{ c a s t r o v a l v a 4.0 } :: Notes from the Underground

I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Saturday, November 21, 2009

A glancing reference in a somewhat recursive Zadie Smith essay on essays, drew my attention to David Shield's Reality Hunger:

"Standard operating procedure for fiction writers is to disavow any but the most insignificant link between the life lived and the novel written; similarly, for non-fiction writers, the main impulse is to insist upon the unassailable verisimilitude of the book they've produced. I've written three books of fiction and twice as many books of non-fiction, and whenever I'm discussing the supposed reality of a work of non-fiction I've written, I inevitably (and rapidly) move the conversation over to a contemplation of the ways in which I've fudged facts, exaggerated my emotions, cast myself as a symbolic figure, and invented freely. So, too, whenever anyone asks me about the origins of a work of fiction, I always forget to say, 'I made it all up,' and instead start talking about, for lack of a better term, real life. Why can't I get my stories straight? Why do I so resist generic boundaries, and why am I so drawn to generic fissures? Why do I always seem to want to fold one form into another?

I have a very vivid memory of being assigned to read The Grapes of Wrath as a junior in high school and playing hooky from my homework to read Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72. Steinbeck’s humorlessness, sentimentality, and sledgehammer symbolism hardly had a chance against Hunter Thompson’s comedy, nihilism, and free association. I loved how easily Fear and Loathing mixed reportage or pseudo-reportage with glimmers of memoir.

I wanted to write a book whose loyalty wasn't just to art but to life, my life. I wanted to be part of the process, part of the problem. For quite a while I wrote in a fairly traditional manner - two linear, realistic novels and dozens of conventionally plotted stories. I’m not a big believer in major epiphanies, especially those that occur in the shower, but I had one, about fifteen years ago, and it occurred in the shower: I had the sudden intuition that I could take various fragments of things, aborted stories, outtakes from novels, journal entries, litcrit and build a story out of them. I really had no idea what the story would be about; I just knew I needed to see what it would look like to set certain shards in juxtaposition to other shards. Now I have trouble working any other way, but I can't emphasize enough how strange it felt at the time, working in this modal mode.

I'm hopelessly, futilely drawn toward representations of the real, knowing full well how invented such representations are. I'm bored by out-and-out fabrication, by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters. I want to explore my own damn, doomed character. I want to cut to the absolute bone. Everything else seems like so much gimmickry. For me, anyway, the fictional construct rarely takes you deeper into the material that you want to explore. Instead, it takes you deeper into the fictional construct, into the technology of narrative, of plot, of place, of scene, of characters. In most novels I read, the narrative completely overwhelms whatever it was the writer supposedly set out to explore in the first place.
"

I tend to agree with Smith that Shields partly refutes his own argument, by noting the fantastical character of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as opposed to the sober realism of The Grapes of Wrath; it can often be the case that the more a writer adheres to autobiography, the more fantastical the narration becomes. Witness Huysmans and DeQuincey as obvious exmaples. One might also note that the division Shields draws between etoliated artifice and the crudity of raw experience is surely a false one; as John Bayley's The Uses of Division : Unity and Disharmony in Literature was at pains to point out, the most interesting work of many realist writers is often their more fragmented and inchoate. For me, writers like Lawrence, Eliot and Hardy are great precisely because of how untidy their novels often are. With all of that said though, in the end I probably sympathise more with Shields than with Smith. From Isherwood and Pessoa onwards to Coetzee and Sebald, writing that defies the division of reality and invention has become a hallmark of the age. Equally, it's difficult not to notice that if our age has any genre it has obsessively explored, it would have to be biography, even those of people who are still living and have done apparently little to merit the attention. Put simply, we live in an age where experience is a heavily circumsribed or heavily mediated concept. I recall an interview with Slavoj Zizek on this subject:

"In my work, I place strong emphasis on what is usually referred to as the virtualisation or digitalisation of our environment... But still, 30 percent of us live in a digitalised universe that is artificially constructed, manipulated and no longer some natural or traditional one. At all levels of our life we seem to live more and more with the thing deprived of its substance... Throughout the entire twentieth century, I see a counter-tendency, for which my good philosopher friend Alain Badiou invented a nice name: 'La passion du reel', the passion of the real. That is to say, precisely because the universe in which we live is somehow a universe of dead conventions and artificiality, the only authentic real experience must be some extremely violent, shattering experience. And this we experience as a sense that now we are back in real life.

I think this may be what defined the twentieth century, which really began with the First World War. We all remember the war reports by Ernst Junger, in which he praises this eye-to-eye combat experience as the authentic one. Or at the level of sex, the archetypal film of the twentieth century would be Nagisa Oshima's Ai No Corrida (In The Realm Of The Senses), where the idea again is that you become truly radical, and go to the end in a sexual encounter, when you practically torture each other to death. There must be extreme violence for that encounter to be authentic.

Another emblematic figure in this sense to me is the so-called 'cutter'- a widespread pathological phenomenon in the USA. There are two million of them, mostly women, but also men, who cut themselves with razors. Why? It has nothing to do with masochism or suicide. It's simply that they don't feel real as persons and the idea is: it's only through this pain and when you feel warm blood that you feel reconnected again. So I think that this tension is the background against which one should appreciate the effect of the act."
Labels: Literature

posted by Richard 6:01 PM

Sunday, June 21, 2009

William Boyd writes on the role of parks in the English novel:

"Angus Wilson (1913-1991), novelist and short story writer, identified what he called an essential dichotomy in the English realistic novel dating back to Samuel Richardson in the 18th century, namely the concepts of "town" and "country" and the opposing values that they imply. The division is an intriguing one, even today, and it is still relatively easy to classify a novelist in one or the other camp. Are you essentially "urban" or are you "rural"? This is not an innocent question, as Wilson infers. To categorise yourself as one or the other is tendentious and provokes a series of unconscious judgments. In his long autobiographical essay, The Wild Garden, Wilson lists some of the antitheses that "town" and "country" respectively embody: progress versus tradition; art versus nature; industry versus the contemplative life; reason versus instinct; strained sensibility versus sturdy common sense, bohemianism versus rootedness, and so on.

Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, in the pantheon of English literature, perhaps best illustrate the split between the "town" writer as opposed to the "country" one. It is a very 19th-century juxtaposition, made particularly acute and particularly obvious as the industrial revolution took its remorseless grip on the nation. Mansfield Park.. It best reflects Angus Wilson's dichotomy of "town" versus "country" in the English novel, with Fanny Price and Mansfield Park - and dull Edmund Bertram - representing all that is solid and worthy of "country" values, set against the witty and louche sophistication of the "town" Crawfords from London.

According to Edmund Burke's treatise of 1756, The Sublime and the Beautiful, the sublime finds its source in anything capable of exciting pain or danger. Beauty, however, consists of anything small, smooth, with an absence of angularity and a brightness of colour. This sounds almost park-like to me, the park providing us with those qualities of beauty we require in our life - in contrast to what the "sublime" city represents with its pain and danger."

Wilson's dichotomies are perhaps slightly disingenuous; in Fielding, Burney and Dickens the transition from the country to the city is essentially a journey from rural virtue to urban vice. Of course, Dickens is perfectly capable of writing of rural vice, as in Nicholas Nickleby but the contrast is still at the centre of his work, even as his descriptions of the city seem to echo Baudelaire's celebration of the urban sublime. The comparison with French literature is revealing; Maupassant and Balzac certainly see the division of town and country as a moral one but are rather more likely to portray it as a contrast of sophistication with dullness. Zola is perhaps slightly less withering in his indictment of rural vice to its urban counterpart, but the difference is one of degree not of kind. Conversely, Johnson might have thought that is a man tires of London he tires of life, but it is difficult to discern it from his depictions of 'the great wen.' While London was the first major industrialised city, writers of that era still tended to denounce or avoid it. The nineteenth century English novel frequently takes rural locations as its setting, from the Bronte sisters and Thomas Hardy to George Eliot, with the same applying to poets like Tennyson and Hopkins. Writers like Gissing, Orwell and Hamilton could justly be argued to belong to a minority tradition. Crime writers like Christie and Allingham preferred rural settings, even when their subject matter was considerably better described as an urban phenomenon. Even as technology made buildings like the Crystal Palace possible, medieval gothic became the preferred architectural style and the garden city movement arose. What tends to be interesting in the English tradition isn't so much a conflict between town and city, but between the sentimental or pastoral and the romantic. In Lawrence and Forster, the country represents eros and wildness, while in Dickens and Gaskell it represents tradition and the merely picturesque. Eliot, Hardy and the Bronte sisters depict the country in terms of both these categories.

Of course, modern England's agricultural sector is one of the smallest in Europe, as is the percentage of forested land area. Pastoral is not a mode that can be convincingly deployed today, which may be suggestive for the current condition of English literature.
Labels: England, Literature

posted by Richard 3:50 PM

Saturday, February 07, 2009

A somewhat unusual article on Post-Soviet 'Gothic morality:'

"How can we discover the consequences of historical amnesia? How can we employ customary historical methods to measure the impact of absent memory on contemporary Russian society? What kind of sources could reveal for us this hidden work of deformed memory that results in transformations of values, attitudes, customs and social relations? Fiction is a particularly fruitful source for studying historical representations of the Stalinist past. As a genre, it addresses moral and aesthetic dilemmas; describes transformations of values, attitudes, customs and social relations; and provides access to the emotions and to the workings of the individual memory of its protagonists. Post-Soviet fiction, loaded with reminiscences of Soviet terror and atrocities, discloses the connection between suppressed memory and the emergence of new moral norms and social structures.

However post-Soviet fiction differs considerably from realistic prose such as Tolstoy's War and Peace or even Grossman's Life and Fate. It is overwhelmed by all kind of magic and monsters – vampires, witches and werewolves... Over the last three centuries, Enlightenment rationality has boxed dragons and witches into a specific genre – fairy tale. Now we see them becoming the main protagonists of novels and films aimed at adults. The human being, that as an inheritance of the Enlightenment used to be the centre of the anthropocentric universe, has been pushed to the periphery in favour of the non-human. Two highly popular cult novels – Sergei Lukyanenko's Night Watch and Vadim Panov's Taganski Crossroads – serve as examples. Their success with the Russian reading public is testified by huge print runs and by the fact that they have been turned into movies and computer games. Both novels share features that are typical for the genre in general. Both leave the realities of Russian culture and society almost intact, making them extremely fertile for an analysis of moral and aesthetic developments. Their main protagonists are strikingly similar: rank-and-file administrators, average men on the street, painstakingly portrayed positive heroes with whom the reader fully identifies. In both novels, the plot unfolds in contemporary Moscow.

A simple mental experiment helps to prove this statement. If we remove the vampires, werewolves and witches from these narratives and substitute them with cops, gangsters and their victims, if we parenthesize the witchcraft and the magic, the story would not differ much from a pale description of everyday Russian life. At the heart of gothic morality is a remarkable equality of good and evil, expressed in Night Watch by the opposition between "light" and "dark" vampires. Their methods and goals are explicitly compared and judged to be the same. Nevertheless, light and dark vampires represent not just a metaphor for the notorious convergence of the state and mafia in Russia. The impossibility of distinguishing good from evil – the heroes conclude – makes any attempt to do so a sheer absurdity. The total denial of morality leads to a cult of force. Gothic morality considers murder an everyday routine – who counts (dead) humans? "Life against death, love against hate, and force against force, because force is above morality. It's that simple," concludes the hero of Night Watch... Personal loyalty to the boss is the only principle that the hero of post-Soviet fantasy never betrays. He is always ready to go against his own judgments, betray his inferiors and the norms of his unit to obey his boss's orders."

It's not an overly persuasive argument. It may be true that Lukyanenko does tend to depict the forces of light and dark as being opposed but equivalent, needing to be brought into balance. The two concepts sometimes seem equivalent to good and evil, sometimes not. But in any case, much of the above criticism of Lukyanenko would also apply to the likes of Anne Rice or any number of contemporary horror novelists in any number of other Western countries. I'm also not persuaded that it's such a bad thing to deny the validity of collective projects (or meta-narratives); if anything, that also seems a rather Western attitude. With that said, it is interesting for other reasons. Realist fiction does tend to presume some degree of social homogeneity or stability, in keeping with its status as what Lukacs called the "bourgeois epic," even if ghost stories were a favourite pastime for the writers as produced landmarks of nineteenth century realist fiction. Nontheless, this may be part of why the fantastic is a familiar component of Russian literature (or why South America produced magical realism). Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Gogol all wrote stories quite similar to the above, set in a familiar realist setting and depicting average men on the street. It would have seem more persuasive to me to observe that horror fiction in increasingly post-traditional societies that lack chiastic structures of good and evil to rehabilitate (or emasculate) the monsters they depict. In other words, to foreground the romantic outcast and decenter the damned creature. A novel like Dracula is frequently depicted as an allegory of Victorian anxieties that perhaps lack the same force today:

"According to Nina Auerbach, in "Our Vampires, Ourselves" (1995), Dracula’s crimes are merely symbols of the real-life sociopolitical horrors facing the late Victorians. One was immigration. At the end of the century, Eastern European Jews, in flight from the pogroms, were pouring into Western Europe, thereby threatening to dilute the pure blood of the English, among others. Dracula, too, is an émigré from the East. Stoker spends a lot of words on the subject of blood, and not just when Dracula extracts it. Fully four of the book’s five vampire-hunters have their blood transfused into Lucy’s veins, and this process is recorded with grisly exactitude. (We see the incisions, the hypodermics.) So Stoker may in fact have been thinking of the racial threat. Like other novels of the period, Dracula contains invidious remarks about Jews. They have big noses, they like money—the usual.

At that time, furthermore, people in England were forced, by the scandal of the Oscar Wilde trials (1895), to think about something they hadn’t worried about before: homosexuality. Many scholars have found suggestions of homoeroticism in
Dracula. Auerbach, by contrast, finds the book annoyingly heterosexual. Earlier vampire tales, such as Polidori’s story and Carmilla, made room for the mutability of erotic experience. In those works, sex didn’t have to be man to woman. And it didn’t have to be outright sex—it might just be fervent friendship. As Auerbach sees it, Stoker, spooked by the Wilde case, backed off from this rich ambiguity, thereby impoverishing vampire literature. After him, she says, vampire art became reactionary. This echoes Stephen King’s statement that all horror fiction, by pitting an absolute good against an absolute evil, is "as Republican as a banker in a three-piece suit."

According to some critics, another thing troubling Stoker was the New Woman, that turn-of-the-century avatar of the feminist. Again, there is support for this. The New Woman is referred to dismissively in the book, and the God-ordained difference between the sexes—basically, that women are weak but good, and men are strong but less good—is reiterated with maddening persistence. On the other hand, Mina, the novel’s heroine, and a woman of unquestioned virtue, looks, at times, like a feminist. She works for a living, as a schoolmistress, before her marriage, and the new technology, which should have been daunting to a female, holds no mysteries for her. She’s a whiz as a typist—a standard New Woman profession. Also, she is wise and reasonable—male virtues. Nevertheless, her primary characteristic is a female trait: compassion. (At one point, she even pities Dracula.) Stoker, it seems, had mixed feelings about the New Woman.

Whether or not politics was operating in Stoker’s novel, it is certainly at work in our contemporary vampire literature. Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series openly treats vampires as a persecuted minority. Sometimes they are like black people (lynch mobs pursue them), sometimes like homosexuals (rednecks beat them up). Meanwhile, they are trying to go mainstream. Sookie’s Bill has sworn off human blood, or he’s trying; he subsists on a Japanese synthetic. He registers to vote (absentee, because he cannot get around in daylight)... In The Vampire Chronicles, Anne Rice also seems to regard her undead as an oppressed group. Their suffering is probably, at some level, a story about AIDS. All this is a little confusing morally. How can we have sympathy for the Devil and still regard him as the Devil?"
Labels: Gothic, Literature

posted by Richard 2:16 PM

Thursday, October 09, 2008

Rather predictably, this article has recently been highlighted on more than one occasion:

"The current economic woes look a lot like what my 96-year-old grandmother still calls "the real Great Depression." ... The problems had emerged around 1870, starting in Europe. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, formed in 1867, in the states unified by Prussia into the German empire, and in France, the emperors supported a flowering of new lending institutions that issued mortgages for municipal and residential construction, especially in the capitals of Vienna, Berlin, and Paris. Mortgages were easier to obtain than before, and a building boom commenced. Land values seemed to climb and climb; borrowers ravenously assumed more and more credit, using unbuilt or half-built houses as collateral. The most marvelous spots for sightseers in the three cities today are the magisterial buildings erected in the so-called founder period.

But the economic fundamentals were shaky. Wheat exporters from Russia and Central Europe faced a new international competitor who drastically undersold them. The 19th-century version of containers manufactured in China and bound for Wal-Mart consisted of produce from farmers in the American Midwest. They used grain elevators, conveyer belts, and massive steam ships to export trainloads of wheat to abroad. Britain, the biggest importer of wheat, shifted to the cheap stuff quite suddenly around 1871. By 1872 kerosene and manufactured food were rocketing out of America's heartland, undermining rapeseed, flour, and beef prices. The crash came in Central Europe in May 1873, as it became clear that the region's assumptions about continual economic growth were too optimistic. Europeans faced what they came to call the American Commercial Invasion. A new industrial superpower had arrived, one whose low costs threatened European trade and a European way of life.

As continental banks tumbled, British banks held back their capital, unsure of which institutions were most involved in the mortgage crisis. The cost to borrow money from another bank — the interbank lending rate — reached impossibly high rates... In the end, the Panic of 1873 demonstrated that the center of gravity for the world's credit had shifted west — from Central Europe toward the United States. The current panic suggests a further shift — from the United States to China and India."

I've long felt that contemporary society bears a marked resemblance to its Victorian precursor, with marked social inequality being matched by the volatility and instability of free markets. As the conservative project to roll back the twentieth century progressed, the inevitable result was that many of the safeguards introduced to prevent depressions like 1873 and 1929 were also removed. The current conditions are essentially identical to those Marx and Engels had hoped would destroy capitalism in the previous recession of 1857 when Dickens had based the character of Merdle in Little Dorrit on railway speculator and Minister John Sadleir, who embezzled and then bankrupted the Tipperary Joint Stock Bank before killing himself. Given that the current crisis poses substantial questions around the Anglo-American economic model of the last twenty to thirty years, it will be interesting to observe whether current events produce novels like Our Mutual Friend or The Way We Live Now, as this article debates:

"In Britain, there is a long-standing aversion to writing about business. More than a century ago, Henry James decreed that novels should focus on private life and the emotions, not politics and business; most writers since have taken him at his word... Perhaps because US writers are generally more ambitious, and also because US culture is less sniffy about moneymaking, modern American novelists seem at home in the worlds of work and money in a way that few British ones do. Think of [Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities] Saul Bellow's comi-tragic portrait of errant market speculation in Seize the Day, or Philip Roth's account of factory life in American Pastoral. Or think of David Foster Wallace's sinister vision of a corporatised America of the future in his 1996 epic Infinite Jest.

We should not be surprised, then, that it is an American writer who has been most prescient about the current financial upheavals. In his slim 2003 novel Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo tracked the life of an enormously wealthy currency trader on a day of global financial meltdown. It is by no means DeLillo's best work, but many things about it that now seem prophetic – the way, for instance, he captures the trader's overweening ambition and arrogance, and how he evokes the sense of a system that no one fully understands spinning rapidly out of control."

I do tend to recall Milan Kundera's observation that the re-establishment of the middle class in the Czech Republic following the collapse of the Soviet bloc was a subject worthy of Balzac at a time when novels of that kind had ceased to be possible. Realism in its conventional sense seemed to assume a more homogeneous society that could be more easily conceived of a single entity, which applies rather poorly to contemporary society (although Hollinghurst's documenting of the 1987 stock market crash in The Line of Beauty does rather spring to mind as a counter example). In practice, it may not be that easy to roll back the twentieth century and all of the literary innovations that went with it. Of course, all of this assumes that we don't end up with nostalgic works of escapism like Brideshead Revisited ("it was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster — the period of soya beans and Basic English — and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past"), Love in a Cold Climate and Lord of the Rings instead.

Update: a closely related follow-up piece from Tristram Hunt:

"To wander through modern Los Angeles is to get a keen idea of Rome in 400AD, Venice at the end of its medieval glory or post-war London. LA is a city redolent of empire and it is visibly in collapse. It is not just the choking smog, violent ghettos or armies of homeless, but a more fin de siècle sense that its time has passed. One can imagine, in 100 years, the Pacific waves lapping at the stones of Santa Monica, the sand blowing through the skyscrapers and the great film studios serving as a 20th-century Colosseum.

Last week's report from the National Intelligence Council only served to confirm the fear that the age of America is drawing to a close, with the Iraq invasion standing as the final act of imperial hubris. As the Pentagon securocrats rightly predict, the emerging economies of the Bric nations - Brazil, Russia, India and China - are starting to flex their political and military muscles. The dollar's financial dominance is crumbling. Meanwhile, Bollywood and Nollywood (Nigeria's nascent film industry) are beginning to challenge the cultural prowess of Hollywood. In the coming decades, globalisation will no longer stand as a byword for Americanisation. quot;
Labels: Literature, Politics

posted by Richard 7:51 PM

Sunday, October 05, 2008

George Szirtes writes on the mutability of signifier and signified alike:

"Writers rely on the precarious stability of language. It's like an artist not trusting fugitive colours. I think of Blake on Reynolds:

When Sir Joshua Reynolds died
All Nature was degraded;
The King dropp'd a tear into the Queen's ear,
And all his pictures faded.

Reynolds experimented with Lake colours that decayed far too quickly - in his own lifetime.

Writers depend on stable reference. Signifier should bear some reasonably constant relationship to signified. It has often been said that part of a poet's function is celebration: the preservation of fleeting phenomena in a medium that is, ideally, less fleeting. That is why all kinds of people write verses on weddings, birthdays, funerals. They are attempts to carve something into the language. You can't carve into that which is fugitive. Even the writing down of events in diaries in the plainest of prose is an attempt at carving.

There is an implication here that, by extension, the referents themselves should remain stable. This would include social circumstances, cultural practices, ideas, values, desires and even dreams: it seems to demand an ossified world of stable meanings. Márai's novelist tells us that his values, his compass, his entire craft depends on a vanishing social framework. He is working down a mine where the coal is all but exhausted. The colours are fading even as he writes.

We could regard him as a hidebound reactionary and indeed, in some ways he is. But that is not all he is. His whole aesthetic is based on the knowledge that the seam has been almost, if not quite, worked out, that the colours are fading. This, he tells us, is the nature of things. He is an elegist by nature, meaning that he gazes upon things dying and is not wholly consoled by a glance at things new born."

The likes of Sandor Marai and Joseph Roth (or Ford Maddox Ford to take an English example) are seeking to document the collapse of an entire form of social order (in this immediate example, the destruction of the Austro Hungarian Empire). In that sense, they have more in common with nineteenth century writers like Balzac, Scott that documented the near past with a suspicious eye on the present, than they do with many of their modernist contemporaries. While a preoccupation with social change is not necessarily mutually exclusive with the modernist fascination with the instability of language (Woolf or Broch for instance) the two have a rather fraught relationship. One particularly good example of this is Andrei Biely's St Petersburg, a novel that is ostensibly concerned with the acts of terrorism in Tadrist Russia that were leading to the Russian revolution. The theme is misleading as the narrative tends to approach events symbolically rather than through the lens of historical realism. Instead of social tensions, events are depicted through a set of chiastic oppositions; reason and unreason, occidental and oriental (at times it reads more like Sax Rohmer than Conrad's The Secret Agent). St Petersburg is at once a real city with places that can be found on the map and also a Escheresque labyrinth made unreal by mists ("he wondered as in a dream about the relation of appearance to reality"); the geometry of the enlightenment reverts to the swamp that lies beneath it. Unsurprisingly, the mutability of language emerges as a recurrent theme; "my words get entangled... a modernist would call it the sensation of the abyss and search for an image."
Labels: Literature

posted by Richard 8:22 PM

It's not a publication I greatly care for or regularly read, but I was struck by this article in First Things:

"The Platonic tradition in Christianity invests beauty with ontological significance, trusting it to reveal the unity and proportion of what really is. Our apprehension of beauty thus betokens a recognition of and submission to a reality that transcends us. And yet, if beauty can use art to express truth, art can also use beauty to create charming fabrications. As Jacques Maritain put it, art is capable of establishing "a world apart, closed, limited, absolute," an autonomous world that, at least for a moment, relieves us of the "ennui of living and willing." Instead of directing our attention beyond sensible beauty toward its supersensible source, art can fascinate us with beauty’s apparently self-sufficient presence; it can counterfeit being in lieu of revealing it... "Art is dangerous," as Iris Murdoch once put it, "chiefly because it apes the spiritual and subtly disguises and trivializes it."

This helps explain why Western thinking about art has tended to oscillate between adulation and deep suspicion. "Beauty is the battlefield where God and the devil war for the soul of man," Dostoevsky had Mitya Karamazov declare, and the battle runs deep....

The closer one moved toward the present time, the more blatant and unabashed became the association of the artist with God. Thus Alexander Baumgarten, writing in the mid-eighteenth century, compared the poet to a god and likened his creation to "a world"... If the artist in the modern age emerges as a second god, his divinity tends to close itself off from reality in order to clear a space for art’s fabrications. As such, the artist tends to draw close to the demonic, which Kierkegaard astutely defined as freedom "shutting itself up" apart from the good. ("Myself am Hell," Milton’s Satan declares in a moment of startling self-insight.) If, as Paul Valéry put it, "the artist’s whole business is to make something out of nothing," then, unable to meet this demand, he will find himself wandering alone among the shadows cast by the world he forsook in order to salvage his freedom and creativity. ...

We do not need Nietzsche to tell us that the disintegration of the Platonic-Christian worldview, already begun in the late Middle Ages, is today a cultural given. Nor is it news that the shape of modernity—born, in large part, from man’s faith in the power of human reason and technology to remake the world in his own image—has made it increasingly difficult to hold the traditional view that ties beauty to being and truth, investing it with ontological significance. Modernity, the beneficiary of Descartes’ relocation of truth to the subject ( Cogito, ergo sum), implies the autonomy of the aesthetic sphere and hence the isolation of beauty from being or truth....

The twentieth-century Welsh Catholic poet David Jones.. [thought that the real threat to the arts] was the modern world’s increasing submission to technocracy, to a thoroughly instrumental view of life that had no room for what Jones called the intransitive—for the freedom and disinterestedness traditionally thought the province of religious experience, on the one hand, and aesthetic experience, on the other."

And from a rather different perspective, Zadie Smith takes up a similar theme:

"All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies. In healthy times, we cut multiple roads, allowing for the possibility of a Jean Genet as surely as a Graham Greene. These aren't particularly healthy times. A breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked...

Critiques of this form by now amount to a long tradition in and of themselves. Beginning with what Alain Robbe-Grillet called "the destitution of the old myths of 'depth,'" they blossomed out into a phenomenology skeptical of Realism's metaphysical tendencies, demanding, with Husserl, that we eschew the transcendental, the metaphorical, and go "back to the things themselves!"; they peaked in that radical deconstructive doubt which questions the capacity of language itself to describe the world with accuracy. They all of them note the (often unexamined) credos upon which Realism is built: the transcendent importance of form, the incantatory power of language to reveal truth, the essential fullness and continuity of the self... In an essay written half a century ago, Robbe-Grillet imagined a future for the novel in which objects would no longer "be merely the vague reflection of the hero's vague soul, the image of his torments, the shadow of his desires." He dreaded the "total and unique adjective, which attempt[s] to unite all the inner qualities, the entire hidden soul of things."... The received wisdom of literary history is that Finnegans Wake did not fundamentally disturb Realism's course as Duchamp's urinal disturbed Realism in the visual arts: the novel is made out of language, the smallest units of which still convey meaning, and so they will always carry the trace of the real. But if literary Realism survived the assault of Joyce, it retained the wound...

The literary economy sets up its stall on the road that leads to Netherland, along which one might wave to Jane Austen, George Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Yates, Saul Bellow. Rarely has it been less aware (or less interested) in seeing what's new on the route to Remainder, that skewed side road where we greet Georges Perec, Clarice Lispector, Maurice Blanchot, William Burroughs, J.G. Ballard. Friction, fear, and outright hatred spring up often between these two traditions—yet they have revealing points of connection. At their crossroads we find extraordinary writers claimed by both sides: Melville, Conrad, Kafka, Beckett, Joyce, Nabokov. For though manifestos feed on rupture, artworks themselves bear the trace of their own continuity."

As Rorty felt, my prejudice has always been that there is no overarching intellectual framework that can reconcile 'Trotsky and the Orchids' in his example (or perhaps the diseased body of a dying prostitute and the second French empire in Zola's Nana; as Eliot put it, these things are a parable) or truth and beauty in this example. My preferences in literature and art has always tended to shun the monologic medieval world where art is for the most part subordinate to the transcendental. Conversely, I've always tended to prefer romanticism specifically for its elevation of the individual ego. Nonetheless, the principal tropes of romanticism and modern literature are heavily indebted to christianity. The role of the transcendental in Emerson or Wordsworth may not be specifically christian (hence the fact that Kerouac could write in a similar vein while casting it in buddhist terminology) but it is difficult to conceive of it without christianity. The concept of the romantic spot of time or epiphany is a moment of revelation in the christian sense whether it belongs to Wordsworth or Joyce. The romantic quest romance is prototypically a christian narrative of fall, damnation and redemption, at the very least a form of via negativa that inverts the standard christian eschatology, as in Lautreamont or Melmoth. As a picture this becomes more intermittent in the twentieth century; Derrida's concept of differance is in many respects kabbalistic, assuming an infinity of arcane meanings within a text; De Man's statement that a text possessed of all meanings is possessed of none marks an end to transcendental underpinnings to literature, leading to places like Forster's Marabar caves where all meanings seem equally valid and invalid. It only waited for the postmodernist suspicion of all meta-narratives to complete the final coup de grace. The examples of Kafka or Perec point to a conception of writing akin to Lyotard or De Man; raising the notion of hermeneutics only to dismiss it, dissolving all interpretation in the same way as the paintings in Life A User's Manual are returned to being a blank slate after the jigsaw has been reconstructed. In the case of Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy, the narrative is deflated to the viewpoint of a single observer (who nonetheless remains absent and never uses any personal pronoun, there by removing any element of authorial interpretation from the narration). As the narrative lacks any speculation at to the consciousness of the observed actors or as to events where the observer is absent, it is one of the most anti-metaphysical narratives written (although a repeated incident with a centipede being squashed does seem to be correlated to the putative death of one of the female protagonists in a car crash), although the refusal of access to the consciousness of the other does rather serve to emphasise the issue in a way that the realist novel does not.

