'd bounce back at you, screaming "Jesus loves me!" I think the basis of the way I see is comic regardless of what I do with it; Greene's is something else..."
-from Flannery O'Connor's letters, collected in The Habit of Being
* * * * *
"Yesterday I sold a pair of [peacocks]...These people showed up in a long white car...The man was a structural engineer. He said he had a friend who was a writer in Mississippi and I said who was that. He said, 'His name is Bill Faulkner. I don't know if he's any good or not but he's a mighty nice fellow.' I told him he was right good..."
* * * * *
"As between me and [Graham] Greene there is a difference of fictions certainly and probably a difference of theological emphasis as well. If Greene created an old lady, she would be sour through and through and if you dropped her, she would break, but if you dropped my old lady, she'd bounce back at you, screaming "Jesus loves me!" I think the basis of the way I see is comic regardless of what I do with it; Greene's is something else..."
-from Flannery O'Connor's letters, collected in The Habit of Being
Galileo's Secret
The summer password for Galileo is "becloud." They always have such nice symbolism in their passwords.
You're welcome.
You're welcome.
When Igor Met Evelyn
In Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship (review coming later), Robert Craft writes this account of this first meeting between Stravinsky (”I.S.”) and his wife (”V.”) and Evelyn Waugh and his wife (”Mr. and Mrs. W.”). It seemed worth quoting in its entirety:
The Waughs arrive at the S.s’ suite in the Ambassador Hotel in evening dress — “for a late party at the Astors’,” they say — the glittering perfection of which seems to exaggerate the crumples in our own everyday togs. Mrs. W. is fair and lovely, Mr. W. is pudgy, ruddy, smooth-skinned, and too short. He offers favorable comments on the temperature of the S.s’ hotel rooms, complaining that he must keep the windows of his own rooms at the Plaza open or suffocate, a confession that may help to account for both his icy exterior and his inner heat. I.S. replies in French, attempting to excuse the switch in language with a compliment on the French dialogue in Mr. W.’s Scott-King’s Modern Europe. Mr. W. cuts in, however, disclaiming any conversational command of the tongue, whereupon Mrs. W. contradicts him — “That’s silly, darling, your French is very good” — and is sharply reprimanded.
I mention Mr. W.’s lecture in Town Hall last week on Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, the coolest performance of the sort I have ever seen, but he disparages it. Unencumbered by notes, he faced the audience like a ramrod and was able to study it, even to turn the tables on it, to judge by the ruthlessly observed details of his descriptions of three people who walked out.
Mr. W. prefers to talk about the undertaking industry and the ban it has imposed against burying him should he, as the industry must fervently hope, expire in the United States. “I have arranged to be buried at sea,” he says. Keenly interested in our own burial plans, he is eager to know whether my beaux restes are destined for a family vault. But this down-to-earth talk makes I.S. uneasy.
A crisis occurs when Waugh refuses the S.s’ whiskey, and their vodka and caviar, not so much because of his rudeness — “I never drink whiskey before wine” — but because the S.s exchange a few words in Russian, a pardonable recourse for them in many instances, but not now; and V.’s pretense, as she talks, of referring to cigarettes she rummages for in her handbag does not take in Waugh who, naturally and correctly, deduces that the subject of the exchange is himself. A new impasse looms when Mr.W. asks I.S. about his American citizenship, says he deplores the American Revolution, and hears I.S. praise the Constitution. Thereupon I.S. proposes that we go to dinner, thus bringing the abstemious and uncomfortable half-hour to a close.
Mr.W.’s spirits take an upward turn during the freezing and, in his case, coatless, block-and-a-half walk to “Maria’s”. The sight of the Funeral Home at the corner of Lexington Avenue and Fifty-Second Street so restores his joie de vivre that for a moment we fear he may actually take leave of us and explore the service entrance. “Maria’s,” small, dark, crowded, is the wrong restaurant: the W.’s are too swanky here. But the starchiness and defensive sparring that the S.s think of as the normal English method of making acquaintance vanish with the Valpolicella, which the temperature-sensitive Mr.W. mulls. It seems to me, too, that the novelist, like everyone who meets V., is succumbing to her charm. He begins to behave gallantly to her, in any case, and even the suspicion in the glowering glances he directs to I.S. diminishes.
With the fettuccine the conversation turns — no apparent connection — to the Church. Here I.S. shines, showing himself to be at least as ultramontanist as Mr.W., as well read in Chesterton and Peguy, and as prone to believe in the miraculous emulsification of St. Januarius’s blood. From some of the novelist’s remarks, I would guess that he supposes the composer to be one of Maritain’s Jewish converts, which is a common and, so far as the Maritain influence is concerned, partly accurate supposition.
Another crisis confronts us when V. mentions the forthcoming New York premiere of I.S.’s Mass and invites the W.s to attend. Explaining that the piece is liturgical, I.S. says, marvelously: “One composes a march to help men march; and it is the same way with my Credo: I hope to provide some help with the text. The Credo is long. There is a great deal to believe.”
Mrs.W. handles this, sincerely regretting that they have already “booked passage home”. Lest the conversation continue in this dangerous direction, her husband adds, with a bluntness that seems to show that he has been inwardly lacerating all evening by the threat of I.S.’s cacophonous art: “All music is painful to me.” The statement can only be ignored, and V. does so, elegantly, with a compliment to Mr.W. on his art, and a comparision between his Decline and Fall and Sade’s Justine. When at length Mr.W. realizes that the S.s have read everything he has published, a new character emerges in him, as magnanimous and amusing as the old one was unbending and priggishly precise.
If the novelist does not brook the literary talk of the literary types, he certainly seems to enjoy it from outsiders like (though no one is like) the S.s and even from semi-insiders like (there are many like) me, for I admire Mr.W.’s fictions and no longer complain that chance and arbitrariness play too important a part in them. We seek to draw him out on other writers but are rewarded with only one acidulated reference to his fellow lecture-touring compatriots, the Sitwells, and the commendation, in which the last two adjectives are wickedly emphasized, of Christopher Isherwood as “a good young American novelist.”
The meal concluded, Mr.W. asks permission to smoke a cigar. Choosing one from a case in his breast pocket, he holds it under his nose, where it looks like a grenadier’s mustache, circumcises the sucking end with a small blade, passes a match under the other end as if he were candling a pony of precious cognac, avidly stokes and consumes it. Holy Smoke!” [4 February 1949]
* * * * *
If those funeral parlour antics had you wondering, The Loved One had been published in 1947.
The Waughs arrive at the S.s’ suite in the Ambassador Hotel in evening dress — “for a late party at the Astors’,” they say — the glittering perfection of which seems to exaggerate the crumples in our own everyday togs. Mrs. W. is fair and lovely, Mr. W. is pudgy, ruddy, smooth-skinned, and too short. He offers favorable comments on the temperature of the S.s’ hotel rooms, complaining that he must keep the windows of his own rooms at the Plaza open or suffocate, a confession that may help to account for both his icy exterior and his inner heat. I.S. replies in French, attempting to excuse the switch in language with a compliment on the French dialogue in Mr. W.’s Scott-King’s Modern Europe. Mr. W. cuts in, however, disclaiming any conversational command of the tongue, whereupon Mrs. W. contradicts him — “That’s silly, darling, your French is very good” — and is sharply reprimanded.
I mention Mr. W.’s lecture in Town Hall last week on Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter, the coolest performance of the sort I have ever seen, but he disparages it. Unencumbered by notes, he faced the audience like a ramrod and was able to study it, even to turn the tables on it, to judge by the ruthlessly observed details of his descriptions of three people who walked out.
Mr. W. prefers to talk about the undertaking industry and the ban it has imposed against burying him should he, as the industry must fervently hope, expire in the United States. “I have arranged to be buried at sea,” he says. Keenly interested in our own burial plans, he is eager to know whether my beaux restes are destined for a family vault. But this down-to-earth talk makes I.S. uneasy.
A crisis occurs when Waugh refuses the S.s’ whiskey, and their vodka and caviar, not so much because of his rudeness — “I never drink whiskey before wine” — but because the S.s exchange a few words in Russian, a pardonable recourse for them in many instances, but not now; and V.’s pretense, as she talks, of referring to cigarettes she rummages for in her handbag does not take in Waugh who, naturally and correctly, deduces that the subject of the exchange is himself. A new impasse looms when Mr.W. asks I.S. about his American citizenship, says he deplores the American Revolution, and hears I.S. praise the Constitution. Thereupon I.S. proposes that we go to dinner, thus bringing the abstemious and uncomfortable half-hour to a close.
Mr.W.’s spirits take an upward turn during the freezing and, in his case, coatless, block-and-a-half walk to “Maria’s”. The sight of the Funeral Home at the corner of Lexington Avenue and Fifty-Second Street so restores his joie de vivre that for a moment we fear he may actually take leave of us and explore the service entrance. “Maria’s,” small, dark, crowded, is the wrong restaurant: the W.’s are too swanky here. But the starchiness and defensive sparring that the S.s think of as the normal English method of making acquaintance vanish with the Valpolicella, which the temperature-sensitive Mr.W. mulls. It seems to me, too, that the novelist, like everyone who meets V., is succumbing to her charm. He begins to behave gallantly to her, in any case, and even the suspicion in the glowering glances he directs to I.S. diminishes.
