The English essay is an artform.
The English essay, unlike the French essay, which, in Montaine, begins with philosophical reflections, grows instead out of journalism. Defoe was what he would now be considered a newspaperman to start. He contributed spectacular and suspicious reports from all over about strange things that were happening, made credible in that they were like medieval tales of miracles in that they happened just over the next hill. Then Defoe turning to stories about exotic and far off narratives considered as novels, like “Robinson Crusoe” and “Roxanne”, reworking real material, until he wrote his magnificent “The Journal of the Plague Year”, so well described as if it had been reported rather than built on records, and not considered a novel because it had no dialogue or central figures but only the types of people, like healthy victims closeted in their houses with plague victims and the people who carried dead victims onto carts so that the bodies could be disposed of.
Read MoreThe story of Adam and Eve replaces myth with fable.
The creation of a woman should not be seen as an afterthought by a God who had previously provided each of his animals with a mate but overlooked doing it for Adam. God may have thought that Adam was a special enough creation, meant to rule over the rest of it, and so he did not need a mate. But either God changed his mind about that or always knew that He would make a special creation later. Woman was a special creation so as to emphasize that in the actual world the relation between man and woman is not like it is with the pairings of the other animals; some special kind of creation was required. Eve was as close to Adam as his own rib. As a legend might, the story of Eve’s creation suggests that woman has thereafter an ambiguous relation to man: part of him, descended from him, and yet a companion to him, and so clearly something different from what happens with some other created species no matter how much it might occur to a son of Adam or a daughter of Eve that the two sexes had different natures. We can see this more clearly if we consider the type of literary undertaking the story of the Garden of Eden is.
Read MorePresidential reality is even better than the very good fictionalized one.
Writers have always known that pomp and ceremony and court intrigue are sure fire winners. There was King Priam of Troy and King David of Israel and all those Shakespeare Plantagenets and assorted other princes, like Hamlet. In modern dress are “Dune” and “The Crown”, “Game of Thrones” and, my favorite, “The West Wing”. What they all have in common is that accomplished people in comfortable settings get to be punctilious in their decorum until those are interrupted and maneuver with high degrees of cleverness to achieve their high or dastardly ends. It is true that the residents of those worlds face tragedy and defeat but it is fun to think for a while to be involved in such elevated things. These are phantasies while ordinary life is for plumbers and dentists. Oh, if I were that clever and so cozened in materiality and did something important while strutting on the stage! “The West Wing”, complete with highlights and sadness, has a very vivid sense of the majesty of surrounding the office of President because so many of the writers and advisors were people who had worked in the Clinton White House or with near adjacent Presidents and knew how it worked and so provided a somewhat realistic view of very high office even if I still think dubious that people in the West Wing bustle about quite so quickly. Let us just write that off as an image of just how harried and overwhelmed people in the West Wing would be about their responsibilities.
Read MoreWhen does simplifying art make it simplistic?
Popular art simplifies art as when, in musical comedy, a look and a sneer in “Kiss Me Kate” shows that the lady lead is jealous of her ex husband’s new love. Irving Thalberg, an executive at MGM in the Thirties, said you didn’t need twenty pages of dialogue to explain that a husband and wife were on the outs. Just have her give her husband a dirty look when he notices a pretty girl getting off an elevator. High art, on the other hand, explains just how complicated are relationships as we slowly unpack the motives of the great Gatsby. Great art can do both. Shakespeare allows the playgoer to see that Beatrice and Benedict are so preoccupied with one another engaging in their banterring that they are candidates for love. Jane Austen presents Mr. Knightley was so attentive to Emma, the daughter of his friend, though it takes a while for the reader and Emma to realize that he cared for her for a long time. Picasso also uses simple lines to make objects fresh and reimagined, as in strokes that make a bull come to life or van Ruisdael, in “Dunes”, freshly see what a rise from a seashore looks like even if seeing only a very small amount of the view.