In theory, this should represent a form of literature that matches my philosophical predilections. In practice, I often find the likes of Perec more devoid of jouissance than the conventional realist novel, with the reader's every response manipulated and controlled. Where Eliot or Dostoevsky wrote novels that are filled with competing, contradictory voices, this is often subdued in novels like those of Robbe-Grillet that are intended to do the opposite; Barthes claimed that "the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text," reassembling the scenes presented and represented here in any number of orders.

To borrow Takashi Murakami's term, such works tend to be characterised by their flatness, something sublunary and lacking transcendent values. It's difficult not to find the sheer untidiness or 'deconstructability' of the realist novel rather more appealing; realism is after all ultimately a form of artifice, hence contrived conventions like the omniscient narrator. I have often wondered if there's such a thing as a novel that retains the polyphonic character of the realist novel without the transcendental assumptions behind it.
Labels: Literature, Postmodernism, Theory

posted by Richard 8:21 PM

Friday, July 25, 2008

On the one hand, an article reclaiming Hugo's most extensive novel:

"The size was the centre of Hugo's discovery in the art of the novel. And this is visible immediately: it's visible, to the perturbed reader, in the second of this novel's many sentences. The beginning, it turns out, is not a beginning at all. "There is something we might mention that has no bearing whatsoever on the tale we have to tell - not even on the background." Les Miserables begins with a digression from a digression... The subject of one of the longest novels in European literature is - what else? - the infinite. That is why its tempo is so explicit with slowness, syncopated with digression. But in this novel there is no such thing as a digression. Everything is relevant - since the subject of this book, quite literally, is everything: "This book is a tragedy in which infinity plays the lead," writes Hugo. "Man plays a supporting role."

"Really, universally, relations stop nowhere," Henry James would write, 40 years later, in his preface to the New York Edition of his early novel Roderick Hudson, "and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so." Life was infinite, argued James, but the novel therefore required a form which gave the illusion of completeness. James, after all, had learned the art of the novel from Flaubert. According to this modernist tradition, the novel was an art of miniaturisation, and indirection.

Hugo, however, had come up with a new solution, no less artful than the solution proposed by Flaubert and James. He wanted to create a novel which would try to represent everything by pretending that it did, in fact, represent everything. It would be wilfully ramshackle and inclusive - both on the level of form, and on the level of content: an essayistic novel, or a novelistic essay. "The eye of the drama must be everywhere at once," wrote Hugo. For every plot, seen from the angle of Hugo's style, was infinite.. In Tolstoy's War and Peace, if people coincide, or marry each other, it still seems probable. Every decision retains its fluidity. And yet in Les Miserables this isn't true. In this gargantuan novel, everything seems utterly improbable. Every plot operates through coincidence. Normally, novelists develop techniques to naturalise and hide this. Hugo, with his technique of massive length, refuses to hide it at all. In fact, he makes sure that the plot's coincidences are exaggerated... One way in which Hugo emphasises the coincidences in his novel is the persistent failures of recognition... Les Miserables is a game with destiny: it dramatises the gap between the imperfections of human judgements, and the perfect patterns of the infinite."

On the other hand, and once more citing the spectre of Herny James, Zadie Smith reclaims the aesthetics of George Eliot's most extensive novel:

"In 1873, the young Henry James reviewed George Eliot’s Middlemarch. It was an odd review, neither rave nor pan. Eliot represented the past and James hoped to be the future. "It sets a limit," he wrote, “to the development of the old-fashioned English novel." James’s objection to Middlemarch is familiar: there’s too much of it. He found "its diffuseness makes it too copious a dose of pure fiction."... A famous query opens chapter 29 of Middlemarch: "But why always Dorothea?" It’s neat that James’s complaint, essentially, "But why always Fred?", should be the inverse reflection of it. You might say of Henry and George what the novel says of Lydgate and Rosamund: between him and her indeed there was that total missing of each other’s mental track . . . James can’t understand why Middlemarch should stray so far from Dorothea, to linger on Lydgate, Fred and the rest...

But Fred, to Eliot, is a member of "mixed and erring humanity" - her favourite Goethe quote. She always hoped that her work would demonstrate the "remedial influences of pure, natural human relations". Still, it took a great deal of Art to arrange Middlemarch so that it might resemble Nature in all its diffusion, all its naturalness. Eliot’s Nature is a thing highly stylised, highly intellectual. She was a writer of ideas, maybe more so than any novelist in our canon. In order to be attentive to Fred, Eliot had to take the long way round. It was a philosopher, Spinoza, who first convinced her of the importance of experience. It was theory that brought her to practice. These days, "writer of ideas" has become a term of abuse: we think "Ideas" are the opposite of something we call “Life”. It wasn’t that way with Eliot. In fact, her ability to animate ideas is so acute she is able to fool the great Henry James into believing Fred Vincy a commonplace young man who was wandered into Middlemarch with no purpose. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Yet to Eliot all were equal, and of equal interest, and worthy of an equal amount of pages. All her people are striving towards the fullest truth, the least partial good. Except, when Eliot thought of striving, she had more in mind than Austen’s hope of happy marriages, or Dickens’s dream of resolved mysteries. She was thinking of Spinoza’s kind of striving, conatus. From Spinoza, Eliot took the idea that the good we strive for should be nothing more than "what we certainly know will be useful to us", not a fixed point, no specific moral system, not, properly speaking, a morality at all. It cannot be found in the pursuit of transcendental reward, as Dorothea believes it to be, or in one’s ability to conform to a set of rules, as Lydgate attempts when he submits to a conventional marriage. Instead, wise men pursue what is best in and best for their own natures. They think of the good as a dynamic, unpredictable combination of forces, different, in practice, for each of us. It’s that principle which illuminates Middlemarch. Like Spinoza’s wise men, Eliot’s people are always seeking to match what is good in themselves in joyful combinations with other good things in the world. In Ethics, the book Eliot spent years trying to translate (she never finished), the wise walk in gardens, see plays, eat pleasantly, do work that is meaningful to them, and so on, as their nature allows and demands. They love and are attentive to the laws of nature, because these alone are eternal and therefore an attribute of the Supreme Good. All of this was the riposte Eliot needed to the arid rigours of her family’s Methodism; she responded passionately to the idea of worldly striving, of cleaving to those qualities in others, and in the world, that complemented one’s own strengths. It was what she herself had done. And it cast two things she cared for deeply - natural science and human relationships - in a new, holy light. Spinoza seemed to understand Marian’s way of being in the world. Her shocking common-law "marriage of true minds" to George Lewes (who also translated Spinoza) was exactly the right kind of conatus: a power-strengthening union characterised by joy. Her rejection of the organised church, so horrifying to her family, was really a turning away from false, abstract moral values. Her interest in the new natural sciences was, in Spinozian terms, a form of worship... Eliot has replaced metaphysics with human relationships. In doing this she took from Spinoza - whose metaphysics are, in fact, extensive - what she wanted, and left what she couldn’t use. To make it work, she utilised a cast of saints and princes, but also fools and criminals, and every shade of human in between. She needed Fred quite as much as Dorothea."

I have to say it's really very refreshing to hear a defence of the Victorian novel that understands its practitioners as being as capable of experimenting with form as much as their modernist counterparts, even if they do so in profoundly different ways. I always tended to be rather wary of James for his dismissal of much of the Victorian novel as formless in contrast to his own works, even when those works were parasitic of the norms introduced in the Victorian novel. In practice, much of the form of the Victorian novel can be described as being akin to a web, a metaphor used by Dickens and Eliot to describe how their work demonstrated that the apparently disparate and unconnected actually formed part of an organic whole. For Dickens, this was a theme related to social solidarity, for Eliot a theme connected to a secular form of ethics that replaced religion. In the case of Hardy, it served as a rather different metaphor for causality, the sort of web that involves spiders and flies. In other words, the form of their novels cannot be painted on anything other than a large canvas if they are to succeed. The Victorians were distinct in discerning how the fate of an individual was bound up with wider forces stemming from the economic and social trends around them, rather than any more metaphysical concept of fate. For a society, acutely aware of economic tides, a preoccupation with the material in their writing seems entirely natural. Again, this is all something that demands a larger canvas and it's always seemed difficult to see Ulysses or Mrs Dalloway (for all their merits) as anything other than a retreat for telescoping their focus down to individual consciousnesses over considerably compressed timescales. Following Baktin, I inevitably tend to think that the polyphonic and heteroglossic character of Victorian writing, with its counterpointing of multiple plot strands, is considerably more interesting than what followed it.
Labels: Literature

posted by Richard 6:51 PM

Saturday, July 12, 2008

This piece from Morgan Meis in The Smart Set struck a chord with me:

"Criticism isn’t powerful anymore. It doesn’t drive anything, it doesn’t define what is good and bad in culture. Surely this has mostly to do with all the changes in the media landscape over the last few decades. Basically, culture has been democratized. It has been flattened out and multiplied. There are no longer real distinctions between high and low. There’s just more... The blogosphere and social networking sites allow anyone to communicate tastes and opinions directly to those people with whom an outlook is already shared. Criticism is essentially bottom-up now, whereas it used to be practically the definition of top-down. The audience does not look to an external authority to find out what to think — it looks to itself...

Critics have, traditionally, prided themselves in a certain amount of distance. There’s even a name for it: "critical distance." To some extent this distance was always an illusion, the byproduct of a metaphysics that saw mind and world as fully separate and staring at one another from across an epistemological abyss. But more importantly, people believed that critical distance was possible and that they were achieving it. This self-perception was enough to fuel the practice from at least the early Enlightenment until some time in the middle of the last century... Trying to maintain critical distance today is thus a practice in self-alienation. The distance might as well be infinite. The proclamations might as well be made in outer space. So we need another metaphor. If criticism isn't about distance anymore, maybe it can be about closeness....

Pleasingly, a version of this argument was made by George Nathan, the co-editor (along with H.L. Mencken) of the original version of The Smart Set back in the early 20th century. Nathan wrote a little book called The Critic and the Drama. It was, I think, ahead of its time in setting up the dilemma of criticism in an age of too much art and suggested some ways to deal with it. Here's the crucial paragraph:

If art is, in each and every case, a matter of individual expression, why should not criticism, in each and every case, be similarly and relevantly a matter of individual expression? In freeing art of definitions, has not criticism been too severely defined? I believe that it has been. I believe that there are as many kinds of criticism as there are kinds of art. I believe that there may be sound analytical, sound emotional, sound cerebral, sound impressionistic, sound destructive, sound constructive, and other sound species of criticism. If art knows no rules, criticism knows no rules — or, at least, none save those that are obvious.

That last sentence is particularly crucial. Art, Nathan is perfectly willing to accept, has no rules. Another way to say this is that each work of art generates its own set of rules. The only way to deal with any individual work, then, is to read out that set of rules, to discover something about its own internal logic. A criticism that wants to step away, to achieve distance in order to apply a set of external rules and to make judgments, ends up stepping away from the only criterion available: the criterion there within the work. Nathan doesn't use the metaphor explicitly, but he is talking about closeness versus distance. He is talking about a kind of criticism that stands there right alongside the work of art, participating in it rather than holding it at arm’s length.

Going a little further into the metaphor of distance and closeness brings us inevitably to the grand master of critical distance, Immanuel Kant. It is simply impossible to talk about the modern critical attitude without addressing the sage of Königsberg. A central component of his aesthetics is the idea of disinterest and then of universality. For Kant, when we make genuine aesthetic judgments we do so with the implication that they are not made 'for ourselves' but with the implicit idea that they stand on their own, that anyone else would make the same judgment, that the judgment ought to be universally true even if that cannot be proven. This is how Kant puts it:

For if someone likes something and is conscious that he himself does so without any interest, then he cannot help judging that it must contain a basis for being liked that holds for everyone. He must believe that he is justified in requiring a similar liking from everyone because he cannot discover, underlying his liking, any private conditions, on which only he might be dependent, so that he must regard it as based on what he can presuppose in everyone else as well.

In contrast, here's a comment by William Hazlitt, an anti-Kantian in terms of aesthetics in every bone of his body: I hate people who have no notion of any thing but generalities, and forms, and creeds, and naked propositions, even worse than I dislike those who cannot for the soul of them arrive at the comprehension of an abstract idea…They are for having maps, not pictures of the world we live in: as much as to say that a bird's eye view of things contains the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth."

It's always seemed to me that the idea of universal standards of taste was an obvious absurdity; any such standard wide enough to encompass Perec, Dante, Orwell and Rabelais would be so generalised as to be meaningless. There's often something quite unpleasant about aesthetic demagoguery of critics; Ruskin's praise of gothic architecture and Pre-Raphaelite painting was predicated on a dismissal of Whistler's painting or architects like Cuthbert Broderick who disdained the gothic revival. Leavis praised Eliot, James, Lawrence and Conrad in The Great Tradition while dismissing the experimental on the one hand (Woolf, Joyce) and the gothic or sensational (Dickens, Bronte) on the other. Both essentially make the mistake of conflating their own predelictions with the universe and do so on grounds that are often moral or political. In either case, it's doubtful that many of us would agree with them now. In many respects, the idea of someone whose sole function is to tell us what to think about art or literature seems a form of impertinence.

When I was first introduced to the ideas of Barthes and Derrida, it seemed to me that much of the basis for criticism as a specialised function had been demolished. If literature was less the product of a single individual writing at a specific historical period and more the product of an endless play of differance in the mind of the reader, then meaning became a subjective affair. Sceptical even then, I'm less attached to either Barthes or Derrida now, but I do still think this view holds. Matters of interpretation or hermeneutics arose out of religious exegesis, the assumption that there were transcendent meanings encoded in texts that could be divined. I suspect I'd still agree with Derrida that such concepts have become untenable. Criticism as a professional activity might do well to be based on Moretti's sociological techniques or exploring reception theory through study groups, but the idea of interpretation as a valid function is one that probably should be discarded.

If there is a problem with the argument outlined above, it's less likely to be an aesthetic one and is rather more likely to be a political or social one. For example, Matthew Arnold's Kantian defence of criticism is partly due to his desire for a set of universal aesthetic standards to replace universal religious standards. Since criticism is derived from the study of religious texts and operates in a similar fashion, Arnold presumably saw the critic as an ideal replacement for the priest. A lot of this assumes that art is a form of individual expression and that the response to it is equally individual. Morgan's arguments are the perfect ones for an atomised, individualistic post-traditional society where consumption is as much a matter of individual preference as it is one of collective identification. But there is something rather ahistorical in this view and it does seem to me that there's a good case to be made that art if an expression of collective mores. That might be why particular genres tend to cluster in certain places at certain times. Labels like Greek tragedy, Restoration comedy or the nineteenth century novel are undoutedly generalisations but they do nonetheless exist for a reason; the works in question did not orginate in a vacuum.
Labels: Culture, Hermeneutics, Literature

posted by Richard 2:57 PM

Monday, May 26, 2008

On the one hand:

"Brecht... was a communist writer, not a writer who happened to support communism. The normal injunction to never judge an artist by his or her politics is an insult to his ghost because politics dominated his work. The Good Soul of Szechuan ends with the narrator asking if it is possible to lead a good life in a rotten world. The expected, indeed demanded, answer is "no". Individual morality will only be possible when the collective morality of communism comes.

Nothing, not the mountains of corpses or the cults of the personality, could shake Brecht's confidence. He preferred silence about the vast crimes of the Bolsheviks, including the murders of his friends and translators, to admitting that his god had failed... The American socialist Sidney Hook put the case for indifference best after Brecht came to dinner in Manhattan in the mid-Thirties. Stalin was forcing thousands of Soviet communists to confess to fantastic crimes, and Hook asked Brecht what he thought of the show trials. It was at this point that he said in words I have never forgotten, 'As for them, the more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot.' I was so taken aback that I thought I had misheard him."

And on the other:

"It's strange how forgiving we are of artists who were involved with Hitler's Third Reich. In 1933, Goebbels appointed the composer Richard Strauss - whose dreamily decadent operas Salome, Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier remain central to any contemporary opera house's repertoire - president of the Reichsmusikkammer, the state music bureau. In 1936, Strauss composed the Olympic Hymn for the infamous summer games and befriended some high-ranking Nazis.

He was probably politically naive. He may have been acting to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law; and he refused to have the name of his friend, the Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig, removed from the playbill of his opera Die Schweigsame Frau. This, it seems, is now enough to redeem Strauss the man... The early Brecht was a wild, anarchic poet. Productions of his 1928 Threepenny Opera often struggle to find in it a consistent political line... For a short time in the 1930s, as German society became more divided, Brecht's plays took a decidedly Leninist turn. His play The Mother shows a working-class woman struggling to reconcile individual needs with the demands of a political cause. It's a beautiful, moving piece, painfully ignorant of the horrors of Stalinism that were to follow. How strange that this play is considered beyond the pale in Britain and no longer performed - yet the Economist can declare, in 2003, that Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl's film of the 1934 Nuremberg rally, marks her out as "the greatest female film-maker of the 20th century".

Brecht was very clear about one thing: his resistance to fascism. Before the Nazis came to power, Hitler's brownshirts were disrupting performances of Brecht and Weill's 1930 opera Mahagonny, claiming that it brought the contamination of black and Jewish musical influences into the German opera house. Brecht dedicated the next 15 years of his writing - plays, film scripts, poetry - to the anti-fascist cause."

I'm not really sure why the second excerpt believes an analogy between Strauss and Brecht to be especially helpful. His complicity with Nazism is rather better documented and more frequently discussed than the above article might suggest, but it is nonetheless rather improbable to imply that Strauss was a fascist composer in the same way that Brecht was a communist writer. A better analogy might have been Hamsun, Celine or Pound, but then the issue of their engagement with Nazism is equally well known and all three faced legal reprisals for their views during their lifetime. The point about Riefenstahl also seems misplaced (although there is a good case to be made that her treatment after the second world war probably was too lenient), particularly given that an especially harsh biography of her involvement with the Nazis was only published a few years ago. Worst of all is the insinuation that Brecht's opposition to Nazism exculpates his support for the other great totalitarianism of the twentieth century. While there's certainly no reason to single Brecht out for more criticism of his art or politics than Pound or Hamsun, there is a good case to be made that communist writers have only comparatively had their political commitments subjected to the same scrutiny that writers associated with fascism did long ago.
Labels: Communism, Fascism, Literature

posted by Richard 2:17 PM

Friday, May 23, 2008

An article questions the resurgence of graphics in modern fiction:

"The Lazarus Project features a twin narrative, telling the story of a murder in 1908 and a present-day writer investigating the death. In both cases, the images are intended to add depth and resonance to both stories. The effect, however, is the opposite: their inclusion only suggests that Hemon lacks confidence in his present-day narrator, and the verisimilitude of his historical reconstruction. Last week, I asked a friend, and fellow Hemon admirer, what he thought about it all. "Sebald has a lot to answer for," he said.

WG Sebald subtly altered the literary landscape with his fiction/travel/history books. Melancholic, digressive and erudite, his unsettling narratives are punctuated with photos, landscapes, diary entries and other images. It's the tension between these two elements - between what is real and fake, what words can describe and what they can't - that gives his books their dream-like power. It also allows Sebald to give a direct line into the mental landscape of his narrator, one that is visual as well as linguistic.

Sebald was a master of this device, but it's a technique that can scupper otherwise good novels... Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Jonathan Safran Foer's image heavy second novel, also suffers under the weight of its artistic leanings. I'm still undecided as to whether the last pages which depict a man falling from the Twin Towers, are an ambitious attempt to prove that sometimes words are not enough, or whether it's a final tricksy passage to a book over-stuffed with visual stimuli."

It's not particularly new; prior to the advent of the printing press, image and text were inextricably entwined. With the Victorian period, the love of medievalism led to a revival of sorts; editions of works by Chaucer issued by the Kelmscott Press were illustrated by Burne Jones. In parallel, Paget's illustrations for Conan Doyle were sufficiently powerful to create an image of Sherlock Holmes that failed to resemble that described in the text. The same followed for Phiz and Cruikshank's illustrations for Dickens and in the case of Tenniel's Alice in Wonderland; although modern readers might find themselves reading an edition illustrated by Mervyn Peake. George Eliot had her novels illustrated by no less a figure than Lord Leighton. Much of Dore's work was done as book illustrations, while Rossetti served as both writer and illustrator. Photographs occurred in fiction as early as Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte, followed by the work of Andre Breton. In a sense, modern fiction has been aberrant for relying solely on text. Nonetheless, the above comments immediately brought an essay by Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning was the Command Line to mind:

"Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself--and more than just graphical. Let's call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.

Why are we rejecting explicit word-based interfaces, and embracing graphical or sensorial ones--a trend that accounts for the success of both Microsoft and Disney? Part of it is simply that the world is very complicated now--much more complicated than the hunter-gatherer world that our brains evolved to cope with--and we simply can't handle all of the details. We have to delegate. We have no choice but to trust some nameless artist at Disney or programmer at Apple or Microsoft to make a few choices for us, close off some options, and give us a conveniently packaged executive summary.

But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.

We Americans are the only ones who didn't get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media. Apparently this actually works to some degree, for police in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV cop shows. When it's explained to them that they are in a different country, where those rights do not exist, they become outraged. Starsky and Hutch reruns, dubbed into diverse languages, may turn out, in the long run, to be a greater force for human rights than the Declaration of Independence.

A huge, rich, nuclear-tipped culture that propagates its core values through media steepage seems like a bad idea. There is an obvious risk of running astray here. Words are the only immutable medium we have, which is why they are the vehicle of choice for extremely important concepts like the Ten Commandments, the Koran, and the Bill of Rights. Unless the messages conveyed by our media are somehow pegged to a fixed, written set of precepts, they can wander all over the place and possibly dump loads of crap into people's minds."

Update: on a related note:

"Our ancestors couldn't have foreseen, however, the sheer quantity of visual distractions which, while they aid, also hinder our readerly mind's eye. Indeed, surveys carried out in schools confirm that non-illustrated texts produce more mental images than illustrated ones. While there's a text/image balance to be struck as a means to training youthful brains in the art of visualising, we know that as adults the extent to which book covers, and even author photographs, while helping us situate a text before we crack open the pages, quite often mislead.

I'm not quite arguing that, in order to focus our minds we go back to minimalist Editions de Minuit style book covers as practiced over here in France - by their very austerity, they convey to the reader the immediate impression of the publishing house's chilly prestige. I am intrigued, rather, by the practice of certain readers like Nabokov, who produced for his Cornell students mock-serious diagrams of the comparative states of mind of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, or drew up sketches of beetle-man Gregor Samsa in Kafka's Metamorphosis."
Labels: Images, Literature

posted by Richard 8:01 PM

Thursday, April 10, 2008

An interesting summary of Beckett's lectures on literature:

"Beckett first defined his literary criteria by way of the contrast he set up between the 19th-century French authors Balzac and Flaubert. Unlike his Irish contemporaries, Beckett saw Balzac as the counter-example of the modern novel, and Flaubert as the great innovator. For Beckett (as he has the protagonist of his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, put it): "To read Balzac is to receive the impression of a chloroformed world." He resented both the lack of confusion and the lack of self-criticism in Balzac. What fascinated him was the clair-obscure (the painterly distribution of light and shade) he found in the writers he admired, like Dostoevsky and Flaubert. Balzac, by contrast, only transcribed the surface, creating a fictional world that resembled a pool table on which balls are perfectly arranged and sent in one direction or another according to a very precise strategy of control. In Beckett's eyes, Balzac divested his fictional universe of the unexpected and the unknowable, properties which, for Beckett, lay at the heart of human experience and whose expression must find its way into fiction.

Art for Beckett at this period was the progressive discovery of the "real", as Burrows remembered in an interview in 1982: "The artist himself was changing all the time and his material was constantly in a state of flux, hence you had to do something to organize this mess, but not to make puppets and set them in motion." Beckett favoured the absence of a controlling authorial personality and any sense of finality in a text, and was opposed to the control, embellishment or glorification of reality. In these respects, Flaubert was an exemplary modern author for him. Citing Madame Bovary and Salammbo he explained that Flaubert was neither photographer nor image monger, but a writer who displayed an honest apprehension of reality.

Beckett denied any modernity in Balzac, whose flawed duality he denounced - on the one hand he was a realist, and on the other a romantic psychologist. But, for Beckett, these two aspects did not fit together, resulting in a profound lack of cohesion in Balzac's work. According to Beckett a modern writer must seek "homogeneity". Thus, Flaubert was at once coherent and complex, in the manner in which the extreme precision of his texts revealed the contradiction of so-called 19th-century realism: exactitude was inevitably bound to be frustrated because confusion cannot be reduced to a neat narrative à la Balzac.

Beckett also appreciated that Flaubert, rather than fabricating heroes, created circumstances that reduced his characters to their just level of banality, thus revealing their paradoxical nature and sometimes their stupidity, an approach which shocked Henry James, who said: "Why did Flaubert choose, as special conduits of the life he proposed to depict, such inferior and ... such abject human specimens?" Madame Bovary's creator had anticipated such a charge by once writing that there were neither good nor bad subjects, and that, from an artistic point of view, the subject was irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things. He refused to dissociate form and content. "Here form is content, content is form. [...] His writing is not about something; it is that something itself" was Flaubert's motto, which Beckett used to champion Joyce's Finnegans Wake. It's a formula at one with Flaubert's notion of the ideal book - that would be about nothing, one that would rely on its style alone and whose subject would be invisible."

As noted on my previous post on this subject, there's a lot about this that reminds me of the distinction Keats drew between Milton (the egotistical sublime) and Shakespeare (negative capability) or that outlined by Berlin in the case of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, with Balzac firmly characterised as a writer who celebrates diversity and the contradictory and Doestoevsky described as the type of writer who sees the world through the lens of a single lens (itself an opposed description to Bakhtin's characterisation of Dostoevksy's work as polyphonic). It's certainly true that in Flaubert, we have the sense of consciousness as something submerged and independent from the normal categories of the social novel, as with Emma Bovary's romantic longings or Frederic's admission at the end of Sentimental Education that the zenith of his life was a hitherto unmentioned visit to a brothel. It's also not difficult to see how Flaubert's stated aim to "derouter le lecteur" would appeal to Beckett. Sentimental Education in particular goes a long way to confirming Beckett's contention; in a Balzac novel the different paths taken by the characters would often lead to different moral outcomes, whereas in Flaubert all paths lead to the same destination. The usual teleological structure of the nineteenth century novel, with its remorseless progress towards tragedy or marriage, is abandoned. While the depiction of Dambreuse is not that far removed from that of Merdle or Melmotte (the poverty of Madame Arnoux and Rosanette is also not that far from Dickens), Flaubert is equally cynical as to the alternatives, as with his observation that Senecal is filled with love towards the mases in their aggregate state and is merciless towards individuals; "a sort of Athenian Sparta in which the individual would only exist to serve the state... anything which he considered hostile to it he attacked with the logic of a mathematician and the faith of an inquisitor." Frederic is at once an aristocratic snob ("he felt utterly nauseated by the vulgarity of their faces, the stupidity of their talk...the knowledge that he was worth more than these men lessened the fatigure of looking at them.") and is fired with revolutionary ideals ("I think the people are sublime"). Deslauriers similarly notes that "he had preached fraternity to the conservatives and respect for the law to the socialists." Sentimental Education is the great novel of the middle ground, with all viewpoints contested and all found wanting Frederic and not steering a straight enough course, and Desluariers being too rigid, with the same applying to the aesthetic debates of Pellerin and Senecal.

Nonetheless, I'm still not quite convinced I find Beckett's argument wholly meaningful. It's certainly true that, like Dickens, Balzac seems to see his characters as caricatures, driven by social and moral concepts rather than an idea of human consciousness (his idea of each individual having only a certain amount of life force that can be frittered away by dissolute or hubristic behaviour has a rather medieval quality to it). On the other hand, there is the difficulty that Balzac, like Thackeray is not an especially good moralist, and the moral fables that lie at the centre of his work either lack conviction or simply go awry altogether, leading to something rather more interesting. In short, I think that the disconnection of the romantic and realist in Balzac is a strength rather than a defect - not the first time, I find myself preferring the dissonant and inconsistent to the consistent and harmonious. Homogeneity is probably the very last thing the novel should aim for. To take the example of The Black Sheep, I was struck by what an anti-novel it is. The form of the novel should be similar to that of Nicholas Nickleby but instead of simply dwelling on the notion of the good and neglected Joseph eventually receiving his dues, Balzac pays as much attention to Philippe, the prodigal son, and instead of solely focussing on the dissolute aspect of his life, depicts the raw will to power as someone could have been a great general but is left out of place in the world he finds himself in. Instead of a simple moral fable, Balzac instead describes "a place where speculation and individualism are carried to the highest level, where the brutality of self interest reaches the point of cynicism." Philippe's rapacity is as vital and necessary here as Eugenie Grandet's self sacrifice or Cousin Pons's good nature is as pointless or helpless in the novels of those name. In Balzac, we always feel that we are reading a novel where the characters are evaluated primarily in moral terms, only to discover that such considerations are never of any importance.

To take another example, Lost Illusions I was struck by how it forms a mid-point between the picaresque novel (since although Balzac's narrative is highly plotted, the plot nonetheless tends to turn through unexpected events in an episodic fashion, a moral fable depicting the travels of a young man from country to city and consequently from innocence to corruption and redemption) and later social novels (where morality has a much more problematic relationship with social conditions and where the character of society is not necessarily regarded as a given, though Balzac is markedly more nonchalant on that score than Zola). For instance, Balzac writes of Lucien that "he was under the spell of luxury and the tyranny of sumptuous fare; his wayward instincts were reviving," but in practice the majority of the narrative is driven not by Lucien's fall into immoral debauchery but by the machinations of society driven by the cash-nexus; "everything is taxed, everything is sold, everything is manufactured, even success." Accordingly, Balzac links dissipation with the society that produces it; "the helotism to which the Restoration had condemned young people... having no outlet for their energy they... frittered it away in the strangest excesses." The consequence is that although 'Herrera' is clearly marked as a Faustian figure, both author and narrator are left pinioned by the novel's own logic when he declares that any morality can only come after financial security. A statement that is worthy of Brecht's What Keeps Mankind Alive?

Update: an interesting comment on the same theme from a review of a history of modernism:

"Each of Gay’s dramatis personae exhibit his two key modernist traits – that is, the desire to challenge the cultural establishment (Ezra Pound’s 'make it new') and to give expression to hitherto unencountered depths of the self, be it the 'monologue interieur' of Joyce or the near pathological self-portraiture of Max Beckmann... Modernism, for its constituents, was experienced not simply as liberation, but as crisis. It bespoke something profound: the cultural experience, indeed, the disillusionment of modernity’s promise of autonomy. The emancipation of individual subjectivity, encouraging self-scrutiny as Gay sees it, if bereft of social bonds becomes as much a prison as a promise of freedom.