With the fettuccine the conversation turns — no apparent connection — to the Church. Here I.S. shines, showing himself to be at least as ultramontanist as Mr.W., as well read in Chesterton and Peguy, and as prone to believe in the miraculous emulsification of St. Januarius’s blood. From some of the novelist’s remarks, I would guess that he supposes the composer to be one of Maritain’s Jewish converts, which is a common and, so far as the Maritain influence is concerned, partly accurate supposition.
Another crisis confronts us when V. mentions the forthcoming New York premiere of I.S.’s Mass and invites the W.s to attend. Explaining that the piece is liturgical, I.S. says, marvelously: “One composes a march to help men march; and it is the same way with my Credo: I hope to provide some help with the text. The Credo is long. There is a great deal to believe.”
Mrs.W. handles this, sincerely regretting that they have already “booked passage home”. Lest the conversation continue in this dangerous direction, her husband adds, with a bluntness that seems to show that he has been inwardly lacerating all evening by the threat of I.S.’s cacophonous art: “All music is painful to me.” The statement can only be ignored, and V. does so, elegantly, with a compliment to Mr.W. on his art, and a comparision between his Decline and Fall and Sade’s Justine. When at length Mr.W. realizes that the S.s have read everything he has published, a new character emerges in him, as magnanimous and amusing as the old one was unbending and priggishly precise.
If the novelist does not brook the literary talk of the literary types, he certainly seems to enjoy it from outsiders like (though no one is like) the S.s and even from semi-insiders like (there are many like) me, for I admire Mr.W.’s fictions and no longer complain that chance and arbitrariness play too important a part in them. We seek to draw him out on other writers but are rewarded with only one acidulated reference to his fellow lecture-touring compatriots, the Sitwells, and the commendation, in which the last two adjectives are wickedly emphasized, of Christopher Isherwood as “a good young American novelist.”
The meal concluded, Mr.W. asks permission to smoke a cigar. Choosing one from a case in his breast pocket, he holds it under his nose, where it looks like a grenadier’s mustache, circumcises the sucking end with a small blade, passes a match under the other end as if he were candling a pony of precious cognac, avidly stokes and consumes it. Holy Smoke!” [4 February 1949]
* * * * *
If those funeral parlour antics had you wondering, The Loved One had been published in 1947.
Wisdom from the lady from Milledgeville...
"What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross."
Flannery O'Connor
Flannery O'Connor
Thursday, May 14, 2009
To Read and to Live (Part 3)
This is an on-going feature...See Parts 1 and 2 for this to make the most sense.
One is tempted to suspect that belief in social constructionism, with its repudiation of the idea of a common human nature, is a luxury that many people can't afford; it is likely to be appealing only to self-professed skeptics in Western societies who, deep down and despite all their protests to the contrary, know their credentials as persons to be safe from interrogation. The really significant question here is whether the abandonment of the ideas of human nature and the human person might, in the long run, eventually put those credentials in danger. As Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has written in Feminism Without Illusions, "If we need a justice sensitive to the variations of gender, race, and class, we also need one that can transcend or at least discipline them. For without such an ideal, how do we expect to avoid Hobbes' nightmare of society as 'the warre of all against all'?"
If, then, the vast claims of social constructionism fail to compel, we might well consider whether a vocabulary that takes cognizance of personal agency might do a better job of describing how and why we really act-and in the process do a much better job of describing what happens in literary works, and of describing how those works can shape the lives of us, their readers.
Which brings up yet another difficulty for the ideologically and politically minded. That literary works can shape the lives of their readers is for many critics precisely the problem. For many teachers today understand their job to be the liberation of their students from the power that books have over them. A classic example of this impulse comes from Robert Scholes' influential book Textual Power, subtitled "Literary Theory and the Teaching of English."
"The students who come to us now exist in the most manipulative culture human beings have ever experienced. They are bombarded with signs, with rhetoric, from their daily awakenings until their troubled sleep, especially with signs transmitted by the audio-visual media...
What students need from us-and this is true of students in our great universities, our small colleges, and our urban and community colleges-what they need from us now is the kind of knowledge and skill that will enable them to make sense of their worlds, to determine their own interests, both individual and collective, to see through the manipulations of all sorts of texts in all sorts of media, and to express their own views in some appropriate manner...
In an age of manipulation...the worst thing we can do is foster in them an attitude of reverence before texts.... What is needed is a judicious attitude: scrupulous to understand, alert to probe for blind spots and hidden agendas, and finally, critical, questioning, skeptical."
Though his concern for the influence of the media is admirable, it would appear that the only kind of relationship Scholes can imagine between a text and a reader is one of power: either the reader is manipulated by a text, falls under its sway, becomes subject to its power, or he exerts his own power, the power of interpretation and analysis, over that threatening text. Scholes thereby provides a literary theory for Hobbes' "warre of all against all."
This makes sense as an account of how to respond to genuinely manipulative media, such as advertisements and political or social propaganda (in which category, one can certainly, especially nowadays, place many works of literature--if they deserve the dignity to be called literature), but do we really want to universalize this account of interpretation?
When I think about the books I read--looking at my "current reading" shelf and bedside table, I see E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, Flannery O'Connor's Complete Works, an anthology devoted to Romanticism, Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine--I find that Scholes' account of "textual power" simply fails to describe my experience and, I believe, that of most of my fellow students.
Scholes wants his students to be able to "make sense of their worlds"--but can't we all point to books that, far from threatening to undermine that effort, have actually been enormously helpful to it? Scholes wants his students to "determine their own interests" and "express their own views," but haven't we all read books that helped us to understand what our interests are and helped us to form our views? Clearly, we need to be able to think about our reading experiences in more ways than the exclusively militaristic one that Scholes offers.
Another example: in an essay called "When Eve Reads Milton," Christine Froula seeks to outline a feminist critique of Milton's Paradise Lost. She argues that we can employ new strategies of reading these canonical texts that expose the "structures of authority" deep inside them, thereby engaging in "a kind of collective psychoanalysis." "In so doing, we approach traditional texts not as the mystifying (and self-limiting) 'best' that has been thought and said in the world but as a visible past against which we can imagine a different future."
For Froula, we can learn from the past, but what we learn is strictly negative: the past is no more than a catalog of error which, through careful study and vigilant self-monitoring, we may be able to avoid repeating. And there is no doubt that Froula's catalog of Milton's sins and errors is pretty convincing: for all his greatness as a poet, his misogyny is obvious and repulsive. But surely the determination to understand all of literary history (or even all of Milton) in these prosecutorial terms is at least as "self-limiting" as the Arnoldian idea of exposing oneself to "the best that has been thought and said." Like Scholes' notion of textual power, Froula's conception of literary history fails to account for the elements of our reading experience that cannot be explained by reference to power relations.
By way of contrast to the thinking of Scholes and Froula, we might consider the belief of the Kentucky poet and farmer Wendell Berry that the tragedy of literary education today is that "teachers and students read the great songs and stories to learn about them, not learn from them." We talk and write about literature "as if we do not care, as if it does not matter, whether or not it is true." Now in one sense Froula would agree with Berry: she too wants to learn from "the great songs and stories," but chiefly to learn what not to do.
Berry obviously means something different: he clearly believes that these "great songs and stories" have been called great because of the weight of truth that they carry. Whereas Froula and Scholes want us to test literature against our own personal standards, Berry wants us to test ourselves against the standards of great literature. Berry's willingness to be taught, his respect for the possibility that those who have walked the earth before him could have learned something valuable, marks an invigorating alternative to the dark visions of Scholes and Froula; nevertheless, one misses in Berry's picture an acknowledgment of the value of the reader's response, of disagreement and critique. No work of literature, however "classical," exhibits wisdom on every subject that it considers; to consider Milton again, one may rejoice in his brilliant evocation of the difference between unfallen and fallen sexuality, yet be dismayed by his belief that Adam was made "for God only," Eve, "for God in him."
Might it be possible, then, to avoid both Berry's temptation to excessive reverence and Scholes and Froula's tendency to cynicism, and to see the literary experience as a simultaneous testing, measuring, of the book and the reader? To ask this question, I believe, is to begin to think ethically about literature. In so doing, we go beyond a vague and essentially content-free reverence for "the classics"; beyond simplistic political polarities; beyond reductive Nietzschean assertions about Power. But what, then, are we getting into? Is there anyone who can describe for us, map out for us, this somehow familiar yet exceedingly complex terrain? As it happens, there has in recent years been a serious renewal of interest in the old and honorable discipline of ethical criticism; and the leaders of this renewal deserve our attention.
To be continued tomorrow with the help of Wayne Booth in his book, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction.
One is tempted to suspect that belief in social constructionism, with its repudiation of the idea of a common human nature, is a luxury that many people can't afford; it is likely to be appealing only to self-professed skeptics in Western societies who, deep down and despite all their protests to the contrary, know their credentials as persons to be safe from interrogation. The really significant question here is whether the abandonment of the ideas of human nature and the human person might, in the long run, eventually put those credentials in danger. As Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has written in Feminism Without Illusions, "If we need a justice sensitive to the variations of gender, race, and class, we also need one that can transcend or at least discipline them. For without such an ideal, how do we expect to avoid Hobbes' nightmare of society as 'the warre of all against all'?"
