Reading, Part I: Literature

It's amazing how much of a luxury real literature becomes when the bulk of one's reading is confined to The News and various articles of political analysis. Certainly not all of these are abysmal from a literary perspective; the latter genre tends to be by far the better of the two, with writers like Walter Russel Mead, Peter Berger, David Brooks, and Charles Krauthammer furnishing consistently readable columns for the more grammatically snobby among us.

However, it's beyond refreshing to be getting back into (English language) literature mode of late. (There's been plenty of French literature, which is fun in its own right: my current read in that language is Monsieur Larose, est-il l'assassin, a wonderfully vocabulary-and-slang rich psychological parody of the detective novel by one of Belgium's greats, Fernand Crommelynck.) Of course, getting back into the English stuff has required that I reconcile myself with the (rather abhorrent)  idea of "reading books online." I'm not a fan for several reasons, not restricted to my Bourgeois bias in favor of the smell of paper and the palpable roughness of its surface (I tell you, it makes a difference, seeing the way the ink has sunk into the slightly porous pages, rendering the letters coarser, individualizing them in a way you don't get onscreen). Reading something on a laptop also  a.) restricts your movement to places with an (accessible) wireless connection, b.) kind of wears on your eyes after a while, and c.) makes the reading feel cursory. However, it's not like there are English used-book stores everywhere around here, and I'm not about to buy any book that I don't love for full price at one of the many Barnes and Nobles-like establishments in the city. Admittedly, "not everywhere" and "unavailable" are two very different things: I could find the used English books if I wanted to, but motivation is lacking, since I then face the problem of transporting them back to the States.

Fortunately, I did bring one American novel, Saul Bellow's The Victim, along with me; I've been hoarding it up for the "ideal moment" as stingily as I used to hoard up Easter candy as a child. With the end of the semester now in sight, I've begun it, but am still reading it very slowly, preferring to savor it in the park during those rare afternoons when it is actually not raining. It's a good book so far, though I'm loathe to judge before having finished the story. The writing, at any rate, is elegant--simple in the best of senses, and adept at conveying and making realistic an emotional state (chez the main character) that could be easily overwrought or absurd. The violence of the "antagonist's" emotion and the sense of self-disgust that begins to pervade the protagonist's  mindset about halfway through the novel reminds me a lot of Dostoevsky. In fact, I'd have to say it's one of the most thoroughly Dostoevskian post-Dostoevsky works I've encountered. The notable difference here is that the most "Dostoevskian" character is in fact not the protagonist, but someone who's set himself up to work on the protagonist and force the poor guy to share (penitentially, as it were) in his own sentiments of self-loathing.

My more recent online reading (after an excellent short story by Edith Pearlman, available at Commentary magazine) has been Kate Chopin's Awakening. Once again, I'm only about halfway through and thus unable to comment on the story itself. The writing, however, is lovely; not quite Virginia Woolf lovely, but certainly lovely enough to lure the reader into the romanticism of Old Louisiana even as the plot remains somewhat critically aloof of the society it describes. Should be interesting to see how it concludes.

Apropos of little, I've also been reading a lot of Foucault and Hume lately. Mostly for my own "edification" (if one can say "edifying" of either one with a straight face--I am doubtful). Hume I'm rereading mostly out of interest (causality is a continually fascinating topic). However, Foucault's discussions of the discourse of power inherent in any formulation of history and of the way that history itself shapes notions of ethics is certainly relevant to my studies regarding the development of national identities and nationalism (and the ways the different historical circumstances of the Middle East makes certain presuppositions about those societies frankly absurd).

From whence we draw our inspiration...

In this case from my sister's latest trip "to the lighthouse". I was rereading the book by bits and reveling in Woolf's exquisite prose (which stands in first place in my admittedly subjective aesthetic system). This bit is one of my favorites--though as soon as I say that I remember four or five other passages that deserve the distinction just as much. When one begins to quote Woolf, it's difficult indeed to stop. I think what I admire so much about her style is how very intertwined each passage of a novel is with the others. The rhythmic repetition of ideas and phrases throughout doesn't leave me bored, but fascinated, as though I'm watching a weaver at work creating a tapestry--less like the Bayeux tapestry than like a Persian rug in which the same theme is elaborated until any "perceived" is an organic emanation from the picture as a whole. Perhaps that's an excessively complicated way of saying that while you can take a chapter from, say, Jane Austen, and read it as it's own sub-narrative, almost every moment in TTL depends on all the others.

Yes, yes, all moments in a good novel depend on the whole for their full explication, and one can admittedly isolate narrative moments from the rest of a Woolf novel. The distinction is meant to mark tendencies; if the difference were as extreme as the rough Bayeux-Persian analogy, I'd find it difficult to even call Woolf's work "novels".

In any case, here's the quote, and if you go look it up in the book (third section of part II), you'll see what I mean by hating to have to stop here. In itself it's a highly poetic expression of the "modernist dilemma," and you can see from this some indication of Woolf's skill as an essayist. But it's rather unsatisfying on its own; it's a moment that deserves its context, so to speak. I've left out the only narrative moment of the third section, incidentally, which is very short in comparison to the rest, although a huge spoiler, if you care about that sort of thing. Again, read it in context though; that narrative moment makes all the difference.

But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore.

It seemed now as if, touched by human penitence and all its toil, divine goodness had parted the curtain and displayed behind it, single, distinct, the hare erect; the wave falling; the boat rocking; which, did we deserve them, should be ours always. But alas, divine goodness, twitching the cord, draws the curtain; it does not please him; he covers his treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them, so confuses them that it seems impossible that their calm should ever return or that we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth. For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only.

The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths. Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul. The hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in his ear. Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer.

[I should hope, incidentally, that anyone reading this would catch the Matthew Arnold reference. If you don't immediately see what I mean, please refer to "Dover Beach" for your own good.]

Peter Walsh

Because I sadly won't be able to talk about this rather excellent character in my final essay. Time constraints in the presentation and all that.

Of the novel's central figures, Peter Walsh is the most directly related to Clarissa herself; he is in fact one of her former suitors, and has essentially wasted his life in a restless quest to recover in other women what he lost through her rejection. He is treated with a good deal more sympathy than the narrative is willing to grant Bradshaw, yet in some senses, he is the physician's most obvious counterpart,with his attitude similar in kind, if not in degree, to his. He is to Clarissa, “dear Peter,” and to the reader he is a man whose honesty regarding his own weaknesses—women and sentimentality—makes him a rather charming figure. All the same, he has several unsettling habits—such as that of stalking women down city streets. Admittedly he does this with no harmful intent. Upon noting that the unknown young woman passing him by is “extraordinarily attractive,” he casually pursues down the street, and pursues her mentally by filling out an imaginative picture of her (210). The picture is harmless enough: he simply imagines that he might invite her to “come and have an ice,” that she would answer, “perfectly simply, Oh yes” (211). Yet though his physical pursuit comes to an uneventful end when she opens the door of her lodgings and walks in, his mental pursuit locks her into an ideal that exists entirely within his own imagination. He conceives of himself as a “romantic buccaneer”; yet his adventure is only this banal response to experience that attempts to capture it in his imagination and to redefine it in terms that he has preordained: “young, but stately; merry, but discreet; black, but enchanting” (211).

A bit of Bradshawian aggression though this may seem, Peter's project ends up being harmless, and within the next four paragraphs Peter dismisses it as a bit of “fun.” “One makes up the better part of life, he [thinks]. . .creating an exquisite amusement” from experience, but nothing more (212). Something compels him to realize the insufficiency of this self-imposing approach to the world, and one is led to believe that this may be in part due to Clarissa herself; she interrupts his thoughts here with her injunction to “remember my party” (212), and dominates his consciousness throughout the novel. He is inclined to pursue and to layer his ideal order over the independent nature of those outside him; he is disposed to make them, at least as they appear to his consciousness, dependent on him for their definition. Yet his love for Clarissa, we sense, has raised the bar for this ideal too high. This girl is not Clarissa. Neither is his first, hastily-married wife. Even Daisy, his object of infatuation at the time this story takes place, fades into the background when he returns from India to Clarissa's London. “All this [making things up] one could never share,” he realizes (212). Clarissa's independent existence constantly returns to “smash to atoms” every attempt to concoct an artificial order out of the elements of experience (212).