Read MoreRomance, I think, is bursting out all over, but people disagree.
Here is a three net tennis match about a well discussed topic in literary history which I think unfolds an even deeper three part argument or presumption about social structure. The topic is the status of romantic love as it has altered or not altered across the ages. The contributors are my daughter in law Maria, who is a trained classicist and seems to have read everything; my close friend Roland, who has esoteric views about sociology, in which he was also well trained, but has standard view on literature, one of his major interests; and myself, also a trained sociologist with a literary flair, who is politically adventurous only in thinking that Joe Biden was the second coming of FDR, while having views on romantic love which seem rather radical even though I thought my own view was the usual one.
Read MoreLife, like show business, puts you in the spotlight before making you miserable.
It is easy enough to think why the Mozart-Da Ponte triptych should be included in the Western literary canon because the three operas expand the consciousness so as to include women. “Don Giovani” shows that women are not to be trifled with; “The Marriage of Figaro” shows that other than aristocrats can create an independent family; “Cosi Fan Tutte” shows that women are onto men even if they do not admit it. It is harder, however, to include any American musical comedies into the canon because the plots are so mannered, so artificial, and so without depth or resonance despite the attractive tunes. “Pal Joey” and “Cabaret” are too pointedly cynical while “Fiddler on the Roof” and Rodgers and Hammerstein are too sentimental to meet literary muster even if Billy Wilder does turn the trick even if he is cynical because he adds suspense to “Double Indemnity”, poignancy to “Ace in the Hole” and vaudeville slapstick to “Some Like It Hot”.
A candidate for entering the literary-cultural canon is “Showboat”, the Kern, Hammerstein and Ferber collaboration, which was introduced in the Twenties and was radical at the time because the play was sympathetic to miscegenation and treating blacks as fully formed figures while Jim Crow was at its height. There are artistic shortcomings in the musical comedy. That include lyrics that don’t fit the metrical line and a telegraphed plot line in that riverboat gamblers are not likely to be trusty breadwinners whatever their charm and personal rectitude. But the themes of the show, which go beyond the political to the existential, are strong enough to give the world it creates plausible, ingratiating and even deep. The only comparison worth considering is Lerner and Lowe’s “My Fair Lady” which owes so much to the today underappreciated George Bernard Shaw who also offered a way of life, the Edwardian aristocracy and its low class counterparts, flower girls and shiftless cockneys, as well as distinguishable characters and a political agenda for female emancipation that goes to the heart of male-female relationships, still not fully plumbed a century after Shaw and a half century after Lerner and Lowe.
Read More Taste is constrained by circumstance and character.
Taste, as in food or music, is regarded as a personal preference that is inconsequential, but that judgment should not be extended to politics or literature, where people are said to be arbitrary or idiosyncratic but where these judgments are not merely consequential but also matters of character.
Begin with the superficial aren of taste. People like the food they grow up with and therefore often seen as comfort foods or throwbacks to their roots. So I like tongue and Reuben sandwiches because my mother was more or less kosher and some people identify the Italian culture with red sauce pasta rather than Michaelangelo or Dante. My children all knew how to use chopsticks because their family and the families around them frequented Chinese restaurants So food tastes are deeply set, people appalled at being exposed to unfamiliar foods, even though, Levi Strauss’s claim otherwise. In my view, taste is a matter of circumstance and history, however deeply set, and does not they do not convey meaning from or for a food taste. It doesn’t explain a person’s character because they prefer rare to well done steak even if someone can speculate that those who prefer the well done are repressed or that those who eat raw shellfish are more open minded.
Read MoreStories are not declarations.
What is a story? It is different from narrative, which is the telling of any sequence of events, as happens in a chronicle of kings with some anecdotes about them added. A story is more sophisticated than that, providing irony and closure. And yet, a story is presumably as old as the time people began to speak, telling stories in caves or around campfires that projected into the future how to kill an animal or recalled from the past how an animal was killed. Story is therefore an elemental aspect of human consciousness, a construction of consciousness, just as straight lines are also human artifacts, things out of consciousness rather than from nature. But a theory of straight lines has been available since Euclid while the nature of story is not well elaborated.