This is writ large in the development of literary modernism. As Gay notes, the mimetic, realistic component typical of nineteenth-century realism was increasingly experienced as a formal inhibition. But he fails to tell us why this was the case. What had changed between the time of Balzac and that of Flaubert and Baudelaire, the two progenitors of modernism identified by Gay? As the Marxist critic Georg Lukacs explained, between these two generations of French writers 'lies the year 1848 and the bloody days of June, the first independent action of the working class, which left so indelible an impression on the ideology of the French bourgeoisie, that after it bourgeois ideology ceased to play a progressive part in France for a long time'. In other words, universal aspirations were abandoned in favour of the protection of particular interests.

This is crucial. For the realist writer, the ability to narrate, to find meaning in social praxes, rests, as Lukács argues, on the artist having a 'living relationship to the real life of the people'. Be it Balzac or Walter Scott, the vital problems of the time are experienced as their problems; the life and struggles of the community as their struggles. Modernism’s emergence depends on the dissolution of just such an involvement. As Peter Nicholls notes, it is with Baudelaire, writing during the 1850s, that 'a cleavage begins to open up between bourgeois modernity, on the one hand, and aesthetic modernity on the other'.

The sovereignty of the artist, his autonomy, is set against the political sovereignty and autonomy won in 1789. Although free to experiment, to push the boundaries of their art, the artist loses those with whom he had previously found common, if problematic cause. His professionalisation becomes a burden. Bereft of something like solidarity, he is left before his fellows – the market – as before an antagonistic mass: 'Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frere!'"
Labels: Hermeneutics, Literature

posted by Richard 8:16 PM

Sunday, April 06, 2008

Philip Hensher writes on the history of the state of the nation novel:

"Several things define this genre: a range of social settings; the coverage of an extended period of time; a sense that the lives described reflect major social shifts or matters of public importance; and, often, open debate on political concerns and the nature of the nation itself. Commentators on the English novel have often claimed to find works of this type in 19th-century fiction. In fact, few of Dickens's or Eliot's works really analyse the whole of a society. However, some 19th-century authors certainly did set out to write state-of-the-nation fiction. The title of Trollope's The Way We Live Now is a clear indication of intent, and the book conscientiously covers a range of social settings and roles, from the agricultural to the new capital markets of the City. Disraeli's splendid "Young England" trilogy of the 1840s, Coningsby, Sybil and Tancred, with its broad social spectrum and tendency to political solutions, is virtually the founding example of the state-of-the-nation novel. The celebrated passage from Sybil about the two nations, rich and poor, is one of the very few examples of a piece of state-of-the-nation rhetoric making its way permanently into the political debate. Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, Middlemarch and, probably, Little Dorrit all have a state-of-the-nation flavour: they have an acute sense of the larger implications of the individual situation; their ambitions are both literary and, in a general sense, policy-directed in ways which go beyond the aspirations of, say, Great Expectations or Daniel Deronda.

The novelist's concern with the state of the nation has never gone away, but it only occasionally emerges in the form of a state-of-the-nation novel. Nothing could be more telling about Britain's unhoused exhaustion at the end of the second world war than the rush of enthusiasm for novels about country houses and fantastical, often demonic palaces—Brideshead Revisited, Love in a Cold Climate, Gormenghast and The Lord of the Rings. None of them, however, was exactly state-of-the-nation, and the taste for the national diagnosis was satisfied by the factual discussions of the Beveridge report, which sold an astonishing 600,000 copies, at two shillings each.

Since then, the state-of-the-nation tendency in fiction has surfaced from time to time. The mid to late 1970s saw a small run of such books concerned with what seemed the collapse of the Attlee consensus. AS Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden (1978), set in the early 1950s, was the first volume of a tetralogy that traced the developing state of the nation in the following decades. William Golding's Darkness Visible (1979) seems to give in to despair in a tale of motiveless violence. In Margaret Drabble's The Ice Age (1977), commerce and property become evil, empty values in ways that foreshadow the "Thatcher's Britain" novelists... Why are we seeing such a range of state-of-the-nation novels at this moment? Perhaps the last occasion when such novels seemed urgent and vital was not the "Thatcher's Britain" years but the years which produced Drabble, Byatt and Golding, the fag-end of the Callaghan Labour government. The public consensus then was clearly breaking down under a prime minister who had no mandate from an election. The trust between people and elected representatives was evaporating, and acts of individual violence were common."

This is something I've been thinking about recently and something I have my doubts about. London Fields by Martin Amis is characterised by a sense of English life as an irrelevance, a place from where history has fled ("Bellow says that America is the only place to be, because it contains the 'real modern action'"). I recall him later comparing England to Switzerland, making me think of Greene's comment about centuries of peace and prosperity creating nothing more than the cuckoo clock. By contrast, the London of Trollope and Dickens was an economic experiment, a place wholly unlike anywhere else on Earth and which represented the shape of things to come. There's also the sense of Victorian society as having been considerably more cohesive; even with two nations there is the sense of inequality as a source of collective shame that needs to be addressed collectively. This isn't something that is obviously a part of modern England, where the return of Victorian social conditions does not seem to have led to any similar set of social concerns. Modern England seems to be comparatively atomised, it's individualism and multiculturalism making state of the nation fiction difficult at best and often confined to minority groups, as with Smith or Hollinghurst.

Perhaps this is why much modern social fiction seems a rather poor substitute for its Victorian counterpart; Arnott's He Kills Coppers spans a social history of decades but its characters remains as they are, unaffected by social upheaval, whereas the Victorian assumption was that the individual and society were inextricably intertwined. Similarly, McEwan's On Chesil Beach certainly contains several passages that suggest a degree of scepticism as to political radicalism; Florence's mother describes the Soviet Union as little different to Nazi Germany. As Florence believes it to be essentially benevolent it is a little inconsistent for her to describe Edward's membership of CND as being akin to a medieval millenarian cult (particularly when she too belongs to it). However, whether any of this really translates to support for conservative ideas is an extrapolation the novel fails to justify, particularly when McEwan comments that he has not disavowed any of the views he once held as a member of CND. My own reservations about McEwan are rather different. As the above descriptions attest, the novel is concerned with events in the years that Larkin described sexual intercourse as having invented in ("This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine ...This was still the era when to be young was a social encumbrance.") At one point McEwan's omniscient narrator declares that "Their personalities and pasts, their ignorance and fear, timidity, squeamishness, lack of entitlement or experience, then the tail end of a religious prohibition, their Englishness and class, and history itself." This seems true of one of the characters, Edward, who travels in the course of the novel from English middle class awkwardness to becoming a sixties dropout. However, Florence's "visceral dread" of sex is deliberately left unexplained and can certainly not be laid at the hand of history. Similarly, her suggestion that their relationship be platonic, with her tolerating him having sex with other women hardly seems to be ahead of its time in the way McEwan seems to believe it to be; quite the contrary. The idea that Edward's life would have been much better if he had accepted also seems somewhat unwarranted, given that the novel itself holds out little more than a post in her father's firm for choosing that road. McEwan generally seems to prefer the aberrant and unexplained too much to be able to work fully within the constraints of the realist novel, where the struggles of Julien Sorrel or Dorothea Brooke is entirely in keeping with the spirit of their age.

Update: an interesting, and to my mind quite persuasive, article from Alan Massie takes an approach that rather recalls Lukacs. In this context we might compare the 'closed' Madame Bovary to the 'open' Lost Illusions:

"One may make a distinction between two types of novel: the self-enclosed and the open. The distinction is not absolute. Such things never are. Genre fiction may merge with what is called the literary novel, for instance. Still the categories I have in mind are useful, or at least interesting. By the self-enclosed novel, I mean one which makes no reference — or almost no reference — to anything beyond itself. It belongs to its age of course, but it does not appear to be set in time. Time naturally passes, as it must in a narrative, but there is no suggestion that events in the world of fact beyond the novel might impinge on its characters, influence their behaviour, or affect the course of their lives. The doors of the novel are closed against the winds of the world. In the open novel, these winds, which are the winds of history, beat upon the characters. Indeed history is itself a character in this kind of novel, even if the author chooses not to introduce real-life historical figures. In, for instance, that fine novel by Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day, the second world war is a character as the Napoleonic Wars are not in Jane Austen’s beautifully self-enclosed novels. The treason of which the heroine’s lover is guilty would seem less significant if we didn’t bring to our reading of the novel our knowledge of the enemy he has chosen to serve — the enemy whom his lover, Stella, rightly calls ‘horrible — specious, unthinkable, grotesque’.

The open novel was invented more or less by Walter Scott, though it had ancestors in Defoe and Fielding. Especially in the series of great novels set in the Scotland of the 17th and 18th centuries, Scott demonstrates that, for a man of a certain stamp at a certain time, there is no escaping history. It is history, the world of harsh political fact which, working in conjunction with personal qualities, forms or deforms men’s lives. Henry Morton’s dilemma in Old Mortality is certainly occasioned by his character, but it is specifically provoked by the temper of the times in which he lives and the bitter animosities with which he is confronted are historical facts...

Some frown on this. A work of art, they say, should be self-sufficient, needing to make no reference to anything beyond itself. This argument is advanced more often in discussion of painting than in literary criticism — Roger Fry’s doctrine of ‘significant form’, for instance — and would have puzzled the Old Masters who expected people to bring their knowledge of the Bible or Classical mythology to the contemplation of their work. It would likewise have puzzled the poets who expected their readers to catch their classical allusions.... The self-enclosed novel will always be written, but Scott’s example was soon followed by Stendhal, Hugo and Tolstoy. Most novels are perhaps hybrids. Sometimes you get an open novel, like Thomas Mann’s masterpiece Doctor Faustus, which, for much of the time, pretends to be self-enclosed. Nowadays the problem for the writer of the contemporary open novel is that news and the sense of immediacy press so hard and insistently upon him. This is perhaps why so many of the best open novels are set in the past, even if that past is quite recent, as in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy."
Labels: Literature

posted by Richard 11:08 AM

Sunday, February 03, 2008

"Besides my other numerous circle of acquaintances I have one more intimate confidant—my melancholy. In the midst of my joy, in the midst of my work, she waves to me, calls me to one side, even though physically I stay put. My melancholy is the most faithful mistress I have known, what wonder, then, that I love her in return." — Kierkegaard

Following my earlier piece on ruins, I had for sometime intended to write a companion piece on melancholy. This intent never succeeded in fully manifesting itself, until I was reminded of it by this article, In Praise of Melancholy:

"I for one am afraid that American culture's overemphasis on happiness at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic, to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations. I am finally fearful of our society's efforts to expunge melancholia. Without the agitations of the soul, would all of our magnificently yearning towers topple? Would our heart-torn symphonies cease?

My fears grow out of my suspicion that the predominant form of American happiness breeds blandness. This kind of happiness appears to disregard the value of sadness. This brand of supposed joy, moreover, seems to foster an ignorance of life's enduring and vital polarity between agony and ecstasy, dejection and ebullience. Trying to forget sadness and its integral place in the great rhythm of the cosmos, this sort of happiness insinuates that the blues are an aberrant state that should be cursed as weakness of will or removed with the help of a little pink pill.

I'm not questioning joy in general. For instance, I'm not challenging that unbearable exuberance that suddenly emerges from long suffering. I'm not troubled by that hard-earned tranquillity that comes from long meditation on the world's sorrows. I'm not criticizing that slow-burning bliss that issues from a life spent helping those who hurt. And I'm not romanticizing clinical depression. I realize that there are many lost souls out there who require medication to keep from killing themselves or harming their friends and families. I'm not questioning pharmaceutical therapies for the seriously depressed or simply to make existence bearable for so many with biochemical disorders... Our culture seems to confuse these two and thus treats melancholia as an aberrant state, a vile threat to our pervasive notions of happiness — happiness as immediate gratification, happiness as superficial comfort, happiness as static contentment. Of course the question immediately arises: Who wouldn't question this apparently hollow form of American happiness? Aren't all of us late at night, when we're honest with ourselves, opposed to shallow happiness? Most likely we are, but isn't it possible that many of us fall into superficiality without knowing it?"

As an argument, this cleaves to the ideas of dystopian novels like A Clockwork Orange or Brave New World that the possibility of stripping away unwanted aspects of ourselves will also dehumanise us or deprive us of our freedom. It's an argument I have a lot of sympathy for, as I tend to feel that modern society mandates happiness, demands it as something to be conformed to even as depression becomes an every greater social ill. According to the World Health Organisation, depression is now the fifth leading cause of death and disability in the world, leaving ischemic heart disease trailing in sixth place. I also feel that modern society is equally capable of embracing melancholy as a uniform, as with the gothic subculture. It becomes a little difficult to complain too much of modern happiness when bands like The Cure, The Smiths, The Manic Street Preachers or Nirvana have had albums outselling their manufactured counterparts.

Melancholy as a concept exists in multiple forms, which warily circle one another, never joing but never quite departing from one another. The Portuguese term, saudaude denotes a feeling of longing for something that one is fond of, which is gone. It is as close to nostalgia as melancholy. The Finnish Kaiho means a state of involuntary solitude in which the subject feels incompleteness and yearns for something unattainable or extremely difficult and tedious to attain. The German Sehnsucht relates to an inconsolable longing, while Japanese "empathy toward things," or "pity toward things," is used to describe the awareness of the transience of things and a gentle sadness at their passing. The importance of the cherry in Japanese culture is due to cherry blossoms symbolising the transience of life because of their short blooming times. In Italian, noia, or ennui, is a particular nuance of melancholy, infused with lingering, incompleteness, loss, and inconsolability. In Russian, toska translates as "the ache." As Nabokov put it in his notes on translating Eugene Onegin; "No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, lovesickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom, skuka." The Arabic word found as huzn and hazan in the Qur'an refers to the pain and sorrow over a loss. Two schools further interpreted this feeling. The first sees it as a sign that one is too attached to the material world, while Sufism took it to represent a feeling of personal insuffiency, that one was not getting close enough to God and did not or could not do enough for God in this world. Orhan Pamuk argued in his recent biography of Istanbul that in modern Turkish it has come to denote a sense of failure in life, lack of initiative and to retreat into oneself, symptoms quite similar to melancholia.

Nonetheless, melancholy was known within Europe as "the English disease." Even as apparently stolid a figure as Dr Johnson could believe that he was damned, wished to be confined and whipped, take opium to alleviate his miseries and write that "this day it came into my mind to write the history of melancholy. On this purpose to deliberate. I know not whether it may be too much to disturb me... I inherited a vile melancholy from my father, which has made me mad all my life" In 1733, Dr George Cheyne speculated that the English climate, combined with sedentary lifestyles and urbanisation, "have brought forth a class of distemper with atrocious and frightful symptoms, scarce known to our ancestors, and never rising to such fatal heights, and afflicting such numbers in any known nation. These nervous disorders being computed to make almost one-third of the complaints of the people of condition in England." To the English, the disease was "the English malady." One can go back further, to 1586 and Timothy Bright's A Treatise of Melancholie; "The perturbations of melancholy are for the most parte, sadde and fearful, and such as rise of them: as distrust, doubt, diffidence, or dispaire, sometimes furious and sometimes merry in apparaunce, through a kinde of Sardonian, and false laughter, as the humour is disposed that procureth these diversities."

The term "melancholia" comes from the old medical theory of the four humours: disease being caused by an imbalance in one or other of the four basic bodily fluids, or humours. Personality types were similarly determined by the dominant humour in a particular person. Melancholia was caused by an excess of black bile; leading to a melancholic disposition. Melancholia was described as a distinct disease with particular mental and physical symptoms in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Hippocrates, in his Aphorisms, characterized all "fears and despondencies, if they last a long time" as being symptomatic of melancholia. The actual word Melancholia is derived from Arabic, specifically Ishaq ibn Imran's essay entitled Maqala fi-l-Malikhuliya, which discovered a foolish acts, fear, delusions and hallucinations under the term "malikhuliya," which Constantine the African translated into Latin as "melancolia." The doctrine of the four humours was modified somewhat in the fourth century when it came under the influence of the portrayals of madness in Greek tragedy and the Platonic notion of "divine frenzy," beginning the transformation of an essentially pathological taxonomy (the classical doctrine of the Four Humours) into a psychological one (the medieval theory of the Four Temperaments). As Agamben puts it; "Melancholy or black bile (melaina chole) is the humour whose disorders are liable to produce the most destructive consequences. In medieval humoral cosmology, melancholy is traditionally associated with the earth, autumn (or winter), the dry element, cold, the north wind, the color black, old age (or maturity); its planet is Saturn, among whose children the melancholic finds himself with the hanged man, the cripple, the peasant, the gambler, the monk, and the swineherd."

Aristotle had seen a connection between melancholy - an excess in a person of black bile - and eminence in philosophy, politics, and poetry, instancing the mythic hero Hercules and the great philosophers Empedocles, Socrates, and Plato. According to Aristotle, the ancients called melancholy "the sacred disease." Before him Plato had linked trance-like raging or frenzy to the abilities to prophesy, to perform priestly functions, to compose divine poetry, and, even, to love truly. Marsilio Ficino's De vita triplici (1489), the first book to treat of melancholy at any length, rehabilitated the Aristotelian notion of the gifted melancholic, and expressly tied it in with the Plato's "divine frenzy," thereby laying the intellectual foundations for a new type of man, the tortured genius, pitched back and forth between the heights of rapture and the depths of despair. Ficino linked melancholy to the astrological notion of being born under, or being at critical moments influenced by, Saturn or his spirits - Saturn being the furthest and slowest of the seven known planets and the god of old age and contemplation. From this analysis of planetary influence emerged the idea of our possessing an inner "saturnian" spirit, "daemon," or genius, and eventually the romantic and modern notion of the mad, afflicted, or wounded genius.

Predictably enough, the origins of English and European melancholy are also inextricably linked to christianity and the context of a society with high rates of mortality and comparatively brief lifespans. Rather than looking to medicine, early christianity had attributed sadness and lethargy to a condition called acedia, which opened the way to the work of the Devil. Anglo-Saxon literature was preoccupied with ideas of destiny and transience, with the Old English word dustceawung denotes contemplation of the dust. The Ruin depicts a fallen city, whose majesty has been vanquished. Poems like The Wanderer and The Seafarer treat of exile and isolation, with the latter proclaiming that "hotter for me are the joys of the Lord than this dead life fleeting on the land. I do not believe that the riches of the world will stand forever." The typical images of melancholy are often those that arise from medieval art; the danse macabre, with its dancing depiction of the Grim Reaper carrying off rich and poor alike, as with Holbein's later engraving of the Totentanz. Doom painting would show rich and poor languishing in the fire of hell, as well as graves opening on the day judgement. The imagery of skulls and hourglasses on tombstones. Sundials decorated with refrains like 'Orimur morimur' (We have risen and we have set) or 'We shall soon die all' (the latter being a rather excruciating pun on sundial). The thanatophilia is qualitatively different from the sense behind 'carpe Diem' or 'nunc est bibendum.' Clocks were decorated with mottos such as 'ultima forsan' (perhaps the last) or 'vulnerant omnes, ultima necat' (they all wound, and the last kills) and most famously 'tempus fugit' (time flies). Private people carried smaller reminders of their own mortality. Mary Queen of Scots owned a large watch carved in the form of a silver skull, embellished with the lines of Horace, Nunc est Bibendum. Astronomical clocks would often have the skeletal figure of death emerge to strike the hour.

Nonetheless, the period most associated with melancholy is the fifteenth century. At this period, the transi, or cadaver tomb, a tomb which depicts the decayed corpse of the deceased became a fashion in the tombs of the wealthy. The advent of painting created the Vanitas genre, with its depiction of skulls, flowers losing their petals and broken loot strings. Holbein's The Ambassadors famously includes the distorted image of a skull as an intercision into a scene of courtly ostentation. This is the period of Dowland's In Darkness Let Me dwell, Campion's The Cypress Curtain of the Night (both following Josquin Desprez's chanson Plaine de dueil et de melancolye, which speaks of an unbearable woe which can be relieved only through complete submission to an object of love.) and Donne's A Valediction of Weeping. As Dean of St Paul's, Donne carried a hourglass into his pulpit to remind the congregation "from the first minute that thou beginst to live, thou beginst to die too." This is also the man who proclained; "they tell me it is my melancholly. Did I infuse, did I drink in melancholly into myselfe? It is my thoughtfulnesse, was I not made to thinke?" Shakespeare was to return to the theme many times, as in The Taming of the Shrew, where "melancholy is the nurse of phrenzy." Later, John Milton was to write in Il Penseroso; "Hail, divinest Melancholy!, Whose Saintly visage is too bright, To hit the Sense of human sight; And therefore to our weaker view, O'er-laid with black, staid Wisdom's hue."

More specifically, this is the period that saw the rise of subjectivity or the discovery of the individual and of the artist, with the transition from craftsman and workshops to named artists. The European nobility had already undergone this sort of psychological shift in their transformation from a warrior class to a collection of courtiers. In the late 16th and 17th centuries, the change becomes far more widespread, affecting even artisans, peasants, and labourers. The new emphasis on disengagement and self-consciousness made the individual potentially more autonomous and critical of existing social arrangements, but also transformed into a kind of walled fortress, carefully defended from everyone else. Mirrors in which to examine oneself become popular among those who can afford them, along with self-portraits (Rembrandt painted more than fifty of them, not to mention Foucault's preferred examples of Velasquez and Las Meninas or the fact that Durer was one of the first artists to draw and paint his own mirror reflection) and autobiographies in which to revise and elaborate the image that one has projected to others. In bourgeois homes, public spaces that guests may enter are differentiated, for the first time, from the private spaces - bedrooms, for example - in which one may retire to let down one's guard and truly "be oneself." More decorous forms of entertainment - plays and operas requiring people to remain immobilised, each in his or her separate seat - begin to provide an alternative to the promiscuously interactive and physically engaging pleasures of carnival. The very word "self," ceased to be a mere reflexive or intensifier and achieves the status of a freestanding noun, referring to some inner core, not readily visible to others.

A number of social trends are cited in this context, such as the prevalence of death through plague and warfare and the failure of the society to provide occupations for its educated class. Under Elizabeth there had been a considerable increase of educational activity, with a consequent heightening of men's expectations, exacerbated by self-fashioning texts in the vein of Castiglione's The Courtier. Even before the close of the sixteenth century there were more than a few who could find no place in the existing organization of the state. The notion of a self hidden behind one's appearance and portable from one situation to another is also often attributed to the new possibility of upward mobility. In medieval culture, you were what you appeared to be - a peasant, a man of commerce or an aristocrat - and any attempt to assume another status would have been regarded as rank deception. But in the late 16th century, upward mobility was beginning to be possible or at least imaginable, making "deception" a widespread way of life. You might not be a lord or a lofty burgher, but you could find out how to act like one. Hence the popularity, in 17th-century England, of books instructing the would-be member of the gentry in how to comport himself, write an impressive letter and choose a socially advantageous wife. Hence, too, the new fascination with the theatre, with its notion of an actor who is different from his or her roles. Shakespeare's Portia pretends to be a doctor of law; Rosalind disguises herself as a boy; Juliet feigns her own death. Writing a few years after Shakespeare's death, Burton bemoaned the fact that acting was no longer confined to the theatre, for "men like stage-players act [a] variety of parts." It was painful, in his view, "to see a man turn himself into all shapes like a Chameleon ... to act twenty parts & persons at once for his advantage ... having a several face, garb, & character, for every one he meets."

Most importantly, the reformation has inaugurated a shift from the more socially directed aspects of Catholicism to Protestantism's focus on faith alone; an emphasis of the self was an unintended product of this, in contrast to the medieval focus on the extinction of the self advocated by Thomas a Kempis. Catholicism offered various palliatives to the disturbed and afflicted, in the form of rituals designed to win divine forgiveness or at least diminished disapproval. By contrast, the Puritan strains of Protestantism did no such thing; instead of offering relief, they provided a metaphysical framework for depression: if you felt isolated, persecuted and possibly damned, this was because you were predestined to be so. In Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, carnival is the portal to Hell, just as pleasure in any form - sexual, gustatory, convivial - is the devil's snare. Durkheim found that Protestants in the 19th century - not all of whom, of course, were of the Calvinistic persuasion - were about twice as likely to take their own lives as Catholics. More strikingly, a recent analysis finds a sudden surge of suicide in the Swiss canton of Zurich, beginning in the late 16th century, just as that region became a Calvinist stronghold.

The overthrow of the Catholic church was also an assault on all known metaphysical certainties, leading to the importance of the concept of mutability in Elizabethan literature, as in Spenser's cantos on the subject. As such, with Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, the melancholic is also often the malcontent, the overreacher. Edmund in King Lear notes that "My cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o'Bedlam." For Shakespeare, living in an age whose metaphysical certainties had been upturned by state decree, conviction is rarely possible. His characters instead defy augury, dramatising their consciousness and examining their own roles. Hamlet is the overreacher, the machiavel, the fool and the wronged hero, failing to become, as Eliot had it, a clear objective correlative for the events of the play. The particular religious significance of Hamlet is that at the head of the hierarchy of sins held by the Elizabethan religious orthodoxy lies the sin of despair. Despair represents a refusal or inability to enter into relationship with God, and, as a result, a distancing from God's grace. Hamlet's melancholy causes him to distrust his first inclinations toward the apparition he has encountered (an apparition whose very existence ran contrary to the theology of the time), and to test them through the device of the mousetrap scene. In effect, he accepts the popular belief that the Devil considers melancholics to be ripe for deception - a belief which looks suspiciously upon melancholy and considers it to be a possible reflection of moral or ethical lapses. But equally, Hamlet's soliloquies can be read as conventional statements on the transience of mortal life; "I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of exercise; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire: why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours." If medieval melancholy is a simple ailment or expression of theological commonplaces, it is an expression of both theological and metaphysical confusion in Elizabethan literature. Hamlet's "fellow of infinite jest" is surely a conventional and orthodox memento mori.

The same theological and metaphysical confusion lies at the heart of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, with its influence on Byron, Keats and Lamb. Burton describes his text as "a rhapsody of rags gathered from several dung hills, excrement of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out," and frequently withdraws from any sense of authorial authority; "But where am I? Into what subject have I rushed? What have I to do with Nuns, Maids, Virgins, Widows? I am a bachelor myself and lead a monastick life in a college." It can probably be best described as a fallen summa theologica, an attempt to account for the lack of metaphysical certainty in a post-reformation world ("the superstition of our age, our religious madness"), cataloguing the myriad schisms undergone by the church and the number of fanatics that have founded new cults as "they drive out one superstition with another... how many silly souls have imposters deluded!". It incessantly probes the boundaries of the immaterial and the naturalistic, cataloguing anecdotes in an encyclopaedic manner (a painter who tortured a man in order to depict it, a Swiftian tale of medical treatment by applying bellows to the fundament). The summa encompasses both the christian and the pagan, leading Burton into some rather heterodox observations. For instance, his dismissal of asceticism; "a company of cynics... that contemn the world, contemn themselves... yet in that contempt are more proud than any man living whatsoever," his dismissal of the virtuous nature of poverty "there are those that approve of a mean estate but on condition that they never want themselves," or his appeal for understanding of suicides; "we ought not to be so rash and rigorous in our censures as some are." Whilst still avowing religious orthodoxy, the dialogic approach Burton adopts castigates other religions and christian sects as well as questioning some of the basic tenets of christianity; "why does he suffer so much mischief and evil to be done, if he is able to help, why doth he not assist good or resist bad?" Burton also decouples religion and morality, arguing that "the nature of injury" is sufficient to keep men obedient to the law. Finally, he also questions the validity of a universal religion, suggesting the need for infinite religions for infinite circumstances.

Similarly, Sir Thomas Browne's Urne Burial has a marked tension between Browne's faith in christ and the resurrection on the one hand and by his antiquarian interest in such pagan habits as cremation and mummification on the other; Baconian scepticism and mysticism in one text. As he put it "I perceive I doe anticipate the vices of the age, the world to me is but a dreame or mockshow, and wee all therein but Pantalones and Antickes to my severer contemplations." Therefore "tis all but one to lie in St Innocent's Churchyard as in the sands of Aegypt... The winter sun shows how soon the light fades from the ash, how soon night enfolds us. Hour upon hour is added to the sum. Time itself grows old. Pyramids, arches and obelisks are melting pillars of snow.... The heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man is to tell him he is at the end of his nature."

The consummate expression of melancholy in the visual arts is undoubtedly Durer's Melencolia I, with its individualized and self-absorbed figure, lost in thought and unable to take up her tools. The prototypical pose of melancholy dates back to the classical period, with statues of the deranged Ajax existing in that pose. It was followed by Domenico Fetti's St Peter (Fetti also gave one of his works the simple title Melancholy), Mary by de Zurbaran, St John, a 13th-century icon by Deodato di Orlando, and St. John the Baptist in the Desert (1480-85), a painting by Gérard de Saint-Jean, both show the prophet's head resting on his right arm. The posture was soon borrowed by secular painting, as in Nicholas Hillard's Portrait of Henry Percy and, in the 17th century, in Michael Sweerts's Portrait of a Young Man. A century later, Goya used it for Portrait of Don Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, as did van Gogh in Portrait of Dr. Paul Gachet and arguably Rodin in The Thinker.

Erwin Panofsky believed that Melencolia I presented "a spiritual self portrait of the artist inspired by celestial influences and eternal ideas, but [one who] suffers all the more deeply from his human frailty and intellectual finiteness." One of the characteristics of Durer’s picture is its superabundance of 'overdetermined' symbols, the comet and the rainbow, the ladder that appears to change plane halfway up, the three nails, one with a double tine and their possible allusion to the crucifixion. The purse, the keys and the clenched fist, for example, are all associated with avarice, one of the vices attributed to melancholy in the medieval period; the crown of watercress and water parsley around the angel’s brow are an antidote to the dry humour of the melancholic; the magic square is designed to invoke the healing influence of Jupiter. Panofsky concluded that Durer’s angel is a personification of Geometry overcome with Melancholy (or Melancholy giving herself up to Geometry) and was in all likelihood inspired by a follower of Ficino, the German philosopher Agrippa devon Nettesheim, whose book, De Occulta Philosophia, draws heavily on the Italian’s work, and a draft of which was sent to Dürer’s friend Johannes Trithemius, in 1510, just four years before the engraving was made. In De Occulta Philosophia, Agrippa distinguishes three kinds of melancholy: melancholia imaginationis, melancholia rationis and melancholia mentis, arranged in an ascending hierarchy. The first holds sway over the untutored, a category that includes architects and painters; the second, over philosophers, physicians and orators; the third, over contemplatives to whom God’s mysteries have been revealed. Shakespeare advanced something similar in As You Like It: "I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician's, which is fantastical; nor the courtier's, which is proud; not the soldier's which is ambitious; nor the lawyer's, which is politic; nor the lady's, which is nice; nor the lover's, which is all these: but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sadness." Panofsky concludes from this that Durer’s angel is a portrayal of the first of these, melancholia imaginationis, surrounded by her instruments but sunk in gloom at the thought of having accomplished nothing. More recently, Joseph Leo Koerner, has argued that Durer's symbolic presentation of melancholy offers more clues for cultural analysis more than personal biography: "The Melencholia engraving thus seems to articulate a pivotal moment in the history of subjectivity. Where the Middle Ages substantialised inwardness as the excess of black bile and moralized that excess as the deadly sin of acedia [moral sloth], the Renaissance abstracted inwardness as an inherent quality of creative genius and valorized its effects in the originality of the artist, whose works are wholly his own."