Peter is not, however, simply a threat rendered harmless by the tempering effect of his memory of Clarissa. By the end of the novel he has become a visionary who, in sharp contrast to both Septimus and Bradshaw, affirms being-as-it-is. The moment when the threat of his potential destructiveness finally disappears is that when he is able to open himself up to enjoyment of life as it is, not as he would like it to be. He is at last able to let go of his pain at Clarissa's rejection and to accept her—and by extension her husband and way of life—as she is: by the end his life has been justified through this reorientation of perspective as one truly worth living despite his failures as an Indian official or in romance. Towards the end of the climactic party, a brief interaction between Peter and his old friend, Sally Seton, highlights the change that has occurred in his disposition that allows him these visionary moments. “Living in the world as she did,” the narrative comments, Sally “had an insatiable curiosity to know who people were”; accordingly she glances around the room, analyzing and caricaturing in a manner reminiscent of Peter's earlier aggressive categorization of people within his own subjective schema. “Clarissa was at heart a snob,” she judges, and then pronounces with assurance that “Clarissa had cared for [Peter] more than she had ever cared for Richard” (337, 339). In his earlier visit, Peter had similarly found that Clarissa “talked nonsense”and that she and her husband led a banal existence centered around “the most appalling bores in Europe”; moreover, the “truth” as he then saw it was indeed that “now [Clarissa] was in love with him” (235, 235). Yet now he admits in response to Sally's declarations that “he had not found life simple” (338). Richard Dalloway may indeed come off as a dull fellow, but Peter can now see more in him: the man who has just too little cleverness to quite make it to the Cabinet now “seem[s] to [Peter] the best,. . .the most disinterested” of men, and he chides Sally for claiming that Clarissa preferred Peter Walsh to such a figure (339). Throughout the passage he acknowledges alternatives to his earlier preconceptions and moves away from envisioning the world entirely in terms of his rejected love for Clarissa.

It is true that at the close of this exchange, Peter returns to asserting that “we know everything. . .at least, he did” (339). But this assertion now appears within the context of Sally's “despairing of human relationships”; her idea that life is just a process of “scratch[ing] on the wall of [one's] cell” in continually ineffective attempts to communicate, is one that Clarissa had long ago left behind and that Peter is now abandoning as well. “It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people” (302). “But,” they discover, if one sort of knowledge is impossible, another is. You cannot simply fit a person into a definition. What you can know, not rationally, but experientially, is “the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, [which] might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that” (302-3). Thinking back on this conversation, Peter has a revelation: this is precisely the sort of knowledge he has of Clarissa. “You were given,” he muses, “a sharp, acute, uncomfortable grain—the actual meeting. . .yet in absence, in the most unlikely places, it would flower out, open, shed its scent, let you touch, taste, look about you, get the whole feel and understanding” (303). Peter's idealism has not died out: he still looks to Clarissa as an ideal by which he can “understand” life, but this is no longer an ideal limited by his past disappointment and imposed upon others. Only when his impulse to pursue and promulgate his vision of “order” has been tempered with the receptivity necessary to respect the inviolability of the individual other is he prepared for the final vision of the novel: “It is Clarissa, he said. For there she was” (341).

Part Three: Faulkner

Despite the vast differences between their narrative styles, both Austen and Flaubert seek to understand an individual through externals. Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, by contrast, uses a variety of first-person narrators to give the reader direct access to individual consciousnesses: these consciousnesses, then, become the defining aspect of each character. Within the framework established by a controlling, selecting “narrative consciousness” are fifteen different accounts of the novel's action, each given by a secondary narrator with his or her own understanding of reality. The portion that Addie Bundren narrates from her coffin is strikingly different in focus from Cora Tull’s hypocritically religious interpretation of events or Anse’s unthinkingly self-centered understanding. Whereas the rest of the characters address and interpret the action and events of the novel directly, she explains the journey to the cemetery in Jefferson in terms of the deep, underlying motivations that led her to request this burial in the first place. The following passage is taken from her account of her early marriage to Anse, just after the birth of her first-born, Cash. Central to the paragraph is her preoccupation with the randomness and insecurity of language, a preoccupation that directs the course of her gradual withdrawal from husband and children into what she attempts to make a world of pure act, unmediated by the forms and words that seem to her to betray the truth of experience.

“He had a word, too. Love, he called it. But I had been used to words for a long time. I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack; that when the right time came, you wouldn’t need a word for that anymore than for pride or fear. Cash did not need to say it to me nor I to him, and I would say, Let Anse use it, if he wants to. So that it was Anse or love; love or Anse: it didn’t matter.” (164)

The narrative consciousness that frames Addie’s account preserves the idiosyncrasies of her stream-of-consciousness, to the point of using punctuation less in a conventional manner to separate discreet portions of dialogue (as an Austen would do) than in a manner that reflects the pauses and progressions of the experienced thought process. Commas mark mental pauses rather than grammatical units, and quotations are incorporated into Addie’s thought without the distinguishing quotation mark to set them off from her consciousness. This technique allows the reader, even as Addie explains her suspicion of language, to garner much additional information about her personality and character simply through the way in which this argument is presented.

The triad of short, dismissive sentences with which she commences indicates the skepticism that controls the paragraph; yet these abrupt dismissals of Anse’s “word” contrast with the complexity of structure and length at which she recounts her own visceral rejection of Anse’s perspective. She is either unwilling or unable (likely both) to examine the nuances of his consciousness, and will thus retain hers as the measure of everything she confronts. The anadiplosis and repetition of structures (I knew that. . ., that) also leads us to a sense of her everywhere-apparent intensity. She rejects Anse’s words out of hand and elsewhere rejects the verbal even violently, because she feels strongly about the insufficiency of this mode of understanding. Words cannot bring about the mingling of blood that she longs for as a means of defeating her isolation; Cash, as the fruit of her womb, is the only creature, at this point, she believes, to have “violated” her aloneness, and he correspondingly does not need words to communicate with her. One cannot truly, she argues, “fill a lack” satisfactorily with a “shape”; she has found this to be consistently the case in her experience, pointing to “the others” that have also failed to be of any use at “the right time”.

By the time we reach the end of the paragraph, the narrative consciousness has made clear precisely how Addie's rant about language relates, not merely to her personality and ideas, but to the plot unfolding as she speaks. Not only are words useless to convey meaning; Anse also is meaningless to her. His name can be interchanged with no alteration of what is being said with the “empty” term, “love”: despite being her husband, he too has failed to fill the lack, to connect blood with blood in the manner that she feels necessary. This point is crucial to her motivation for demanding the trip to Jefferson. Anse and love both are things that to her “d[on’t] matter,” and by the time she has had her affair with Whitfield she has similarly rejected both Cash and Darl, thinking them away so that “it doesn’t matter what they call” these two sons either. All that is left to her now as the root of her identity is the blood of her forbears in the soil in Jefferson; the family that she has acquired through ritual and verbal assent has no meaning for her. She demands the trip as “revenge” for being tricked by “words older than love or Anse”; her revenge is to get the better of this deception at Anse’s expense, to affirm the meaning of her roots above the meaning of the new life she rejects even as she participates in it.

From Irish Fairy Tales, by James Stephens: A Tale of Fionn Maccumail

All desires save one are fleeting, but that one lasts for ever. Fionn, with all desires, had the lasting one, for he would go anywhere and forsake anything for wisdom; and it was in search of this that he went to the place where Finegas lived on a bank of the Boyne Water. But for dread of the clann-Morna he did not go as Fionn. He called himself Deimne on that journey.

We get wise by asking questions, and even if these are not answered we get wise, for a well-packed question carries its answer on its back as a snail carries its shell. Fionn asked every question he could think of, and his master, who was a poet, and so an honourable man, answered them all, not to the limit of his patience, for it was limitless, but to the limit of his ability.

"Why do you live on the bank of a river?" was one of these questions. "Because a poem is a revelation, and it is by the brink of running water that poetry is revealed to the mind."

"How long have you been here?" was the next query. "Seven years," the poet answered.

"It is a long time," said wondering Fionn.

"I would wait twice as long for a poem," said the inveterate bard.

"Have you caught good poems?" Fionn asked him.

"The poems I am fit for," said the mild master. "No person can get more than that, for a man's readiness is his limit."

"Would you have got as good poems by the Shannon or the Suir or by sweet Ana Life'?"

"They are good rivers," was the answer. "They all belong to good gods."

"But why did you choose this river out of all the rivers?"

Finegas beamed on his pupil.

"I would tell you anything," said he, "and I will tell you that."

Fionn sat at the kindly man's feet, his hands absent among tall grasses, and listening with all his ears. "A prophecy was made to me," Finegas began. "A man of knowledge foretold that I should catch the Salmon of Knowledge in the Boyne Water."

"And then?" said Fionn eagerly.

"Then I would have All Knowledge."

"And after that?" the boy insisted.

"What should there be after that?" the poet retorted.