Read MoreTerror is the temper of our century in public affairs and in literature.
The Twenty first Century is only a quarter over and so it might seem too early to assess the temper of the times for the century. But a quarter into the cavalcade of centuries has already set its defining emotions. The Seventeenth Century started with the tragic mode of Shakespeare and Webster, as that was continued later in the century with Racine and Pascal. The Eighteenth Century abruptly changed to the comedy of Pope who shared a sense of humans as all too human and therefore comic as continued later in the century by Hume and Locke, who thought people to be reasonable and accommodating. “Gulliver’s Travels“ is, after all, a satire in that it exaggerated features to comic extreme, as by making British royalty into Lilliputians, even if the book presents, as a whole, a very tragic view of the human condition. The book was published in 1726, just a year past the quarter century mark. The Nineteenth Century of Romanticism and melodrama was set early with Wordsworth and Coleridge in their “Lyrical Ballads' in 1798 and Jane Austen’s inquiry into all the conflicting and well articulated motives was over by the quarter century mark, however well developed by Dickens later on in the century to high melodrama, including the insufferably bathetic “A Christmas Carol''. Darwin emerged much later in his century but the writers he combined, Malthus and Lyll, of his “Geology”, had been there at the beginning of theNineteenth Century. Modernist greats such as Picasso and Joyce and Kafka and Freud appeared in the early Twentieth Century and so it is possible to see already the strictures and the impulses of that. The epic literature of that century largely preceded the epic warfare of the century: the two world wars and the Cold War.
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Fascism can be attractive.
A golden age of science fiction took place between the late Forties and the Seventies when the new technologies that made readers think they were in the future were atomic weapons and spaceships where everyone could jaunt to strange places and alien civilizations distant and isolated from one another just as had been the case when Gulliver could get on ship and also visit very different kinds of societies and apply an anthropological eye. That period had not yet invented computers and a previous period in “Brave New World”, from the Thirties, had invented test tube babies and mood altering drugs, and the Thirties and before had envisioned a war made destruction of civilization, though the image of plagues were as old as “Exodus” and as current as Poe. Moreover, the post WWII science fiction age carefully distinguished between science fiction, as driven by technology, from science fantasy, which was driven by medievalist sentiments concerning fairies and goblins, that best represented in Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” where the aliens are ghostly specters surrounding the Earth visitors who have colonized Mars.
Read MoreStories precede doctrine.
Many descriptions in literature about kinds of social reality can be confirmed with evidence independent of the literature. You know that the parapet constructed in York, England in the Victorian Era and described by Wilkie Collins in “No Name” could be confirmed from maps of the time and local histories. How Parliamentary politics operated in the late Victorian Era as that was described in Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda” could be verified in newspapers and memoirs. The ideas and emotions of Naziism as presented in Mann’s “Dr. Faustus'' could be buttressed by reading books about Hitler. But here is another species of social reality that cannot be accessed by anything other than through literature and that is what is properly called the spirit of the age, which is the pervasive, encompassing sentiments that underskirt what is happening in a culture. Some commentators make a try at capturing that, as happens when Jimmy Carter made a speech about how America was undergoing a period of malaise, and David Riesman’s “The Lonely Crowd” got it wrong that Americans were fighting conformity when they were embracing it. Literature provides the true compass if you just jiggle it.
Read MoreIs “NYPD Blue” art or just entertainment?