Subsequently, melancholy seems to be held in abeyance. Diderot and Alembert dedicate a short article in their encyclopaedia to it, which recapitulates many medieval commonplaces regarding bile in spite of references to examining the brains of melancholics during autopsies. This is the age of "la douce melancolie." Nonetheless, the school of graveyard poetry developed much of what was to become romanticism, as with Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard; "Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife... Melancholy mark'd him for her own" Sentimental novels like Manon Lescaut were to create a new focus upon the interior life in terms that were often highly similar to sixteenth century descriptions of the melancholic lover. Prevost's Manon Lescaut is like the works of Defoe and Fielding, episodic in nature rather than operating a linear narrative; events proceed through coincidence and accident rather than by causality. The characters of the novel accordingly vary with the circumstance; Manon being devoted and fickle by turns. Although the narrative is cast in the form of a fable, there is no redemption or repentance anymore than there is damnation ("a craven little soul, so devoid of feeling, that he could not see the humiliation of it... or else a christian... I was neither one thing or the other"), with Des Grieux even arguing that his love for Manon is akin to religious devotion or that it is unexceptional when one considers "that a mistress is nothing to be ashamed of nowadays." Prevost also suggests that Des Grieux's crimes are not of his own making; "knowing neither the mad lust for money.. nor the fantastic notions of hnour that had turned my father into an enemy." The novel is fundamentally a sentimental one, valuing natural emotion over the unnatural morals of his father, something that further serves to distort the moral fable at the novel's core.

Similarly, Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther also presents an interesting dialectic between Romantic ideas of nature and rationalist ideas. Werther speaks of "my resolve to keep to Nature alone in future. Only Nature has inexhaustible riches, and only Nature creates a great artist." Nonetheless he also later reverts to a less idealised conception of nature when he writes; "Nature, which has brought forth nothing that does not destroy both its neighbour and itself." Werther's fall is characterised by his loss of feeling for nature (though the editor speaks of Werther's 'natural powers' being confounded) but it equally suggests that Nature has a dual role within the novel. When debating with Albert he defends the Romantic individual against the contempt of the mundane masses, only to be told; "a man wholly under the influence of his passions has lost his ability to think rationally," before Albert states that suicide is simply a display of weakness where fortitude was called for.

Only towards the very end of the century, when the French Revolution begins devouring its own children, does the black sun of melancholy once more start to rise. Most famously, the term is reintroduced by Keats in his Ode to Melancholy; "Aye, in the very temple of Delight, Veiled Melancholy has her sov'reign shrine, Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue, Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine, His soul shall taste the sadness of her might, And be among her cloudy trophies hung." Keats had written that "I have an habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence... Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a Soul?" repeating the idea of the melancholic as one given special insights; the only way to engage the great mysteries of life is to suffer "Misery and Heartbreak, Pain, Sickness and oppression."

This next chapter in the history of melancholy comes once more with a change to how society came to regard the individual, with the advent of romanticism. The romantic stress upon the internalised quest romance further accentuates the role of the individual, as tormented genius and as rebel, as in Byron's Manfred and Shelley's Alastor. There are two aspects to this. Firstly, the destruction of the ancien regime itself acted to further decouple the individual from their assigned social roles, ending Burke's "age of chivalry" and introducing a paradox whereby although romanticism often tended to be radical in its politics it also aestheticised medieval chivalry. Individuals felt that they should be able to rise up through society in the same way that Napoleon had done, leading once more to the problem of over-educated young men unable to realise their ambitions, as with Stendhal's Julien Sorel or Balzac's Philippe Bridau. More crudely put, the unleashing of the terror, and the consequent betrayals of enlightenment aspirations, create a new emphasis on the melancholic, the most noted examples of which being Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son, The Sleep of Reason Brings Forth Monsters, and Yard with Lunatics, the latter rearticulating the melancholic linkage of imagination and madness that is also present in Fuseli's paintings (The Artist Moved by the Grandeur of Ancient Ruins alludes to sublimity in its title but also uses the standard tropes of melancholy in its depiction).

Secondly, romantic aesthetics existed at a particular intersection with religion that emphasised only remote and fleeting glimpses of the infinite being granted to solitary individuals. In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Burke had defined these two modes as being "ideas of a very different nature, one being founded on pain , the other on pleasure." , going onto define the one as dark and gloomy, the other the reverse." Kant views the sublime as an attempt to grasp an absolute conception of magnitude, while the beautiful is restricted to the phenomenal world. Kant describes the sublime as a complex feeling that combines both displeasure and pleasure. The displeasure is caused by the agitation and overwhelming of the senses and imagination which struggle but fail to take in the vastness or power of the sublime object. In the dynamically sublime the displeasure also seems to be caused by a feeling verging on fear. We feel so overwhelmed by the object that we would fear for our lives, except that we are safe and secure, and thus able to experience a sense of awe rather than genuine fear. Kant points to how sublime objects invite melancholy: "Thus any spectator who beholds massive mountain climbing skyward, deep gorges with raging streams in them, wastelands lying in deep shadow and inviting melancholy meditation, and so on is seized by amazement bordering on terror." The experience of the sublime is consequently a devastating one that the individual is not fully able to intuit. Thus Wordsworth in The Prelude writes of how "I grew up, fostered alike by beauty and by fear... terrors, pains, and early miseries, ... interfused within my mind ... (made) up the calm existence that is mine." The Lyrical Ballads are replete with examples of solitary figures; for example in The Mad Mother the narrator writes that "I am happy when I sing, Full many a doleful thing... if thou art mad, my pretty lad, Then I must be for ever sad." In some respects romantic melancholia is a critique of Kantian aesthetics, emphasising horror and fear rather than awe and terror. Something similar pertains to literature and to the creation of the gothic novel in particular. Ann Radcliffe drew a distinction between terror and horror; the former we are told expands the soul, the latter only creates revulsion, with that being the part dwelt on by the likes of Lewis, Beckford and Maturin. Similarly, Edgar Allan Poe opens Premature Burial by declaring "there are certain themes of which the
interest is all absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction". The opening section of the story constitutes a discussion of the division between the sublime and the grotesque, terror and horror. The discussion is nonetheless strangely inconclusive. Intitially, we are told "these the mere romanicist must eschew, if we do not wish to offend, or to disgust". Many of Poe's critical principles are romantic so we would naturally assume that
he himself ought to avoid such themes, but the phrase "mere romanticist" alerts us that this issue is more complex that that. Poe justifies his continuation by saying "they are with propriety handled only when the severity and majesty of truth sanctify and sustain them". As the story progresses the cataleptic malady becomes equated with horror rather than terror. The narrator describes his "very horror of thought" and states that "my fancy grew charnel". In
the earlier section we had been told that "fancy" usually viewed as inferior to the imagination in romantic thought, as with Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, is impressed by terror which is here seen as inevitably degenerating to horror and disgust, as in the narrator's dream "I fell prey to perpetual horror". By Poe's own criteria, he seems to indulge these "morbid" instincts on the part of both reader and author, only to disperse them "the imagintion of man is no Carathis, to explore with impunity its every cavern".

This critique of sublimity through melancholy is perhaps most evident in the work of Kleist and Thomas DeQuincey. Kleist's works presents rather bizarre combination of ontological ideas. One the one hand, he developed a pre-Nietzchean form of pessimism surrounding Kant's distinction of the unknowability of things as noumena and as phenomena, so that his work is replete with ironic misprisions, with tragic consequences in The Betrothal in Santo Domingo, The Foundling and The Earthquake in Chile. However, this also leads to an emphasis on supernaturalism as inThe Beggarwoman of Locarno and St Cecilia or The Power of Music, implying a divine ordering in the sense that Kant had originally intended, rather than Kleist's original pessimistic interpretation. At one point in The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater DeQuincey informs the reader that "in his happiest state, the opium reader cannot present himself in the character of L'Allegro; even there he speaks ... as becomes Il' Penseroso." In his Letters To a Young Man DeQuincey writes that Kant did not offer universal rules by which certain problems could be tested, but that "by raising the station of the spectator... the very faculty of comprehending these questions will often depend on the station from which they are viewed." The spectator is the centre of a number of varying reactions, making the narrator the centre a function as much as a persona. To Kant the mind exists in an indeterminate relation to the aesthetic object, unless in the presence of the sublime. At this point the imagination fails to grasp totality but because of this failure the reason is able to intuit the existence of the infinite. The obvious problem with this is that order in the system is maintained at the temporary expense of the subject, which is crushed by the overbearing presence of the sublime. Whereas to Wordsworth the shock of the sublime encoded within the spots of time has the effect of forcingan ultimate awareness of the infinite upon an closed mind, DeQuincey remains unconvinced as to whether the sublime allows anything other than the mind reconstructing reality upon its own terms. It therefore comes as no surprise when The English Mail Coach we were told of how "the dreamer finds housed within himself - occupying ... some separate chamber in his brain ... his own nature repeated." The finite self is left eternally striving in much the same manner as Piranesi on his staircase, "God, seems to be scure and deep, only so long as the presence of man and his restless and unquiet spirit are not there."

Pre-eminent in the visual arts are works like Caspar David Friedrich's Cloister Graveyard in the Snow and Arnold Bocklin’s The Island of the Dead. As an aspect of conventional romantic aesthetics, David Friedrich's paintings often feature landscapes with a single figure with her or his back to the beholder, but both themes, dwell rather more on decay and contain echoes of the Middle Ages, for, much as the medieval hermit withdrew to the desert for purgation, only to fall prey there to the temptations of demons, so the solitary Romantic turns to nature for spiritual replenishment, only to be beset by visions of an infinite and possibly indifferent universe. The Romantic fascination with ruins can, after all, ultimately be traced back to the medieval tradition of apocalypse.

The nineteenth century can in many respects be regarded as the zenith of melancholy. Schopenhauer had written of how "abnormal sensitiveness produces inequality of spirits, a predominating melancholy, with periodical fits of unrestrained liveliness. A genius is one whose nervous power or sensitiveness is largely in excess; as Aristotle has very correctly observed, Men distinguished in philosophy, politics, poetry or art appear to be all of a melancholy temperament." The pessimism of Schopenhauer's philosophy, combined with the death of god heralded by Nietzsche and Darwin led to Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Tennyson's In Memoriam and Arnold's Dover Beach (" Sophocles long ago, Heard it on the Aegaean, and it brought, Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow, Of human misery... The Sea of Faith Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore, Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled. But now I only hear, Its melancholy"). The lines in Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, "While you live, Drink! — for, once dead, you never shall return," mark the return of a pagan melancholy that had not been witnessed since the likes of Horace. Equally, this was a period that constructed lavish funerary monuments in the style of classical temples or gothic cathedrals and decorated them with Egyptian spinxes. The impression is invariably of an industrialised and deracinated society that had lost contact with its own funerary traditions and instead retreated into something that more resembled a collage of differing styles. The invention of photography also ushered in the advent of mortuary photography, something daguerreotype photography was well suited to. Intrigued by psychiatric research some artists and photographers followed in Hogarth's footsteps to visit asylums to paint and draw the insane. Nonetheless, it was also a period when melancholy's connections with ideas of the divine frenzy and the sublime were severed and it grew increasingly marginalised as something decadent and diseased. This went hand in hand with, for the middle classes at least, a declining awareness of death and mortality. Even tuberculosis, the disease feted by Sontag as the central metaphor of the Victorian era, was something increasingly confined to sanatoria. As Walter Benjamin put it; "It has been observed for a number of centuries how in the general consciousness the thought of death has declined in omnipresence and vividness... in the course of the nineteenth century bourgeois society has, by means of hygienic and social, private and public institutions, realized a secondary effect which may have been its subconscious main purpose: to make it possible for people to avoid the sight of the dying. Dying was once a public process in the life of the individual and a most exemplary one. In the course of modern times dying has been pushed further and further out of the perceptual world of the living. There used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not died. Today people live in rooms that have never been touched by death, dry dwellers of eternity, and when their end approaches they are stowed away in sanatoria or hospitals by their heirs." Put in Foucauldean terms, it was a period when the birth of clinic sundered the melancholic from society into a specially devised category. Experiences like those of the Bronte sisters, growing up amidst the graves of the churchyard, were to become increasingly unusual, with new cemeteries being built outside of populous areas, as with Brookwood and Kensal Green.

During this period, the historian Janet Oppenheim argued, "severely depressed patients frequently revealed fears of financial ruin or the expectation of professional disgrace," as with characters like the Dorrit family in the Marshalsea prison in Little Dorrit. This is not autonomy but dependency: the emerging "self" defines its own worth in terms of the perceived judgments of others. For far from being detached from the immediate human environment, the newly self-centered individual is continually preoccupied with judging the expectations of others and his or her own success in meeting them. As Emile Durkheim saw it, "Originally society is everything, the individual nothing ... But gradually things change. As societies become greater in volume and density, individual differences multiply, and the moment approaches when the only remaining bond among the members of a single human group will be that they are all [human]."

This led Durkheim to draw theoretical conclusions on the social causes of suicide, seeing it as resulting from too little social integration (London and London bridge were almost synonymous with suicide, as with the Hexams in Our Mutual Friend or any number of suicides in his novels, from Merdle to Lady Dedlock). Those individuals who were not sufficiently bound to social groups (and therefore well-defined values, traditions, norms, and goals) were left with little social support or guidance, and therefore tended to commit suicide on an increased basis. Sporadic decreases in the ability of traditional institutions (such as religion, guilds, pre-industrial social systems, etc.) to regulate and fulfil social needs played a part in this, as did the long term dimunition of social regulation. Durkheim identified this type with the ongoing industrial revolution, which eroded traditional social regulators and often failed to replace them. Industrial goals of wealth and property were insufficient in providing happiness, as was demonstrated by higher suicide rates among the wealthy than among the poor. Thus opens the canvas of the nineteenth century social novel, with its scores of atomised characters and suicides, characters like Dicken's Miss Wade and the narrator of Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground or works like Thomson's City of Dreadful Night where Melancholy presides as London's goddess; "O melancholy Brothers, dark, dark, dark!, O battling in black floods without an ark!, O spectral wanderers of unholy Night!.. My wine of life is poison mixed with gall, My noonday passes in a nightmare dream.".

As the century drew on, melancholy was increasingly regarded not only as an illness but as a form of criminal degeneration. This change was effected by three men; the psychiatrist Benedict Auguste Morel, the criminologist Cesare Lombroso and the writer Max Nordau. Where the Neoplatonist philosophers had seen in the spiritual torments of the "children of Saturn" the seeds of genius, for Lombroso and company the imaginative powers of Baudelaire, for example mark him out as, quite literally, a madman. "Baudelaire," the criminologist wrote, "strikes us as the true type of lunatic possessed by the manie des grandeurs: provocative appearance, defiant gaze, extreme self-satisfaction" and so on.

Baudelaire's poetry itself reminds me of Arnold's line about "alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night." Where Arnold's response to the death of god is comparatively straightforward, Baudelaire's is considerably more complex. In reading Baudelaire, one soon discovers that his world is urban (following the lead of Poe's The Man of the Crowd with its depiction of the regimented urban bustle thrown up by the Industrial Revolution), where that of his predecessors was natural; the world of the flaneur is one of alienation and anomie, not encounters with the sublime. The poet, the artist, was thereby displaced, even in his own eyes. He was no longer the hero, the seer and prophet who leads a grateful people to a higher spiritual life. He was now an outcast — maudit (accursed), doomed to misery, poverty, disease, and death. The city it is that gives rise to the comprehensive word for the unrelieved Baudelairean experience: "Spleen." Its connotation in French is depression; it is not tender like melancholy, nor does it carry the idea of resentment as does English "spleen." In a sense, Baudelaire's egotistical sublime rather resembles Burton's encylopaedianism. Since his work is essentially symbolic, the symbol always seems to lack something stable to represent, so that his Hymn to Beauty asks "did you come from the depths of heaven or up from the pit?" (just as Horreur Sympathetique speaks of how "your shafts of light are the reflection of hell") suggesting that clear knowledge of the noumenal is beyond the poet. The result is that his poetry is over-signified, being replete with meaning. At times, his stance seems to be akin to that of Arnold, of a poet caught in a world without the divine (the line about "my soul tossed.. on a monstrous, shoreless sea" in The Seven Old Men having more than a passing resemblance to Dover Beach), at other times his mythology remains essentially christian ("a damned man without a lamp" in Abel and Cain) and at others he resembles Blake, feeling sympathy for the devil (in The Irremediable there is "an angel, unwary traveller tempted by the love of the misshapen... as if it were reproaching god" while in The Rebel there is "a furious angel... but the damned rebel always answers "I won't!" Finally, Abel and Cain speaks of throwing god down upon the earth). Baudelaire's poetry works by overthrowing oppositions between good and evil, beauty and ugliness, company and isolation as he writes in Crowds that "the poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able at will to be himself and someone else."

Similarly, De Nerval's writing is deeply embued with German metaphysics but nonetheless represents a point where the death of god leaves sublimity undermined by melancholy (Nerval's Aurelia, his Beatrice, is imagined as Durer's Angel of Melancholy). Whereas earlier Romantic aesthetics emphasised the ability to intuit the noumenal through the phenomenal in brief epiphanies, Nerval foregrounds the question of the potentially subjective and misleading character of such spots of time, both through his emphasis on the difficulty of distinguishing the real from the metaphysical and through the foregrounding of his insanity and experience of the asylum. For example, in The King of Bedlam, Spifame's imaginings of himself as the king lead to his being placed in the asylum only for him to end up leading a parallel existence to the monarch as he lives in luxury and has most of dictats implemented; "Spifame could recognise himself in a mirror or dream, he could take stock of himself even as he changed roles and personalities." Sanity and reason exist in a strangely liminal relationship rather than as opposites in Nerval; his characters remain aware of themselves even as they lose themselves. Similarly, in The Tale of Caliph Hakim, the sultan emerges first as the double of himself, sane even while mistaken for a lunatic, only to realise that he has a double he had been unaware of. The ruin strewn landscape of Sylvie similarly emerges as a place of mistaken identities where neither the phenomenal nor the noumenal can be taken for certain; "but how could I be sure I was not merely the victim of one more illusion.. such are the chimeras that beguile and misguide us." Travelling to the Orient, Nerval found it too quotidian ("the Orient is no longer the land of marvels") and prefers his friends's opera set designs, travelling to Paris, Nerval found it a land of fantasy in contrast to British realism. His masterpiece, Aurelia, continues this: "the overflow of dream into real life... Spirit from the external world suddenly takes on the bodily shape of an ordinary woman." although at one point after a vision of the afterlife, Nerval proclaims that there is a god, he elsewhere proclaims that there is no god ("the virgin is dead and all prayers are useless... there is no god, god is no more!") and that he is god ("I myself was god, trapped in some sorry incarnation"), with the additional complication of his frequently esoteric view of religion, which has more in common with the druze than with christianity. Nerval is plagued throughout by his own double, as well as the question of whether his beloved exists as spirit or simply as a lost love, whether is insanity is precisely that or simply a form of vision. Throughout, Aurelia, opposites are overturned and nothing is left stable; everything is swallowed by the black sun.

In their fascination with ruins and the macabre the Romantics had gestured toward the existence of melancholy, but its scientific grounding came with the work of Freud. Here, the melancholic is no longer a romantic figure. Entrapped in narcissistic regression, he or she resists any consolation and inhabits a surround devoid of affect and feeling, other than that of a compulsive desire to "repeat the trauma of loss." Ever since he wrote On Transience in 1915, Freud acknowledged that mourning was the crucial conundrum that the therapist must penetrate. "Mourning over the loss of something that we have loved or admired seems so natural to the layman that he regards it as self-evident. But to psychologists mourning is a great riddle, one of those phenomena which cannot themselves be explained but to which other obscurities can be traced back." In Freudian theory, "mourning follows a loss that has really occurred," asserts Agamben; "in melancholia not only is it unclear what object has been lost [self or other], it is uncertain that one can speak of a loss at all." In a 1917 essay titled Mourning and Melancholia, Freud began a meditation on the manner in which the human psyche deals with loss. "Mourning," he wrote, "is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person." We rest assured that after a lapse of time it will be overcome, and we look upon any interference with it as inadvisable or even harmful." This is grief at the "normal" register. By contrast, "melancholia," though sharing many of the surface characteristics of "mourning," is identified by Freud as a pathological illness, marked by an inability to recover from the loss, to "overcome" it, and to return to daily activities. Thus, "the complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound," a wound that refuses to heal, a loss that cannot be salved.

Unsurprisingly, after Freud melancholy lost its organizing status and became a minor category subsumed into the larger realm of developmental psychology. Similarly, the melancholy and the tragic are perhaps too integral an aspect of modernist aesthetics for it to be distinguishable amidst the surrounding sound and fury; consider Eliot's "Webster was much possessed by death, And saw the skull beneath the skin" or Benjamin's "Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them.... The persistence which is expressed in the intention of mourning is born of its loyalty to the world of things." Modernist literary discourses are generally haunted by the spectre of loss: loss of a coherent and autonomous self, loss of a social order in which stability reigned, loss of metaphysical guarantees, and in some cases loss and fragmentation of an empire. Holderlin's elegiac sense of modernity's profound loss; Rilke's elegiac metaphysics of absence, the loss of personal identity in Woolf's novels, the loss of authentic existence in Hamsun's novels (Hunger perhaps being the modern work that most deserves to be labelled melancholic) Heidegger on the forgetting of Being or the nightmare worlds of Beckett and Kafka. In the midst of all this, the pleasurable sense of melancholy is either at a loss or is simply subsumed, in the same way as the traditional idea of the ruin began to seem merely picturesque by the twentieth century. As EM Cioran put it "Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it." Modernism was the culture of an age of mass death. It was, as Matei Calinescu has said, an "aesthetic thanatophilia." Richard Howard, in his homage to Ford Madox Ford, called the modern "that all-inclusive negative." By the end of the second world war the question had become even more difficult, with the likes of Plath termed a depressive rather than a melancholic; the two terms may be congruent but they are far from synonymous.

Some visual arts continue to reference melancholy, as with De Chirico's Melancholy and Mystery of a Street, or several works by Edvard Munch all entitled "Melancholy," Several versions depict a pensive man sitting by the sea (for example, paintings from 1891; 1892), many repeating the pose depicted previously by Fetti and Durer. Even so, there's little doubt that his painting of The Scream was rather more in keeping with the spirit of that age. Conspicuously present in the background of Durer's engraving is an enigmatic, eight-sided, and up to the present inscrutable polyhedron, one whose very inscrutability makes it mysterious, even uncanny. Alberto Giacometti based a sculpture on this work, sculpting a plaster version of the singular-looking polyhedron in Durer's composition. It seems to summarise well the displacement of the traditional iconography of melancholia.

Melancholy was ultimately parasitic on christian theology and its secularised equivalents in romantic aesthetics. However, there has been at least one noteworthy resurgence. In his recent book Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk draws connections between representations of Istanbul by French writers who visited the city in the nineteenth century such as Nerval and Gautier, and those by prominent Turkish writers of the early twentieth century. Pamuk emphasizes the melancholic tone in all of these "western" and "eastern" representations of Istanbul, which in turn constructed his own perceptions of his home city. "A sense of deprivation and hopelessness" which was verbalized by Baudelaire as the definition of beauty, and which can be seen in Nerval's and Gautier's depictions of Istanbul's landscape, also appears in Pamuk's Istanbul, as the melancholy raised by wandering in the poor back-streets of Istanbul, in its ruins from past civilizations, in the midst of an urban landscape that has lost the glorious days it had during the Byzantine and Ottoman Empire. The huzun inscribed deeply in the urban landscape of Istanbul is a collective melancholy for Pamuk that unifies its residents. In Baudelaire and Pamuk, melancholy is no longer something internal to the subject, but something connected to the object. It is not a single individual who is melancholic, but the city's landscape (manzara), "the beautiful object", that elicits the feeling of melancholy as a collective emotion. Melancholy thus leaves the isolated individual and infiltrates the city itself. In the book that juxtaposes his autobiography with the biography of the city, Pamuk suggests melancholy caused by "poverty, defeat, and the feeling of loss" as the primary common emotion of Istanbul.
Labels: Art, Culture, Literature, Melancholy

posted by Richard 5:29 PM

Saturday, January 26, 2008

This section leapt out of a review of The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt:

"The Indian Clerk is the latest adornment of an increasingly fashionable literary sub-genre: what might be called the fictive biography. At least half a dozen of them have appeared in the last half-decade, from David Lodge's Author! Author! (chapters in the later life of Henry James) to Julian Barnes's Arthur and George (Conan Doyle and the Edalji affair) and Benjamin Markovits's ongoing Byron trilogy. In most cases the reader's interest in these real lives, painstakingly set out in the pages of something advertised as a novel, is trailed by a mild anxiety about the form."

One might also have mentioned that this is something that seems to apply to both the 'literary' and 'popular' strains of writing, with thrillers written in the last few years featuring the likes of Freud and Marlowe as their protagonists. The review also neglects to mention that Lodge's novel was issued at roughly the same time as Colm Toibin's The Master as well as a number of other novels about Henry James. This review by Terry Eagleton summarises some of the complexities of this affair:

"Lodge argues in The Year of Henry James, his record of the affair, that James has always been both a writer's writer and a critic's writer. Since Lodge himself is both together, the allure in his case proved doubly strong. But as he points out, James also created some of the most memorable women characters of the period, which makes him fit meat for the feminists; and queer theory gets a look in, too, as gay critics debate exactly how repressed his (probable) homosexuality was. In any case, novels about historical figures have become fashionable in the past decade or two, as Lodge reminds us, and a lot of these have been writers on writers.

There's another reason, however, for this rash of Henriads, which one wouldn't really expect Lodge to note. In a post-political age, writers are more likely to be enthused by exquisite states of consciousness or the intricacies of personal relationships than by more workaday matters; and the aloof, fastidious James, a man famously described as chewing more than he could bite off, appears to fill this bill exactly.

The appearance, however, is mostly illusory. Few writers have been so haunted by the themes of power and possession. James's unfathomably subtle mind is materialist to its roots. Lodge admires him because he's all about "consciousness", but he is even more about ownership and exploitation. His fictions may be full of delectably cobwebby sentences, but they are also populated by bloodied victims and monstrous predators, and what drives them is a force as mysteriously elusive as art, known as money. It's this interaction between artistic (or moral) beauty and the brutal workings of power which make James so magnificent an artist. Lodge, Toibin and Hollinghurst, one suspects, want the beauty without the brutality."

In part, one might be generally dismissive of this sort of writing as a form of escapism in the way historical fiction often is. But this is something that takes place against a backdrop of biography being one of the most widely practised forms of modern writing. It does seem to suggest a certain inadequacy to the form of the realist novel, an attempt to marry the dramatic principles of that form to the solidity of non-fiction, without having to venture as far as Sebald's experiments in non-fiction (after all, Sebald often wrote about figures like Stendhal or Fitzgerald) or the likes of Capote and Wolfe.
Labels: Literature

posted by Richard 10:34 AM

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

There's been quite a bit of comment in a recent talk by Mike Figgis on the subject of whether there's too much culture. The essential argument is that immediate access to digitally stored copies of films, texts and music has had a stultifying and conservative effect on art. As transcribed by Imomus:

"The 1950s was the birth of rock'n'roll. And let's say we can argue that the king of rock'n'roll is Elvis Presley. One of the most famous actors of that period is Marilyn Monroe, but there's also James Dean, there's Marlon Brando, and any number of other figures that we would now call icons. And they were recorded in the 1950s. And I wonder why, fifty years on, 2007, when you go to an event, say popular music, we're still seeing Elvis Presley. We're still seeing someone accompanied by two guitars and a bass and drums, and a chord structure which is pretty much three chords and twelve bars. There's nothing wrong with rock'n'roll in its limited way. But fifty years on they're still wearing the same clothes. They're still singing the same songs. And they're still trying to look like Elvis. Think about it -- it's jeans, it's leather jackets, nothing's changed. Now let's take 1957, say, and go back fifty years. That would be 1907, right? Can you imagine in 1957 the youth wanting to look and sound like someone from 1907? It's unthinkable. Because that seems like the dark ages. That's prehistoric, baby. So why? Why suddenly are we stuck in 1957? And I think the reason why is that we've become the prisoner of this reproductive image of ourselves, and we can't let it go."

Figgis is quite good on the subject of the emotional implications of our access to digital reproduction, with films and programmes instantly available where they would previously have been something ephemeral, that one might see only once, performed and consumed simultaneously. Nonetheless, I find it rather hard to agree with him with for any number of reasons. As several of the commenters at Click Opera acerbically point out, Mod culture was to a large extent predicated on imitating Edwardian styles of dress (in exactly the same way as David Wilkie Wynfield's photographs depict Victorian writers and artists dressed in medieval costume), which would seem to rather vitiate the argument from the outset. Art does after all tend to evolve very gradually with often little change or development over protracted periods of time; modernism's exhortation to make it new is the exception, not the rule. Nor is Figgis entirely consistent on this point; while decrying the conservatism he see digital reproduction as enforcing, he also welcomes its economic implications for film production, seeing it as leading to smaller and less mass market films.