If, then, the vast claims of social constructionism fail to compel, we might well consider whether a vocabulary that takes cognizance of personal agency might do a better job of describing how and why we really act-and in the process do a much better job of describing what happens in literary works, and of describing how those works can shape the lives of us, their readers.
Which brings up yet another difficulty for the ideologically and politically minded. That literary works can shape the lives of their readers is for many critics precisely the problem. For many teachers today understand their job to be the liberation of their students from the power that books have over them. A classic example of this impulse comes from Robert Scholes' influential book Textual Power, subtitled "Literary Theory and the Teaching of English."
"The students who come to us now exist in the most manipulative culture human beings have ever experienced. They are bombarded with signs, with rhetoric, from their daily awakenings until their troubled sleep, especially with signs transmitted by the audio-visual media...
What students need from us-and this is true of students in our great universities, our small colleges, and our urban and community colleges-what they need from us now is the kind of knowledge and skill that will enable them to make sense of their worlds, to determine their own interests, both individual and collective, to see through the manipulations of all sorts of texts in all sorts of media, and to express their own views in some appropriate manner...
In an age of manipulation...the worst thing we can do is foster in them an attitude of reverence before texts.... What is needed is a judicious attitude: scrupulous to understand, alert to probe for blind spots and hidden agendas, and finally, critical, questioning, skeptical."
Though his concern for the influence of the media is admirable, it would appear that the only kind of relationship Scholes can imagine between a text and a reader is one of power: either the reader is manipulated by a text, falls under its sway, becomes subject to its power, or he exerts his own power, the power of interpretation and analysis, over that threatening text. Scholes thereby provides a literary theory for Hobbes' "warre of all against all."
This makes sense as an account of how to respond to genuinely manipulative media, such as advertisements and political or social propaganda (in which category, one can certainly, especially nowadays, place many works of literature--if they deserve the dignity to be called literature), but do we really want to universalize this account of interpretation?
When I think about the books I read--looking at my "current reading" shelf and bedside table, I see E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, Flannery O'Connor's Complete Works, an anthology devoted to Romanticism, Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine--I find that Scholes' account of "textual power" simply fails to describe my experience and, I believe, that of most of my fellow students.
Scholes wants his students to be able to "make sense of their worlds"--but can't we all point to books that, far from threatening to undermine that effort, have actually been enormously helpful to it? Scholes wants his students to "determine their own interests" and "express their own views," but haven't we all read books that helped us to understand what our interests are and helped us to form our views? Clearly, we need to be able to think about our reading experiences in more ways than the exclusively militaristic one that Scholes offers.
Another example: in an essay called "When Eve Reads Milton," Christine Froula seeks to outline a feminist critique of Milton's Paradise Lost. She argues that we can employ new strategies of reading these canonical texts that expose the "structures of authority" deep inside them, thereby engaging in "a kind of collective psychoanalysis." "In so doing, we approach traditional texts not as the mystifying (and self-limiting) 'best' that has been thought and said in the world but as a visible past against which we can imagine a different future."
For Froula, we can learn from the past, but what we learn is strictly negative: the past is no more than a catalog of error which, through careful study and vigilant self-monitoring, we may be able to avoid repeating. And there is no doubt that Froula's catalog of Milton's sins and errors is pretty convincing: for all his greatness as a poet, his misogyny is obvious and repulsive. But surely the determination to understand all of literary history (or even all of Milton) in these prosecutorial terms is at least as "self-limiting" as the Arnoldian idea of exposing oneself to "the best that has been thought and said." Like Scholes' notion of textual power, Froula's conception of literary history fails to account for the elements of our reading experience that cannot be explained by reference to power relations.
By way of contrast to the thinking of Scholes and Froula, we might consider the belief of the Kentucky poet and farmer Wendell Berry that the tragedy of literary education today is that "teachers and students read the great songs and stories to learn about them, not learn from them." We talk and write about literature "as if we do not care, as if it does not matter, whether or not it is true." Now in one sense Froula would agree with Berry: she too wants to learn from "the great songs and stories," but chiefly to learn what not to do.
Berry obviously means something different: he clearly believes that these "great songs and stories" have been called great because of the weight of truth that they carry. Whereas Froula and Scholes want us to test literature against our own personal standards, Berry wants us to test ourselves against the standards of great literature. Berry's willingness to be taught, his respect for the possibility that those who have walked the earth before him could have learned something valuable, marks an invigorating alternative to the dark visions of Scholes and Froula; nevertheless, one misses in Berry's picture an acknowledgment of the value of the reader's response, of disagreement and critique. No work of literature, however "classical," exhibits wisdom on every subject that it considers; to consider Milton again, one may rejoice in his brilliant evocation of the difference between unfallen and fallen sexuality, yet be dismayed by his belief that Adam was made "for God only," Eve, "for God in him."
Might it be possible, then, to avoid both Berry's temptation to excessive reverence and Scholes and Froula's tendency to cynicism, and to see the literary experience as a simultaneous testing, measuring, of the book and the reader? To ask this question, I believe, is to begin to think ethically about literature. In so doing, we go beyond a vague and essentially content-free reverence for "the classics"; beyond simplistic political polarities; beyond reductive Nietzschean assertions about Power. But what, then, are we getting into? Is there anyone who can describe for us, map out for us, this somehow familiar yet exceedingly complex terrain? As it happens, there has in recent years been a serious renewal of interest in the old and honorable discipline of ethical criticism; and the leaders of this renewal deserve our attention.
To be continued tomorrow with the help of Wayne Booth in his book, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction.
From my Highlighter: A Twisted Man, but Smart (Part III)
See Part I and Part 2
D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature. My version: Penguin, 1977.
“There is such a thing as evil belief: a belief that one cannot do wrong.” p. 109.
Which is, of course, the ailment of most politicians. They acknowledge verbally that they can do wrong, then plow ahead like they can’t.
“[Melville] was a modern Viking. There is something curious about real blue-eyed people. They are never quite human, in the good classic sense, human as brown-eyed people are human: the human of the living humus. About a real blue-eyed person there is usually something abstract...”. p. 139.
Startling observation. I’m not sure what to make of it, except to note that I have blue eyes...and that I think I should move on quickly.
“The harder a man works, at brute labour, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind. And the harder a man works, at mental labour, at idealism, at transcendental occupations, the thinner becomes his blood, and the more brittle his nerves.” p. 113.
“It seems absurd to class people according to their implements. And yet there is something in it. The heart of the Pacific is still the Stone Age; in spite of the steamers.” p. 141
Marshall McLuhan wouldn’t think it absurd. Implements (media) shape our pursuits, our ideas, our attitudes. To the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That cliche has a lot of truth in it.
“I am a moral animal. And I’m going to remain such. I’m not going to be turned into a virtuous little automaton as Benjamin would have me. . . I am a moral animal. But I am not a moral machine.” p. 22
Right on. Lawrence wrote these words about Ben Franklin’s Autobiography. Franklin, of course, would’ve done better to be an animal than a machine, since his moral machine was broken.
“[T]he most idealist nations invent most machines. America simply teems with mechanical inventions, because nobody in America ever wants to do anything. They are idealists. Let a machine do the doing.” p. 38.
De Tocqueville, I think, would’ve concurred.
“The desire to extirpate the Indian. And the contradictory desire to glorify him. Both are rampant still, today...The minority of whites intellectualize the Red Man and laud him to the skies. But this minority of whites is mostly a high-brow minority with a big grouch against its own whiteness. “ p. 41.
“I should think the American admiration of five-minute [tours] has done more to kill the sacredness of old European beauty and aspiration that multitudes of bombs would have done.” p. 45
“[E]very American citizen is free to force his presence upon you, no matter how unwilling you may be.” p. 45.
I sometimes long for the "good ole days" that our grandparents reminisce upon (to absurd lengths oftentimes)--in some minor respects. For instance, can you imagine how nice it would be to go into a doctor's office, or wait at the mechanic shop, and actually have the pleasure to talk to someone. To my own delight, I often go to Lockerly Arboretum and have shared many a wonderful conversation with one of the members of the lawn crew during his breaks.
The way our conversation all came about was when he offered me a drink of water from the well-pump available under the patio near the pond--this was over last year's summer. I was reading something that escapes me now, but I put my book down and we talked for 45 minutes.
The same pleasure could be ours elsewhere if blaring TVs didn't occupy every corner of American space where a person might have to sit for more than ten minutes. A world without TVs in this context would give a person a choice: be saintly and lend your ear or tell the person to shut the hell up. But alas, there is no choice. If you turn off the TV in, say, a hospital waiting room, someone is going to react like you just urinated on his leg and then turn you over to the hospital police.
A harbinger of Kerouac:
“The Open Road. The great home of the Soul is the open road. Not heaven, not paradise. Not ‘above’. Not even ‘within’. The soul is neither ‘above’ nor ‘within’. It is a wayfarer down the open road. . . . Not through charity. Not through sacrifice. Not even through love. Not through good works. Not through these does the soul accomplish herself. Only through the journey down the open road.” p. 181.