"I mean, what would you do with All Knowledge?"

"A weighty question," said Finegas smilingly. "I could answer it if I had All Knowledge, but not until then. What would you do, my dear?"

"I would make a poem," Fionn cried.

"I think too," said the poet, "that that is what would be done."

In return for instruction Fionn had taken over the service of his master's hut, and as he went about the household duties, drawing the water, lighting the fire, and carrying rushes for the floor and the beds, he thought over all the poet had taught him, and his mind dwelt on the rules of metre, the cunningness of words, and the need for a clean, brave mind. But in his thousand thoughts he yet remembered the Salmon of Knowledge as eagerly as his master did. He already venerated Finegas for his great learning, his poetic skill, for an hundred reasons; but, looking on him as the ordained eater of the Salmon of Knowledge, he venerated him to the edge of measure. Indeed, he loved as well as venerated this master because of his unfailing kindness, his patience, his readiness to teach, and his skill in teaching.

"I have learned much from you, dear master," said Fionn gratefully.

"All that I have is yours if you can take it," the poet answered, "for you are entitled to all that you can take, but to no more than that. Take, so, with both hands."

"You may catch the salmon while I am with you," the hopeful boy mused. "Would not that be a great happening!" and he stared in ecstasy across the grass at those visions which a boy's mind knows.

"Let us pray for that," said Finegas fervently.

"Here is a question," Fionn continued. "How does this salmon get wisdom into his flesh?"

"There is a hazel bush overhanging a secret pool in a secret place. The Nuts of Knowledge drop from the Sacred Bush into the pool, and as they float, a salmon takes them in his mouth and eats them."

"It would be almost as easy," the boy submitted, "if one were to set on the track of the Sacred Hazel and eat the nuts straight from the bush."

"That would not be very easy," said the poet, "and yet it is not as easy as that, for the bush can only be found by its own knowledge, and that knowledge can only be got by eating the nuts, and the nuts can only be got by eating the salmon."

"We must wait for the salmon," said Fionn in a rage of resignation.

Part Two: Flaubert

Performance is central to Austen’s aesthetic, both technically and philosophically. Flaubert’s meticulously-crafted short story, “A Simple Heart,” is similarly concerned with exploring the relationship between external action and the essence of a person, but unlike Pride and Prejudice, this tale of a simple servant woman with an extraordinary capacity for love does not focus on the relationship of personality to character. Félicité is, rather, a woman in whom choice and disposition are so fully integrated that there is no tension between the consistently selfless actions she undertakes and the sentiment towards which she is disposed. As we see in the following passage, Flaubert’s objective, removed narrator focuses not on tensions within Félicité’s character, but on the external challenges that the continual stripping-away of all the objects of her affection presents to her outlook on the world.

“For two nights Félicité never left the dead girl. She said the same prayers over and over again, sprinkled holy water on the sheets, then sat down again to watch. At the end of her first vigil, she noticed that the child’s face had gone yellow, the lips were turning blue, the nose looked sharper, and the eyes were sunken. She kissed them several times, and would not have been particularly surprised if Virginie had opened them again: to minds like hers the supernatural is a simple matter. She laid her out, wrapped her in a shroud, put her in her coffin, placed a wreath on her, and spread out her hair. It was fair and amazingly long for her age. Félicité cut off a big lock, half of which she slipped into her bosom, resolving never to part with it.” (39-40)

The death of the beloved young girl is only one in the series of losses that forms the substance of the narrative. Whatever brings Félicité joy—the arrival of a long-lost sister, the visits of her nephew, Victor, or the parrot Loulou—is stripped away from her, either by others or by circumstance. Yet despite every trial her character remains constant in its uncomplaining fidelity. The narrative voice juxtaposes the fidelity of the vigil with detail upon detail of the corpse’s inexorable decay, yet despite this narrative objectivity, the analytical comment “to minds like hers the supernatural is simple matter” does not leave the reader unaffected. Despite its objectivity, this observation, paired with the relentless material realism used to describe the corpse, propels us towards Félicité in sympathy while leaving us astonished at the constancy inherent in her response. Her simple, repetitive action culminates when she cuts lock of the girl's hair, preserving the single part of the corpse that retains its former beauty. This impulse to continue the vigil long past its material extent leads her to memorialize her lost loved one: a movement that she undertakes again and again in the story. Whether collecting a lock of Virginie’s hair or preserving Loulou’s stuffed body, Félicité accumulates material objects as tiny memorials to fill the shabby little room that is all that is left to her by the end of her life. In committing them to her memory, Félicité maintains her loving vigil, while the narrator's focus on these external manifestations of her memorialization avoids the sentimentality that might mar the description. Félicité's character is untarnished by loss because she has preserved all that she loves within an interior that the vagaries of the material world cannot access. Just as the narrator can access Félicité’s interior self only through the image of the time-worn room filled with bric-a-brac, so the ravages of time can only affect the external beings that contribute to her happiness, without accessing the core of joy that remains within herself.

Austen's Performative Art

Part one of a series of readings of three different novels, examining a dichotomy between individual life and social life that is very much pertinent to my study of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

Pride and Prejudice is renowned for Austen's brilliant use of a satirical narrative voice, but equally brilliant is her use of dialogue to force the analytical narrator out of the spotlight and allow the interaction of one or more characters to stand on its own. The following exchange between Elizabeth and Darcy at the Netherfield ball is entirely performative, yet conveys a complete depiction of the dramatic tension of the novel, elsewhere explained by the narrator.

“Are you consulting your own feelings in the present case, or do you imagine that you are gratifying mine?”

“Both,” replied Elizabeth archly; “for I have always seen a great similarity in the turn of our minds. We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb.”

“This is no very striking resemblance of your own character, I am sure,” said he. “How near it may be to mine, I cannot pretend to say. You think it a faithful portrait undoubtedly.”

“I must not decide on my own performance.”

As in any well-crafted theatrical piece, Elizabeth's hostility to Darcy is here conveyed through phrasing and implication rather than through narrative comment, while Darcy's growing attraction is communicated through his even-tempered response. Darcy's ironic “imagine” conveys his still-lively pride (she is wrong, he believes), yet leaves open the possibility that Elizabeth's “mistakenness” is rooted in an honest desire to “gratify” his feelings. Elizabeth, meanwhile, by presenting her judgment as an observation on their “similarity,” cleverly manages to maintain basic courtesy while criticizing him severely. They are not really similar in this respect: no attentive reader would argue that Elizabeth is unsocial and taciturn. Darcy himself understands this clearly, and rejects it as “no very striking resemblance of [her] own character”; his earlier reluctance to take offense at Elizabeth, however, again leads him to assume that “[she] think[s] it a faithful portrait” of him.

Within these few lines, Austen is able to address in miniature one of central the ethical concerns of the novel. Whatever emotional tensions are at its root, the subject of the conversation is the relationship between character and personality as this relation affects the possibility of judging another. Darcy rightly cavils at Elizabeth's claim to know him well enough to paint a faithful portrait of him. Yet whereas Elizabeth speaks of “disposition,” a term referring to the sum of one's personal inclinations, Darcy insists on saying “character,” a term traditionally associated with the way conscious choice builds upon the foundation of innate personality. Elsewhere in the narrative, he admits Elizabeth's claim about his disposition: he does incline to being reserved around strangers. Yet despite using the term “disposition,” Elizabeth moves implicitly into a discussion of character, of what the person inclined to taciturnity will actually do in a social context, when she asserts that Darcy is “unwilling to speak, unless [he] say[s] something that will amaze the whole room.” Elizabeth's judgment is hasty of course: Darcy is not merely arrogant, and if he does at times act thus, he struggles against the tendency.

However, while Darcy urges a qualification to her claim, he feels that he “cannot pretend to say” whether it is an accurate description of his own character cannot without being just as arrogant as Elizabeth considers him. Ironically, Elizabeth's lighthearted reply that she is likewise unable to “decide on [her] own performance” reveals that her understanding of the extent self-knowledge is fundamentally similar to Darcy's. One can have an accurate idea of one's own disposition, but it is arrogant to assume perfect knowledge of one's character: the latter is a social fact, not the sole property of an individual. Correspondingly one may, if highly perceptive (like Elizabeth) have some idea of another's personality, but this idea must necessarily be extrapolated from the other's social presentation. Only when Elizabeth comes to a better understanding of Darcy's character will she understand that he is in disposition more than a taciturn, arrogant individual: he is kind and generous precisely because he has cultivated these elements of his disposition through his performance of good actions.