More specifically, these sort of arguments could easily have been debated in relation to earlier forms of reproduction, such as photography or printing. This sort of argument tends to remind me of Gianni Vattimo’s essay The Death or Decline of Art which argues that once art resists tradition and loses its cult value, it loses its status and has to engage in self-referential dissidence and postmodernist pastiche; a kitsch aesthetic played out against a vapid culture. Bt contrast, Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction argued that modern art had discarded with the ritualistic cult value attached to works characterised by their unreproducability and authenticity. To Benjamin this creates a space for a form of art that is both more political and more democratic (though in practice, Benjamin also decries the commoditisation of art, while his admiration of Kafka is on the basis of the occluded and ritualistic character of a work that had more in common with folklore than with the contemporary novel). Communist aesthetics aside, I tend to agree with Benjamin and it seems to me that novelists like Pynchon or Stephenson could easily be described as producing the sort of work that best suits an age of digital reproduction, by embracing the overload of information rather than by rejecting it.
Labels: Art, Literature

posted by Richard 9:56 AM

Thursday, November 29, 2007

As an appendix to my last post, this article from AS Byatt covers much of the same territory:

"Thomas Pavel once gave a splendid paper on the changes in the presentation of human nature during the history of the novel. In the beginning, he said, characters had immortal souls, and their actions took place in a battle between good and evil for the salvation or damnation of these souls. In later sentimental novels, souls had been replaced by hearts; what mattered was romantic love, and the recognition of other selves. Later still, he said, the heart had been replaced by the psyche – a system of unconscious drives, revealed in dreams, not clear to the characters, though controlled by the author, who like the analyst, understood the forms of energy and action. Iris Murdoch felt that humans – including those of her characters who were philosophers and psychoanalysts – had not understood the shift in the moral world that had come about with the absconding of God, the vanishing of external, metaphysical moral authority. Her analysts tend to be daemonic, manipulating what she described as a "system" and a "mechanism" of sadomasochism.

The consequences of Darwin’s evolutionary idea for literature has been deeply studied. Characters in the novels I read as a girl struggled with the meaninglessness of the world – the chancy world of gradual evolution of species, and death as a final end. European novels went on using the biblical and Christian stories as paradigms long after many of the novelists had lost their belief. Forms of art change more slowly than forms of thought or belief.

Both Freud and Darwin put sexuality at the centre of human nature. In Darwin, sexual selection is one of the important ways living creatures pass on their characteristics. Freud thought all human action was driven by libido, and libido was sexual desire. The Darwinist Richard Dawkins sees all life as driven by "selfish genes", seeking self-replication and outliving the bodies in which they are temporarily housed. In a way foreshadowing this, Freud saw what he called "the germ-cell" as immortality: the body dies, the gene lives on. Self-definition in terms purely of sexuality is one consequence of the thought patterns of the last century... modern humans define themselves to themselves in terms of their private lives, and define their private lives in terms of sexuality."

In spite of Byatt's citation of Bellow and Roth, I wonder whether sexuality's relationship to modern conceptions of character is quite so straightforward. The struggle for sexual self expression forms the nucleus of much nineteenth and twentieth century fiction, from Madame Bovary to Lady Chatterley's Lover; with its arrival in the sixties a lacuna emerged in the modern novel that the nouveau roman sought to correct by excising the idea of character from the novel altogether. Sexuality was a central theme only in so far as it existed as a form of stigma, an expression of civilisation's discontents, as Freud might have put it. Modern society is quickly displacing ideas of the unconscious with the gene, away from the environmental assumptions shared by Freud and Marx towards something typified instead by evolutionary psychology. It would be surprising of conceptions of character did not change accordingly. To a large extent much modern literature seems to regard character as less as a coherent set of traits and more as a collection of conflicting drives (episodic rather than diachronic), as in Bret Easton Ellis, Dennis Cooper or JG Ballard. Ballard's novels in particular, with their depiction of repressed primeval impulses, are often composed of episodic fragments rather than the sort of linear narrative that is conducive to the portrayal of more conventional modes of characterisation.

Update: a related observation from this piece on Celine by Will Self:

"When the novel first appeared, it was still possible to believe in the avant-garde: there were important things to be said, things suppressed by taboo and prejudice. Now, everything is permitted and nothing is heard."

It's often been observed that modern society has ceased to be a guilt culture and has instead become a shame culture where our increasingly post-traditional ethics have nothing to do with earlier ideas of denial and abstinence. But it is an interesting question whether stigma or repression aren't necessary qualities for literature. Certainly when I think of the Victorian novel I think about novels like Anna Karenin and Madame Bovary or even La Dame Aux Camelias, which are predicated on a conflict between eros and civilisation of the kind Freud described as unavoidable; "It is much the same thing if we say that the conflict between civilization and sexuality is caused by the circumstance that sexual love is a relationship between two people, in which a third can only be superfluous or disturbing, whereas civilization is rounded on relations between larger groups of persons." Similarly, later writers like Burroughs, Lawrence or Genet dedicated their work to the subversive and transgressive, something a theorist like Georg Lukacs would argue that typifies the entire history of the novel, which he saw as based on the sort of conflict between self and society that this typifies.

Consider the difference between The Mill and the Floss or Tess of the D'Urbervilles and modern re-enactments of Victorian literature like The French Lieutenants's Woman or Self's own Dorian, both of which vacilliate somewhat regarding a tragic denouement their predecessors wouldn't have thought twice about. By contrast, the idea of a literature for a post-traditional society seems more problematic, with examples like Ballard or Houellebecq being comparatively few and far between.
Labels: Literature

posted by Richard 6:12 PM

Thursday, November 08, 2007

For writers like George Eliot, the ability of art to elicit an empathetic response from the reader is one of its paramount readers. I've read a few posts this week on the subject of why we feel forms of emotional attachment to fictional characters i.e. to regard them no differently to written accounts of real figures or even to people we know. Firstly, Butterflies and Wheels:

"It is very odd, and even somewhat mysterious, what powerful emotions we can feel about fictional characters. The oddity becomes more obvious if you try to imagine animals doing it. The idea is absurd - yet we're so used to doing it ourselves that we forget how odd it is. What's that about, do you suppose? Other minds, probably. Right? Must be. The social animal thing. Our brains would have been too expensive to have evolved if they didn't have a huge payoff; the payoff is social collaboration; for that we need a working theory of mind. So we have this hypertrophied faculty of thinking and feeling about the interior worlds of other people - so hypertrophied that it works even (or especially) on people who don't actually exist."

Secondly, George Szirtes;

"The answer to this is bound to be long and tentative, but my guess is that the imagination does not distinguish carefully between the real and the imagined... So we have few reliable data to the objective reality of others. We understand that others exist and that we live in a world where not to acknowledge their existence would quickly lead to ruin... Consciousness tells us we are subjective beings, that the evidence of our senses is not enough. It is precisely because we have imaginations that we can cope with the world: we can construct the scenarios in which the world makes sense in the ways we are capable of apprehending sense... The fact that we know we are shaping apprehensions of reality into sense means we are properly sceptical about our imagination too. And that is how literary, theatrical, cinematic, and other artistic conventions work. They frame the imagination, allowing it scope but limiting it. That is the vital function of art."

It generally seems to me that the tendency to anthropomorphise is the critical question here and our tendency to attribute intentions, emotions and other mental states to inanimate objects (whether that happens to mean incarnating physical elements into the form of a deity or simply swearing at obstreperous household appliances). However, before I go too far in accepting the evolutionary psychology explanation offered in the former quotation above, it's worth noting that it can be argued that the role of character (and consequently of empathy) changes over time. In classical literature, the absence of a notion of free will tends to constrain the role of consciousness while in medieval literature the idea of self-annihilation before god as being a worthy goal tends to have a similar effect. Early prose narratives, like those of Daniel Defoe, often tend to by highly episodic with character somewhat inconsistent between episodes. For the type of narrative, being discussed, we have to turn to the sentimental novel with its combination of first person narration and explicit soliciting of empathy. As such, an emotional reaction to the death of Lear or Cleopatra is rather different to that of Clarissa:

"Hunt draws attention to epistolary novels of private lives and loves, above all Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa, and Rousseau’s Julie. These books received frenzied popular and critical acclaim, but not because they said anything about constitutions and rights, even allegorically. What they did do, according to Hunt, was to encourage readers to identify with weak female characters who struggled to preserve their autonomy and integrity against various forms of domestic oppression.

For her, the 18th-century discovery that rights were self-evident depended on two factors. First, people had to learn to see one another as separate, autonomous individuals possessed of free will. And second, they had to be able to empathise with one another, to see themselves in one another’s shoes. Only when they came to feel, viscerally, that all others deserved the same rights as they did could the notion of universal, equal, natural rights take hold. Hunt notes further that "autonomy and empathy are cultural practices." They have histories, and both changed remarkably during the 18th century. Which is where the novels come in.

Happily, Hunt does not depend solely on novels to make her point, and rapidly sketches in a much broader cultural background. She draws on Norbert Elias, and his story of the "ever-rising threshold of shame about bodily functions", to trace the rise of personal autonomy. She follows Charles Taylor, in his great philosophical history Sources of the Self, to elucidate the evolving 18th-century concept of "sympathy". She also devotes a fascinating chapter to changing attitudes towards torture. Here she notes that "an almost complete turnabout in attitudes took place over a couple of decades." Up to the mid-18th century, most educated Europeans accepted the legitimacy of the most grisly forms of torture: stretching on the rack, pincers, forcing gallons of water down the throat, and a form of execution that involved crushing a person’s bones, dislocating their limbs, and then stretching them over a cartwheel and leaving them to die. When Voltaire condemned the judicial murder of the Protestant Jean Calas in the 1760s, he did not initially consider the victim's "breaking on the wheel" worthy of comment. But some years later he denounced the punishment as inhuman, and by the 1780s torture in general had come to be almost universally denounced as barbaric and impermissible."

Beyond this also lies the question of whether this anthropomorphisation applies not just to characters but also to the text itself, as with the Barthesian notion of the death of the author or Wimsatt and Beardsley's intentional fallacy (and its related idea ). It seems to me that the intentional fallacy and the pathetic fallacy have more than a little in common. Here, the text is assumed to possess a character of its own right which transparently reflects that of the author, leading readers to assume that a character's viewpoint must necessarily echo that of the author or that the depiction of certain events is equivalent to authorial endorsement of them (as with films like Crash or novels like American Psycho). In practice this is less reliable that our habit of seeing patterns and shapes in clouds. However, it's worth noting that these sorts of tendencies do vary by culture to some extent;

" In one study, by Dr. Nisbett and Incheol Choi, of Seoul National University in Korea, the Korean and American subjects were asked to read an essay either in favor of or opposed to the French conducting atomic tests in the Pacific. The subjects were told that the essay writer had been given "no choice" about what to write.

But subjects from both cultures still showed a tendency to "err," judging that the essay writers believed in the position endorsed in the essays. When the Korean subjects were first required to undergo a similar experience themselves, writing an essay according to instructions, they quickly adjusted their estimates of how strongly the original essay writers believed what they wrote. But Americans clung to the notion that the essay writers were expressing sincere beliefs."

This shouldn't be too surprising; Eastern cultures have long tended to be sceptical over the determination of the ethical character of actions rather than the justification of claims as well as being less concerned with any idea of the self or with individualism in the Western sense. But it would be interesting to know whether Japanese or Chinese literature is less reliant on identification with the narrator as a representation of the author or on emotional identification with the interior life of a character. The example of how Japan modified European naturalism into a genre that while identifying author and protagonist did so by dwelling at length on negative aspects of his personality, would seem to suggest there is something to this.
Labels: Literature

posted by Richard 7:43 PM

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Margaret Atwood comments on Bengt Ohlsson's retelling of Hjalmar Söderberg's Dr Glas:

"Novels that snitch characters from other novels or stories and retell events from their point of view can give a reader the uneasy feeling that a previous author's work has been violated. None the less, such books now constitute almost a separate genre. The earliest attempts - such as Shamela, in which Fielding took the stuffing out of Richardson's pious Pamela - were often satiric, but the 20th and 21st centuries, with their interest in the scorned, the marginalised and the voiceless, have approached this task with more seriousness. Jean Rhys looked at Jane Eyre through the eyes of Mr Rochester's mad wife in the brilliant Wide Sargasso Sea; John Gardner has Grendel the Monster give a capering, blood-swilling, tragic rendition of Beowulf in the equally brilliant Grendel. Classics such as Rebecca, Gone with the Wind, and - endlessly - Dracula, have had their shadow versions, as have many other books. The mere doing of such a thing is no longer a novelty, and thus the doing of it well has become a considerable challenge."

If you were to believe someone like Harold Bloom, all writing is in essence a means of rewriting or reintperpreting what preceded it, as with the likes of Keats and Blake rewriting Milton and Spenser. As Atwood suggests this is something that seems to have become a genre in its own right in recent years with novels like Will Self's Dorian (rewriting The Picture of Dorian Gray as a modern gay novel), Great Apes (a Ballardian rewrite of Gulliver's Travels and Boulle's Planet of the Apes), Carter's The Bloody Chamber (a feminist reinterpretation of fairy tale - one might also mention Atwood's own Penelopiad in that context), Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman (almost any Victorian novel you might care to designate, but especially Anna Karenin and Madame Bovary) Updike's Gertrude and Claudius or Cunningham's The Hours (more unusually rewriting a modern text, namely Mrs Dalloway). A variant on this adopts authors as characters, like Coetzee's The Master of Saint Petersburg, Arthur and George by Julian Barnes or Tsypkin's Summer in Baden Baden. With all that said, as Atwood suggests, this is something that seems to have a particular force in genre fiction, as with the innumerable reinterpretations of Dracula (itself rewriting the likes of LeFanu) and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Martin's Mary Reilly, for example), the legions of Sherlock Holmes stories (the stories themselves, being in many ways a rewrite of Poe's detective novels, with the reinterpretation of Holmes having arguably begun as early as Hornung's Raffles and then continued with the likes of August Derleth, himself perhaps best known for having rewritten much of Lovecraft).

I agree with Atwood that this is something that has grown in prominence over recent decades; this is a post-romantic age (notwithstanding romantic rewriting of medieval mythologies) and the idea of the author as a solitary genius was always likely to give way to a conception of writers as more firmly embedded in a shared set of culture and myths. This is after all how the likes of Euripides and Sophocles approached figures like Medea and Electra, or how Shakespeare and Marlowe approached Caesar and Edward the Second. However, I also tend to suspect that a lot of this writing reflects a post-traditional nostalgia for periods where literature had more of a hegemonic cultural status; hence the particular interest in rewriting Victorian literature, that being probably the last period where forms of elite literature could conceivably also carry popular appeal. I recently came across this interesting analysis of the state of modern art:

"It has become excruciatingly difficult and even impossible to write a history of contemporary art -- a history that will do justice to all the art that is considered contemporary: that is the lesson of postmodernism. If writing history is something like putting the pieces of a puzzle together, as psychoanalyst Donald Spence suggests, then contemporary art is a puzzle whose pieces do not come together. There is no narrative fit between them, to use Spence's term, suggesting just how puzzling contemporary art is, however much its individual pieces can be understood...

In Postmodernism what André Malraux called the global "museum without walls" has been realized, resulting in the unlimited expansion of the contemporary. The radical pluralism that prevails in the museum without walls has made a mockery of the belief that there is one art that is more "historical" than any other. Thus history has become as absurd and idiosyncratic as the contemporary... Even if one was a Gibbon one could not fit all the pieces of contemporary art together in a unified narrative. In postmodernity that is no longer any such thing as the judgment of history, only an incomplete record of the contemporary...

History is no longer possible in postmodernism because of modernism itself: at its most vital, it is a history of self-questioning and self-doubt, leading artists to look far a field for their identity... At the same time, the indiscriminate adulation of creativity -- virtually any kind of creativity, leading to the labeling of any kind of activity as creative if it is performed "differently" -- is responsible for the overcrowding of contemporary art. It is paradoxically the loss of standards of creative excellence that makes art vulnerable to market and populist forces. They alone can make an art "historical" and "meaningful" when it is no longer clear what the value of art is."

It's not difficult to see how this might also easily apply to modern literature, which ranges from traditional realism, postmodernism (Eco) to magical realism (Carter) or hysterical realism (Pynchon), as well as writers that seem to have analogues in disciplines like art (Ballard) rather than any currently dominant literary trends. Rewriting may be one of the few ways writers can overcome Vattimo's ideas of The Death or Decline of Art, where art, by way of resisting tradition and engaging in continual forms of experimentation, loses is cultural niche. With that said, Vattimo saw this as having less to do with resistance and more to do with self-referential dissidence, allusion and pastiche, a point that can be left open for other times.

Updates: a new addition to this genre in the form of Castorp, a sequel to Mann's The Magic Mountain:

"The situation of Huelle’s Castorp reminds one of Jean Rhys and her celebrated Wide Sargasso Sea. In that novel the canonical narrative of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is challenged through the switching of perspectives. By giving voice to Antoinette Cosway, the actual name of the animal-like and repulsive Bertha Rochester in Bronte’s work, Rhys invites her audience to a contrapuntal rereading of Bertha’s traumatic life story as told from her own non-British perspective. This is how Rhys "writes back" to Bronte and to the colonial discourse encapsulated in Jane Eyre. In Wide Sargasso Sea we see the polemic response by the former British colony to the dominating image of the periphery as solidified in the master narratives of the metropolitan center...

I argue that Pawel Huelle's novel should be viewed from a similar position. The Gdansk-based episode of Castorp attracts readers’ attention by the unique postcolonial perspective from which the novel personae and events are narrated... Gdansk in Castorp is, in fact, more than just a provincial melting pot bearing some marks of a splendid Hanseatic past. Viewed through the protagonist’s eyes, the town seems to comply perfectly with the criteria of literary representation of colonized space defined by Fanon. Dominated by the Germans, it has Prussian barracks with Prussian soldiers and a newly established German university with German and Prussian students. Every street and building is filled with things German. However, the town constitutes a space that is heterogeneous, with an array of impervious zones. Viewed by Castorp the biker, the indigenous Polish and Kashubian people constitute an enclave driven to the margin of the world and its spatial representation. "

Dracula has also proved fertile ground for rewriting and revision; most obviously through the many films made of the novel, but more recently through other forms of writing, such as Robert Forrest's The Voyage of the Demeter, which dwells on the events onboard the ship that brought the vampire to Whitby and are entirely elided from the novel. This is also the premise behind The Dracula Innocence Project, which questions the reliability of Stoker's narrators in order to rewrite the novel.
Labels: Culture, Literature

posted by Richard 9:02 AM

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

In the unlikely event that I have regular readers, some of them might happen to recall that one of my obscure passions is the early twentieth century literary theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin:

"Just as Bakhtin's work is among other things a coded critique of Soviet autocracy, so postmodernism springs in large part from the rout of modern Marxism. In the work of Baudrillard, Lyotard and others, it began as an alternative creed for disenchanted leftists. Its obsession with discourse makes sense in an age short on political action. Instead of setting fire to campuses, American students now cleanse their speech of incorrectness. If Marxism had been shamefully coy about sexuality, postmodernism makes a fetish of it. The warm, desiring, palpable body is a living rebuke to all those bloodless abstractions about the Asiatic mode of production. Instead of grand narratives that lead to the gulag, we have a plurality of mini-narratives. Since doctrinal absolutes dismember bodies, relativism is the order of the day. If castrating homosexuals is part of your culture, it would be ethnocentric of me to object. Revolution is no longer on the agenda, but sporadic subversions may stand in for it. Class politics yields to identity politics. The system cannot be overthrown, but at least it can be deconstructed....

It means that every word or utterance is refracted through a host of other, perhaps antagonistic idioms, through which alone its meaning can be grasped. It thus bears an affinity with the post-structuralist concept of textuality. There can be no unmediated truth. We come to ourselves, as many modern thinkers have claimed, through a medium which is profoundly strange to us. Language for Bakhtin is a cockpit of warring forces, as each utterance finds itself occupied from within by alien significations. Every sign glances sideways at other signs, bears the traces of them within its body, and faces simultaneously towards speaker, object, context and addressee. Like human subjects, words are constituted by their relations to otherness, and language is always porous, hybrid and open-ended. There was never a first word, and there could never be a last one. The inherent unfinishedness and unpredictability of language – the fact that I can never deduce from any two of your words what the third one is going to be – is a token of human freedom, and thus in a broad sense political. Signs are never self-identical, and always mean more than they say (a surplus that includes what they don’t say). The enemy is what Bakhtin dubs ‘monologism’, meaning the kind of meta-language which seeks to subdue this irrepressible heterogeneity. At times in his work, it is a polite word for Stalinism...

Pechey argues persuasively that Bakhtin was out to rewrite the history of modernity. Epistemology yields to aesthetics, as the abstract reason of the Enlightenment is replaced by the sensuous particularity of art. A brutally instrumental rationality makes way for a form of communicative reason. The falsely autonomous subject of the modern age is overturned by the dialogical self. In all these ways, the aesthetic in the modern age becomes the repository of lost or sidelined forms of knowledge."

Eagleton's review does an excellent task of highlighting what I found so appealing in Bakhtin; his defence of the untidy, unfinished and chaotic, that which defies order and system. Nonetheless, for all of the comparisons evinced here Bakhtin's work contains no assumption that there is nothing outside language, pertains largely to the formal and linguistic properties of the novel and lacks any metaphysical critique of meta-narratives. One can draw some parallels with Derrida, viewing differance and dialogism as being spiritually akin concepts but any such parallel is necessarily rather strained. The figure Bakhtin does remind me of isn't so much Derrida but Sartre. Both Bakhtin and Sartre were drawn in many respects to Marxism as a philosophy (albeit with Sartre far more committed to it than the man who was to die in one Stalin's gulags). In the former case, Bakhtin's work treats of the novel in materialistic terms as a product of specific cultural, historical and social forces as much as the linguistic ones Eagleton highlights. His work nonetheless treats of the ways in which these forces combine to ensure that the novel is, to purloin a phrase, condemned to be free or, to use Bakhtin's phrase, to be dialogic. Similarly, Sartre's work struggles to yoke together the heterogenous elements of existentialism and communism, of how freedom could gear itself to the social conditions it found itself in. The polyphonic novel was naturally the ideal vehicle for Sartre to manifest those ideas, utilising concepts like the cutups and multiple viewpoints that he had borrowed from Dos Passos but which also bore a distinct resemblance to Bakhtinian dialogism.
Labels: Language, Literature, Theory

posted by Richard 6:54 PM

Sunday, April 29, 2007

Hermione Lee discusses various critical approaches to the novel, ranging from Kundera to Moretti:

"Hegel called the contingent, the everyday, the mutable, "the prose of the world," as opposed to "the spiritual, the transcendent, the poetic." "Prosaic" can mean plain, ordinary, commonplace, even dull. Prose fiction, historians of the novel tell us, has had to struggle against the sense of being a second-rate genre. Heidegger said that "novelists squander ignobly the reader's precious time." In late-eighteenth-century Britain, when large numbers of badly written popular novels were being published, "only when entertainment was combined with useful instruction might the novel escape charges of insignificance or depravity."

In pre-modern China, Japan, and Korea, the general word for fictional writing was xiaoshuo (in Chinese), meaning "trivial discourse." Socialist critics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have accused the novel of bourgeois frivolity. By contrast, aestheticians of the novel, like Flaubert, proposed the ideal novel as "a book about nothing," or, like Joyce, as a game which would turn the everyday world into the most concentrated and highly designed prose possible. Moral writers of novels like George Eliot or D.H. Lawrence believed in the novel as the book of truth, teaching us how to live and understand our lives and those of others...

The most interesting pursuit of categories comes when they are seen crossing cultural borders, as in a rather fascinating account in Moretti (by Jongyon Hwang) of how in the early twentieth century, Korean fiction began to adopt the genre of the bildungsroman as a means of moving away from the previous generation's authoritarian culture (which collapsed under Japanese colonialism) and toward more Western desires for "self-expression and social advancement." Classification can be valuable, too, when the category is seen as a shape-shifter, as in a brilliant essay by Bruce Robbins on how the "upward mobility story" in fiction shifted from social climbing to the making of a writer...

The idea of the novel as contradictory, double-dealing, and secretive, the secret agent of literature, is matched in all these critical commentaries by an equally strong idea of the novel as multifarious, polymorphous, expansive, and superfluous, the behemoth of literature. For the prose of the world to be turned into the world of prose, superfluity, spilling-over, and generous abundance are called for. These critics show how even the most formal and aesthetically stringent of novelists also have appetites for excess. A.S. Byatt on Balzac eloquently celebrates his "manic inclusiveness." One critic of Ulysses describes it as investing in "an ideal of exhaustiveness..." Mary Shelley, in Frankenstein, "officially" endorses the theories of her time "of inherent human goodness," but at the same time, through her story, refutes them as "sentimental and false." Emily Brontë divides herself painfully between a desire for a marriage between the world of human vision and inhuman nature, and a recognition of its impossibility: "the romantic dreamer longs for a home that she is doomed never to find." For Mullan, secrets, suppressed emotions, and withheld information are some of the main engines of the novel—"moments when the surface of things suddenly changes its meaning.""

Similarly, Jonathan Ree also writes on this subject:

"The novelty of the novel is of course connected with the rise of printing, and the growth of a literate public with time and money to spare. Beyond that, the sheer scale of the form allows storylines to be extended and multiplied as never before, crossing and re-crossing each other with ample scope for coincidence, surprise and contingency, and hence for the depiction of characters with whom, as William Hazlitt put it, the reader can "identify..." The art of reading a novel involves a dash of experiment, conjecture, even risk. It requires readers to try out different narrative perspectives, styles, even personalities, and so to explore the inherent variousness of experience, and to recognise the vein of arbitrariness that runs through any possible version of events. Novels, in short, are implicitly pluralistic...

If Cervantes rent the curtain that separates us from the prose of ordinary life, Kafka tore it down completely. After Kafka, according to Kundera, the novel entered a realm where reality could never "correspond to people's idea of it"; from now on the novel would be a constant witness to the "unavoidable relativism of human truths..." And this gentle scepticism has political implications too, as Kundera notes when he recalls the "Manicheism" that deformed his native Czechoslovakia when he was a student in Prague after the second world war. Politics at that time was not a forum where perplexed citizens could engage in a collective search for freedom and happiness, or truth and reconciliation, but a battlefield where militant partisans would try to vindicate their correct views about everything and punish anyone who saw things differently...

One of the great virtues of the novel, according to Coetzee, is to teach us that there is no perfect way of carving up the world or recounting its stories. This is a lesson that bears on politics as well, counting against any political aspiration that arises from nationality, identity or tribal loyalty. But Coetzee does not confine his attention to novelists, and an outstanding essay on Walt Whitman allows him to explore a conception of democracy that he himself would evidently endorse: democratic politics, he suggests, is "not one of the superficial inventions of human reason but an aspect of the ever-developing human spirit, rooted in eros." Those who make a fetish out of politics, he implies, are in danger of foreclosing on democracy. Take Walter Benjamin, for example. Coetzee, refusing to treat him with the awed indulgence that has become customary, contends that when Benjamin decided to become a good communist, it was not through an imaginative appraisal of political options, but was simply "an act of choosing sides, morally and historically, against the bourgeoisie and his own bourgeois origins." And if there was something silly and unconvincing about Benjamin's Marxism — "something forced about it, something merely reactive" — it could perhaps be attributed to a certain literary narcissism. "As a writer, Benjamin had no gift for evoking other people," Coetzee says; he had "no talent as a storyteller," and no capacity for the kind of compassionate intelligence implicit in the art of the novel. In a perverse attempt to opt for political realism rather than literary imagination, Benjamin managed to cut himself off from both.

Susan Sontag would have agreed with Coetzee about the political significance of literature. The novel, as she remarks in her last, posthumous collection At the Same Time (Hamish Hamilton), exists to recall us to a sense of the interminable diversity that is the basis of what she calls "politics, the politics of democracy." In a substantial essay on Victor Serge, she praises him for having combined political militancy with a serious engagement with the art of writing. As a mature novelist, she says, Serge was able to deploy "several different conceptions of how to narrate," elaborating a capacious "I" as a device for "giving voice to others." It was through his narratorial doubles that he liberated himself from what he called the "former beautiful simplicity" of the fight between capitalism and socialism, so as to produce books that were "better, wiser, more important than the person who wrote them.""

Perhaps due to its relatively recent historical orgins, the novel has had far more attempts to interpret the implications of its genre in terms that are either metaphysical or political. It particularly tends to interest me how such interpretations can often be entirely opposed. From a Marxist perspective, Georg Lukacs saw the novel as the 'bourgeois epic,' the product of a disjunction between consciousness and society that is the product of the alienation produced by modern capitalism. Writers like Scott accordingly demonstrated a historical consciousness that demonstrated the contradictions of capitalism, their aristocratic sensibilities providing an ideal platform to critque bourgeoisie. Walter Benjamin went rather further, describing a distinction between the novel and story telling that he views as analogous to a distinction between the role of chronicler and historian. The former simply relates, the latter interprets and expounds. Benjamin sees the novel as a commoditised form of storytelling, burdened with information. The evolution from the story to the novel is something he sees as being akin to the evolution of crafts into industrial production; in other words, it is something he unambiguously disapproves of. Benjamin's tastes run to writers whose work resembles fairytale and form part of an oral tradition, like Kafka's Metamorphosis (by contrast, Lukacs preferred Mann to Kafka). Benjamin's admiration of Kafka is largely predicated on the opaque quality of his writing, which is all surface, lacking interest in consciousness or social relations. Symbolic imputations may be made but interpretation is withdrawn from the events being depicted. Benjamin's distinction between story and novel stems from his distinction between painting and film; the latter a form of mass reproduction and a form of art geared for modern capitalism. On the whole, I tend to agree with Coetzee; although Benjamin is the more famed writer today, Lukacs was far less doctrinaire and his notion of critical realism far more in keeping with the genius of the novel.

An alternative view of the novel is provided by Mikhail Bakhtin. Although influenced by Marxism, Bakhtin saw the novel as polyphonic, a means of representing multiple voices in a democratic manner that opposed monologic political viewpoints. Where Benjamin preferred the closed and withdrawn, Bakhtin prefers the open and untidy, the heteroglossic, dialogic and carnivalesque. I've already written elsewhere about this type of opposition between writers like Kafka and Shakespeare on the one hand and writers like Eliot and Dickens on the other. It's not an opposition that necessarily corresponds to the novel; Blake and Baudelaire are both 'open' writers while Kafka and Coetzee are 'closed.' Nontheless, the former category opposes meanings, the latter denies them. For instance, Coetzee's Slow Man places the central elements of the novel in the background, whether it is narrative (events are understated, abandoning resolution in favour of the indeterminacy of life) or consciousness (the central character being essentially hollow, experiencing a series of reactions towards Marijana, none of which can be fully characterised as emotion or feeling). As a fable, Slow Man is non-existent, its protagonist gaining no redemption, resolution or closure, simply a dying fall.