Return to this long standing issue of mine as to the difference between art and entertainment. Literature that is artistic in its product whatever its intent presents itself as a self contained fictional sphere which can be found to be coherent and vivid when it deploys plot, imagery, characterization and those other elements of story. You know “Hamlet” is art because you care about penetrating Hamlet’s character as he resides in the very credible atmosphere of Denmark. Literature can be found in the canon of work from the Iliad to Thomas Mann that are assigned to students, recent works not yet judged to have met that standard, though I think Ishiguro is probably a worthy advocate who has not yet been anointed at a Cooperstown because anointing a member of the canon is a matter of critical consensus rather than even having won a Nobel Prize in literature, which was awarded to Ishiguru.. Some contestants, over time, fade in their grasp of having created an artful sphere of their own, and that is true with Steinbeck and O’Hara. We can think of those two and others as falling just short of making literature however commendable were their efforts. The question is what are the qualities of the literature itself that commend a work to be considered literature rather than an entertainment which provides a passtime for engaging a reverie, like most westerns or mysteries, these using the devices of literature but not accomplished enough for a reader to become resident in its work. Critics discuss whether some writers have come close but not quite there, as is the case with Conan Doyle or Mrs. Gaitskill, honorable attempts at literature, and even praise Agatha Christie for her plotting while admitting weaknesses in characterization that limit a reader’s full emotional and intellectual involvement. My own purpose is to find the qualities that make a work literature or not rather than think approbation a matter of taste or a reflection from outside the work, such as the social background of the reader that make a reader like rural or urban settings. Literature is to be treated as an objective matter rather than a matter of taste, the experience of art an exquisite accomplishment of the spirit rather than a bauble to be put in a china shop so as to remind people of what is already familiar.
Read MoreCultural tastes are more ingrained than social class.
The “Partisan Review” crowd of the Forties through the Seventies, had a very clear sense of how culture and society interacted with one another and was best stated abstractly by Dwight Macdonald in an article and then a book published in 1960, called “MassCult and MidCult”. That view could be considered a rejoinder to the Cultural Marxism which vied during the same time with a key and distinctive understanding of how culture and society interacted. Cultural Marxism was an intellectually heavier point of view and was a response to the fact that economic Marxism had not accurately predicted the eventual immiseration of the working class so that they would overthrow capitalism either through Leninist violence or Bernstein-like use of the democratic ballot box. To the contrary, economic capitalism flourished. The Fifties were an affluent society and labor unrest turned to detailed collective bargaining arrangements about wages and perquisites where both sides wanted to make a deal so the corporations could get on selling their cars and workers could get their raises and benefits, never mind whether the work itself was arduous or mind numbing. The cultural Marxists insisted, however, that there was a price for economic prosperity. It was that people were spiritually impoverished by late stage capitalism. The population as a whole was subject to alienation in that their work and their selves were lost to meaning and that the mind itself had lost the ability to engage in reasoning, that meaning, as Horkheimer put it, in the title of his book “The Eclipse of Reason'' whereby people became mindless automatons, society not run by selfish capitalists, but going on its way on its own, a totalitarian society without a Fuhrer. The best statement of this view on the American scene was Herbet Marcuse’s “One Dimensional Man”, published in 1964, which portrayed Americans of all classes, including the capitalists, obsessed with capitalist fetishism, buying until it hurt, with deodorants and slightly more upscale cars as fueled by tv and radio jingles so inane as to dumb down the populace.
Read MoreBreaking news doesn’t tell the whole story.
There have been flashpoints in the last seventy-two hours that suggest something important is happening in some of the ongoing issues of our times that make them part of the temper of our times: the legal issues about whether Donald Trump had tried to overthrow a presidential election, an issue only some three years old but destined to remain with us historically; the issue of the Israel Hamas War, which goes back to the creation of Israel since 1948 or if one cares to ever since Jews have been an irritant to others, which goes back for thousands of years; and the issue of American border immigration, which go back to the 1850’s when the Know Nothing Party originated in its rejection of Irish Immigration. The first two flashpoints do not upon analysis as being of significant importance and it is uncertain whether the third will be, which suggests that flashpoints don’t tell what is really going on, They are driven instead by the need for breaking news to fill up media hours rather than the contexts which explain the ongoing issues. Yes, the times are full of issues but the abundance of flashpoints is just the fluff to fill airtime.