The Wanderer

One of two Anglo-Saxon poems that we had to know for our rather absurdly easy comps, "The Wanderer" has been one of my all-time favorite poems since I studied it in Medieval Lit a few years ago. An obvious reason for this affinity is its Tolkein-esque-ness (how's that for an agglutinative?). Thinking of this, and being lazy as usual (when it comes to this blog, at least), I thought I would post a brief quote and see if it sounds familiar at all:

Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?
Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa?
Hwær cwom symbla gesetu?
Hwær sindon seledreamas?
Eala beorht bune!
Eala byrnwiga!
Eala þeodnes þrym!
Hu seo þrag gewat,
genap under nihthelm,
swa heo no wære.

Where is the horse gone? Where the rider?
Where the giver of treasure?
Where are the seats at the feast?
Where are the revels in the hall?
Alas for the bright cup!
Alas for the mailed warrior!
Alas for the splendour of the prince!
How that time has passed away,
dark under the cover of night,
as if it had never been!

This anaphora is a staple of the poem, and a large part of why I find it so powerful (the tragic background to this almost-narrative verse is another reason). Plus anything in Anglo-Saxon is irresistible to me. But aside from those remarks, what does this remind you of? Honestly, the resemblance to one of the hymns of Tolkein's Rohirrim is uncanny:

Where now the horse and the rider? where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harp-string, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning?
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?

Or perhaps not so uncanny when you recall that Tolkein, besides being fluent in Old Norse and conversant in about 16 other dead languages was an aficionado of Old English. Rather nifty all the same.

From "The Dry Salvages"

It seems, as one becomes older,
That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence—
Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy
Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,
Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.
The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being,
Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection,
Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—
We had the experience but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning
We can assign to happiness. I have said before
That the past experience revived in the meaning
Is not the experience of one life only
But of many generations—not forgetting
Something that is probably quite ineffable:
The backward look behind the assurance
Of recorded history, the backward half-look
Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.
Now, we come to discover that the moments of agony
(Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,
Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,
Is not in question) are likewise permanent
With such permanence as time has. We appreciate this better
In the agony of others, nearly experienced,
Involving ourselves, than in our own.
For our own past is covered by the currents of action,
But the torment of others remains an experience
Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.
People change, and smile: but the agony abides.
Time the destroyer is time the preserver,
Like the river with its cargo of dead negroes, cows and chicken coops,
The bitter apple, and the bite in the apple.
And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;
On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,
In navigable weather it is always a seamark
To lay a course by: but in the sombre season
Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.

The Fictionality of Fiction

According to Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking Glass. Rather brilliant little book.

`Now, if you'll only attend, Kitty, and not talk so much, I'll tell you all my ideas about Looking-glass House. First, there's the room you can see through the glass -- that's just the same as our drawing room, only the things go the other way. I can see all of it when I get upon a chair -- all but the bit behind the fireplace. Oh! I do so wish I could see that bit! I want so much to know whether they've a fire in the winter: you never can tell, you know, unless our fire smokes, and then smoke comes up in that room too -- but that may be only pretence, just to make it look as if they had a fire. Well then, the books are something like our books, only the words go the wrong way; I know that, because I've held up one of our books to the glass, and then they hold up one in the other room.

`How would you like to live in Looking-glass House, Kitty? I wonder if they'd give you milk in there? Perhaps Looking-glass milk isn't good to drink -- But oh, Kitty! now we come to the passage. You can just see a little peep of the passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it's very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different on beyond. Oh, Kitty! how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking- glass House! I'm sure it's got, oh! such beautiful things in it!

Let's pretend there's a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let's pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it's turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It'll be easy enough to get through -- ' She was up on the chimney-piece while she said this, though she hardly knew how she had got there. And certainly the glass was beginning to melt away, just like a bright silvery mist.

In another moment Alice was through the glass, and had jumped lightly down into the Looking-glass room. The very first thing she did was to look whether there was a fire in the fireplace, and she was quite pleased to find that there was a real one, blazing away as brightly as the one she had left behind. `So I shall be as warm here as I was in the old room,' thought Alice: `warmer, in fact, because there'll be no one here to scold me away from the fire. Oh, what fun it'll be, when they see me through the glass in here, and can't get at me!'

Impersonality in Woolf

Being the T.S. Eliot junkie I am, I've been rather fascinated--if not particularly surprised--to see the concept of the "impersonality" of the artist explicitly voiced in many other writings than his "Tradition and the Individual Talent". Because of his towering status, and his remarkable talent for expressing critical concepts in a way that made them seem unquestionable, people tend to remember his formulation. But the same idea exists in Yeats, Pound, Hulme, and last, but certainly not least, Virginia Woolf.

This idea Eliot expresses as follows: "What happens [in creating a work of art] is a continual surrender of [the artist's self] as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality." One can get at a good idea of what he means here by considering that when you read an excellent book or poem, you're not primarily interested in what the author was feeling when he or she wrote it. (Not that the common assumption isn't the opposite--that art is sloppy self-expression.) The artist's actual experience and emotions will almost inevitable play a part in the creation of the work, insofar as the artist is a human person with emotions like everyone else, but the work itself is not merely an expression of those. The artist is "a medium and not a personality", as he puts it, not something himself to be communicated, but the means by which the pressure of the artistic process is exerted on the objects of everyday life to create a coherent whole out of what is otherwise disjointed.

It's hardly a surprise that Virginia Woolf, well-read and part of the highly literary Bloomsbury group which Eliot himself frequented would have been acquainted with this notion of impersonality, nor that this would be one of the objects she tried to achieve in her art. What did surprise me a little upon reading To the Lighthouse for the Twentieth Century Literature class was how explicitly she lays out this aesthetic within the novel itself.

The novel is famously divided into three parts, the highly experimental central part, "Time Passes", being (logically enough) a lyrical evocation of the passage of time and its inexorable erosion of the human constructs that have brought order to life. Both the first and second parts, by contrast, deal with the creation of a work of art. At the end of part one, Mrs. Ramsay, the paradigm of the gracious hostess, brings the "work of art" of a perfectly harmonized dinner party into being. Part three then ends with the parallel completion of a painting by Lily Briscoe, one of the guests at the Ramsays' summer house. Now just before either work of art is achieved, something rather important has to happen: both Mrs. Ramsay and Lily undergo a loss of personality that allows them to identify with the Lighthouse, the overarching guiding image of the novel.

"Losing personality," Mrs. Ramsay muses, "one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity". This peace, rest, and eternity are what she hopes to achieve in the dinner party, and what she will in fact accomplish. The tensions of "personalities" subside as each guest, under her tacit direction, subordinates his or her individual likes and dislikes to the artistic unity of the evening. This may be seen as regrettably hypocritical by some. Lily certainly feels a twinge of regret for the honesty of self-expression that Mrs. Ramsay's created order denies, saying to herself after a bit of conversation with the generally disliked Charles Tansley, "She had done the usual trick--been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her." But any brutal honesty displayed to Charles would be out of place in this unusual work of art that is so contingent not merely on Mrs. Ramsay's direction, but upon the cooperation of the participants. (By analogy one may imagine that the best of Shakespearean plays, untainted by the author's personality, may nonetheless be marred as a total work of art if the actors playing the parts cannot cooperate with the words on the page and insist upon bringing in their personal lives to their performances.) No cooperation would be necessary, however, without Mrs. Ramsay's personal success in effacing her own personality to the point at which she can be seen as "like" the Lighthouse. "It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things...felt they became one..." And in this disposition, she can attach herself to the other : to the Lighthouse's last, "long steady stroke" or--and this is most important--to another person. Because that is precisely what the dinner party and its aftermath end up being. Art as portrayed in "To the Lighthouse" is not merely some theoretical literary unity as it can come off in the essays of Eliot's younger days. It helps to effect human unity, to enable love that is the loss of the individual's preoccupation with self in his or her desire to know another. Lily, by not displaying her dislike for Charles at the dinner is enabled to later remember him not by that initial dislike, but by the moment of mutual liking brought about some indefinite time later with Mrs. Ramsay acting as catalyst. And in the aftermath of the dinner party, Mrs. Ramsay is able to wordlessly relate to her husband in a way that had been consistently elusive up to that point in the novel as she turns away from what is now her image in the Lighthouse to smile at him.

Lily's case can be covered in fewer words, now that this pattern is established. She is initially frustrated in her efforts to complete her painting by Mr. Ramsay's too-strong personality: "He imposed himself. He changed everything." (It will, incidentally, be Mr. Ramsay's moment of redemption when he too reaches the Lighthouse and has ceased in some way to impose himself.) But a sudden surge of sympathy in Lily allows her to resolve her resentment of him as he heads out on his journey to the Lighthouse, and this opens the door to a whole series of revelations about the nature of Mrs. Ramsay, of art, and of what is necessary to complete the painting. Mrs. Ramsay has been the one to teach Lily the value (though I would argue she only realizes it now) of "giving, giving, giving." And now Lily is able to make the connection between this selflessness, this lack of desire to merely express oneself, and the making of art. "'You' and 'I' and 'she' pass and vanish; nothing stays; all changes; but not words, not paint. The crucial aspect of the painting she creates is not the intent behind it, but "what it attempted", the effort to achieve unity is what "remained forever".