Elizabeth Costello has also led to questions as to whether it can be called a novel at all, seeming more like Murdoch's Acastos or Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Composed of a series of lectures given by the author himself, the issue of the author function is also present to an unusual extent, although this issue is further problematised by the extent to which the Costello personae's views are challenged throughout. In practice, the central issue of more one of the relation of literature of life; "the word-mirror is broken, irreparably... we are just performers speaking our parts." Similarly, the section on the novel in Africa foregrounds the solitude of reading as much of Costello's seclusion when writing, "people on trains take books out of their bags or pockets and retreat into solitary worlds" The novel and writing become a form of imperialism, a form of cancer, denying the ability to think ourselves into the mind of a bat and diminishing the ability to think oneself into the mind of an ape or cockroach; "if I do not convince you, that is because my words here lack the power to bring home to you the wholeness, the unabstracted unintellectual nature of that animal being." Where Lukacs saw the novel as typifying the disjunction of self and society, Coetzee sees solipsism.

Similarly, in In the Heart of the Country the narrator is denied awareness of the basis for her own actions, speaking of theories and fictionalised narratives of herself; "I signify something. I do not know what... is it possible that there is an explanation for all the things I do and that explanation lies inside me, like a key(?).. To die an enigma with a full soul or to die emptied of my secrets."

The Life and Times of Michael K is a novel that reprises the theme of the idiot from Dostoevsky and Cervantes. The obvious influence though, as indicated by the title, is Kafka, reminding me of some of Zadie Smith's recent comments; "His influence seems to cause a mutation in the recipient, metamorphosing the novel into something closer to a meditation, a fantastical historiography, an essay, a parable... Novelists simply do not resist life in this fashion. Life, in its shared social form, is, for lack of a less vulgar term, their material. They cannot say, as Kafka did, "Never again psychology!" Or, as Walter Benjamin put it, Kafka used the traditional forms of representation without the associated truth value. Like Kafka, Coetzee inverts the normal function of the novel, serving to obfuscate rather than elucidate social relations (hence the lack of a definite setting); "barely aware of its surroundings, enveloped in itself". The novel is therefore polyphonic, offering a narrative of resistance to social norms (even to civilisation, since Michael is described "as if he had once been an animal") or of emotional dependency to matriarchal domination. Experience cannot be reduced to the neat patterns of literary convention.
Labels: Bakhtin, Benjamin, Hermeneutics, Kafka, Literature

posted by Richard 2:52 PM

Saturday, March 24, 2007

An interesting discussion of the controversy around the Austrian author Peter Handke's views on Serbian nationalism:

"Like Heidegger, Handke now claimed he wanted to awaken in his readers a new sense of "the mystery of being." To that end, he had his fictional creations travel to places in which new perceptions of exterior reality would enable them to surpass rational thinking and engage directly with objects themselves rather than the preconceived notions of them induced by language. His characters are finally able to achieve moments of happiness, but only in an irrational way as they sink below the threshold of mind and participate, if only for a moment, in the unfolding processes of life.

For the first two decades of his writing career, Slovenia, in Handke’s mind, symbolized everything Austria wasn’t: it, together with the rest of Yugoslavia, stood outside the Western free-market system in something of a preconsumerist idyll. Moreover, it was, in his view, a self-enclosed world of peasants and artisans who were "at one" with the land, where language counted for little and what it did count for was still "pure" and retained an exact fit to the surrounding reality.

But all this changed in 1991 when Slovenia, followed in rapid succession by Croatia and Bosnia, gained independence and sought greater ties to the European Union. Handke was outraged over the destruction of his utopian fantasy, which he wrote about in a book called, appropriately enough, The Dreamer’s Farewell (1991). Predictably, he laid the blame for his disappointment on those countries, including his native Austria, that had supported independence for the former Yugoslavian provinces.

As war intensified in the Balkans in the 1990s, Handke devoted more and more of his energies to speaking out about the conflict. He employed arguments similar to those being made on the far left that what was occurring in Yugoslavia was, in Handke’s words, "a civil war, unleashed or at least co-produced by European bad faith" and that Europe and the United States had decided to carve up Yugoslavia to fill the coffers of their bankers and industrialists."

As an argument, this runs into problems by conflating the question of the political with the aesthetics. Having already dismissed Handke's politics, the author feels that he must reinforce his case by doing the same with his aesthetics, consequently arguing that Handke's dwelling on the mechnical nature of the minutiae of existence represents a betrayal of writing. This seems a rather unjustified addition of the polemic but, nonetheless, the idea that certain apparently apolitical aesthetics so entail political commitments is an interesting one. The most famous exposition of this argument is Susan Sontag's Fascinating Fascism:

"Riefenstahl's particular slant is revealed by her choice of this tribe and not another: a people she describes as acutely artistic (everyone owns a lyre) and beautiful (Nuba men, Riefenstahl notes, "have an athletic build rare in any other African tribe") ; endowed as they are with "a much stronger sense of spiritual and religious relations than of worldly and material matters," their principal activity, she insists, is ceremonial. The Last of the Nuba is about a primitivist ideal: a portrait of a people subsisting in a pure harmony with their environment, untouched by "civilization."

All four of Riefenstahl's commissioned Nazi films—whether about Party congresses, the Wehrmacht, or athletes—celebrate the rebirth of the body and of community, mediated through the worship of an irresistible leader. They follow directly from the films of Fanck in which she starred and her own The Blue Light. The Alpine fictions are tales of longing for high places, of the challenge and ordeal of the elemental, the primitive; they are about the vertigo before power, symbolized by the majesty and beauty of mountains. The Nazi films are epics of achieved community, in which everyday reality is transcended through ecstatic self-control and submission; they are about the triumph of power. And The Last of the Nuba, an elegy for the soon-to-be extinguished beauty and mystic powers of primitives whom Riefenstahl calls "her adopted people," is the third in her triptych of fascist visuals...

Although the Nuba are black, not Aryan, Riefenstahl's portrait of them evokes some of the larger themes of Nazi ideology: the contrast between the clean and the impure, the incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and the mental, the joyful and the critical. A principal accusation against the Jews within Nazi Germany was that they were urban, intellectual, bearers of a destructive corrupting "critical spirit." The book bonfire of May 1933 was launched with Goebbels's cry: "The age of extreme Jewish intellectualism has now ended, and the success of the German revolution has again given the right of way to the German spirit." And when Goebbels officially forbade art criticism in November 1936, it was for having "typically Jewish traits of character": putting the head over the heart, the individual over the community, intellect over feeling. In the transformed thematics of latter-day fascism, the Jews no longer play the role of defiler. It is "civilization" itself."

Sontag suggests that aestheticised aspects of fascism appear in contexts where it may have been deliberate (the movels of Mishima) or inadvertent (the films of Kenneth Anger). The aesthetic carries a set of political connotations that exist beyond its own artistic conception. The most obvious example of this is how Nazism and romanticism are often considered as related concepts in their rejection of bourgeois society in favour of the heroic self and idealised visions of the past. For instance, Heidegger's ideas of authentic existence and of being was not only present in but also able to transcend its situation, are key romantic concepts but they also relate to his acceptance of the Fuhrer principle, of hero-worship ("that unyielding spiritual mission that forces the fate of the German people to bear the stamp of its history").

Also central to the joining of Nazism and romanticism was the distinction of gemeinschaft and geschellschaft. Volk was a German romantic response to French Enlightenment ideas of social contract, a characteristically romantic response to the problem of the separation, or alienation, that was seen as typical of life in modern society. Lawrence's 'savage pilgrimage' was opposed to what he saw as a dehumanised and mechanised society in which "the machine works him, instead of he the machine." In Women in Love Gerald and Loerke wish to create "an activity of pure order, pure mechanical repetition." In The Plumed Serpent, the cult of the machines had transformed the Americans into a "mechanical cog-wheel people," who robotically performed their functions within "that horrible machine of the world" Similarly, Celine's Voyage to the Edge of the Night partly takes place in a factory characterised by the "earsplitting continuity of the thousands and thousands of instruments that commanded the men... we ourselves became machines, our flesh trembled in the furious din, it gripped us around our heads and in our bowels and rose up to the eyes in quick continuous jolts... everything you still manage to remember more or less becomes as rigid as iron and loses its savour in your thoughts. "

In some cases, such as Lawrence and Nietzsche, notions of volk and imperialism were largely repugnant to them, effacing some of the more authoritarian elements of their work. In others such, as Wagner, Pound and Heidegger, it is considerably more difficult to effect any rehabilitation. One such case is the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun a supporter of the Quisling government who openly wrote in support of Hitler. For instance, in Pan Hamsun contrasts the authentic self of his soldier protagonist, who lives alone in the woods with his dog as his sole companion, to the bourgeois Edvarda, who lives in society and marries a Swedish count. As with Lawrence, Hamsun's novels typically depict outcasts from an alienated bourgeois society; "I loathe your whole taxpayer's existence... I feel indignation rising within me like a rushing mighty win of the Holy Spirit." Heidegger sought from Nazism "a spiritual renewal of life in its entirety... Only a spiritual world gives the people the assurance of greatness.. and the spiritual world of a people...is the power that most deeply preserves the people's strengths, which are tied to earth and blood." Similarly, Nagel "couldn't understand what human beings would gain by having life stripped of all symbols, of all poetry," often speaking in parables, the fairy tales of a pagan christ. Influenced by Nietzsche, Hamsun's characters do not believe in god but continue to believe in a religious life, the same ambivalent relationship to religion that Nazism had.

But equally, his characters are deluded fantasists, inventors of falsehoods and contradictions. As one character says in Nagel in Mysteries; "I cannot figure out why you are turning yourself inside out for me." He himself speaks of his sudden jumps of thought, being a thinker who has never learned to think; "I admit I am a living contradiction." The vial of prussic acid he carries and his killing of a dog point to a dark aspect to his fantasies, parodying and mocking christ in the same way Nietzsche did. The element of romantic heroism is absent. Perhaps rather predictably, Hamsun's novels cannot easily be diminished to a set of unambiguous propositions. It seems flawed to analyse Hamsun's works for traces of Nazism when it was romantic culture, of which Hamsun was only one example, that acted to create Nazism. Celine's depiction of 'machine culture' is mild in comparison to that of Huxley. Lawrence's mythology of nature and eros owes a great deal to Hardy, Blake and Freud and is paralleled to a large extent in writers like Forster. Conversely, fascists like Marinetti openly embraced the machine and rejected nature. If the enlightenment is not viewed as being irredeemably tainted through its association with communism, it seems unfair not to grant romanticism the same benefit of the doubt. In practice, romanticism often acted as a necessary corrective to the extremes of other ideologies, a fact that should efface its own extremes a little.
Labels: Art, Literature, Politics, Romanticism

posted by Richard 9:16 PM

Sunday, November 19, 2006

This article by Alan Hollinghurst on Ronald Firbank does rather make me want to reread both writers:

"By making the novel a structure of bright fragments, Firbank had aestheticized it, and in the aesthetic realm the normative claims of morality are relaxed. Firbank’s difficult inconsequential manner is part of a bigger subversion of the novel, and what is in many ways a homosexualization of the novel. Characteristically, he didn’t do this by writing a "gay novel" of the kind that E. M. Forster had struggled with in Maurice, or of the kind that James Baldwin or Gore Vidal would later write in Giovanni’s Room and The City and the Pillar – novels in which the homosexual condition is itself the subject, with an unusual dominance of maleness. For Forster, the crisis which led him to abandon the novel form altogether was the impossibility of writing about the one thing which most determined his view of life. "

Although one of the striking facts about the novel in the twentieth century is that it easily adapted to producing gay novels like a A Boy's Own Story as readily as it had adapted to women's writing in the previous century, the notion of fragments as a gay aesthetic is interesting idea, particularly when one considers parallels between the fragmentary approach described here and the Burroughsian cut-up technique (or Gertrude Stein's verbal collage). EM Forster's dictum, only connect, may have largely been applied to a conventional interpretation of the novel but it was nonetheless applied to a context of alienation as much as Genet's novels or John Rechy's City of the Night (and goes some way to explain why modernism, with its emphasis on epiphany and fragment proved a fertile ground for gay writers like Proust and Gide). With that said, the most interesting example in this regard is Hollinghurst himself, given the influence of the Victorian novel on The Line of Beauty (the first post-gay novel, as Edmund White called it and very far from being concerned with outcasts and outsiders in the way Rechy, Baldwin or Vidal were), where the main character certainly does allude to Trollope's The Way We Live Now and the novel depicts a broad swathe of nineteen eighties society and depicts the transition of conservatism from being a party of the landed gentry to being a party of upstart magnates. Where a Victorian social novel would have shown how different parts of society were inextricably joined, Hollinghurst deliberately emphasises the divisions of an increasingly atomised society, as the main character's homosexuality clashes with both his middle-class background and the upper-class milieu he has become accustomed to.
Labels: Aesthetics, Alienation, Literature, Sexuality

posted by Richard 10:51 AM

Saturday, October 21, 2006

The eastern cemetery at Highgate is a comparatively obscure and undertstated affair when compared to its grandiose rival in the west. However, it does boast one monument that is rather more imposing, namely the grave of Karl Marx. Orginally, this was as understated as theose that surround it until the Soviet Union decided that the Holy Father could no more be allowed to languish in obscurity that could the worms be allowed to have their sport with Lenin's flesh. Today, a ponderous bust of Marx looks out across the cemetery atop a plinth that bears the legend 'the object of philosophy is not to understand the world but to change it.' Recently, I've found myself wondering to what extent the act of depicting or interpreting the world is actually distinguishable from an attempt to sway it. I was particularly reminded of this by this article on Hans Christian Anderson and Kierkegaard;

"As far as Kierkegaard was concerned – and he argued the point at length in a remarkable dissertation for Copenhagen University, called "The Concept of Irony, with continual reference to Socrates" – the recourse to laughter went back to the very beginnings of philosophy, in ancient Greece.

Philosophers have always recognized Socrates as the founder of their tradition, but according to Kierkegaard they have had a blind spot when it comes to his peculiar sense of humour. Socrates was, as everyone knows, an ironist, and his teaching operated in the gap that irony opens up between inside and outside, or between real meanings and ostensible ones.... Socrates himself had never put his own opinions on display, preferring to offer himself to the citizens of Athens as a universal intellectual sparring partner and an all-round ironist. It was as if he had no particular point of view, and no personal convictions or beliefs, but only a repertory of dialectical dodges and feints with which he would lead his conceited challengers on till they ran out of words and had to confess that they had no idea what they were talking about. The Socratic ironist, Kierkegaard reminds us, denies his real self in order to "produce himself poetically" and keep the flame of doubt burning bright. The true philosophy of Socrates, like the true religion of Jesus, depended on losing the illusion of self-sufficiency; and "if we need to be wary of irony as a seducer, we must also praise it as a guide".

The young Kierkegaard wanted to be an ambiguous teacher just like Socrates, except that he was going to work through literature rather than the spoken word. He would devise writerly techniques for upsetting people’s prejudices, leaving trapdoors through which he could make his escape and leave his readers baffled as to who he really was or what his own opinions might be. "Having an opinion is both too much and too little for me," he wrote."

The immediate argument at hand, that in certain respects Kierkegaard's claim to be considered as an artist is as good as, or greater than, that of Anderson, is one I happen to agree with. Much of Kierkegaard's work, Either/Or in particular has a Bakhtinian novelistic quality that seemed somewhat lacking when I read Anderson's stories. However, there are a number of obvious difficulties with the interpretation being outlined above. Irony does not only open gaps between apparent and suggested meanings (thereby creating an ambiguity between the propositions being expressed), it can also be a means of reinforcing a single meaning. It's this that leads to the further difficulty, whether Socrates is the disinterested ironist described above, or whether this simply serves as camouflage for a philosophy that is quite different to the one described above, disdaining empirical experimentation and observation in favour of a focus on the causes of causes, disdaining the body as a prison and which distinguished itself in opposition to sophistry's concern with descriptions of the world that meet our needs rather than conceptions of absolute truth. Throughout Plato's Dialogues, Socrates repeatedly scorns those who deal in paradox, viewing their arguments as being concerned with power rather than with truth, but is far from reluctant to marshall sophistical violence in his own arguments. The obvious place to turn for a countvailing argument is Richard Rorty:

"By "Platonism" I mean the idea that great works of literature all, in the end, say the same thing-and are great precisely because they do so. they inculcate the same eternal "humanistic" values. They remind us of the same immutable features of human experience. Platonism, in this sense, conflates inspiration and knowledge by saying that only the eternal inspires-that the source of greatness has always been out there, just behind the veil of appearances, and has been described many times before... For a functionalist, it is no surprise that some putatively great works leave some readers cold; functionalists do not expect the same key to open every heart. Whereas essentialists take canonical status as indicating the presence of a link to eternal truth, and lack of interest in a canonical work as a moral flaw, functionalists take canonical status to be as changeable as the historical and personal situations of readers."

From a personal perspective, I find myself basically in accord with Rorty's distrust of the metaphysical and preference for the existential and situational. As with my earlier post, on the difficulty I find with reading the religious aspects of medieval literature, Rorty holds that in a post-Nietzschean, post-philosophical culture, many of the older literary texts are simply obsolete (Plato’s dialogues and scripture amongst them) because they no longer serve to transform us; we are a different sort of people than the ones those texts appealed to (in much the same way that Scott meant a great deal to the Victorian but little to most readers now). To Rorty, literature serves a greater value than philosophy since it simply inspires private projects of self-creation, with novels serving to teach us to appreciate social solidarity and "the other," as with the role of empathy in the novels of writers like Dickens and Eliot, or indeed the extension of sympathy that can easily be found in Anderson's stories but is repulsively absent from Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling.
Labels: Literature, Philosophy

posted by Richard 12:21 PM

Sunday, October 01, 2006

I've just been reading this interview with Joseph Koerner about his work on the reformation of the image. Amongst many other things, it raises the question of whether the iconoclastic tradition within Protestantism was to undermine art by severing its link with faith.

"The dispiriting didacticism of this Lutheran art has often been commented on. Nineteenth-century Romantics blamed Luther for the death of art for art's sake, and its replacement with mere propaganda. Hegel thought that the Reformation inaugurated a tragic but necessary shift towards interiority which had robbed art of its intrinsic holiness, a disjunction between the beautiful and the true. The material world, fetishised by medieval Christianity in the cult of relics, the eucharist and holy images, was now disenchanted, and from that point onwards, however skilfully God, Christ or the saints might be portrayed by painters, 'it is no help, we bow the knee no longer.' Art was no longer sacred, immediate, an encounter with the ultimate: instead, it offered an alternative form of textuality, mere food for thought...

The Lutheran aesthetic, Koerner believes, broke decisively with the past in transforming art from a direct encounter with the sacred into a cognitive instrument, a didactic device in which understanding was everything, veneration banished. He therefore insists on the corresponding absence of this cognitive priority in medieval religion... Koerner here effectively articulates a modern version of an accusation often made by Lutherans at the time of the Reformation: Catholicism was external, magical and mechanical, Protestantism was interior and rooted in personal responsibility."

It's an interesting argument, albeit one perhaps more familiar from TS Eliot's theories concerning the dissociation of sensibility (where such writers as the metaphysical poets felt "their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose"). In The Open Work Umberto Eco commented that "the order of a work of art in this period is a mirror of an imperfect and theocratic society." Medieval literature is a place where every single sign was remorselessly subjugated to serving a transcendental order. As Thomas a Kempis wrote in his The Imitation of Christ; "Stand without choice and without all manner of self and thou shalt win ever; for anon, as thou hast resigned thyself and not taken thyself again, then shall be thrown to thee more grace." In other words, from the retraction that concludes the Canterbury Tales to the writings of mystics like Julian of Norwich, art was inseparable from religion. This is an old argument, shared by Bloom in Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human and originating with Burckhardt's The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy; "their powerful individuality made them in religion, as in other matters, altogether subjective... and markedly worldly... we are individually developed, we have outgrown the limits of morality and religion." The idea of subjectivity as a renaissance development is one that was later to be disavowed by Burckhardt and challenged by medievalists, but it has nonetheless persisted and does indeed seem to account for much of the difference we might find in the autobiographies of Abelard and Cellini. The lack of a sense of subjectivity in medieval art makes it especially difficult for an atheist like myself to appreciate it; there are simply very few naturalistic, non-religious, reasons to do so.

Medieval art and literature are things I can bring myself to admire but not something I can often bring myself to actually like. Reading the above comment from Eco, I find it very difficult not to think of Czeslaw Milosz's study of how writers were prepared to deform and contort their views to fit the prevailing ideology of communist states. The term Milosz uses to describe this is one derived from religion, ketman, a concept that seems highly applicable to the medieval worldview; "If one penetrates into the minds of these people, one discovers utter nonsense. They are totally unaware of the fact that nothing is their own, that everything is part of their historical formation - their occupations, their clothes, their gestures and expressions, their beliefs and ideas... The pressure of an all-powerful totalitarian state creates an emotional tension in its citizens that determines their acts." This tension is perhaps best observed in what is, to my mind, the most interesting work of medieval literature, Langland's Piers Plowman. This is one of the few medieval works where theological conformity is not a given, with Langland being deeply concerned with the relation of his radical social views to heterodox theological positions like Lollardy for the relationship between art and religion to be an unproblematic one.

For myself, art begins with the likes of Cranach and Holbein where the intermingling of the spiritual and the temporal is perhaps rather more uneasy than in their predecessors. Similarly, in literature characters in Shakespeare and Marlowe inhabit a world where god and the knowledge of god are no longer certain (as with Shakespeare's "as flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport"). The infinite variety of a Cleopatra or a Falstaff is something quite different to the trompe l'oeil effect Chaucer gives to characters like the Wife of Bath who at first sight appear fully rounded but to my mind never quite escape the taint of allgeory.

Update: Nigel Warburton quotes Richard Norman on the question of whether atheists can apreciate religious art:

"Haldane does however pose a genuine problem for the atheist when he turns to the specific case of religious art, and I want to consider this in more detail. He argues that any serious work of art is ‘a presentation of the reality and values in which the work seeks to participate’, and that in evaluating the work ‘we are judging the credibility of what it proclaims’ (pp.171-2). It would seem to follow that if a work presents religious beliefs and values, the atheist is bound to reject those beliefs and values and is therefore committed to judging the work less highly. And this appears to exclude the atheist from fully appreciating and valuing religious works of art. One of Haldane’s examples is Piero della Francesca’s painting The Resurrection in Borgo San Sepolcro. The atheist might try to take refuge in praise of the formal qualities of the work, but as Haldane rightly says, its form and content are inseparable. The arrangement of the figures, with the sleeping soldiers in their poses of disarray ‘contrasting with the simple sweeping contour of Christ’, who divides the background landscape between the deadness of winter and the new life of spring - all of this serves to point up the content of the painting, and the painting seems to be inescapably religious."

From a personal perspective, I do find appreciation of religious art to be far from straightforward. To continue to take medieval art as an example, I love the pigments and styles probably more than I do their Renaissance equivalents but do tend to find that art altogether impossible to relate to in a way that I don't for art after the Renaissance. Art is about content as much as form and the two are not easily separable. The aesthetics of art depend on its propositional elements to a very large extent; I doubt any art can be deflated down to such content but I'm equally inclined to doubt that it can exist independently of it. I've never really liked the idea that is some sort of all transcending concept rather than a product of specific cultures. It seems to me that it is more difficult to apprecicate a lot of religious art for much the same reason that the Victorians saw something in Little Nell's death that we can't. Certainly there are authors and artists that depict or propound viewpoints of such extremity that is very difficult to be other than revolted by them (the depiction of saints being tortured and killed in medieval art, some of the bloodthirstier parts of the Bible, Hitler's writings or Riefenstahl's films); pure aestheticism seems to me a position that very few people will actually hold in practice even while they happen to evince it in theory.

As a final point, it does seem somewhat unreasonable to me that atheists are incessantly questioned on their ability to appreciate gothic architecture or Bach cantatas, when the question of whether the same applies in reverse is never raised. A committed christian could well have a cap on their appreciation of DH Lawrence, Gide, Genet, Bataille, Pasolini, Burroughs, or Bunuel given that all of those have marked divergences from a christian worldview in their work. Or even to Victorian writers like Hardy, Arnold and George Eliot, whose work takes the death of god as essentially a given. My own objection to christianity is mostly that it seems a very cramped worldview that would exclude a great deal if I were to adhere to it.
Labels: Aesthetics, Art, Literature, Religion

posted by Richard 12:17 PM

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Since a few people have been kind enough to lament my not posting rather more, it would seem churlish not to attempt to redress this. As it happens, this piece I came across last week on Allen Ginsberg, did indeed remind me of something I wanted to write about for quite sometime now, about how the hermeneutics of meaning seem to work in very different ways for different authors.

"Ginsberg's audacity in comparing himself to Apollinaire was matched by his knack for advertising "Howl" as an all-purpose cultural barometer. When he learned in the spring of 1956 that the New York Times had assigned the poet Richard Eberhart to write an article on the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, he sent him a long letter explicating his poem: "Howl is an ‘affirmation' of individual experience of God, sex, drugs, absurdity etc." In an interview with Gay Sunshine in 1974, Ginsberg remarked that "Howl" was a "coming out of the closet." Two years later, in a volume commemorating the twentieth anniversary of "Howl," he announced that the poem "was really about my mother."

While the piece is acute in its judgement of some of the more embarrassing aspects of Ginsberg's work, it does also have to be said that Ginsberg was very much the sort of poet whose work can simply accumulate the most diverse and incompatible meanings and accommodate them alongside one another. Like his mentors Blake and Whitman, Ginsberg fitted into the class of writer that draws a vast amount of heterogenous experiences and influences into their work which them remain alongside one another even as the writer elsewhere seeks to weave all into a unitary philosophy. As Whitman put it, "I contain multitudes" It is not an uncontentious aesthetic. TS Eliot once tartly observed that Blake had concoted a personal mythology from odds and ends he had found lying about the house, while DH Lawrence waspishly complained that Whitman had contained so much that he had drowned in a sea of multitudes and lost himself. Nonetheless, to my mind it does afford a particular interest to the work of these writers where unity and disunity sit alongside one another, particularly with Blake's complex and shifting depictions of such themes as god and sexuality.

Isaiah Berlin discussed this sort of writer in The Hedgehog and the Fox where he classed Shakespeare, Balzac and Joyce as foxes (writers who celebrate diversity and the contradictory) and as Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Ibsen as hedgehogs (writers who relate everything into a single vision). Inevitably, the question of how to class each writer is a difficult one; for myself I would see both Dostoevsky and Nietzsche as foxes; for all of Nietzsche's vehement insistence of themes like the superman and the death of god, his work is nonetheless alive with so of the most fascinating contradictions (between his celebration of the will to power and his disdain for Prussian militarism and preference for French civilisation). Similarly, for all of Dostoevsky's insistence on his christian faith, his fascination with atheism and what we would now term existentialism formed the entire basis of Mikhail Bakhtin's account of how the novel typified a dialogic and polyphonic way of depicting reality that refused to relate everything into a single vision. Finally, characterisations of Shakespeare as an exemplar of negative capability (where the author is impersonal and hidden behind his characters) and Milton as an opposed exemplar of the egotistical sublime (where the writer does indeed subsume everything into his own vision) seem perhaps more acute than Berlin's descriptions.

Susan Sontag, writing in Against Interpretation addressed these questions from the point of view of how critics should attempt to discuss literature and film. Sontag detested hermeneutic criticism that sought to arrive at a single key to a meaning of a work, whether that key happened to be Marxist, Christian or Freudian. Ultimately, this is a religious approach to criticism that applies the techniques of Biblical scholarship to novels and poetry and uses them to discern divine pattern and meaning, even when the impulse to interpret is secular rather than sacred.

"The most celebrated and influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud, actually amount to elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious theories of interpretation. All observable phenomena are bracketed, in Freud's phrase, as manifest content. This manifest content must be probed and pushed aside to find the true meaning--the latent content--beneath... It is always the case that interpretation of this type indicates a dissatisfaction (conscious or unconscious) with the work, a wish to replace it by something else... Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories."

Instead, criticism should consider the formal properties of works and use them to account for how meaning is structured by them. After all, the precise manipulation of meaning and ambiguity in writers like Donne, Marvell and Hopkins is very different to the more untidy and novelistic approach of writers like Blake. On the whole, I find myself in sympathy with Sontag but am still left suspecting that the question is not that simple. By their very nature, works tend to invite interpretation. Two writers in particular exemplify this difficulty; Shakespeare and Kafka. Sontag herself cites Kafka as an example:

"The work of Kafka, for example, has been subjected to a mass ravishment by no less than three armies of interpreters. Those who read Kafka as a social allegory see case studies of the frustrations and insanity of modern bureaucracy and its ultimate issuance in the totalitarian state. Those who read Kafka as a psychoanalytic allegory see desperate revelation of Kafka's fear of his father, his castration anxieties, his sense of his own impotence, his thralldom to his dreams. Those who read Kafka as a religious allegory explain that K. in The Castle is trying to gain access to heaven, that Joseph K. in The Trial is being judged by the inexorable and mysterious justice of God."

The Trial always reminds me foremost of Eliot's essay Hamlet and his Problems, from The Sacred Wood, where Eliot suggests that art expresses emotion through a suitable vessel, an objective correlative. However, in the case of Hamlet "The artistic "inevitability" lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear." With Kafka, none of the events or personae exist in relation to the reality that appears to the reader (just as the text refuses to exist in relation to either allegory or realism). As Robert Calasso noted, Kafka is not an 'organiser' of human experience in the manner of Proust and Joyce. In Kafka, consciousness is never more than vestigial; 'for the last time psychology!' is his watchword, where the central characters of his novels are rarely even fully described. Instead of action and causality being the central aspect (indeed being almost peripheral; the precise narrative voice never hints at the extremity of the events that often follow and never changes register when they occur), undifferentiated bureaucratic time is the substance of his fiction; his characters simply wait. Calasso describes this as plunging the 'sharpest Ockham’s razor into the substance of the novel,' utilising the form of the novel in a manner completely opposed to its origins. Kafka does indeed generate vast numbers of interpretations and will doubtless continue to do so but his work simply does not respond to such efforts and any interpretation will run off him like water from a duck's back.

Much the same does indeed apply to Shakespeare, where I have always remembered Camille Paglia's observation that Shakespeare confronts the reader with verse that is both extraordinarily intricate and extremely hostile to the reader and to interpretation. As an author, Shakespeare is every bit as impersonal as Kafka and evry bit as absent from his own works. There is no notion of an authorial presence that provides any convenient commentary or interpretation of its own work. Shakespeare, living in an age whose metaphysical certainties had been upturned by state decree (it is not for nothing that madness and seeming figure so strongly in so many of his plays), ensures that his characters instead defy augury, dramatising their consciousness and constantly examining and shifting their own roles. Hamlet is the overreacher, the machiavel, the fool and the wronged hero, failing to become, as Eliot had it, a clear objective correlative for the events of the play. There is no more clear answer to what Hamlet calls the nature of action within the play than there is to the events of The Trial. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Shakespeare and Kafka both seem to represent an extreme in terms of their impersonality and resistance to interpretation (something similar could be said to apply to Moby Dick or A Passage to India but Melville and Forster are far from being as occluded and inaccessible). There is something glacial and remote about them that will always be occasion for new interpretation and speculation while ensuring that none of them will ever account for their work. It's difficult not to agree with John Bayley's argument in The Uses of Division that imperfect and untidy but more knowable authors like Dickens, Blake, Nietzsche, Lawrence, Ginsberg or Forster have perhaps more to commend them. Disharmony has its own value.