Read More Daydreams are structued as stories.
Imagining oneself as having another life, different from the one you have lived, is one version of a daydream, and there are other kinds of daydreams that will be referred to later. What happens in that particular daydream, let us say in Boise, Idaho or Lincoln, Nebraska, is that a person imagines how he or she took one or more forks in the road and so came to live in a different place or time, a satisfying conjecture given the pleasures of time travel romances and disasters, people finding love in another age, or fining the world on the other side of apocalypse, both of them the case in the granddaddy of the literary version of the genre, E. G. Wells’ “The Time Machine”. The thing about daydreams is that they are not random thoughts but are stories, filled with incidents and described situations and even dialogue, and so are subject to the restraints of stories and so not to be dismissed as mere reveries.
Read MoreHow both parents and the times make you what you are.
Formalism is the view of aesthetics that only the dynamics of the artwork or the text is to be consulted in garnering what the artwork or text means regardless of the biography or circumstances of the artwork or text. What is important is the work itself and anything else is either unimportant or a mere adjunct of or an inconclusive hunch about the work itself, as when Jane Austen said that she was going to create a heroine in “Emma” who was unappealing. The novel itself shows that whatever Austen meant to do was not necessarily what she did do. She might have gotten her conception of her own character wrong, as happened, critics generally agree, when Shylock got away from Shakespeare and became more trod upon than Shakespeare had originally thought him to be. A work is itself superior to the intentions of the work. This is a very radical view of art and literature in that it applies high standards, gleaming meaning from the work rather than from the commentaries written about it. That puts Dante’s “Divine Comedy” as inferior to, let us say, “Henry V” because Dante’s stories can’t be understood without the footnotes, however succinct and profound is his poetry, while “Henry V” makes sense in itself, the machinations of international relations, whether or not the play is accurate to its time and is not foreshadows the fact, after all, that Henry V died soon afterwards and did not take over France for very long. Very different from commentaries are T. S. Eliot’s footnotes in “The Wasteland”, which are part of the text and so allow a reader to wonder what Eliot was doing with poetry by including footnotes. Is a text restrained or expanded as poetry by including within it its own footnotes?
Read MoreI have a liking for the long form in television ever since I saw the twenty six half hour episodes of “Victory at Sea” in the Fifties, the bass narrator and the Richard Rodgers score accompanying the film record of naval battles in both the Pacific and Atlantic theaters. Although the sitcom was a weekly half hour episode, you could think of it as also a miniseries in that it was a set of seasons, five to seven years long, from “All in the Family” to “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” to “Cheers” and “Friends” and “Seinfeld”, all of which exhausted their possibilities by the time the series ended. There was nothing else to say. I felt the same of “The West Wing”, which follows an administration something akin to reality, or at least a Liberal version of one, until a successor President comes into office, predicting it would be a minority President before Obama became one. And I was struck by the miniseries “Band of Brothers” which followed the 82nd Airborne Division from the training for D Day to past the end of the war while the heroes were still in Europe, the story having rightly ended in that what happened to these heroes in the Fifties and afterwards was irrelevant. “The Best Years of Our Lives” was a different story. And so I am not surprised that television dramas also take the long form, particularly the HBO miniseries “The Queen’s Gambit”, which uses seven hour long episodes to tell its story and which I have seen through for three times, just as I have seen the run of “The West Wing” three times. The long form was invented by Charles Dickens who allowed himself digressions to side characters and subplots whatever the main matter of the story was whatever the coincidences required to tie these together so as to provide the full amplitude of life while Jane Austen was based on expanding the form of a play and, even further back, Fielding was posing as a mock epic to structure “Tom Jones”, itself a mighty saga filled with outrage and uncertainty. And so I come to “The Queen’s Gambit” not quite that glorious but a very successful bildungsroman worthy of Dickens, which is no faint praise indeed.