Terry Eagleton and Wuthering Heights

I'm currently reading Terry Eagleton's book "The English Novel," which is really quite a good read, despite the fact that he's a Marxist critic, and I entered it a bit suspicious of his likely ideological bias. That exists, it certainly does, and I find rather skews his vision of what a novel is (is it really only a social instrument"? I disagree, at any rate), but whenever he delves down into criticism of/commentary on specific novels, he's quite perceptive. The key to this seems to be a certain intellectual honesty, by which Eagleton may heartily disagree with, say, Jane Austen's overall worldview, and certainly finds much problematic in the claim that any sort of absolute truth can be located by human society (it can't, that's why we have the Church, my friends, and that's what will always be missed as long as people insist upon considering the Church a purely social institution...), but he's willing to take the authors' ideas as they are. Thus you have here a genuinely remarkable admission that, yes, Jane Austen is a moral figure on the model of Aristotle and Homer, looking at a person's proper role in society as the context in which they live a moral life.

I'll take one example which has been rather on my mind of late. Wuthering Heights. He gives a remarkably "conservative" interpretation of this novel. Refreshingly, given how often that book has been distorted by readings that see it as little more than a sordid romance novel (think Stephanie Meyer and Twilight). Fairly obviously, even though I read it years and years ago, it is in part a serious critique of the Byronic hero, showing how uncontrolled "naturalness" in Heathcliff results in a grotesquely unnatural character who is willing to act atrociously to every person around him, using them more blatantly than the entire utilitarian society which he tries to escape. In short, Heathcliff is not a romantic hero. He's an antihero, and his romance with Catherine is a wild, egotistical fall into passion that is simply a hiatus in his general project of manipulating the society he loathes in order to gain revenge on basically everyone who's ever offended him. I do think Emily Bronte is more of a moralist here than Eagleton seems to give her credit for being, but he does a very excellent job of bringing out the contradictions inherent in Heathcliff's and Catherine's alternate acceptance of, then rejection of society--in both cases they are really using it as an objective standard to measure themselves against. Heathcliff, from what I can remember, pretty much defines himself in terms of his antagonism towards society, but in doing so, he's implicitly accepting the demands it makes on him as real...you can only "throw off" real constraints.

Now Eagleton more or less concludes claiming that the problem is that society exists in anything like a form that makes objective demands on its members. Or that's more or less the claim holding up most of the book. You can understand immediately why a Marxist would have a problem with that. Or really why any modern liberal would: human freedom has become the paramount value in their perspective. Any external force that influences behavior is an illegitimate invasion of human freedom--a capital crime.

I disagree with him here. The thing he misses--or rather, doesn't really miss, but is unwilling to admit--is that there may be some objective standard outside the purely human sphere of action, that human society, for all it's internal insecurity and propensity for error, may ideally be based on. And thus I see Bronte's suspicion of radical breaks with this society in terms of the ideal Jane Austen puts forward and can't bring myself to disagree with her all that much. What Eagleton has a problem with is that this ideal is rarely--one may even say never--really met. My question is...because an ideal is constantly unachieved, does that make it illegitimate in itself?

I've far too little time now to present a defense of that my actual position, or even to try to explain it more clearly, but the question should make things clear enough. Far too much to say, and work summons.

The Quest for the Force

No, this post has nothing whatsoever to do with the unfortunate science fiction trilogy (more than that now?), "Star Wars" (I will probably never be able to get past the execrable acting and dismally waffling philosophy of that series).

Happily, my subject is Henry Adams instead. First off, Please tell me not that this book is convoluted or confusing! Its complexity pales in comparison to, say, that of Moby Dick, which itself is not such an arduous read, though certainly (like HA) deserving of multiple readings which will only flesh out a single strongly coherent argument.

For instance, he spends three of his post-twenty-years-of-silence chapters ("The Dynamo and the Virgin", "Twilight", and "Teufelsdrockh") reiterating the same essential point: explaining (more explicitly than is his usual ironic habit) his search for education as a search for a dynamic Force that gives history some direction and thus some meaning. This search he frames in terms (quite brilliantly) of a conflict between the power of Science and the power of Woman (take that, ye twentieth-century feminists!). Is the Dynamo or the Virgin (Woman imagined specifically as imaged in the figure of Mary, the mother of God) the real driving force of history? That's something I'll have to get into later; it's largely the focus of "The Dynamo and the Virgin" and "Teufelsdrockh", whereas "Twilight" has to take a bit of a time out to return to Adam's age old argument for the idea that there should be such a force to identify at all.

People need to recognize someunifying force if they're going to think at all. He comes into the chapter presupposing that, and proceeds to explain a bit. While the multitudinous heirs of the Enlightenment were invested in bringing to light such a panoply of seemingly unconnected bits of information, a similarly multitudinous series of drastically opposing "explanations" for how these might be thought to fit together were springing up on every side--Darwinism, chemistry, physics, progressive history:

All one's life, one had struggled for unity, and unity had always won. The National Government and the national unity had overcome every resistance, and the Darwinian evolutionists were triumphant over all the curates; yet the greater the unity and momentum, the worse became the complexity and the friction.

A strangely ambivalent statement. You'd think the man whose nostalgia for the 18th century world of the Founding Fathers, even for the unified world of Christian Medieval Europe, would hardly identify unity and directionality in history as itself the very source of multiplicity and the confusion of the early modern (1901) era. Now that's a taste of his irony coming through. Yes, national government and Darwin are examples of modern attempts at a synthesis, but that doesn't mean they succeed, despite his ironic praise of "the Darwinian evolutionists"' triumph "over all the curates". All these efforts for unity prove is that everyone wants it, that "the wisest of men could but imitate the Church, and invoke a 'larger synthesis' to unify the anarchy again". In actuality, for the thinking individual, Darwin (and his analogues in other disciplines--Hegel, for instance) doesn't have the final answers: "The ganoid fish [a subject of evolutionists' study] seemed to prove--to him--that it had selected neither new form nor new force, but that the curates were right in thinking that force could be increased in volume or raised in tintensity only by help of outside force...a little more, and he would be driven back on the old independence of species" (my emphasis).

Now please don't dismiss Mr. Adams as a stodgy old conservative afraid of scientific ideas. He was actually obsessed with science to an almost amusing degree throughout his life, and quite the rabid Darwinian (by his own account) as a young man. No, he's not afraid of evolutionary theory as it exists in biology. What he's protesting against is that that single biological concept (not less than physical theories about magnetism and electricity a little later) is being held up as an alternative to traditional faith. These modern "wise men" would have us believe not merely that Darwinism explains something, but that it explains everything.

Truly the animal that is to be trained to unity must be caught young. Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see. The older the mind, the older its coomplexities, and the further it looks, the more it sees, until even the stars resolve themselves into multiples; yet the child will always see but one.

Aside from being an excellent bit of prose, this comment helps (ironically, once again) to further refine his position. Both the old mind and the child as depicted here are seeing part of a truth, but each one is to some extent missing the whole. The child--seen again and again in Henry Adams' depiction of his younger self--thirsts for the type of unity that all these theories attempt to provide, and has faith in man's potential to find it. In a way, the child is right. Unity is real, and it can be accessed by men. What he doesn't have such a strong natural instinct for is the idea that it can't be discovered by men. "For human purposes a point must always soon be reached where larger synthesis is suicide." In this, Henry Adams is shamelessly hearkening back to the traditional Christian conviction of the necessity of revelation to provide the final "synthesis" of history that human reason cannot discern for itself. As appealing as their claims to authority may be, Darwinism, Hegelianism, Marxism, Scientism, etc. are ultimately misleading in the way they narrow the meaning of the universe to whatever their proper discipline can comprehend.

This latter point is precisely what the older mind comes to comprehend. Attempted on a purely human level, the synthesis seems an impossibility, an invitation to ruin, an intellectual suicide. Complexity seems unavoidable as one begins to learn that while Darwin might have a decent explanation for the meaning of life and Hegel a slightly different one, the physicist and chemist is in possession of a hundred other facts that reduce the former to a jumble (though maybe one that can still be synthesized). And none of these have even the slightest explanation for the mysterious power of Woman--Adams' way of figuring those other forces of duty, faith, love, and family. Yet to ignore these (as is so often done) is to mutilate human history; one must simply take everything up to Descartes and lop it off ("Oh, those were just the 'Dark Ages'"), then proceed to explain the post-Cartesian believers in such antiquities as fascinating sociological relics of a long-extinct Age of Ignorance.