Update: an itnerestingly similar post from 3quarksdaily:

"As Milosz says of him, “Gombrowicz lived in an epoch which neither quantitatively nor qualitatively brings to mind any of the previous epochs and which distinguishes itself through ubiquitous cases of ‘infection’ with mass and individual madness.” Man, as Aristotle once mentioned, needs a world, a complicated arrangement of social interactions, in order actually to be man. But that same ordering of complicated social arrangements can also be the vehicle by which human beings destroy themselves and one another.

But Gombrowicz chose flight, literally and metaphorically. From his exile in Argentina he conjured up an absurd mental universe that spins out the problems of experience in countless ‘as if’ scenarios that are so powerful exactly insofar as they make sense despite their insanity. Gombrowicz took flight into the endless malleability of human experience in order to keep a step ahead of the world as it is. That is his particular freedom. It is the freedom of Socrates as Kierkegaard describes him in The Concept of Irony, the freedom that escapes from every possible determination.

Truth be told, this version of freedom annoys Milosz. Because for Milosz, the possibility of meaning in human affairs is dependent on commitment. If nothing else, it is founded on the capacity for human beings to hold experience together even as forces from within and without work to tear it apart. "
Labels: Hermeneutics, Interpretation, Literature

posted by Richard 7:46 PM

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Of late, I've been reading two very different texts that share several themes in common. The first of these, Colin Wilson's The Outsider, a survey of alienation in romantic and existential literature. As a work of criticism it tends to be somewhat reductive, seeing anomie as a byproduct of thwarted mysticism, a somewhat difficult theory to approach the post-christian likes of Camus and Sartre with. Accordingly, Nietzsche in deflated to a religious mystic while the moral questions that so excised Bakhtin in his reading of Dostoevsky are declared an irrelevance.

The second, Orhan Pamuk's Istanbul, is both a bildungsroman and an account of the history and architecture of his native city. Where a Western writer would typically have sought to interrelate these two themes, Pamuk alternates between them, reflecting his own preoccupation with the idea of the divided self. Pamuk writes of his childhood imagining of another Orhan living in the same city, of seeing his myriad other selves reflected in the mirror, of his father's other life in another flat and of his dual perception of his city as its inhabitatant and under his own westernised eyes so that he comes to see it as a foreigner. The experience of alienation is one Pamuk sees as the product of a divergent cultural heritage, under Western eyes. At one point, he notes that the traditional Turkish view of literature was as something social, the bricolage that provides the communal myths and discourses that bind a society. To this he opposes the Western tradition of seeing the artist as a man apart and suggests a form of dissociation of sensibility is an inevitable result of this collision. To take a similar argument from TS Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent:

"No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of æsthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it."

Of the two views, I have to admit to finding Pamuk's the more congenial. As the likes of Lukacs argued, much of the reason for mythology of the individual in Western Literature is attributable to the increasingly individualistic, post-traditional nature of Western society; the paradox is that only an outsider can describe such a society. Like Sartre and his attempts to reconcile existentialism and communism, Lukacs saw self and society as being irrevocably sundered in modern society, in contrast to more homogeneous societies. Once this unity disintegrated, there could be no more spontaneous totality of being.

This paradox seems to me to have particularly seeped into the work of two of the greatest contemporary writers; JG Ballard and Michel Houellebecq. The latter depicts an atomised society with a fervour for the subversive and transgressive, such as sex tourism and a contempt for much of tradition, welcoming capitalism's destruction of religion. Equally, he detests capitalism and the social breakdown he sees as following from it, often reviling other forms of transgression like hippy communes and sex clubs. The former depicts a world of homogeneity and conformity which by its very nature produces instincts towards violence and destruction; "thrill seekers with a taste for random violence.. a deep need for meaningless action, the more violent the better." These drives alternate in Ballard between becoming the basis of a new form of social cohesion in which entire communities participate and a form of social subversion. Equally, Ballard often oscillates between depicting such instincts as the product of modernity and as a reversion to nature that takes place in the absence of society. Ballard's aesthetics remind me of this observation from Slavoj Zizek:

"Throughout the entire twentieth century, I see a counter-tendency, for which my good philosopher friend Alain Badiou invented a nice name: 'La passion du reel,' the passion of the real. That is to say, precisely because the universe in which we live is somehow a universe of dead conventions and artificiality, the only authentic real experience must be some extremely violent, shattering experience. And this we experience as a sense that now we are back in real life."
Labels: Alienation, Culture, Individuality, Literature

posted by Richard 8:18 PM

Thursday, July 06, 2006

"Beauty has never been absolute and immutable but has taken on different aspects depending on the historical period and the country" - Umberto Eco

In Italian Hours Henry James wrote that "to delight in the aspects of sentient ruin might appear a heartless pastime, and the pleasure, I confess, shows the note of perversity." Perversity is perhaps the correct term for interest in decay and ruins, in spite of figures like Midas Dekkers who are prepared to see such matters in a Heraclitean spirit of celebrating cycles of destruction and renewal. Dekkers cites the example of how the bombing of the Natural History Museum during the blitz led to the rebirth of ancient silk tree seeds from China, woken by the fire brigade's hoses. Modern society, according to Dekkers, is obsessed with realising the dreams of Dorian Gray, in opposition to earlier conventions of memento mori; the skull in Holbein's paintings or Donne's tolling bell. Seeing, as Eliot had it, the skull beneath the skin.

In practice though, although few can bring themselves to be so sanguine our interest in the derelict is rather more deep seated than Dekkers would have supposed. This may well be why I recently found myself standing amidst the burnt out remains of the Crystal Palace, originally built to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. All that remains are a set of empty terraces, the sort of enigma that would leave archaeologists with endless speculation. The terraces of the Crystal Palace are graced with headless statues while Sphinxes guard the entrance way to nothingness. Based on the designs of ruined Egyptian temples, the Sphinxes seem entirely at home with their place amidst overgrown oak trees, returned to the same state as the Egyptian ruins they were based on. Behind the trees, a BBC transmitter mast now holds domain over the empty spaces of the park.

Some architecture has within it the potential for decay and ruin; the ruins of the gothic St Dunstan in the East wear their decay as if they had never been anything else, while the baroque ruins of Christchurch Greyfriars are decidedly ill at ease with their decline. As this was one of Wren's attempts at gothic, decay seems to become it, with the walls and spire still standing while the interior was been turned into a garden; water trickles from a fountain while blue pansies flower where the pulpit would have been; a haven of peace and serenity. The foliage within the church is lush and verdant; it is, however, rather odd to look through the empty gothic arches and see banana trees and magnolias. The delicate vaulting of the white Portland stone almost looks like bleached bones.

Visiting these places, it's rather difficult not to think of Albert Speer's theory of ruin value:

"The idea was that buildings of modern construction were poorly suited to form that 'bridge of tradition' to future generations which Hitler was calling for. It was hard to imagine that rusting heaps of rubble could communicate these heroic inspirations which Hitler admired in the monuments of the past. My 'theory' was intended to deal with this dilemma. By using special materials and by applying certain principles of statics, we should be able to build structures which even in a state of decay, after hundreds or (such were our reckonings) thousands of years would more or less resemble Roman models.

To illustrate my ideas I had a romantic drawing prepared. It showed what the reviewing stand on the Zeppelin Field would look like after generations of neglect, overgrown with ivy, its columns fallen, the walls crumbling here and there, but the outlines still clearly recognizable. In Hitler's entourage this drawing was regarded as blasphemous. That I could even conceive of a period of decline for the newly founded Reich destined to last a thousand years seemed outrageous to many of Hitler's closest followers. But he himself accepted my ideas as logical and illuminating. He gave orders that in the future the important buildings of his Reich were to be erected in keeping with the principles of this 'law of ruins.'"

What often tends to be most disturbing about Nazi ideology is the manner in which it reflects other aspects of Romanticism that are deeply embedded in our culture, just as the spectre of communism casts a shade over certain Enlightenment ideals of progress. Consider the example of Joseph Gandy, the English Piranesi who illustrated John Soane's designs. Like Gibbon contemplating the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, he had been on the grant tour to Rome where he had explored the Catacombs and the Appian way. At this point, much of Imperial Rome remained in a stated of unconserved decay, with the Colosseum, overwhelmed with trees, vines and other vegetation. The grand tour certainly marked an important point in the history of decay, transforming interest into the theoretical symmetry of classical architecture into an interest into the ruined state of the buildings themselves. In 1855, the English botanist Richard Deacon had published his Flora of the Colosseum, recording the 420 species of plant growing there. The six acres of flora included species so rare in Western Europe that their seeds must originally have been carried there, Deacon conjectured, by the animals imported from Asia and Africa for the city's games and spectacles. Gandy returned to England and imagined it through the lens of what he had seen, transforming Soane's Bank of England into a Roman ruin. Just as Speer drew Hitler's imaginings of Berlin as Babylon, so did Gandy draw Soane's vision of London as Rome. Nor was Gandy alone in this; the pretensions of the Holy Roman Empire to claim descent from Imperial Rome led to the Hapsburg dynasty building fake Roman ruins on their estate at Schoenbrunn. The Gothic revival in architecture was prefigured with the building of such counterfeits, whether at Pottsdam or at the Hell Fire Caves in Buckinghamshire. All over Europe, country houses acquiried gothic folloies and manufactured ruins, often sitting alongside classical temples in the Palladian vein.
Villages would be moved to make way for these vistas, with only the church for company as a reminder of where the village had once been. Sometimes bits of the cottages would be retained as romantic ruins, evacuated and aestheticised according to the picturesque tastes of the upper classes.

Prior to this, Burckhardt, writing in his The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy, had spoken of the Renaissance had seen the ruins of Rome as of interest to patriots and historians rather than to pilgrims, citing the example of Petrarch and of the unearthing of the corpse of a Roman woman whose remains were treated with as much veneration as those of a saint. The Renaissance came to see ruins as a bridge to the classical world, with inscriptions on monuments, tombs, stelae and fragments of statuary, columns and pediments representing an incomplete Rossetta stone that would unlock the secrets of the ancient world. Alternatively, Renaissance painting woukd depict as a hinterland upon which to present the sacred or suffering martyr, suggesting the ultimate triumph of Christendom over Roman paganism and representing the ambivalence of the Renaissance towards the reconstruction of the classical world.

In time, this was an ambivalence that was to be resolved in favour of the glory that was Greece and the splendour that was Rome, as with Fuseli's The Artist Overwhelmed by the Grandeur of Antique Ruins showing a figure against the remains of a titan statue (a trope that returns in the gothic novel, such as Walpole's The Castle of Otranto), despairing of matching its sublimity in his own work. The influence of the grand tour and travel in general was especially important in this regard; Chateuabriand in Ottoman Athens, Nerval in Constantinople, Ruskin in Venice, Flaubert in Egypt, Dickens at the Appian Way and Shelley at the Baths of Caracalla; Ozymandias being both an allegory of the fall of tyranny and a lament for the mutability of things. Equally, it lent a political aspect to things, as visitors from Western Europe went to see the remains of fallen Empires; Venice and Athens had after all, like Britain, once been great maritime powers. Later visions of where London stood were, to put it bluntly, frequently rather self-pitying melancholy prompted by the fall of Empire, as with Macaulay's vision of a future New Zealand tourist standing on a broken arch of London Bridge and contemplating, "in the midst of a vast solitude," the ruinous dome of St. Paul's Cathedral and a desolate city.

In spite of all this, the place of ruin and decay within Romantic aesthetics was a surprisingly precarious one; such things were not explicitly singled out by Kant, he did nonetheless discuss how architecture could partake of the sublime as much as nature. Ruins occupy a space between nature and civilisation that means they can either be seen as symbols of the sublime and transcendent (as one would expect from Kant) or as symbols of the ephemeral. While Romanticism was based upon an appreciation of infinity, this found its expression in an understanding of the world as fragments, as ruins. As Schlegel put it, "many works of the ancients have become fragments. Many works of the moderns are fragments at the time of their origin." The Romantic aesthetic prized the incomplete and the ephemeral, as with Coleridge's fragmented epiphany in Kubla Khan or with De Quincey's citation of Piranesi's engravings of ruined civilisation in the midst of his disquisitions upon the transsendental.

In this sense, the uneasy relationship of decay to Romantic aesthetics is similar to that between the Gothic novel and Romantic literature. Where Romanticism largely concerned itself with the nounemnal and the transcendental, Ann Radcliffe's distinction of terror and horror. The former, we are told, partakes of the sublime and expands the soul, the latter only creates revulsion, with many such tales creating horror far more easily than terror. Given the uncertainty as to whether ruins symbolise the transcendent or simply corruption, it was essentially inevitable that ruins would be prominent within the gothic novel, as with Dracula's castle, Otranto's ruins or this passage from Melmoth the Wanderer;

"He stood and saw another flash dart its bright, brief, and malignant glance over the ruins of ancient power, and the luxuriance of recent fertility. Singular contrast! The relics of art forever decaying,—the productions of nature forever renewed."

The sublimity of the ruin was not to be stated fully until Ruskin, who saw architectural decay as a return to nature. Distinguishing between what he termed a lesser and higher picturesque, a concept that seemed to sit between beauty and the sublime. To Ruskin, the picturesque lacked a transcendental aspect and was essentially a response to what he saw as the monotonous, symmetrical and utilitarian character of architecture, a classical conception at odds with Romantic views of nature.

"A broken stone has necessarily more various forms in it than a whole one; a bent roof has more various curves in it than a straight one; every excrescence or cleft involves some additional complexity of light and shade, and every stain of moss on eaves or wall adds to the delightfulness of colour. Hence in a completely picturesque object, as an old cottage or mill, there are introduced, by various circumstances not essential to it, but, on the whole, generally somewhat detrimental to it as cottage or mill, such elements of sublimity — complex light and shade, varied colour, undulatory form, and so on — as can generally be found only in noble natural objects, woods, rocks, or mountains."

Equally, Ruskin is also concerned with the decay and decomposition of the natural world, with pollution, industrialisation and building. In Modern Painters, he characterises the modern landscape painting as indistinct, occluded by cloud and fog. The natural world has come to resemble, in fact, the murky atmosphere of the modern city, or of the industrial hinterland. The landscapes of Constable, given way to the shrouded land found in Turner, Whistler and Monet.

Ruin is a subject that is inevitably divisive, between the importance of conserving a past that is at risk of being irrevocably lost and the aesthetics of decay. This is perhaps particularly acute today, when ancient ruins have typically been preserved and restored. William Morris, who had happily depicted London and the Palace of Westminster as having falled into ruin, nonetheless established a tradition of preserving historical architecture that was contined through other figures like Betjeman. There can indeed be something rather disturbing about visited restored buildings. The act of restoring an old building frequently does so by destroying layer after layer of history to reveal the desired outcome, just as Schliemann did with all of the cities he found at Hissarlik until he was satisfied he had found the Troy he wanted, or as Evans did at Knossos. In other words, it can be an extremely destructive and arbitrary process. There is something rather awkward about the hyperreal recreations of buildings, which seems as lacking in authenticity as the faked ruins favoured in the eighteenth century. Not to mention that the very idea of conservation has the unwelcome tinge of conservatism to it, which sits uncomfortably for someone ill at ease with the idea of tradition for tradition's sake. After all, most of the buildings prized as part of our heritage were built by either discarding the styles of the past or through the more literal means of destroying the buildings of the past.

So, I wanted to visit an unrestored building instead, of which there can be few better examples than the Midland Grand Hotel, now known as St Pancras Chambers. If there was ever a case study in architectural hubris it was this; built in luxuriant gothic style (it was not unknown for visitors to mistake it for a cathedral and ask when services began), its lack of either central heating or bathrooms ensured its downfall; perhaps rather incongruously so, since its 'ascending rooms' were state of the art at the time. Entering inside, elaborate columns coated in gold leaf sit alongside walls where the paint has flaked away and floors where the boards have rotted away. Pre-Raphaelite murals of Chaucerian scenes and wyvern gargoyles rest in the darkness. In spite of my above comments it's difficult not to feel disconsolate at the Fifties beige or Edwardian burgundy paint covering the gold and crimson Victorian wall patterns. This is particularly so when one ascends the best preserved part of the building; the grand staircase. This imposing lined with gothic arches, through which light seeps into the gloom, leads up to a ceiling vaulted around a central boss, and incongruously painted with a blue sky and gold stars. Even in the dark the blazing colours shine out.

I'd certainly hate to think that such a building would fall further into decay and would love to see what these rooms look like once the paint has been scraped away to reveal the original frescos. But equally, much of why it is so striking is simply because it is a modern ruin; brightly lit and immaculate rooms as opposed to the current dark and cavernous interior would in many ways be a poor replacement. Now that St Pancras is set to become the main terminal for the Eurostar it is being restored; the prospect of what sea change it is now set to undergo is in itself a fascinating one. As Hugh Pearman puts it, cities regenerate themselves from their own scar tissue. It might seem perverse to appreciate the scarring, but perhaps that is just because it has the allure of the ephemeral. So an abandoned railway station in Paris, beloved of art-film makers, becomes the Musee d'Orsay, while a dilapidated power station becomes the Tate Modern. One further difficulty with the contemporary atttitude towards decay is that so many modern ruins are essentially visions of lost future, whose modernist architecture, such as that of Battersea Power Station or the many decaying art deco cinemas, remains more futuristic than was has replaced it. Similarly, much modernist literature was bifurcated between the modernist (the Futurists, most obviously) and the archaic, with its replacement of the medieval with Picasso's reception of the Lascaux cave painting, the African influence on Modigliani or Pound's fusion of ancient Greece and China.

Where modern literature represents decay, it only does so in an anomalous form, such as JG Ballard's Drowned World or The Crystal World; "Down Oxford Street the buildings were festooned with ivy and Virginia creeper. Trees grew from the windows of Selfridges, the pavements and Tarmac were split by plane trees spreading across Marble Arch from Hyde Park... at the bottom of Oxford Street stood the tall Centrepoint tower, its remaining upper windows glinting, while most of the base was covered in vines." UnlikeWyndham's apolcalyptic fiction, Ballard sees decay as a form of death instinct, entropic regress, far removed from the sublime or picturesque.

Ruin has essentially come to be regarded as a failure to preserve the past, and has ceased to represent the tragic, sublime or transcendent. John Piper's "pleasing decay" has translated into "criminal neglect." In short, it is increasingly difficult to think of Ruskin's higher and lower picturesque as being readily distinguishable. On the other hand, the modern interest in the ruined and decay is more likely to explore derelict factories, asylums, Icelandic farms, places like Chernobyl, Russian submarine bases or ghost villages than ancient ruins; places that are out of kilter from the notions of urban space as productive, efficient and regular. This is in many respects a form of flaneurism, in the sense meant by Benjamin; bourgeois dilettantes seeking out the derelict and discraded as a vicarious thrill. A form of post-romantic fascination with decay that no longer relates to romantic aesthetics. Such experiences are seen as somehow more 'real' and less mediated than the conventional city, as with Benjamin's own denunciation of the passing of the arcades into the department store; "In the convulsions of the commodity economy we begin to recognize the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins even before they have crumbled... it is the gaze of the flaneur, whose mode of life still surrounds the approaching desolation of city life with a propitiatory luster."
Labels: Architecture, Cataclysm, Decay, Literature, Ruins

posted by Richard 9:11 PM

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Gabriel Josipovici has published an essay on the writings of Borges from his latest collection:

"Borges’ fondness for detective stories stems from his dislike for the classical novel. For the detective story, unlike the novel, accepts from the start that the logic of fiction is not the logic of life and that as a fictional construct its prime duty is to be interesting, not realistic. The novel, on the other hand, is a curious hybrid: it wants to assert at one and the same time that it is dealing with life in all its boring contingency, while at the same time telling a story which implies that life has a meaning, is always more than mere contingency. This is the secret of its hold over us, as Sartre, for one, understood so well. We open a novel, Sartre says in La Nausee, and read about a man walking down a road. The man seems free, the future open before him. At once we identify with him, for that is how our own existence seems to be to us. We too are walking down the road of life, not knowing what is to come. But the pleasure of reading a novel stems from the fact that we know that this man is in fact the subject of an adventure that is about to befall him. How do we know this? Because he is there at the start of the novel and he would not be there if nothing were going to happen to him...

The traditional novel, by refusing to countenance the fact that things could have been otherwise, stops us also from understanding the strangeness of the fact that they are not otherwise, but thus."

For a while after reading this I found it difficult to pinpoint what bothered me about this, until I realised that it was the reference to Sartre. In practice, Sartre's ideas of existential self-determination were confronted with the social obligations represented by Sartre's communist sympathies. Behind lies the polyphonic narratives played out by the differing characters in Sartre's novels, which surely represents the fractured perspectives and disjunction between individual and society that the realist novel excels at.

More generally, I always have difficulty with the concept of realism as a monolithic entity. What is commonly referred to as the realist novel evolved in tandem with other forms; gothic, sensation and crime, all of which were absorbed into the realist novel itself. It's for this reason that the works of Balzac and Dickens combined elaborate plotting with the most abrupt and unexpected events, while even the arch-naturalist Zola was notorious for introducing the most lurid and sensational of plots. Josipovici correctly notes that early detective fiction works as a puzzle rather than a sequence of determined actions, with Poe and Doyle's stories working by revelation as much as by ratiocination. Conversely, the writer most wedded to causality as a central concern is an equally unclear example of realism; Hardy once wrote that fiction was about disproportioning reality so as to enable it to be seen more clearly and he tends to alternates between realism and something more metaphysical, reminding me of Hawthorne's definition of the romance as opposed to realism; "Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory... where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other."
Labels: Fantasy, Literature, Realism

posted by Richard 6:47 PM

Saturday, February 04, 2006

Somewhat belatedly, I wanted to write about the recent Valve seminar on Graphs Maps and Trees, which has been described as offering a qunatitative approach to literary history, based on documenting the history of differing genres (analysing all tests from a given period rather than solely the canonical ones) through 'distance reading' rather than close reading. This piece seemed particularly striking to me:

"In this piece, Moretti addresses the problem that the clues in the Sherlock Holmes stories are not decodable by the reader—whereas today the decodability of clues is “the First Commandment of detective fiction.” “Conan Doyle gets so many things right,” writes Moretti, so how is it that he can “lose his touch” at the last minute? Moretti eventually concludes that the unintelligibility of the clues is a deliberate means of emphasizing Holmes’s omniscience: if the reader could decode the clues, Holmes would no longer be a superman. Conan Doyle, in short, misuses clues “because part of him wants to.”

In “Trees,” Moretti passes over the “wants to” element—presumably to underscore the element of randomness. But I think he had it right the first time. Science is necessary but not sufficient for Holmes’s genius. After all, Dr. Watson is a good scientist, and conscientiously uses the “deductive method,” only to arrive, time and again, at the wrong conclusion—as the reader is guaranteed to do. Holmes’s use of clues strikes an incredibly delicate balance: the mystery is always solved using rational rules, but this doesn’t mean the solution is available to just anyone. Holmes is essentially aristocratic: things come to him effortlessly that never come to others at all.

Perhaps the Holmes stories are not half-baked versions of the “correct” mystery story, but a different kind of mystery story, wherein the nondecodability of clues is not a bug, but a feature. Conan Doyle was writing during the conquest of England by industry and rationalism; perhaps his readers wanted stories about the kinds of magic that are possible within the constraints of science. Holmes categorically rejects the supernatural, not in order to show that the new, rational rules preclude magic, but in order to show that you can still have magic even if you play by the rules. Decodable clues came a “generation” later, with Agatha Christie and the first World War, and became more rigorous after the second—by which time readers wanted to be reminded that the world was still rational."

This isn't really especially radical and is indeed particularly reminiscent of Mikhail Bakhtin's account of heteroglossia and its consequences in the polyphonic aspects of the novel. If criticism and comparison are two tools that can be used to interpret the text, then surely the above comparisons throw light into questions like Christie's social conservatism or the role of the gothic and supernatural in Doyle. Such examples of how genres are interpreted and redefined are surely not all that unusual; the case of how Langland rewrote sections of Piers Plowman in response to radical authors appropriating elements of the text seems to offer a particular concrete example.

With all that said, what does tend to concern me about Graphs, Maps and Trees somewhat is the attempt to quantify elements of literary history across large periods of time and distance; firstly because genres are rarely especially stable (and individual texts are rarely confined to single examples of any genre) and their classification somewhat arbitrary. Even with a defined morphology, it seems difficult to define why certain genres succeed and other do not. After all, literary history is riddled with examples of authors that failed to catch the popular imagination and were only to be acclaimed later; such models might work well with Doyle and Christie but what about authors like Bernhard, Pessoa and Kafka who remain even now largely acclaimed through critical endorsement than popular success (and who were very far from being even remotely representative of the bulk of work published in their lifetime)? Moretti's model seems to work well for popular genres but I'm not quite so sure it works so well otherwise.
Labels: Interpretation, Literature, Theory

posted by Richard 6:28 PM

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Via the Valve, a critical discussion of Maurice Blanchot's views on reading:

"For Blanchot, the good reader would not be what he terms the critical reader but the literary reader. Rather than interrogating “the work in order to know how it was fashioned” (SL 203), which is to say, rather than subordinating the openness of reading to an active means of elucidating the value and meaning of the work (and, by proxy, the value of reading itself), all of which Blanchot identifies with critical reading, the literary reader or what Blanchot refers to as “the true reader” (SL 203) passively collapses before the work, giving “the work back to itself: back to its anonymous presence, to the impersonal affirmation that it is” (SL 193). The work says nothing and of the work, therefore, there is nothing to say. If the work is to remain communicable at all, this is what it is necessary to say, always again, always badly, and always for the first time. As such, the task of the good reader is not to say the work but rather to procure a space in which the work can continue not to say itself..."

I'm not convinced. I certainly feel that there is a point where thinking analytically about much literature becomes futile; for instance, what happened in the Marabar caves, the source of Hamlet's hesitations or what Josef K was charged with. The figures in these particular carpets must of necessity remain hidden and we can indeed only give such works back to themselves. On the other hand, reading seems to me intrinsically analytical; we read with a horizon of expectations which we constantly re-evaluate in the light of new information or new thoughts. This is something that one of the comments at the Valve notes, citing how Bakhtin views works as structuring themselves in anticipation of a response and requires the reader to provide it. It's this which makes reading a dialogic process of engaging with the text; something that seems an infinitely preferable idea of reading to me.

My own relationship to the school of school of language inhabited by the likes of Blanchot and Derrida is a somewhat oblique; while I agree with the criticism of the 'metaphysics of presence' the notion of there being nothing outside the text seems to confer a form of metaphysical status on the text (Blanchot's romantic idea of desoeuvrement being emblematic here). Language ceases to be social category and becomes something quasi mystical and transcendent, apparently detached from the phenomenal. Thus the waspish comment from Habermas that Derrida was a 'jewish mystic.' It's difficult not to feel sympathetic to the Searlian complaint that the idea of language as a system of differences is precisely a system of presences and absences and accordingly rather failed to live up to the claims Derrida made for it. Inevitably, I grew to prefer Mikhail Baktin's concepts of polyphony and heteroglossia, which proceed from the same criticism of metaphysics but instead relates hermeneutics to the social and political.
Labels: Hermeneutics, Interpretation, Literature

posted by Richard 7:29 PM

Sunday, August 07, 2005

An interesting piece from Waggish on the decline of realism:

"Genealogy of Metaphysics: what was it that caused the shift from the master dichotomy of real/unreal to the slave dichotomy of real/fake? The loss of authority/authenticity in young American authors (see Eggers, Foer) indicates a preoccupation with returning to an imagined time where every utterance was a statement of the real, as opposed to the supposed fakeness that surrounds us that everyone is fed up with. The term "irony," which once signified a sophisticated sort of social satire that required a certain amount of intelligence to appreciate, has become to devalued to the point where it simply signifies insincerity, the positive referent not being a specific target but simply the mores of society."

Certainly, realism has not been an especially fertile ground for modern literature (though I suspect that the increasingly individualistic nature of modern society is as likely a cause as Lyotardian explanations; realism has a certain sense of social solidarity as a pre-requisite; this is the difference between Balzac and Houellebecq), in spite of a brief flourishing after the second world war (Greene, Murdoch). Other forms have come to the forefront; historical fiction (Ackroyd, Atwood, Fowles), magical realism (Marquez, Kundera, Carter, Winterson) or speculative fiction (Atwood). That said, although Waggish notes that those that want to return to a pre-enlightenment authenticity (a dangerous notion, if one thinks of Hamsun or Heidegger) ingore how marginal and disingenuous their views are, his comments did remind me of Slavoj Zizek saying this:

"Throughout the entire twentieth century, I see a counter-tendency, for which my good philosopher friend Alain Badiou invented a nice name: 'La passion du réel', the passion of the real. That is to say, precisely because the universe in which we live is somehow a universe of dead conventions and artificiality, the only authentic real experience must be some extremely violent, shattering experience. And this we experience as a sense that now we are back in real life."

This seems a good description of the writing of JG Ballard and perhaps others like Bret Easton Ellis or Chuck Palahniuk. Perhaps that is the writing that will be remembered from these times as being real. Perhaps it already is; I always remember JG Ballard observing that on the whole, the future would be bland, a world of stifling mediocrity and conformity occasionally punctuated by mildly absurd and senseless acts of violence. For all of its impact, 9/11 did not seem to fall into this category; it resembled a film (a Hollywood disaster movie) too much to seem truly real. The recent Tube bombings seem to meet Ballard's description rather more accurately.

Update: Some interesting related observations I came across from John Fowles:

"In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the novel was at one remove from life. But since the advent of film and television and sound recording it is at two removes. The novel is now generally about things and events which the other forms of art describe better.

All the purely visual and aural sequences in the modern novel are a bore, both to read and to write. People’s physical appearance, their movements, their sounds, places, moods of places—the camera and the microphone enregister these twenty times better than the typewriter... In other words, to write a novel in 1964 is to be neurotically aware of trespassing, especially on the domain of the cinema... So over the novel today hangs a faute de mieux. All of us under forty write cinematically; our imaginations, constantly fed on films, “shoot” scenes, and we write descriptions of what has been shot. So for us a lot of novel writing is, or seems like, the tedious translating of an unmade and never-to-be-made film into words."