Finally, perhaps my favorite passage in the book:
“Whitman’s mistake. The mistake of his interpretation of his watchword: Sympathy. The mystery of SYMPATHY. He still confounded it with Jesus’ LOVE, and with Paul’s CHARITY. Whitman, like all the rest of us, was at the end of the great emotional highway of Love. And because he couldn’t help himself, he carried on his Open Road as a prolongation of the emotional highway of Love, beyond Calvary. The highway of Love ends at the Cross. There is no beyond.” p. 182
D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature. My version: Penguin, 1977.
“There is such a thing as evil belief: a belief that one cannot do wrong.” p. 109.
Which is, of course, the ailment of most politicians. They acknowledge verbally that they can do wrong, then plow ahead like they can’t.
“[Melville] was a modern Viking. There is something curious about real blue-eyed people. They are never quite human, in the good classic sense, human as brown-eyed people are human: the human of the living humus. About a real blue-eyed person there is usually something abstract...”. p. 139.
Startling observation. I’m not sure what to make of it, except to note that I have blue eyes...and that I think I should move on quickly.
“The harder a man works, at brute labour, the thinner becomes his idealism, the darker his mind. And the harder a man works, at mental labour, at idealism, at transcendental occupations, the thinner becomes his blood, and the more brittle his nerves.” p. 113.
“It seems absurd to class people according to their implements. And yet there is something in it. The heart of the Pacific is still the Stone Age; in spite of the steamers.” p. 141
Marshall McLuhan wouldn’t think it absurd. Implements (media) shape our pursuits, our ideas, our attitudes. To the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That cliche has a lot of truth in it.
“I am a moral animal. And I’m going to remain such. I’m not going to be turned into a virtuous little automaton as Benjamin would have me. . . I am a moral animal. But I am not a moral machine.” p. 22
Right on. Lawrence wrote these words about Ben Franklin’s Autobiography. Franklin, of course, would’ve done better to be an animal than a machine, since his moral machine was broken.
“[T]he most idealist nations invent most machines. America simply teems with mechanical inventions, because nobody in America ever wants to do anything. They are idealists. Let a machine do the doing.” p. 38.
De Tocqueville, I think, would’ve concurred.
“The desire to extirpate the Indian. And the contradictory desire to glorify him. Both are rampant still, today...The minority of whites intellectualize the Red Man and laud him to the skies. But this minority of whites is mostly a high-brow minority with a big grouch against its own whiteness. “ p. 41.
“I should think the American admiration of five-minute [tours] has done more to kill the sacredness of old European beauty and aspiration that multitudes of bombs would have done.” p. 45
“[E]very American citizen is free to force his presence upon you, no matter how unwilling you may be.” p. 45.
I sometimes long for the "good ole days" that our grandparents reminisce upon (to absurd lengths oftentimes)--in some minor respects. For instance, can you imagine how nice it would be to go into a doctor's office, or wait at the mechanic shop, and actually have the pleasure to talk to someone. To my own delight, I often go to Lockerly Arboretum and have shared many a wonderful conversation with one of the members of the lawn crew during his breaks.
The way our conversation all came about was when he offered me a drink of water from the well-pump available under the patio near the pond--this was over last year's summer. I was reading something that escapes me now, but I put my book down and we talked for 45 minutes.
The same pleasure could be ours elsewhere if blaring TVs didn't occupy every corner of American space where a person might have to sit for more than ten minutes. A world without TVs in this context would give a person a choice: be saintly and lend your ear or tell the person to shut the hell up. But alas, there is no choice. If you turn off the TV in, say, a hospital waiting room, someone is going to react like you just urinated on his leg and then turn you over to the hospital police.
A harbinger of Kerouac:
“The Open Road. The great home of the Soul is the open road. Not heaven, not paradise. Not ‘above’. Not even ‘within’. The soul is neither ‘above’ nor ‘within’. It is a wayfarer down the open road. . . . Not through charity. Not through sacrifice. Not even through love. Not through good works. Not through these does the soul accomplish herself. Only through the journey down the open road.” p. 181.
Finally, perhaps my favorite passage in the book:
“Whitman’s mistake. The mistake of his interpretation of his watchword: Sympathy. The mystery of SYMPATHY. He still confounded it with Jesus’ LOVE, and with Paul’s CHARITY. Whitman, like all the rest of us, was at the end of the great emotional highway of Love. And because he couldn’t help himself, he carried on his Open Road as a prolongation of the emotional highway of Love, beyond Calvary. The highway of Love ends at the Cross. There is no beyond.” p. 182
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
From my Highlighter: A Twisted Man, but Smart (Part II)
Continued...you can read the first part here.
Passages from D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature. My version: Penguin, 1977.
Lawrence believes in the spirit. He even understands it, albeit in a warped way:
"The root of all evil is that we want this spiritual gratification, this flow, this apparent heightening of life, this knowledge, this valley of many-coloured grass, even grass and light prismatically decomposed, giving ecstasy. We want all this without resistance. We want it continually. And this is the root of all evil in us." p. 82
Well, yes, but that yearning is also the root of all good. That desire for spiritual gratification is nothing less than what is called the summum bonum, the final call, our ultimate destiny. When that divine signal gets distorted, troubles arise. We seek that spiritual gratification in warped ways. The desire to seek itself, though, is not the root of all evil.
“[P]eople may go on, keep on, and rush on, without souls. They have their ego and their will; that is enough to keep them going.” p. 171 Go to any mass sporting event for confirmation of this observation.
On a more serious note: Spiritual darkness doesn’t kill a person’s ability to think and act. A person can move forward and regress at the same time. But as he improves his faculties for thought and action, but doesn’t elevate his spiritual nature as well, his capacity--and potential--for doing horrible things increases. Because Society is Man writ large (Plato), the same truth applies to civilization. Eric Voeglin liked to point out that a civilization can progress and regress at the same time.
“The essential function of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not decorative, not pastime and recreation. But moral. . . . But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind. Changes the blood first. The mind follows later, in the wake.” p. 180. “Art,” Maritain said, “is a virtue of the practical intellect.” The artist must possess the virtue proper to his activity. In this, it is aesthetic. Art is concerned with morality, but I think morality is secondary. The artist paints—writes, sculpts...conveys--what is true/real. Morality is nothing less than living in accordance with truth.
If an artist sets out to be moral, it’s hard to imagine how his art won’t be didactic.
You sculpt the piece first. The meaning comes later.
“Hawthorne, Poe, Longfellow, Emerson, Melville: it is the moral issue which engages them. They all feel uneasy about the old morality. Sensuously, passionally, they all attack the old morality. But they know nothing better, mentally. Therefore they give tight mental allegiance to a morality which all their passion goes to destroy. Hence the duplicity which is the fatal flaw in them, most fatal in the most perfect American work of art, The Scarlet Letter.” p. 180.
Really? I’m no Hawthorne expert (and sadly, the Hawthorne expert at GCSU sold his soul to the NEA :), but the witness of his daughter Rose implies that he had a mental and emotional allegiance to traditional morality (whether that’s the same morality Lawrence is referring to, I don’t know). From Flannery O’Connor’s The Habit of Being:
You know [St. Rose’s Free Home for Incurable Cancer] was founded by Hawthorne’s daughter? My evil imagination tells me that this was God’s way of rewarding Hawthorne for hating the Transcendentalists. One of my Nashville friends was telling me that Hawthorne couldn’t stand Emerson or any of that crowd. When one of them came in the front door, Hawthorne went out the back. He met one of them one morning and snarled, “Good morning Mr. G., how is your oversoul this morning?”
[More passages to follow at a later date. I might make this a regular blog feature.]
Passages from D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature. My version: Penguin, 1977.
Lawrence believes in the spirit. He even understands it, albeit in a warped way:
"The root of all evil is that we want this spiritual gratification, this flow, this apparent heightening of life, this knowledge, this valley of many-coloured grass, even grass and light prismatically decomposed, giving ecstasy. We want all this without resistance. We want it continually. And this is the root of all evil in us." p. 82
Well, yes, but that yearning is also the root of all good. That desire for spiritual gratification is nothing less than what is called the summum bonum, the final call, our ultimate destiny. When that divine signal gets distorted, troubles arise. We seek that spiritual gratification in warped ways. The desire to seek itself, though, is not the root of all evil.
“[P]eople may go on, keep on, and rush on, without souls. They have their ego and their will; that is enough to keep them going.” p. 171 Go to any mass sporting event for confirmation of this observation.
On a more serious note: Spiritual darkness doesn’t kill a person’s ability to think and act. A person can move forward and regress at the same time. But as he improves his faculties for thought and action, but doesn’t elevate his spiritual nature as well, his capacity--and potential--for doing horrible things increases. Because Society is Man writ large (Plato), the same truth applies to civilization. Eric Voeglin liked to point out that a civilization can progress and regress at the same time.
“The essential function of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not decorative, not pastime and recreation. But moral. . . . But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind. Changes the blood first. The mind follows later, in the wake.” p. 180. “Art,” Maritain said, “is a virtue of the practical intellect.” The artist must possess the virtue proper to his activity. In this, it is aesthetic. Art is concerned with morality, but I think morality is secondary. The artist paints—writes, sculpts...conveys--what is true/real. Morality is nothing less than living in accordance with truth.