I'm getting ahead of myself. Woman vs. the Machine is a fight to save for a later post. All I'm trying to get at is the idea that once you've seen more of the world than the young Darwinian or young Hegelian, one human explanation for everything begins to seem a bit pale. Blast! Can't we have a sythesis after all then? Maybe we should just do as the turn-of-the-century society was beginning to do: "throw up [our] hands and [avow] that progress depended on studying each rock as a law to itself." Why not? Well, it all comes back to the very quotidian fact that we can't think, we can't see ("Unity is vision") except in context...of something. The mid twentieth century would begin to admit utter meaninglessness as a possible "explanation" for the world; cf. Jean-Paul Sartre and the other Existentialists for whom nothing means anything and only the stark fact of free choice has any reality. Henry Adams is not an existentialist. And who can blame him? Existentialism is really the most logical answer to anyone who tries to locate the core of reality in human measurements of a physical world, or even in human measurements of what various theoretical models of that world, but no one wants to be one. Sartre's students had an unfortunate tendency to throw themselves off bridges when hearing one of his particularly dismal proofs of the meaninglessness of life.

There's an alternative, of course. You could--but don't do it: you'll be anathema to the orthodoxy of modernism--you could search for that meaning...outside of human society. You could admit the fact that perhaps the faith of the Church, which Adams so frequently refers to in ironically degrading-but-really-uplifting-because-he's-echoing-the-modernists terms. Because that's what Adams wants you to get out of these chapters, "Twilight" in particular.

Henry Adams' desperate protest rather reminds me of Puddleglum's heroic speech in The Silver Chair, when the witch is trying to enchant away the childrens' belief that there is anything real beyond the dim, two-dimensional reality of her cave world: "Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all of those things—trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones."

Anyway, more to come, most likely. The book certainly deserves it.

The Education of Henry Adams

This is a marvelous book. And I must say, that's not hyperbole in the least, despite the fact that beyond a few remaining strongholds of stodgy academia it's barely known. And that is despite the fact that it's a Pulitzer prize winner consistently reaching the pinnacle of lists of "Best Non-Fiction of all Time".

It is perhaps a tough read in certain respects. At least, if you go into it expecting a clear and direct account of precisely what Mr. Adams thinks about 19th and early 20th century America, you'll most likely toss the book across the room before getting through the first few chapters, frustrated by what seems egregiously scattered thought and woefully ambiguous attitudes towards everything he mentions. Don't read it that way. It's ironic, and obviously so, as long as you're alerted to the fact (I came into it alerted, fortunately).

It's superficially an account of Henry Adam's attempts to educate himself, yet its underlying aim is to delve into the heart of what America really means, to provide an account of the purpose of this country during a time when various attempts at consolidation of Senatorial power and the growth of utilitarianism throughout the western world was challenging the Founders' original conception of its purpose. Did I say challenging? The entire structure of academia and the practice of government at the time directly contradicted the idea that we're a government not of liberty for license but of liberty for excellence; that the Declaration of Independence was affirming not freedom from traditional structures, but recognizing the contemporary European attempts (especially in England and France) to collapse the boundaries between Church and state as antithetical to one of the most essential tenets of Christianity since the late Roman era (see Pope Gelasius' declaration of the necessary separation of Church and state all the way back in 492 AD: "There are two powers by which chiefly this world is ruled: the sacred authority of the priesthood and the authority of kings."). Puritains, Cavaliers, Non-Conformists, Scottish Presbyterians, Irish Catholics all came to America to evade the tradition-squelching bulldozer of the modern homogeneous nation-state, in particular the Leviathan state of the British parliament (which drew into itself first religious, then royal power before absorbing the Scottish and Irish parliaments).

America, Adams argues (though not explicitly till after the chapter "Twenty Years After") is the land of those free to abide by their traditions, not of F.J. Turner's frontiersmen, stripped of their tradition by their encounter with the State of Nature, not of Benjamin Franklin's utilitarianism that would have us all be finding happiness as nice, comfortable, productive machines (traditions? holidays? Holy Days? Ritual? what useless bosh!). It is a deliberately UNprogressive place, he holds, though his younger self whom he sometimes mercilessly parodies in the earlier chapters at times seems to find the Progressive model of history appealing in its claims to bring about "The Perfection of Human Society".

At the risk of sounding a bit self-important, I must say I think some of my earlier posts might be helpful if the idea of liberty for excellence seems extremely alien, so I've been linking to them throughout (plus they help to round out what must necessarily be a skeletal account of things if it is to avoid being far too long for a blog post). It's not a popular idea nowadays, as Henry Adams already discerned all the way back in 1918. If you really want some good stuff on that idea though, I recommend Cicero's De Officiis (how we can understand man's natural rights in terms of his moral obligations), Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, John Paul II's "Veritatis Splendor" (intrinsically evil acts), or Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's account of women's experiences in slavery (Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South).

This is a book that I will almost certainly keep writing about from time to time. However simple its main point may be, it is rather brilliantly complex on a more detailed level, making its point in a hundred different ways, using a thousand different images for what he means. And any of the chapters that relies heavily on a concept that you may not be familiar with (as I was not familiar with the overall meaning of Wagner's oeuvre while reading "Teufelsdröckh") automatically becomes a bit more difficult as it demands that you do a bit more leg work to get at his meaning than you may be accustomed to (unless you're a classics major or something).

Thought and Feeling in Blake's Innocence and Experience

In response to my previous musings on William Blake. I don't mind posting the essay because of its relative inferiority (i.e. no aspirations of publishing, etc.).

William Blake's Songs comprise an account of Innocence and Experience, two “contrary states of the soul” which each offer a certain limited perspective on reality. Though a characterization of these states as respectively “optimistic” and “pessimistic” outlooks on life is not strictly misleading—the Songs of Experience being unabashedly more negative in tone than those of Innocence—such a generalization shortchanges the depth of thought that Blake has put into what is in fact a nuanced picture of human nature. Frustrated by the scientific revolution’s reduction of the distinctively human faculty of Reason to mathematically logical cogitation, Blake sought to effect a reintegration of the human faculties of thinking and feeling by replacing the now constricted concept of Reason with Imagination, or the poetic genius. Yet this new cosmic model recognizes nonetheless that a certain tension between the human powers of feeling and thought persists. In the introductory poem to each collection, Innocence and Experience are portrayed as states distinguished chiefly by these two ways of engaging and responding to the universe: Innocence responds with spontaneous emotion to the beauty of nature, Experience with a rational recognition of the sorrow that threatens human life.

In their imagery, the “Introduction”s to Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience differ much less dramatically than many other similarly paired poems in the series. Both are set in the context of a pleasant pastoral scene, the former making reference to “valleys wild” and “songs of pleasant glee” while the other presents images of “dewy grass,” and the “starry floor” (“Intro,” SoI, 1,2; “Intro,” SoE, 18). The tenses reveal, however, that while this comforting environment is a thing of the present for the speaker of the Innocence “Introduction,” for the speaker of the “Introduction” to Experience, it belongs to the past. This temporal contrast is reflected on a rhythmic level. The meter of the first poem is iambic tetrameter with initial trochaic substitution: a stanza form familiar as a variation on the traditional ballad meter. The movement of the meter is natural, almost facile at times, conjuring both by sound and by historical association children's rhymes or the simplicity of folk hymns; it evokes faith in present happy existence. By contrast, the “Introduction” to Experience is written in nonce stanzas. While the first two are patterned after one another, they are somewhat ungainly, with their almost nonrhythmic pattern of 3-4-2-2-4 foot iambic lines further upset by the jolting trochee that opens each stanza. And when the third and fourth lines of stanza three—“Night is worn/And the morn”—evade even this pattern, or when the second line of verse four lacks the four metrical feet of its cognates in the previous stanzas, we are firmly out of the comfortable metrics of ballad stanzas, hearing in the stilted rhythm an echo of a tearful appeal to the “lapsèd soul” of modern man (“Intro,” SoE, 13-14; 6). Beyond the emotional power of these dramatically opposed rhythms however, is a reflection of the human Imaginative capacities proper to each state. The highly evocative simplicity of the “Introduction” to Innocence favors the emotions and makes no great demands upon the intellect, while the irregular cadence, difficult to discern by eye or ear and complicated to pronounce, of Experience puts the focus on the words and demands the reader's close attention.