I'm not sure I agree, as I tend to think of cinema as the artform that failed but it does rather remind me of Paglia's observation that cinema was always implicit in Western art in the prominence it gave to the visual or to Tanizaki's compliant about the respective roles of light and shadow in Oriental and Occidental aesthetics.
Labels: Alienation, Literature, Realism

posted by Richard 5:02 PM

Saturday, August 06, 2005

Sometime ago, I came across an unually interesting meme. Based on an idea from the Vienna circle whereby each of the propositions in Wittgenstein's Tractatus was declared to be either true or false, it suggested doing the same to Alain Badiou's Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art. On the whole, I don't think that the idea that statements can be verified in this manner is worth spending too much time and certainly not in the case of Badiou, many of whose theses reflect a very specfic policitical worldview. However, I was struck by one of the propositions:

"Every art develops from an impure form, and the progressive purification of this impurity shapes the history both of a particular artistic truth and of its exhaustion."

It's not an obviously flawed idea, but I'd still have to answer false. Clearly, influence will inevitably work to alter and even refine what has preceded it but the thesis still asumes that purity in art is necessarily a welcome concept. The most extreme example here is Shakespeare, who seemed to me best described by Camille's Paglia's comment that she was alwasy struck by the implacable density and hostility of Shakespeare's writing, its resistance to all interpretation. While much of Shakespeare seems to be all pattern and symmetry, it is equally true to say that it is all shifting perspectives and lacunae. When Eliot bemoaned the absence of an objective correlative in Hamlet he had identified the source of its power; interpretation runs off it like water from a duck's feathers, ensuring that it can always be renewed and reinterpreted.

At the same extreme are modern writers like Kafka and Coetzee. The protagonists of The Trial and The Castle have no key to the events that unfold around them and neither does the reader, with political, relgious and even Freudian interpretations seeming equally applicable and inapplicable. Coetzee's characters are equally denied access to self-knowledge; Elizabeth Costello speaks of how her beliefs are only provisional, Michael K simply has no lexicon to explain himself. In spite of the humour in Kafka and Shakespeare there's is nonetheless something hostile about both of them a certain glacial quality that comes from never being able to get close to any of their works, to penetrate to the heart of what they are about.

By contrast, I always liked John Bayley's The Uses of Division for its argument that the imperfections in a work were what brought it to life, what made it appraochable were Shakespeare and Kafka are forbidding and impersonal. Another theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin argued that the novel in particular would always thwart aesthetic purity; its different registers and voices would always create something characterised by different perspectives, something polyphonic. Ambiguities and uncertainties remain but appear more human. I think of how DH Lawrence's anxieties over his sexuality created fractures in his visions of new modes of being, of how George Eliot's sense of empathy for the lost meant that she could never quite depict sacrificeand sympathy in the way her system demanded, of how Hardy's social convictions could never be quite brought to tally with his pessimistic Schophenhauerian worldview. There's something endlessly fascinating about these imperfections, largely because they are so immediately apparent to us.
Labels: Hermeneutics, Interpretation, Literature

posted by Richard 6:12 PM

Tuesday, June 07, 2005

There's already been quite a bit of comment about John Carey's latest book:

"When it was published, The Intellectuals and the Masses was criticised for going too far in eliding British intellectuals' snobberies with fascist ideology, as if modernism taken to its logical conclusion would automatically lead to Nazism. Academic and critic Stefan Collini, for example, attacked Carey's "breathtaking tendentiousness" for seeing "Virginia Woolf's tart remarks about shop-girls or Eliot's sneers about typists [as] part of that disdain by intellectuals for ordinary people which reached its culmination in the death-camps"...

Carey takes an uncompromising relativist position on aesthetics, denying the possibility of absolute values. There is no way of determining what constitutes a work of art - Carey concludes that it is merely anything that anyone has defined as such - and evaluating such works is a purely subjective activity... It is the absence of God which, ultimately, leads him to deny the possibility that there can be absolute values in aesthetics, and indeed in ethics ("Once belief in God is removed, moral questions, like aesthetic questions, become endlessly disputable")."

As it happens I don't have any particular difficulty denying an absolute standard for aesthetic judgements; in practice such matters of taste have always been based around arbitrary distinctions that continually change and shift. Art has very often been an essentialy social concept and requiring it to be justifiable from first principles seems more than a little excessive. To put the issue in pragmatic terms, the absence of a solid foundation has surprisingly few implications for the superstructure as a whole. To fail to have a clear definition of aesthetic quality drawn from first principles is unlikely to prevent anyone from concerning themself with such matters or to change anyone's view of why such a definition might be needed. Culture can still be defended in the same terms that Arnold put forward as "contact with the best which has been thought and said in the world," or a Leavisite view or any number of other ideas and definitions.

Where Carey is correct is that one cannot do this if one wishes to reconcile an idea of culture with any thoroughgoing egalitarianism. Ideas of culture have more often than not tended to be formed by elites, often through patronage or subsidy in the absence of a free market. In modern history, the former Soviet Union was alone in retaining a central role for culture rather than leaving such matters to the free market (where they inevitably withered; it reminds me of Gianni Vattimo's notion that art, an implicitly subsersive force that undermines conventions and traditions, loses its privileged status and is forced to compensate for this by becoming increasingly self-referential and kitsch against the backdrop of an increasingly vapid culture). It does seem rather odd to me that Carey's liberalism extends to issues of equality but not as far suggesting any basis for culture other than the free market.

Update: This piece from Blake Morrison explains things more clearly:

"In pre-industrial societies, Carey argues, art was "spread through the whole community". But once the word "aesthetics" was coined in the mid-18th century, it became the preserve of a priestly caste. To Kant, art was good insofar as it accessed a "supersensible" realm of beauty and truth, and only certain kinds of artist - geniuses - were capable of that. Kant's view of art, as developed by Hegel and Schopenhauer, also required that the audience for art (readers, spectators and concert-goers) be unusually gifted. To expect the blind, striving creatures who composed the mass of humanity to appreciate art was clearly futile. The best that could be hoped was that, as one philanthropist involved in setting up the National Gallery in London put it, art might "wean them from polluting and debasing habits".

Snooty though it is, this view of art dominated much of the Romantic and Modernist period. Carey gives countless examples - and might have added to the list Henry Treece's physiologically intriguing claim that to be an artist is "to have your blood running a different way to other men's blood". The legacy persists to this day. There's Jeanette Winterson, for example, contrasting her own superior taste with that of her mother's preference for the "hideous" and "factory-made"."

Certainly a more clear explanation, but not necessarily a more helpful one. In particular, I have to admit to a rather considerable degree of scepticism as to whether this distinction between post and pre-industrial societies really stands examination. One of the dominant forms of art for much of the industrial and post-industrial age has been the novel, which has tended towards being the most popular of forms. Conversely, the pre-industrial period was very far from being a stranger to poetry and art that was essentially aristocratic, particularly when large swathes of the population would not have been able to read or have the luxury of being able to attend (state-subsidised) galleries or concerts.
Labels: Art, Literature

posted by Richard 6:37 PM

Saturday, June 04, 2005

Michel Houellebecq has written a characteristically provocative defence of HP Lovecraft:

"Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new, realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and don't care to know any more. Humanity, such as it is, inspires only an attenuated curiosity in us. All those prodigiously refined notations, situations, anecdotes ... All they do, once a book has been set aside, is reinforce the slight revulsion that is already adequately nourished by any one of our "real life" days... Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.

Lovecraft, for his part, knew he had nothing to do with this world. And at each turn he played a losing hand. In theory and in practice. He lost his childhood; he also lost his faith. The world sickened him and he saw no reason to believe that by looking at things better they might appear differently."

Of course, Houellebecq has 'form' in this particular area, having attempted to reclaim Agatha Christie for the literary canon in the past. It reinforces his status as enfant terrible, even if his actual writing is more influenced by Camus than by Christie (horror and crime are reactionary genres to a large extent, presenting threats to the social order that are quickly subsumed, which doesn't quite seem to fit, for all of Houellebecq's reactionary pronouncements). Equally, such defences do little to hide the fact that Lovecraft couldn't write for toffee. His prose is truly terrible, being entirely worthy of comparison to William Topaz McGonagall. He influenced other horror writers like Derleth and more literary writers like Borges and every single one of them wrote considerably better than he did.

Nonetheless, I wouldn't want to dismiss Houellebecq's arguments; you only have to read some of the final passages of Atomised to understand that his sense of indifference to the world is perfectly sincere. At one point, I would have been rather more puritannical to such arguments; fiction served a representational function, as Hardy had suggested; "Art is a disproportioning — (i.e., distorting, throwing out of proportion)— of realities, to show more clearly the features that matter in those realities." While far from being overly wedded to realism, I would prefer a simpler view now, largely based around Shklovsky's ideas of making the familiar into the unfamiliar, ostanenie (after all, consider how much science fiction from Brave New World to The Handmaid's Tale revolves around the depiction of contemporary concerns rather than the projections of the future).

With this, I seem to have become more tolerant of the notion that art can be a means of escaping reality rather than representing it; it seems difficult to deny that Gormenghast or The Bloody Chamber is as canonical as Mrs Dalloway and Little Dorrit or that the same could not be said of Grimm, Poe and Hoffmann. One of the reasons why Houellebecq is one of the very few modern authors to have successfully written in a social realist vein is that he does so with little sense of social engagement, an indifference that Balzac and Zola were simply incapable of. Living at a time when many European societies see their cohesion and identity as being undermined by increasingly liberal economic structures, I rather suspect this is the only way the realist novel can be created in the present age.
Labels: Fantasy, Literature, Realism

posted by Richard 1:36 PM

Friday, May 27, 2005

A somewhat mediocre article from the Los Angeles Times (one of my favourite publications, if it goes without saying) manages to accidentally stumble across an interesting point:

"My students and colleagues have returned in recent years to long-neglected writers in the American realist tradition, including William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Sinclair Lewis, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather....

Like Henry James before them, they saw themselves less as lonely romantic outposts of individual sensibility than as keen observers of society. They described the rough transition from the small town to the city, from rural life to industrial society, from a more homogeneous but racially divided population to a nation of immigrants. They recorded dramatic alterations in religious beliefs, moral values, social and sexual mores and class patterns. Novels like Dreiser's "Sister Carrie" and Wharton's "House of Mirth" showed how fiction paradoxically could serve fact and provide a more concrete sense of the real world than any other form of writing... This is how most readers have always read novels, not simply for escape, and certainly not mainly for art, but to get a better grasp of the world around them and the world inside them. "

To some extent, I tend to think that the present age does bear greater comparison with much of the Victorian period than with the first half of the twentieth century. In both cases, rapid technological change has helped to drive forward economic and social change. In both cases, the impact of economic growth was greater social inequality the two nations are increasingly divergent once more. Instead of the cataclysmic disruptions that dominated the first half of the twentieth century, social forces are at play that could theoretically be documented by modern writers in the same way that they were documented by Dickens and Eliot.

However, it nonetheless remains the case that any return to realist fiction seems unlikely at best; if there is a dominand force in modern literature it is probably magical realism. The realist novel rested on a numner of shared assumptions relating to social homogeneity rather than post-traditional individualism, and relating to notions of progress through commerce and science rather than scepticism with which both of those continue to be viewed. If I were to speculate as to the greatest modern writer, I would put the name of JG Ballard forward. His fractured, episodic narratives represent in many respects a return to the type of narrative that existed before nineteenth century realist fiction and suggests a route beyond it.
Labels: Literature, Realism

posted by Richard 8:32 PM

Sunday, March 13, 2005

I've been thinking about the issue of criticism lately. One particular issue is whether you think reviewing is concerned with value or not, whether it is descriptive or prescriptive. From a personal point of view, I'd argue that prescriptive reviews usually say more about the reviewer than the reviewed subject (one reads Woolf's review of Bennett to find out more about Woolf, not Bennett, just as DH Lawrence's reviews of Emerson and Whitman tells us a great deal about Lawrence and little about either American author). Unless the reviewer happens to be particularly engaging for some reason then reading a set of rationalisations never really seems especially engaging to me, thinking of Pirsig's notion of aesthetic quality as something self evident but which cannot be defined within the confines of traditional logic.

The aesthetic theories of FR Leavis, to take one example, were quite succesful in producing a notion of what constitutes 'literature' based on a certain set of criteria. The problem was that this continually acted to exclude works that most people would have naturally assumed to be part of the canon, like Dickens and Bronte. However, to broaden the criteria was to run the risk of requiring certain other works to be admitted to the canon that would not seem to have any obvious place; the theory cannot be both complete and consistent at the same time.

However, as tempting as a form of criticism governed by the policy of 'that which we cannot speak, whereof we must be silent' might be, the question value will inevitably bleed through. Even the most objective statement will usually be found to be a part of wider subjective view of literature. On the whole, I think I increasingly see prescriptive writing as being best described as an unavoidable evil.
Labels: Literature

posted by Richard 7:57 PM

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

I wrote some time ago about a piece by Julian Evans, bemoaning the lack of narrative in contemporary European fiction. In this review of Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots he pursues a similar line of argument. On the whole, I'm more interested in this argument than in Booker's rather Jungian and Casaubonesque tome:

"The histories of the novel and of storytelling ran together until the early 20th century; since the 1920s, that history has been one of formal drift, away from the novel as a social form that described how characters live in relation to others... After the 1950s it was more creditable, as a writer of fiction, to be Beckett's or Borges's descendant than Orwell's or Waugh's. Possibly writers were tired of making the effort of linear narrative, possibly they simply wanted to be modern. Yet I can think of few more complete embodiments of 20th-century alienation than Orwell's George Bowling in Coming Up for Air, and I cannot think of a novel that better expresses 20th-century English dissent than Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy."

One of the problems with Evans's critique is that it never seems entirely clear whether he is lamenting the dearth of narrative fiction or the dearth of social fiction. After all, though the two may often be related they are hardly synonymous. On the whole, I'm inclined to think that modernism and the displacement of narrative are less important than the displacement of the social novel. Although many post-war writers like Greene, Fowles and Murdoch tally well with Evans's ideas about the novel, it's striking that rather more writers have since strayed into magical realism (Carter, Winterson, Kundera), historical fiction (Eco, Ackroyd, Pamuk) or speculative fiction (Atwood, Coetzee, Ballard). Though realist fiction remains available to contemporary novelists (Gordimer and Houellebecq, for example), it isn't necessarily the only form of novelistic expression in the way Evans suggests (as with the picaresque novel prior to the rise of realism).

My own suspicion is that realism is a simply a less attractive form now than it was for Victorian novelists, who were writing in a society dominated by competing social narratives (from Comte to Marx to Newman) in a way that doesn't seem particularly true for a contemporary society, which is signficantly more atomised and lacking shared assumptions. I recall Martin Amis comparing modern Britain to Switzerland; an ordered, prosperous society that had produced nothing other than the cuckoo clock (to steal a phrase from the Third Man). I'm not sure that Britain quite fits this description, but I might certainly say that as a society it lacks any general narratives to discuss the kind of concerns that so motivated Victorian fiction.

Of course, as far as narrative is concerned, I'm biased. One of the critical works that I always found rather appealing was John Bayley's Unity and Disharmony in Literature. Its central argument was that works characterised by a certain uneveness are often much more engaging than works characterised by a rather formidable and inapproachable aesthetic perfection. Certainly, when I read novels it was always the sub-plots and diversions and all the other things that didn't quite fit into the central narrative that I liked the most.

Update:

An interesting comment from Susan Sontag:

"The long prose fiction called the novel, for want of a better name, has yet to shake off the mandate of its own normality as promulgated in the 19th century: to tell a story peopled by characters whose options and destinies are those of ordinary, so-called real life. Narratives that deviate from this artificial norm and tell other kinds of stories, or appear not to tell much of a story at all, draw on traditions that are more venerable than those of the 19th century, but still, to this day, seem innovative or ultraliterary or bizarre...

It seems odd to describe ''Gulliver's Travels'' or ''Candide'' or ''Tristram Shandy'' or ''Jacques the Fatalist and His Master'' or ''Alice in Wonderland'' or Gershenzon and Ivanov's ''Correspondence From Two Corners'' or Kafka's ''The Castle'' or Hesse's ''Steppenwolf'' or Woolf's ''The Waves'' ... or Calvino's ''Invisible Cities'' or, for that matter, porno narratives, simply as novels. To make the point that these occupy the outlying precincts of the novel's main tradition, special labels are invoked. Convention dictates that we slot many of the last centuries' perdurable literary achievements into one or another of these categories."
Labels: Literature

posted by Richard 6:36 PM

Saturday, October 09, 2004

Umberto Eco has been pondering changing notions of beauty through the twentieth century, drawing a division between the avant-garde art of provocation and the popular art of mass-consumption:

"Avant-garde art does not itself pose the problem of beauty. And while it is implicitly accepted that the new images are artistically "beautiful", and must give us the same pleasure that Giotto's frescoes or Raphael's paintings gave to their own contemporaries, it is important to realise that this is so precisely because the avant garde has provocatively flouted all aesthetic canons respected until now. Art is no longer interested in providing an image of natural beauty, nor does it aim to procure the pleasure ensuing from the contemplation of harmonious forms. On the contrary, its aim is to teach us to interpret the world through different eyes...

Visitors to an exhibition of avant-garde art who purchase an "incomprehensible" sculpture, or those who take part in a "happening", are dressed and made up in accordance with the canons of fashion. They wear jeans or designer clothes, wear their hair or make-up according to the model of beauty offered by glossy magazines, the cinema or television, in other words by the mass media. These people follow the ideals of beauty as suggested by the world of commercial consumption, the very world that avant-garde artists have been battling against for over 50 years."

In many respects, this is similar to the type of thesis Camille Paglia has been presenting for several years, wherein elite forms of art became increasingly moribund during the course of the twentieth century and declined in favour of popular music and film. With the advent of pop-art the eclipse of old forms of artistic expression was complete. But on the whole, it seems to me that Eco is nearer the mark in describing a fragmented world where there is no monopoly on any form of artistic expression; even in the mass culture it is difficult to find anything that resembles a popular movement in the way that the sixties and punk music did. Instead, all forms of artistic expression seem more like micro-cultures, an expression of lifestyle in an individualistic age.
Labels: Aesthetics, Art, Literature

posted by Richard 8:45 PM

Monday, August 02, 2004

The latest edition of Prospect has an odd piece on how British interest in European fiction dwindled, to be replaced by an interest in North & Latin American or Commonwealth literature:

"(a) shift in British literary outlook away from European modernism and the successors of Sartre and Camus, our last continental icons, and towards the American postwar realists - Updike and Roth, Mailer, Bellow and Morrison... That aesthetic break - the schism of form - between British and continental writing has little to do with native taste or British "insularity," but emerged from a condition of history. In Warsaw in 2001, I interviewed the Polish novelist Tadeusz Konwicki in his Stalin-era flat. To Poles who had experienced Hitler's war and had then to deal with Stalin's communists, he said, conventional narrative made no sense. "My generation time and again had to face the possibility of their lives being threatened. Traditional narrative structure could not express the psychological insight of the situations we found ourselves in."

What took them there was America's own vitality, an evolving narrative force in which one can see an unbroken vital line stretching from Scott Fitzgerald's America in The Great Gatsby to Thomas Pynchon's in Mason & Dixon. History had caused continental Europe's faith in narrative to falter in its stride; in the US (as, variously, in Latin America and the Commonwealth) there was no pause in the gallop. A great, unbordered expanse of narrative lay all around."

It's a somewhat peculiar argument, if only because the move away from traditional narrative predated the second world war and because earlier British writers, such as Virginia Woolf and Lawrence had shared this alongside Gide and Pessoa. It would probably be easier to make a case that it was Britain whose 'vital line' was broken, with the end of the second world war leading to markedly more traditional writers like Burgess, Murdoch and Greene, at precisely the same period Europe produced Sartre and Camus.

Nonetheless, that Britain has tended to look more towards the US in recent years seems as unarguable as it always has been unfathomable from my perspective. Whenever I have looked through the pages of Faulkner, Hermingway, Updike, Roth, Mailer, Bellow, DeLillo and Morrison I've always found myself facing something as alien in its mindset as medieval literature (in the case of Mailer and Hemingway an especially bellicose individualism would certainly be the cause, with even the more popular literature of Coupland seeming to replace European anti-bourgeois romanticism with dreary American pioneer individualism). When I consider the rich fusion of realism and symbolism in nineteenth century American fiction, such as Hawthorne and Melville and then consider the dull realism of twentieth century American fiction, the merits of traditional narrative seen less assured.

Equally, if I am to think of the contemporary writers I most admire they tend to be European; Kundera, Houellebecq, Ballard, Eco, Pamuk, Goytisolo or from the Commonwealth; Coetzee, Lessing or Gordimer. The most significant literary innovation of the second half of the twentieth century, magical realism (a belated means of codifying surrealism into narrative) originated in writers such as Borges and Marquez but was adapted by many of those above or with writers like Carter and Winterson. The one place it did nto find any purchase was the United States, which did indeed keep on ploughing the same furrow it had always done.
Labels: Literature

posted by Richard 7:45 PM

Tuesday, May 25, 2004

One of the themes I seem to keep on tripping across these days is the division between historical literary criticism, literary writing intended for the mythical common reader, and academic criticism, such as post-structuralism and deconstruction. The latest example of this comes from this review of The Oxford English Literary History:

"Writers are intensely interested in what might be called aesthetic success: they have to be, because in order to create something successful one must learn about other people's successful creations... But conventional, non-theoretical criticism often acts as if questions of value are irrelevant, or canonically settled... In his new book, After Theory, Terry Eagleton describes two camps, the belletristic and the theoretical. Why is it, he asks, that the former is credited with seeing what is 'really in the text'? 'To see The Waste Land as brooding upon the spiritual vacancy of Man without God is to read what is there on the page, whereas to view it as a symptom of an exhausted bourgeois civilisation in an era of imperialist warfare is to impose your own crankish theory on the poem."

On the whole I have always been sceptical of claims regarding aesthetic judgement, where, it seems to me, the difference between opinion and prejudice is merely a recognition than man is as much a rationalising animal as a rational one. This seems particularly so in this case, where the problem is not that the Oxford Review lacks aesthetic discrimination, but that it does indeed discriminate between works according to an aesthetic the reviewer is not in sympathy with (i.e. one that prefers postmodern and politically committed aesthetics).

In fact, this review raises several questions that are poorly answered; for example, surely there is a great deal that is arbitrary about the formation of the canon (after all, the Victorians read Scott and Rossetti rather than Austen and Hopkins; a prejudice always rather more congenial to me than that of modern times). Equally, if one should be wary of reasing texts symptomatically, one feels tempted to ask what is the value of literature if it cannot be regarded as being symptomatic? But rather than doing nothing more than writing a rebuttal, it might be better to recall what a criticism of aesthetic merit resembled. Though he disliked the term 'aesthetic' FR Leavis would nonetheless seem to the very acme of the type of criticism being exalted. His criticism sought to weigh the merits of differing authors. Those admitted into the great tradition included George Eliot, James, Conrad and Lawrence; those excluded had Milton, Woolf, Tennyson and Hardy amongst their number. Dickens and Charlotte Bronte flitted between the two camps. While contemporary criticism might be guilty of neither selecting nor rejecting, aesthetic criticism promptly went to the other extreme.

There's a good argument to be made that some notion of 'literatity' is important, even an arbitrary one. But such arbitrary notions cannot be founded on anything other than prejudice masked as judgement. It seems to me that a division between criticism and theory is something to welcome. Let the former return to being the preserve of writers like James, where there is little pretence that one is seeing anything other than a mirror of the writer themself (as with Rushdie and Franzen, both cited by the reviewer) while the role of the critic as self-appointed arbiter of taste can comfortably be left to wither on the vine. While I have a great many reservations about contemporary theory (its selective appropriation of philosophy and linguistics, its ignorance of historical conditions in favour of what remains a vulgar Marxism, to cite the two most obvious complaints in what would otherwise be a rather long list) I'd still prefer the likes of Bakhtin and Lukacs to Trilling and Richards any day of the week.
Labels: Interpretation, Literature

posted by Richard 6:41 PM

Tuesday, May 04, 2004

The death of Thom Gunn marks the end of what I had viewed as one of the most important bodies of work in modern literature. Certainly, he had always seemed to me to be the most important poet since Auden. Where most twentieth century poetry retreated either into a sense of quirky parochialism (Larkin, Betjeman) or into solipsistic romanticism (Hughes), Gunn had always seemed ably to effortlessly offer a via media between romanticism and realism.
Labels: Literature

posted by Richard 7:29 PM

Friday, October 24, 2003

I've noticed of late two articles in the Hudson Review concerning the establishment of a form of Darwinian literary criticism, a prospect that has me less than enthused.

The general problem with much literary theory is that for something concerned with cultural studies it runs the risk of being overwhelmingly concerned cultural production rather than how a culture actually manifests itself. In other words, concerning oneself with whether the theme of the interconnection of organisms in Victorian literature is to be primarily understood in Marxist or Darwinian terms is perhaps simply not very interesting in either case. Similarly, whether sexual dynamics within a novel are understood in feminist, Freudian or Darwinian terms is also not especially interesting (largely because the answer to these can essentially be summarised as 'choose your favourite prejudice' since it is by definition impossible to falsify any thesis here). In any of these cases, the theoretical perspective brought to bear changes the terms in which literature was produced but says rather less about the nature of the text itself. The essay discussing Pinker brings most of these concerns to light:

"He corrects Virginia Woolf’s jocular remark that human nature (actually, she wrote “human character”) changed in 1910 by explaining that “Modernism certainly proceeded as if human nature had changed. All the tricks that artists had used for millennia to please the human palate were cast aside."

I recall EM Forster commenting that whether human nature changed or not was largely unimportant in comparison to whether how we view human nature had changed or not. In this case, artistic representation of human nature tends to be response to how the culture of the time views it. Medieval artists saw human nature in terms of a set of social and religious typologies. Eighteenth century novelists often as human nature in the same terms as Locke, that of the blank slate. It's difficult to conceive of any of these conforming to what Pinker would deem acceptable.

More to the point, if the acme of artistic achievement is "pleasing the human palate" then Pinker has advanced a view that would displace most of the artistic canon. In particular the idea that modernism created a form of elitism in contrast to previous popular notions of art is somewhat misconceived. From Maecenas to Kreutzer, patrons have been needed to fund artists whose works did not please the human palate as much as their now forgotten contemporaries. The problem of defining artistic value is that definitions are either too vague to exclude works that aren't part of the canon or too narrow to include works that are: Pinker is to be congratulated for forming a definition that would be likely to exclude much of the canon. Which begs the question of what a Pinker canon would comprise. For example;

"We know that late Beethoven, late Wagner, Mahler, Stravinsky, Picasso, some of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, etc., were at first regarded as “ugly” and now are so naturalized as to present few problems. What hasn’t been assimilated—Finnegans Wake, Moses und Aron—may be the sort of artifacts that affirm Pinker’s judgment."

Possibly. But why stop there? Eliot, Picasso and Stravinsky were equally controversial in their own time and had no more interest in pleasing the human palate than Joyce did. Frankly, having an erroneous conception of human nature is perhaps rather less the point in those cases than deliberately setting out to create something in opposition to perceived norms.

Regarding the critique of post-structuralism referred to in the second of these articles, I would be interested to know what this actually consists of. The difficulty is likely to be that post-structuralism and evolutionary psychology are not especially likely to actually 'speak' with regard to each other. The former is concerned with how the characteristics of language manifest themselves, the latter is concerned with how the origins of language manifest themselves. I'm not sure that those two really have much in common and are as likely to be compatible as incompatible.
Labels: Literature

posted by Richard 11:36 AM

Monday, May 05, 2003

The Guardian has an excerpt from Thomas Pynchon's introduction to 1984, argung that the common interpretation of the story as being concerned with a critique of Stalinism is incorrect. The point is well made, and anyone who has read Homage to Catalonia should be aware that Orwell was at least as concerned with fascism as with communism. That said, it does seem to be a case of stating what I had always assumed to be obvious; allegory as a form was originally perfected in religious discourse (e.g. The Pilgrim's Progress) and it is probably true to say that there is a constant elision in Orwell's allegorical works of the political in favour of the moral and vice versa. Orwell is clearly referring to traits of specific ideologies, but is reluctant to confine himself therein. Pynchon's observation that Orwell was himself the greatest practitioner of doublethink puts the matter most clearly;

"The idea seems to have presented Orwell with his own dilemma, a kind of meta-doublethink - repelling him with its limitless potential for harm, while at the same time fascinating him with its promise of a way to transcend opposites"
Labels: Literature

posted by Richard 5:00 PM

Tuesday, July 16, 2002

Excellent article from AC Grayling, which addresses many of the concerns of the Carey thesis regarding Intellectuals and the Masses, but perhaps neglects to consider aspects of the production of art, rather than its consumption.

"In one corner of this fight lies the question of high culture in literature and the arts, automatically defended by the Right - who, it is clear, sometimes do not know what they are talking about, since much in high culture is profoundly subversive of what they cherish: think of the anticlerical Voltaire, the adulteresses Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, Madame Butterfly living in sin with Pinkerton, the liar Odysseus, the communistic New Testament, and endless examples besides, which, if they knew of it, would certainly affright America's gun-and-family-loving right... But almost all other art forms are capable of transcending barriers, and appreciators of the high culture of their own tradition are for that very reason well placed to appreciate that of other traditions. Consider the enjoyment of Chinese porcelains, textiles and ink paintings in the west, and the Chinese passion for Dickens and European and American music in return. Consider western relish for Mughal miniatures, Indian dance, African carving, and Japanese netsuke. Consider the excellent practitioners of western classical music who come from China and Japan; and consider the admiration felt by western visitors to the exquisite Forbidden City treasures displayed in the National Museum in Taipei... It was the African figures in the Louvre that inspired Picasso. That one fact alone could serve to remind us how porous high culture is, in both directions, and how symbiotic the existence of all cultures is, especially in the globalised world."

The only state in the modern developed world to have retained an integral role for art and culture within its society was the Soviet Union (one is inclined to doubt whether this might still be the case). Art, while a creative impulse specific to an individual is in many ways a form of collective expression and symbology (what we mean by the phrase 'striking a chord') which has found it difficult to adapt to the modern conditions of individualism and the atomised society (bear in mind that the concept of art is always referred to in the singular, we never speaks of arts except when referring to differing mediums; and even that is a move away from the eighteenth century conception of art).
Labels: Art, Literature

posted by Richard 4:00 PM

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