Read MoreSome figures in literature are evocative. That means the figures are placed in a situation and then come into their own kind of existence and will do what they will, whether by their natures or their preferences, making their impressions on their worlds and it is up to the reader or the audience or the viewer to make some sense of them, to appreciate them or to blame or praise them, though only rarely to do what Aristotle said happens in tragedy, which is to go beyond praise or blame and just achieve an acceptance of what is. Then there is no longer a need either to bemoan or praise characters. Audiences do not need to admire or hate Oedipus. He is what he is, as are the rest of us. Such figures are given to us and we tussle with them. A literature that goes beyond morality is very liberating because it opens possibilities to consider how people have been willed into being and how strange is human existence.
Then there is a very different kind of existence for literary figures. They are the ones who as characters legitimize a kind of person rather than exist only as trends or other social facts. They become part of the world order even if they had never existed as such before. These might seem lesser figures because they may seem not to stride so strongly on the stage, but they are the ones to which their creators demand, as Linda Loman says in “The Death of a Salesman”, people should be paid attention. That is very different from Greek drama and it becomes central, I think, in Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale”, where a creature lacking in nobility or dignity, is raised into importance through the craft of the author , however much that narrator is ironic about heroic pretensions. Take heroes with a grain of salt but they are nonetheless heroes who imprint themselves, and the Wife of Bath is memorable because she is shown as having the different motives and circumstances of women in the stages of life. She is now a type of life, however mundane her concerns are, and so is also elaborated into being like a creature in a tragic life, part of the texture of the social universe, a singular thing and so also beyond morality.
Read MoreThat high culture and popular culture go past one another is a phenomenon that arrived with Modernism, meaning Joyce and Kafka and maybe Mann, who is straightforward in style but difficult in that he is highly philosophical. Remember that this division was not clear in Browning who had clubs devoted to the reading of the author by their middle class followers. I suggest that the addition of silent movies as they supplemented vaudeville provided popular culture alongside the new high culture. How was this divide to be overcome? It was not done in the Forties even though late Faulkner and Hemingway were published in popular magazines, culminating in Life Magazine in 1952 publishing “The Old Man and the Sea”, which strikes me as a parody of Hemingway rather than the real thing. Nor was it in movies that tried to be high class by having Katheryn Grayson singing what was called at the time “light classical” or Disney versions of high music in “Fantasia”or a biopic about George Gershwin. The real adaptation took place in the Fifties when literature in both high and popular culture engaged in modifying presentations that were tragic in themes but with ordinary or even working class people and so engaging the audience rather than having to confront the lofty people like Oedipus who do disgusting things and with whom one cannot engage the sympathies of those lofty people.
Read MoreWillam Hazlitt was a literary critic who published his book, “The Spirit of the Age”, in 1825 and in doing so started out a new method of investigation that remains available and practiced up to and including in our own time. Hazlitt said that an examination of the literary and philosophical works of the elite could tell what was going on with English society. The elite are tied to the general culture. The idea that there is a general culture was elaborated a generation later by Macaulay, and Samuel Johnson, writing a few generations before Hazlitt, had separated his criticism from his essays about the state of English society. I am particularly struck by Hazlitt’s vivid and accurate essays on Bentham and Coleridge. Bentham simplified life and morality to calculating benefits to be derived from pleasure and forgetting everything else, like obedience or moral obligation, reducing life to quantums of pleasure though never presenting a metric for it, though he left himself an out by considering “satisfaction” as a pleasure and that lets in treating honor or justice as that even if that involves pain. Coleridge, on the other hand, was a quasi-mystical medievalist committed to the sense that society was organic and complicated and that, as Pascal said, the heart has its reasons. But both views, Bentham’s late Enlightenment and Coleridge’s Romanticism, were both strands in the early nineteenth century English experience each to be savored and evaluated by the reader.
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