If an artist sets out to be moral, it’s hard to imagine how his art won’t be didactic.
You sculpt the piece first. The meaning comes later.
“Hawthorne, Poe, Longfellow, Emerson, Melville: it is the moral issue which engages them. They all feel uneasy about the old morality. Sensuously, passionally, they all attack the old morality. But they know nothing better, mentally. Therefore they give tight mental allegiance to a morality which all their passion goes to destroy. Hence the duplicity which is the fatal flaw in them, most fatal in the most perfect American work of art, The Scarlet Letter.” p. 180.
Really? I’m no Hawthorne expert (and sadly, the Hawthorne expert at GCSU sold his soul to the NEA :), but the witness of his daughter Rose implies that he had a mental and emotional allegiance to traditional morality (whether that’s the same morality Lawrence is referring to, I don’t know). From Flannery O’Connor’s The Habit of Being:
You know [St. Rose’s Free Home for Incurable Cancer] was founded by Hawthorne’s daughter? My evil imagination tells me that this was God’s way of rewarding Hawthorne for hating the Transcendentalists. One of my Nashville friends was telling me that Hawthorne couldn’t stand Emerson or any of that crowd. When one of them came in the front door, Hawthorne went out the back. He met one of them one morning and snarled, “Good morning Mr. G., how is your oversoul this morning?”
[More passages to follow at a later date. I might make this a regular blog feature.]
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Stop
Just stop everything.
Andrew Lloyd Webber did a musical based on P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves & Wooster books and nobody thought to tell me? What kind of world is this?
Andrew Lloyd Webber did a musical based on P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves & Wooster books and nobody thought to tell me? What kind of world is this?
Excellence
Movies can be very good, but sometimes you’ll get a movie trailer that is itself a small work of art. The initial teaser for Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is one such achievement (and the movie itself was even better); this new trailer for Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are is another:
Wonderful.
Wonderful.
From the Archives: Ten Things I Noticed About The Dark Knight
*I decided to post this, after watching the film again last night. These ramblings were inspired upon seeing it last year on the big screen.
1. Monstrous implications – The Dark Knight is PG-13. I get that, it has to be; it’s a comic-book movie, and not a comic-book movie based off of some high-brow graphic novel only ever read by people with arts degrees. It’s Batman; you’ve got to let those kids in there somehow.
That doesn’t mean, though, that you can’t inescapably imply things that, if actually depicted, would put you on the track to an R rating so fast that you’d swear you’d been abducted by pirates. The Joker’s pencil trick (I’ve never seen an audience react so strongly to something in my life, though that reaction was highly varied); the broken pool cue casually thrown down between three men who’ve been informed that there’s only room on the team for one of them; the cutting of Gambol’s lip; Lau sullenly burned alive. And this is only the stuff that happens more or less on camera; there’s much that’s even worse that we hear about happening off.
It’s in circumstances such as these that other critics might mention the strange disconnect that exists in the rating-giving establishment between sex and violence. To whit, it seems a strange sort of thing that a cavalcade of murder and explosions and knifeplay and gunfights and whatnot is perfectly fine, while one exposed breast would be enough to bring them roaring out of their seats. Of sex there’s next to nothing in The Dark Knight; a dishevelled couple are seen trying to quickly get themselves in order shortly after the Joker crashes Bruce’s fundraiser, and there may have been some very light innuendo between Harvey and Rachel. Other than that, though, not a trace. Of violence, though… well, it need hardly be said. Not since City of Violence has there been a city more fraught with violence.
For my own part, and the only reason I even bring this up, is because I do not find this difference of tolerance for sex and violence either surprising or, necessarily, unreasonable. While the instinct towards force and battle seems to exist in the human person from the first breath (little kids are ruffians, after all), the sexual faculty develops more slowly, and not at all consistently or smoothly. But that’s grist for another mill. I actually don't have much interest in the rating system, nor do I pay attention to it--my reason for mentioning it was due to hearing a gentleman refer to it while coming out of the theater, and thought that maybe some people do actually take them seriously. Of course, I am not a parent.
2. The Bat-Pod – Not as lame as I thought it would be, and substantially cooler than it had any right to be.
3. The creation of Two-Face – As those who have read the comics know, the Joker is not typically depicted as being involved in the hideous and traumatizing scarring that turns Harvey Dent into Two-Face. The general story (as most notably told in the pages of Batman: The Long Halloween), sees Dent scarred by a jar of acid splashed in his face by a mobster on the stand during the trial of Salvatore Maroni. In most versions of the story it’s the attack that unhinges him, but sometimes (as in Batman: The Animated Series) there’s a sort of latent monstrousness to him that is only released by the attack rather than created.
In the case of The Dark Knight I can almost see an improvement on the original story. There have been recent storylines that have seen Two-Face take on a sort of vigilante status, albeit still with archly criminal tendencies, but I like the idea of him being driven into a life of infamy by the loss of everything he ever loved and the perceived betrayal by those he trusted more than I like the idea that simply being badly scarred would turn him into a ganglord. Did he survive his final fall at the end of the movie? I think so. For one it would be lame as hell if he didn’t come back after all of this set up, and for another, if I recall correctly, his body seems to have vanished from where it had been lying just before Batman runs off to draw the attention of the police. We’ll see, though. We’ll see.
4. Textual references – As mentioned above, The Long Halloween seems to be a source, here, although The Dark Knight eschews the other supervillains who so frequently appear in that miniseries. There’s also more than a little bit of Moore and Bolland’s The Killing Joke in it as well, particularly as regards the Joker’s doubtful origins and his complete sadistic evil. The idea of a Joker with a “cut smile” has cropped up in a number of other places (see The Man Who Laughs and the Elseworlds book, Gotham Noir), and the final battle in which Batman fights the S.W.A.T. in a dangerous building seems to echo some stuff from Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One (and also the truly excellent animated film, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm). If there are more, I’d like to hear ‘em.
5. The Joker’s astoundingly elaborate plans – There are too many to go into with any great depth, but let’s just consider the implications and timing of one of them. To effectively set up his two-way death trap involving Harvey and Rachel, he needs to make sure that he’s captured and taken to the station, that Batman is there as well, and that all of this is done in a reasonable amount of time so that the fun isn’t taken away by having the bombs go off before he can send Batman out to try to stop them. That’s pretty meticulous in and of itself, and it suggests that he knew exactly what would happen with the astonishing car chase he started, though whether or not he knew it would be the presumed-dead Gordon who would arrest him is anyone’s guess. I think he did, actually, as only Gordon could be relied upon not to either kill him or set him free for the mob.
So there he is, in the cell. He had to have dealt with the bomb in the fat guy situation ages ago, as well as have had a great deal of confidence that the guy would be picked up by the police and brought to that station while he was there. It’s possible that it would have been fine with him to blow up the bomb from elsewhere just for the damage it would cause, but there seems to have been a pretty elaborate bit of foresight here on his part involving him using this affair to destroy the only effective police force in Gotham, break Batman’s spirit, get Lau (and his money) under his control, and win his freedom once more. It all goes off without a hitch.
But the only reason it was able to go off without a hitch is because he was able to predict that he could rile Batman enough to start throwing him around the room, eventually breaking one of the window-mirrors and giving him a shard of glass to use as a knife. This shard would have been useless if he hadn’t also reckoned rightly on the police decision to put a guy in the cell with him for extra security’s sake, thus giving him a hostage to let him get out onto the main floor and there complete the rest of his plan.
You know what’s really troubling? It could all have been luck and coincidence. That’s what Chaos does sometimes.
All in all, though, that’s some damn impressive work from the Nolan brothers.
6. The humor – Let’s not mess around here: this is a pretty dark film, by any measure. Cut smiles, bombs sewn into fat guys, shaky-cam snuff films, you name it. Nevertheless, they still manage to break the tension without having to resort to the “man, my powers are awesome” montages of a Spider-Man, or the “man, I’m so cool” montages of Iron Man. No pratfalls either.
What there is, on the other hand, is a great amount of what could best be described as hesitant, self-aware humor. In the original review I mentioned the newspaper headline about Bruce absconding with the entire Moscow ballet – which was great – but there’s so much more, most of it involving Lucius Fox. That Bruce wants new armor that will allow him to turn his head is a friendly nod to complaints fans have been making since 1989, and Lucius’ description of the sonar phone’s capabilities as being “like a submarine, Mr. Wayne; like a submarine” is delivered with truly excellent timing. His slow-building-yet-instantaneous deflation of Mr. Reese’s blackmail scheme also had the audience howling. They sure needed it, at that point.
7. The fake-outs – In a lot of films like this we’re asked to accept some pretty unlikely stuff in support of some pretty obvious later reversals, but in The Dark Knight this whole subject gets turned around. First there’s the turmoil surrounding James Gordon’s “death.” I’ll admit that I was sort of distracted or something when that happened so at no point did I actually believe he really was dead, or even that the film was actually maintaining that he was. I was helped considerably in my opinion by the fact that the trailers I’d so obsessively watched contained numerous scenes involving Gordon that had jet to take place. Still, I’ll wager that a fair proportion of those in the audience thought that Nolan really did have the guts to kill Gordon off before he could even become commissioner; this is, after all, a grittier and more realistic world he’s created.