The external effect of the contrast between the musicality of the Innocence poem and the unsettledness of that of Experience is no more than a presage of the variation in content, as seen in the contrasting narrative methods. The narrator of the first poem speaks in an apparently unselfconscious first person; his lighthearted piping of “songs of pleasant glee” takes its inspiration from a child who appears within the first lines (“Intro,” SoI, 2). Cajoling the Piper to “Pipe a song about a Lamb,” this child both directs his choice of subject and demands that he actualize the artistic impulse. The repetition of the verbs “hear,” “pipe,” and “sing” puts an emphasis on the faculty of hearing that complements the aurally oriented meter. This agrees with the child's initial appeals to the Piper to use an instrumental medium to communicate the beauty of his surroundings, but contrasts rather sharply with the eventual demand that the Piper put his song in writing—an action that seems, as will be seen more clearly later, to impel the Piper towards a state more akin to that of the Bard of the subsequent poem than of the carefree musician of the opening. There is neither a present inspiring voice nor a cohesive linear storyline for the Bard of the Songs of Experience to engage in this book's Introduction. That he has been inspired is beyond a doubt: his “ears have heard/The Holy Word,” but this Word that once “walk'd among the ancient trees” is no longer a presence except in the prophetic voice of the Bard (“Intro,” SoE, 3-4; 5). This prophetic character s in fact one of the most significant elements of the poem. Eschewing the leisurely first person narrative of the Songs of Innocence, the narrator—who, one may note, is still even once removed from the person of the Bard himself—commands the reader to “Hear the voice of the Bard,” who seeks to resolve the tragic disconnect between man and the riches of nature by calling both the “lapsèd soul” and the earth itself to “Turn away no more” (“Intro,” SoE, 1,6,16). Unlike in the Songs of Innocence, there is a sense that something in man's relationship to his universe has been lost, that the soul has divorced itself from the Word, its poetic genius, and thus—senselessly, as the query of line seventeen hints—is disconnected from the “starry shore” and “watery floor” which might form touching subjects for the Piper (“Intro,” SoE, 18,19). In a milieu of such dissociation of man and his environment, mere music cannot effectively negotiate between identification of the problem and the possibility of solution. Moreover, however, the proliferation of words and verbal constructions is an image for a strengthening of the rational outlook on reality.

The different effects of musical (understood here in a general sense as combinations of rhythm and sound) and verbal communication are in fact the primary images that Blake uses in these two poems to introduce the concepts of Innocence and Experience as he will present them in the rest of the works. As observed above, the “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence puts an emphasis on sonic modes of communication both through its rhythm and vocabulary. The question of how an utterly sonic art—piping, here—relates to the process of verbalization is foremost in this work, and the process of transforming music to words is revealed to be indicative of a growth in consciousness that by the end of the poem seems only barely compatible with Blake's conception of Innocence. The Piper of the opening is unabashedly a figure of the poet in the state of Innocence. The previously discussed unselfconsciouness of the rhythm and narrative style is matched in the action of piping, initially a spontaneous response to the beauties of the natural world as he encounters it. Though the laughing child is hardly a foreboding figure, its appearance causes a certain quality of consciousness to come into the piper's art. “Pipe a song about a Lamb,” it commands, and though the Piper does so with “merry cheer,” the song is now not a direct response to the beauty of the wild valley, but to the child's demand. (“Intro,” SoI, 5,6) Repeating the directive, the child then “[weeps] to hear,” another slight indication that the conscious repetition of the initially spontaneous response to the world something of its original freshness (“Intro,” SoI, 8). The next command causes a more noticeable disturbance: “Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe,” the child directs, and with the command to “Sing thy songs of happy cheer,” introduces the first clearly verbal element into the Piper's art (“Intro,” SoI, 9,10). The child weeps at the song, and though he weeps “with joy,” the action nonetheless suggests a waning of innocence: one whose approach to life is one of joy untainted by knowledge of potential sorrow is not likely be anything but blithe in his response to beauty (“Intro,” SoI, 12). The real turning point of the poem comes in the fourth stanza and is borne out in the fifth as the Piper moves, once more at the child's behest, from song to writing. At the moment when the voice of inspiration moves the Piper to “sit. . .down and write,” it disappears (“Intro,” SoI, 13). From that point on, the poem is driven onwards with dry anaphoristic declarations of action. “And I plucked a hollow reed. . ./And I stained the water clear”: mixed with the apparently harmless depictions of making a pen and writing “happy songs” are these two images that hint that the action of writing itself may have a corrupting effect on the unstudied reaction of joy to one's environment (“Intro,” SoI, 16,18,19).

Indeed, the nature of writing makes such a conclusion not unsurprising. Writing is an intrinsically rational enterprise, depending as it does on the medium of human language, which enables communication by virtue of its ability to symbolize and thus articulate intellectual conceptions of human experience. Thus as the Piper becomes more verbally articulate, he begins to resemble the Bard of the Songs of Experience, until at the end of the poem, the former foreshadows the latter directly. While the poems in this collection remain the Songs of Innocence, firmly within the state of the soul to which an active and spontaneous response to the emotions elicited by a world unsullied by human mathematics, Blake's explanation of how the poems came to be recorded in pen and ink suggests that this very medium necessitates a move on the artist's part into the state of Experience.

In some sense, then, the “Introduction” to Songs of Experience picks up where its corresponding poem in Songs of Innocence left off, resuming the theme of the poet's reliance upon rationally based verbal communication. Songs of Experience depicts the human thinking faculty negatively on the whole, portraying it, as in “London,” as too often corrupted into applying a misleadingly rational structure to the universe; it is a capacity associated with the genesis and growth of “charter'd streets” and “black'ning Church[es]” (“London,” SoE, 1,10). Yet here the presentation is more ambiguous. The Bard himself, as a prophetic figure, is bound to a specifically verbal mode of expression if he is to effectively communicate to his audience the problems of this world of pure rationality. It would seem, in fact, that one may be in a state of Experience without falling prey to what was for Blake the great fallacy of the modern age: the isolation of logic as the only meaningful power of the human machine. The poem is melancholy in its regret for a past age when the human soul and Earth were united, yet it is precisely its ability to cognate about the flaws of the culture it addresses that enables the Bard to be a prophetic presence in its midst. This is most directly seen in the fact that the source of the Bard's inspiration is the “Holy Word,” itself a figure of linguistic rationality, yet one that is sanctified, that both recalls a time of its own converse with “the ancient trees” and that “might. . .fallen, fallen light renew” if allowed free “control” of its proper realm (“Intro,” SoE, 4,5,8-10). Basically I just need to make a few more well-sounded points that derive directly from the text in order to drive home the idea that reason can be good and that it's really to be identified with this set of poems. I should also go back to the SoI part of the essay and more explicitly state the connection with feeling.

Thus while the difference between musical and verbal communication serve as potent images in these two poems for the divide between feeling and thinking that Blake diagnoses in man, neither can absolutely be taken as the “proper” state of the human soul. Innocence is a state of joyous emotional response to the beauty of the world that begins to dissolve once the impulse to rationally describe these is indulged; it is a state in all external respects preferable to the state of Experience. Yet the poet must step into the state of Experience if he is to express either Innocence or Experience, and is doing a disservice to neither state by painting the other. Even in itself, the rational outlook on life (if not arrogantly assumed to be the only outlook) is not entirely objectionable. The increased willingness to think deeply about the ramifications of actions and the awareness that initial impressions of goodness and beauty may be superficial are both characteristic of the Bard's vision, and though painful realizations to some extent, this “Introduction,” at least, does not seem willing to allow us to reject them as unattractive in comparison to the partial ignorance of the “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence. Though these states are contraries, they need not be at war: Blake reminds us in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that “contraries are necessary for progression” (CITE). Thus the rapturous musical encounter with the world and the more sober comprehension of the world's all-too-actual evil are equally necessary to progress spiritually towards a more complete understanding of human nature. Like a slow tread, both legs advancing at different times to move the whole body forward, the progress of the human spirit is measured by the alternate steps of the feeling and thinking states of the soul: it is a progress that may not unite these faculties, but which sees each as responsible for a movement towards perfection of the Imagination, the poetic genius of man.