Few people probably thought that the masked driver of the police van taking the “prisoner” Harvey Dent to the station was James Gordon, but it was clear from early on that his covered face and silence were a matter of some significance. At first, I think, many believed the masked man to be the Joker in disguise, which would be implausible enough but not impossible and certainly dramatically appropriate. As it gradually became apparent that the Joker was still a large elsewhere, the choice would then likely pass to the masked man being Batman. But no, there was the Batmobile, and its driver inside of it. The reveal of the truth was nicely done.
The second such fake-out was more subtle – so subtle, in fact, that I’ve been reading accounts of people simply not understanding it. As if it weren’t bad enough that the Joker has set up a two-way trap guaranteeing the death of either Rachel or Harvey (or both), he goes the extra sadistic length of switching the addresses at which they’re being held so that no matter who Batman chooses to save, it won’t be the choice he wanted to make. Fiendish.
The third fake-out is the most significant of all, and occasioned gasps and murmurs in both of the showings I attended. Heaven only knows what people thought about it afterwards. As the clock ticks down to the destruction of both ferries, it seems obvious that the enormously menacing prisoner (played by Tommy “Tiny” Lister) is going to do something terrible. He even seems to say as much. The weaker man relents, unable to have the murder of hundreds of innocent people on his conscious. Everyone knew what was coming, and so steeled themselves for either the explosion of the other ferry or the explosion of the prisoners’ own ferry (for thus the Joker rolls).
But no; he just throws it out the window and goes to lead some of his fellow inmates in prayer. What a badass.
8. Possible foreshadowing – There were only two such moments that I noticed, and one might have been a joke while the other could easily be completely meaningless. The first is obvious: Lucius’ wry comment about the new suit of Bat-armour being able to protect him from cats could stand as an indication of a Catwoman to come, or that she might already exist in the world at that time and Batman had had run-ins with her before. Either way, that’s great; Catwoman is one of the few Batman villains that could be rendered in Nolan’s “real world Gotham” without too much trouble. A kleptomaniacal acrobat who decides to put her talents to good use is not so very far-fetched.
There’s another foreshadowing though, that’s a bit more peculiar. One thing that’s been good about Nolan’s restrained approach to things is that we’ve been spared the many villains whose real names just happen to match up with their eventual criminal vocations (as with Victor Fries [Mr. Freeze] and Edward Nygma [E. Nygma - The Riddler]). Jonathan Crane (the Scarecrow) had a nice gothic name, but other than that we’re cool.
Or are we? We have reason to think differently. The character of Reese, the too-smart consultant who follows the money and figures out that Bruce Wayne is Batman, seems to have been introduced for no good reason at all. This is not to say that he’s unwelcome, by any means; his arc is both hilarious and effective, particularly after the Joker invites the people of Gotham to kill him to save their own skins. His name is a strange one, and was obviously chosen for a reason. What might that be? Well, let’s say it fast. Mr. Reese. Mysteries? Very similar to the Riddler’s other nominal justification (”Mr. E.”), wouldn’t you say?
Edward Nygma is too dumb a name to work in the world Nolan has created, but Reese is not. He has the intellect and head for patterns and the physical qualities of the Riddler, to be sure, and it was long rumored (particularly after the announcement that Anthony Michael Hall would be in the film [he plays the reporter, Mike Engel]) that the Riddler would be introduced in The Dark Knight, though out of costume. Fair enough, but what of the fact that he knows Batman’s secret identity? Nolan has an out there, too. It has been established for a while now in the comics that the Riddler is one of the few people who knows that Bruce Wayne is Batman. He did for a while, anyway, I don’t know if they’ve mind-wiped him now or what. But he did, and he never told a soul. Why? Because, although he was Batman’s enemy (again, only for a while; now he’s somewhat reformed, if I remember correctly, and working as a detective in his own right), he loved riddles more. And indeed, what would be the value of a riddle to which everyone knew the answer? So he kept it a secret even as he fought the vigilante.
I don’t know if Nolan and his team will go this route, but I wouldn’t necessarily oppose it if they did.
9. More symbolism – The three-headed hellhound (kind of) guarding the Joker at the very end was pretty sweet.
10. The flaws – Yeah, there were some. The trouble with the fight scenes has been mentioned before, so I won’t go beating that into the ground, but there are a few others worth mentioning. The two most egregious involve the Joker. First, you don’t end a film by leaving the most notorious villain in the history of the world hanging off the side of a building. It’s perfectly permissable for him to escape to possibly return another day, or to fall or trip or do something that makes his fate uncertain (he should be dead, but is he? etc.). Don’t just cut away from him as the cops arrive, though, and then never return to him again. Was he arrested? Did he escape? Did they (being Gotham cops) just kill him? These are all possibilities, and I guess we could say that we’re meant to see his ultimate fate as being just as open a question as his origins, but seriously, man, that was a bit lame.
Also troubling was the scene in which the Joker crashes Bruce Wayne’s fundraiser. This is not to bash the scene as it went down, of course, because it was tremendous. I felt bad for everyone who had to be there while Heath Ledger was doing all of that. Even for acting, it must have been nauseating to witness. No, the trouble is with how the scene concludes. The Joker flings Rachel out the window, as is good and proper, and Batman goes tumbling after her. He catches her, they land roughly, and… that’s it. He’s happy, she has a sarcastic quip, and all seems pretty well.
Never mind that the Joker and his armed thugs are now alone in Bruce Wayne’s penthouse with the richest people in the city. How does that turn out? Don’t make us guess, Nolan, you’re better than that. There’s too much opportunity for the Joker’s particular brand of fun there for us to be left holding the bag.
But these are small problems, not large ones. Maybe the director’s cut or special edition or whatever they eventually release will have something added that will make these things more clear. For the moment, though, it stands as a testament to just how great this movie is that this is about as far as I can take my criticism of it.
Now, before we conclude, a brief look at potential villains might be in order. I think we can more or less count out the more “supernatural” villains, like Killer Croc and Clayface and Manbat, and it would be dangerous indeed to bring back Mr. Freeze or Poison Ivy (or, I regret, Bane) after what happened with them the last time.
That leaves us with some interesting possibilities:
- The Penguin: If he’s presented in the proper way, he could be great. Not some sad-sack mutant played by Danny Devito, please understand, but rather, the totally-amoral, gang-boss business-genius Penguin of ‘No Man’s Land’. The No Man’s Land story arc saw Gotham separated from the continental U.S. by an earthquake and more or less abandoned to shift for itself. It was pretty awesome, actually.
- Catwoman: As I mentioned above, she’s not implausible. Just steer clear of Halle Berry and magic cat powers and everything will be fine. Unfortunately, both the Penguin and Catwoman seem to have been nixed by Nolan and his crew, who claim that they intend to focus on someone else (singular or plural, hard to say) in later films. Too bad. She’s a good character.
- The Riddler: See above. Not impossible, and not implausible in a realistic sense, either, with a little tweaking. No outlandish costume necessary (sorry, Frank Gorshin), and it could lead to some plots and disasters that might rival even the Joker’s carefully-wrought schemes.
- Rupert Thorne: Almost a certainty. He’s not a supervillain, per se, but rather a mobster of particular power and tenacity. He was a constant presence on Batman: The Animated Series, and he could easily complete the trifecta of conventional Gotham mob bosses (with Falcone of the last film and Maroni in this one).
- Black Mask: Also a mob boss, but with a terrifying black mask, typically in the shape of a skull. Sometimes that mask has been melded with his face through an accident (or by choice), sometimes it’s just an aesthetic decision. Whatever the case, Roman Sionis (for such is his name) is bad news for everyone in the whole world.
- Harley Quinn: The Joker’s gal friday. Could look silly, but the character is a fun one. How you bring in her back story of meeting the Joker at Arkham Asylum, without, well, The Joker, is a tricky one however.
- Talia al-Ghul: It would be somewhat fitting for Ra’s al-Ghul’s daughter to come back for revenge, or even to announce that he is still alive somewhere.
Any other ideas? Ideal casting?
And what about The Dark Knight Returns? Is Nolan trying to tell us something by choosing the title for this film that he did? Only time will tell.
-from July 2008
* * * * *
A few quick thoughts after watching the film today:
-Why was the mayor wearing eye-liner? I suspect he will be up to no good in the next film.
-In terms of the Joker-in-the-penthouse scene, I didn't have much of a problem with it this time, possibly because it just made so much sense that the Joker would throw Rachel out the building so he could make his escape. Maybe the Joker should have said “Time to go” or something infinitely more clever after throwing her from the building. Maybe this would have been too cheesy though.
-In terms of potential villains, I’d add Mad Hatter, Scarface, the Great White Shark, and the Phantasm. Although they all have their problems (not film-friendly, too goofy, too obscure, and not technically a comic book villain, in that order), I think Nolan of all people would be able to work around them. Hell, Nolan could probably pull off Bat-Mite. Still, my #1 pick would be Black Mask, followed by the Riddler, revamped Nolan-style. Followed by the Mad Hatter and Harley Quinn.
I recall another villain by the name of Red Claw, a woman who ran some sort of terrorist organization. She was only in the animated series of my childhood, but she’d probably make the transition to Nolan’s version of Batman quite well.
But...back to Harley Quinn...she could be interesting, particularly since she was the psychiatrist to The Joker and fell in love with him. They’d never actually have to show him. Now, this would be the perfect foil for the supremely frightening Jane Doe. If you don’t recall or are not familiar, Jane Doe is a serial killer who obsesses over her victims and mimics their manneurisms; upon killing them she “wears” their skin, much like Ed Gein: how fascinating it would be for her to kill Harley Quinn and mimic her. That way you would not have to explain the fact that the Joker is missing; of course, he could just be at Arkham Asylum, but that wouldn’t be as intriguing I suppose...I'll have to think about it some more.
-Bale's voice as Batman was more noticeable this time...actually it was pretty funny at times.
-One of my comments after seeing the film last year, lightly complained about the anti-climax in which we witnessed the Joker suspended from the building. I suppose they felt like leaving the demise of the Joker as an open end for Batman did say: “You’ll be in a padded cell forever.” At least the Joker lives. Its kind of eerie too...perhaps, even, an involuntary homage to the actor.
1. Monstrous implications – The Dark Knight is PG-13. I get that, it has to be; it’s a comic-book movie, and not a comic-book movie based off of some high-brow graphic novel only ever read by people with arts degrees. It’s Batman; you’ve got to let those kids in there somehow.
That doesn’t mean, though, that you can’t inescapably imply things that, if actually depicted, would put you on the track to an R rating so fast that you’d swear you’d been abducted by pirates. The Joker’s pencil trick (I’ve never seen an audience react so strongly to something in my life, though that reaction was highly varied); the broken pool cue casually thrown down between three men who’ve been informed that there’s only room on the team for one of them; the cutting of Gambol’s lip; Lau sullenly burned alive. And this is only the stuff that happens more or less on camera; there’s much that’s even worse that we hear about happening off.
It’s in circumstances such as these that other critics might mention the strange disconnect that exists in the rating-giving establishment between sex and violence. To whit, it seems a strange sort of thing that a cavalcade of murder and explosions and knifeplay and gunfights and whatnot is perfectly fine, while one exposed breast would be enough to bring them roaring out of their seats. Of sex there’s next to nothing in The Dark Knight; a dishevelled couple are seen trying to quickly get themselves in order shortly after the Joker crashes Bruce’s fundraiser, and there may have been some very light innuendo between Harvey and Rachel. Other than that, though, not a trace. Of violence, though… well, it need hardly be said. Not since City of Violence has there been a city more fraught with violence.
For my own part, and the only reason I even bring this up, is because I do not find this difference of tolerance for sex and violence either surprising or, necessarily, unreasonable. While the instinct towards force and battle seems to exist in the human person from the first breath (little kids are ruffians, after all), the sexual faculty develops more slowly, and not at all consistently or smoothly. But that’s grist for another mill. I actually don't have much interest in the rating system, nor do I pay attention to it--my reason for mentioning it was due to hearing a gentleman refer to it while coming out of the theater, and thought that maybe some people do actually take them seriously. Of course, I am not a parent.
2. The Bat-Pod – Not as lame as I thought it would be, and substantially cooler than it had any right to be.
3. The creation of Two-Face – As those who have read the comics know, the Joker is not typically depicted as being involved in the hideous and traumatizing scarring that turns Harvey Dent into Two-Face. The general story (as most notably told in the pages of Batman: The Long Halloween), sees Dent scarred by a jar of acid splashed in his face by a mobster on the stand during the trial of Salvatore Maroni. In most versions of the story it’s the attack that unhinges him, but sometimes (as in Batman: The Animated Series) there’s a sort of latent monstrousness to him that is only released by the attack rather than created.
In the case of The Dark Knight I can almost see an improvement on the original story. There have been recent storylines that have seen Two-Face take on a sort of vigilante status, albeit still with archly criminal tendencies, but I like the idea of him being driven into a life of infamy by the loss of everything he ever loved and the perceived betrayal by those he trusted more than I like the idea that simply being badly scarred would turn him into a ganglord. Did he survive his final fall at the end of the movie? I think so. For one it would be lame as hell if he didn’t come back after all of this set up, and for another, if I recall correctly, his body seems to have vanished from where it had been lying just before Batman runs off to draw the attention of the police. We’ll see, though. We’ll see.
4. Textual references – As mentioned above, The Long Halloween seems to be a source, here, although The Dark Knight eschews the other supervillains who so frequently appear in that miniseries. There’s also more than a little bit of Moore and Bolland’s The Killing Joke in it as well, particularly as regards the Joker’s doubtful origins and his complete sadistic evil. The idea of a Joker with a “cut smile” has cropped up in a number of other places (see The Man Who Laughs and the Elseworlds book, Gotham Noir), and the final battle in which Batman fights the S.W.A.T. in a dangerous building seems to echo some stuff from Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One (and also the truly excellent animated film, Batman: Mask of the Phantasm). If there are more, I’d like to hear ‘em.
5. The Joker’s astoundingly elaborate plans – There are too many to go into with any great depth, but let’s just consider the implications and timing of one of them. To effectively set up his two-way death trap involving Harvey and Rachel, he needs to make sure that he’s captured and taken to the station, that Batman is there as well, and that all of this is done in a reasonable amount of time so that the fun isn’t taken away by having the bombs go off before he can send Batman out to try to stop them. That’s pretty meticulous in and of itself, and it suggests that he knew exactly what would happen with the astonishing car chase he started, though whether or not he knew it would be the presumed-dead Gordon who would arrest him is anyone’s guess. I think he did, actually, as only Gordon could be relied upon not to either kill him or set him free for the mob.
So there he is, in the cell. He had to have dealt with the bomb in the fat guy situation ages ago, as well as have had a great deal of confidence that the guy would be picked up by the police and brought to that station while he was there. It’s possible that it would have been fine with him to blow up the bomb from elsewhere just for the damage it would cause, but there seems to have been a pretty elaborate bit of foresight here on his part involving him using this affair to destroy the only effective police force in Gotham, break Batman’s spirit, get Lau (and his money) under his control, and win his freedom once more. It all goes off without a hitch.
But the only reason it was able to go off without a hitch is because he was able to predict that he could rile Batman enough to start throwing him around the room, eventually breaking one of the window-mirrors and giving him a shard of glass to use as a knife. This shard would have been useless if he hadn’t also reckoned rightly on the police decision to put a guy in the cell with him for extra security’s sake, thus giving him a hostage to let him get out onto the main floor and there complete the rest of his plan.
You know what’s really troubling? It could all have been luck and coincidence. That’s what Chaos does sometimes.
All in all, though, that’s some damn impressive work from the Nolan brothers.
6. The humor – Let’s not mess around here: this is a pretty dark film, by any measure. Cut smiles, bombs sewn into fat guys, shaky-cam snuff films, you name it. Nevertheless, they still manage to break the tension without having to resort to the “man, my powers are awesome” montages of a Spider-Man, or the “man, I’m so cool” montages of Iron Man. No pratfalls either.
What there is, on the other hand, is a great amount of what could best be described as hesitant, self-aware humor. In the original review I mentioned the newspaper headline about Bruce absconding with the entire Moscow ballet – which was great – but there’s so much more, most of it involving Lucius Fox. That Bruce wants new armor that will allow him to turn his head is a friendly nod to complaints fans have been making since 1989, and Lucius’ description of the sonar phone’s capabilities as being “like a submarine, Mr. Wayne; like a submarine” is delivered with truly excellent timing. His slow-building-yet-instantaneous deflation of Mr. Reese’s blackmail scheme also had the audience howling. They sure needed it, at that point.
7. The fake-outs – In a lot of films like this we’re asked to accept some pretty unlikely stuff in support of some pretty obvious later reversals, but in The Dark Knight this whole subject gets turned around. First there’s the turmoil surrounding James Gordon’s “death.” I’ll admit that I was sort of distracted or something when that happened so at no point did I actually believe he really was dead, or even that the film was actually maintaining that he was. I was helped considerably in my opinion by the fact that the trailers I’d so obsessively watched contained numerous scenes involving Gordon that had jet to take place. Still, I’ll wager that a fair proportion of those in the audience thought that Nolan really did have the guts to kill Gordon off before he could even become commissioner; this is, after all, a grittier and more realistic world he’s created.
Few people probably thought that the masked driver of the police van taking the “prisoner” Harvey Dent to the station was James Gordon, but it was clear from early on that his covered face and silence were a matter of some significance. At first, I think, many believed the masked man to be the Joker in disguise, which would be implausible enough but not impossible and certainly dramatically appropriate. As it gradually became apparent that the Joker was still a large elsewhere, the choice would then likely pass to the masked man being Batman. But no, there was the Batmobile, and its driver inside of it. The reveal of the truth was nicely done.
The second such fake-out was more subtle – so subtle, in fact, that I’ve been reading accounts of people simply not understanding it. As if it weren’t bad enough that the Joker has set up a two-way trap guaranteeing the death of either Rachel or Harvey (or both), he goes the extra sadistic length of switching the addresses at which they’re being held so that no matter who Batman chooses to save, it won’t be the choice he wanted to make. Fiendish.
The third fake-out is the most significant of all, and occasioned gasps and murmurs in both of the showings I attended. Heaven only knows what people thought about it afterwards. As the clock ticks down to the destruction of both ferries, it seems obvious that the enormously menacing prisoner (played by Tommy “Tiny” Lister) is going to do something terrible. He even seems to say as much. The weaker man relents, unable to have the murder of hundreds of innocent people on his conscious. Everyone knew what was coming, and so steeled themselves for either the explosion of the other ferry or the explosion of the prisoners’ own ferry (for thus the Joker rolls).
But no; he just throws it out the window and goes to lead some of his fellow inmates in prayer. What a badass.
8. Possible foreshadowing – There were only two such moments that I noticed, and one might have been a joke while the other could easily be completely meaningless. The first is obvious: Lucius’ wry comment about the new suit of Bat-armour being able to protect him from cats could stand as an indication of a Catwoman to come, or that she might already exist in the world at that time and Batman had had run-ins with her before. Either way, that’s great; Catwoman is one of the few Batman villains that could be rendered in Nolan’s “real world Gotham” without too much trouble. A kleptomaniacal acrobat who decides to put her talents to good use is not so very far-fetched.
There’s another foreshadowing though, that’s a bit more peculiar. One thing that’s been good about Nolan’s restrained approach to things is that we’ve been spared the many villains whose real names just happen to match up with their eventual criminal vocations (as with Victor Fries [Mr. Freeze] and Edward Nygma [E. Nygma - The Riddler]). Jonathan Crane (the Scarecrow) had a nice gothic name, but other than that we’re cool.
Or are we? We have reason to think differently. The character of Reese, the too-smart consultant who follows the money and figures out that Bruce Wayne is Batman, seems to have been introduced for no good reason at all. This is not to say that he’s unwelcome, by any means; his arc is both hilarious and effective, particularly after the Joker invites the people of Gotham to kill him to save their own skins. His name is a strange one, and was obviously chosen for a reason. What might that be? Well, let’s say it fast. Mr. Reese. Mysteries? Very similar to the Riddler’s other nominal justification (”Mr. E.”), wouldn’t you say?
Edward Nygma is too dumb a name to work in the world Nolan has created, but Reese is not. He has the intellect and head for patterns and the physical qualities of the Riddler, to be sure, and it was long rumored (particularly after the announcement that Anthony Michael Hall would be in the film [he plays the reporter, Mike Engel]) that the Riddler would be introduced in The Dark Knight, though out of costume. Fair enough, but what of the fact that he knows Batman’s secret identity? Nolan has an out there, too. It has been established for a while now in the comics that the Riddler is one of the few people who knows that Bruce Wayne is Batman. He did for a while, anyway, I don’t know if they’ve mind-wiped him now or what. But he did, and he never told a soul. Why? Because, although he was Batman’s enemy (again, only for a while; now he’s somewhat reformed, if I remember correctly, and working as a detective in his own right), he loved riddles more. And indeed, what would be the value of a riddle to which everyone knew the answer? So he kept it a secret even as he fought the vigilante.
I don’t know if Nolan and his team will go this route, but I wouldn’t necessarily oppose it if they did.
9. More symbolism – The three-headed hellhound (kind of) guarding the Joker at the very end was pretty sweet.
10. The flaws – Yeah, there were some. The trouble with the fight scenes has been mentioned before, so I won’t go beating that into the ground, but there are a few others worth mentioning. The two most egregious involve the Joker. First, you don’t end a film by leaving the most notorious villain in the history of the world hanging off the side of a building. It’s perfectly permissable for him to escape to possibly return another day, or to fall or trip or do something that makes his fate uncertain (he should be dead, but is he? etc.). Don’t just cut away from him as the cops arrive, though, and then never return to him again. Was he arrested? Did he escape? Did they (being Gotham cops) just kill him? These are all possibilities, and I guess we could say that we’re meant to see his ultimate fate as being just as open a question as his origins, but seriously, man, that was a bit lame.
Also troubling was the scene in which the Joker crashes Bruce Wayne’s fundraiser. This is not to bash the scene as it went down, of course, because it was tremendous. I felt bad for everyone who had to be there while Heath Ledger was doing all of that. Even for acting, it must have been nauseating to witness. No, the trouble is with how the scene concludes. The Joker flings Rachel out the window, as is good and proper, and Batman goes tumbling after her. He catches her, they land roughly, and… that’s it. He’s happy, she has a sarcastic quip, and all seems pretty well.
Never mind that the Joker and his armed thugs are now alone in Bruce Wayne’s penthouse with the richest people in the city. How does that turn out? Don’t make us guess, Nolan, you’re better than that. There’s too much opportunity for the Joker’s particular brand of fun there for us to be left holding the bag.
But these are small problems, not large ones. Maybe the director’s cut or special edition or whatever they eventually release will have something added that will make these things more clear. For the moment, though, it stands as a testament to just how great this movie is that this is about as far as I can take my criticism of it.
Now, before we conclude, a brief look at potential villains might be in order. I think we can more or less count out the more “supernatural” villains, like Killer Croc and Clayface and Manbat, and it would be dangerous indeed to bring back Mr. Freeze or Poison Ivy (or, I regret, Bane) after what happened with them the last time.
That leaves us with some interesting possibilities:
- The Penguin: If he’s presented in the proper way, he could be great. Not some sad-sack mutant played by Danny Devito, please understand, but rather, the totally-amoral, gang-boss business-genius Penguin of ‘No Man’s Land’. The No Man’s Land story arc saw Gotham separated from the continental U.S. by an earthquake and more or less abandoned to shift for itself. It was pretty awesome, actually.
- Catwoman: As I mentioned above, she’s not implausible. Just steer clear of Halle Berry and magic cat powers and everything will be fine. Unfortunately, both the Penguin and Catwoman seem to have been nixed by Nolan and his crew, who claim that they intend to focus on someone else (singular or plural, hard to say) in later films. Too bad. She’s a good character.
- The Riddler: See above. Not impossible, and not implausible in a realistic sense, either, with a little tweaking. No outlandish costume necessary (sorry, Frank Gorshin), and it could lead to some plots and disasters that might rival even the Joker’s carefully-wrought schemes.
- Rupert Thorne: Almost a certainty. He’s not a supervillain, per se, but rather a mobster of particular power and tenacity. He was a constant presence on Batman: The Animated Series, and he could easily complete the trifecta of conventional Gotham mob bosses (with Falcone of the last film and Maroni in this one).
- Black Mask: Also a mob boss, but with a terrifying black mask, typically in the shape of a skull. Sometimes that mask has been melded with his face through an accident (or by choice), sometimes it’s just an aesthetic decision. Whatever the case, Roman Sionis (for such is his name) is bad news for everyone in the whole world.
- Harley Quinn: The Joker’s gal friday. Could look silly, but the character is a fun one. How you bring in her back story of meeting the Joker at Arkham Asylum, without, well, The Joker, is a tricky one however.
- Talia al-Ghul: It would be somewhat fitting for Ra’s al-Ghul’s daughter to come back for revenge, or even to announce that he is still alive somewhere.
Any other ideas? Ideal casting?
And what about The Dark Knight Returns? Is Nolan trying to tell us something by choosing the title for this film that he did? Only time will tell.
-from July 2008
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A few quick thoughts after watching the film today:
-Why was the mayor wearing eye-liner? I suspect he will be up to no good in the next film.
-In terms of the Joker-in-the-penthouse scene, I didn't have much of a problem with it this time, possibly because it just made so much sense that the Joker would throw Rachel out the building so he could make his escape. Maybe the Joker should have said “Time to go” or something infinitely more clever after throwing her from the building. Maybe this would have been too cheesy though.
-In terms of potential villains, I’d add Mad Hatter, Scarface, the Great White Shark, and the Phantasm. Although they all have their problems (not film-friendly, too goofy, too obscure, and not technically a comic book villain, in that order), I think Nolan of all people would be able to work around them. Hell, Nolan could probably pull off Bat-Mite. Still, my #1 pick would be Black Mask, followed by the Riddler, revamped Nolan-style. Followed by the Mad Hatter and Harley Quinn.
I recall another villain by the name of Red Claw, a woman who ran some sort of terrorist organization. She was only in the animated series of my childhood, but she’d probably make the transition to Nolan’s version of Batman quite well.
But...back to Harley Quinn...she could be interesting, particularly since she was the psychiatrist to The Joker and fell in love with him. They’d never actually have to show him. Now, this would be the perfect foil for the supremely frightening Jane Doe. If you don’t recall or are not familiar, Jane Doe is a serial killer who obsesses over her victims and mimics their manneurisms; upon killing them she “wears” their skin, much like Ed Gein: how fascinating it would be for her to kill Harley Quinn and mimic her. That way you would not have to explain the fact that the Joker is missing; of course, he could just be at Arkham Asylum, but that wouldn’t be as intriguing I suppose...I'll have to think about it some more.
-Bale's voice as Batman was more noticeable this time...actually it was pretty funny at times.
-One of my comments after seeing the film last year, lightly complained about the anti-climax in which we witnessed the Joker suspended from the building. I suppose they felt like leaving the demise of the Joker as an open end for Batman did say: “You’ll be in a padded cell forever.” At least the Joker lives. Its kind of eerie too...perhaps, even, an involuntary homage to the actor.
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