Responsibility in Mansfield Park

As I was reading the first few chapters of Mansfield Park (for Literary Tradition IV), I was particularly struck by the proclivity of various characters to claim all the benefits of a position of responsibility while foisting off the challenges of such a position onto others. Mrs. Norris is, from the first pages on, the clearest example of such a character, as we see in her manipulate the Bertrams into taking on Fanny Price as a ward: a gesture that (at least in her own mind) allows her to appear the generous and forgiving sister while avoiding all the inconveniences that would accompany such a gesture. “Good heaven!” she cries, upon hearing of Sir Thomas’ proposition that she take on the older Fanny about five years later, “what could I do with Fanny? – Me! A poor helpless forlorn widow, unfit for any thing, my spirits quite broke down, what could I do with a girl at her time of life, a girl of fifteen!” ( MP, 63). Yet this same “forlorn widow” is quite capable of “promoting gaieties for her nieces, assisting their toilettes, displaying their accomplishments, and looking for their future husbands” (MP, 68). She is ready to jump at the least excuse to avoid the arduous task of looking after an undesirable niece from the poor side of the family while claiming all the merit of having procured Fanny’s welfare, and the responsibilities she does take on seem accepted only because of the “means [they] afforded her of mixing in society without having horses to hire” (MP, 69). While Mrs. Norris’ hypocrisy and essential indolence (as pronounced as Lady Bertram’s, though camouflaged beneath a veneer of frantic activity) are clear-cut, Austen does not commit the problem of how one must accept responsibility to Mrs. Norris alone. Lady Bertram’s laziness obviously unfits her for the role of a responsible guardian, but Sir Thomas’ case is more complex. He clearly wants to be a good father to his children and guardian to Fanny, yet fails on many counts to provide for their welfare. Austen repeatedly emphasizes his lack of emotional connection with his children and with Fanny, describing him as a man of the best interior disposition, sensitive to the potential trauma of Fanny’s removal from her childhood home and determined to treat her kindly, but unable to form his charges’ characters due to his “reserve of manner” (MP, 55). As the novel progresses, Austen’s attention begins to turn from the question of the responsibilities of educators to their charges towards the question of how one is socially responsible in the adult world. The most responsible thing Mr. Rushworth can do with his great wealth and estate is to spend as much as possible to restore the estate to a level of grandeur appropriate to his social status—or so Mrs. Norris believes (MP, 85). Mary Crawford speaks with great levity about the responsibility of getting married at some point, and eventually being constrained by attention to public opinion to be “staunch” in defense of marriage (MP, 76, 79). But consistently thus far, the only two characters who seem to take their responsibilities towards others seriously, rather than merely putting on a socially acceptable show of assuming them, are Fanny and Edmund. Edmund is the single member of the family to genuinely care for Fanny, not merely as a figure to be given an education in French and then tolerated as a companion for Lady Bertram, but as a human person, with cares, interests and sorrows of her own that need attending. His education seems to encourage Fanny in her original gentle and caring disposition, and its effects are evident when Fanny is the only member of the Bertram household besides Edmund himself who has enough loyalty to her guardian to grieve when he leaves for the West Indies. Given this early relationship between Fanny and Edmund, it will be interesting to watch more closely the progress of Fanny’s turn to being a guardian of sorts for her older cousin as he becomes increasingly ensnared in the charms of Mary Crawford, a charming woman, with much of the good intentions that so many of the novels inefficacious and otherwise unpraiseworthy characters seem to share, but hardly a “moral” match for Edmund Bertram.

Ion

That's not a reference to chemistry. Rather it's to philosophy; specifically to the first of Plato's dialogues that appears in the Signet edition of Plato's collected works. My brother is reading the Republic and several others currently, and in a fit of nostalgia for freshman year of high school, I picked up his book and started from the beginning. I hadn't read Ion since way back then, and it's a much faster read at 20 than it is at 14, I can assure you.

For one thing, it's one of the shortest Socratic dialogues that I've ever read. Well actually, probably the shortest - even Laches seemed longer. I believe Cleitophon is the shortest that exists, but I've never read that one. Anyway, its remarkable conciseness: Socrates manages to turn the very pliable Ion's way of thinking completely around using even fewer arguments and examples than he usually needs to correct the generic dull-minded interlocutor. This brevity makes it quite an easy dialogue to follow, and the ubiquitous irony of the set-up and of the argument's course is much easier to pin down than usual.

In questioning Ion about the nature of his art of rhetorician, Socrates is basically doing what we would be if we tried to define the work of a literary critic; at least, so one might think of it. "The reciter," Socrates observes to Ion, "must be the interpreter of the poet's mind to the audience; and to do this, if he does not understand what the poet says, is impossible". This makes plenty of sense to Ion, who, though enthusiastic about his craft, hardly strikes one as the cleverest reciter of poetry to sing verse. Within a few paragraphs, he has Socrates running intellectual circles around him (as is Socrates' habit), as both begin to conclude that the reciter is altogether less qualified to judge the merit of the poet when, for instance, the poet sings of horsemanship than a skilled horseman, when the poet speaks of healing than a doctor. In other words, Ion is soon admitting, the reciter or actor has much less knowledge of anything that a poet writes about than the professional whose skill is that described; and any knowledge that the reciter does have is in virtue of his skill in that art. That is, a reciter may know the standards of good horsemanship because he possesses that skill to some degree himself, but only in virtue of that art does he know it, not in virtue of his art as a reciter.

Clearly this leaves them with the idea that there is no such thing as the art of reciting or acting, at least not such as Ion understands them and Socrates had just defined them at the beginning. Ion's proposed defense of the reciter's art is that he knows "what is proper for a man to say" - that is, he knows what a fisherman, a weaver, a slave, or a ruler would say in a given situation. But the argument Socrates has just used easily quashes that suggestion when he points out that surely a fisherman, a weaver, a slave, or a ruler would certainly know better than the reciter whether what the poet has written corresponds to the reality of the situation.

The dialogue ends with Socrates and Ion agreeing that the reciter really has no art or special knowledge at all: he is either a cheat, or when interpreting the great poets is "possessed by divine dispensation". Ion is serious. Socrates is most certainly not.

At least, it seems most unlikely that Plato, master of the literary art of the dialogue, would have so little respect for art that he would find it uninterpretable - or so little rationality that he would consider interpretation to be possible only through a divinely-induced frenzy. And of course, he never leaves the reader with a hard and fast conclusion to savour: these dialogues are meant to keep you thinking.

Well one of the first things this gets me thinking is that perhaps Plato wants to make a point about the nature of poetic art as compared to that of manual crafts or theoretical skills. The close connection he draws between the work and the interpreter necessarily makes us think, as he discusses the nature of the interpreter's understanding, also of what is being understood. Poetry is not one of the arts with a concrete, useful result, like a plow made by a blacksmith that can help create a garden, or a mathematical formula that allows certain buildings to be built; it is not, as Josef Pieper would say, one of the "servile arts". Thus it's not something that is properly encountered as a blacksmith would approach a "how-to-forge-a-good-plow" manual. You don't just want to judge poetry on the skill with which it describes isolated activities. It's a thing much more organic and coherent than a how-to manual; if it is good poetry, at any rate, it will say something not so much about fishing or smithing, as it will say something about the meaning of life. Yes, accuracy in the details is important, but only insofar as this will help give a truer picture of what life as a whole is truly like and how human beings will interact with this world.

The accuracy of description is not the end of poetry, though Ion quite misses the point and easily falls for Socrates' trap when the latter suggests that it is through his incessant questioning. And if there's some other type of truth present than the purely utilitarian, there is something more in poetry than a fisherman, a blacksmith, a horseman, or any other type of artisan will know by virtue of their art. There's nothing preventing the busiest artisan from being an interpreter of art on some level, but now the tables are turned from when Socrates suggested that the reciter only can judge the virtue of poetry by means of other skills that he possesses. It is not the case that the artisan will truly understand parts of Homer because he is a seaman and Homer talks about ships; rather he will understand all of Homer and be capable of judging his work, insofar as he understands human nature and something of what life in the world is all about.

Cucumber Melon

I always get a kick out of the general tenor of people's reactions when I touch on anything we study here at UD. Ancient literary classics, Euclid, Aristotle, Church Fathers. . .'how boring!' Well, not really. It doesn't take an excessive amount of natural astuteness, really not even a grand degree of nerdiness, to begin to find these texts vastly amusing.

You perhaps don't believe me. Perhaps you mutter to yourself various epithets describing me as an excessive nerd. Perhaps you think my testimony is unreliable.

Read this.

Just for a bit of background, this is an excerpt from the writings of St. Irenaeus' massive work Against Heresies. He's attacking the absurdity of the Gnostic myths explaining the creation of the world, and in so doing uses this hilarious example.

Iu, Iu! Pheu, Pheu!— for well may we utter these tragic exclamations at such a pitch of audacity in the coining of names as he has displayed without a blush, in devising a nomenclature for his system of falsehood. For when he declares: There is a certain Proarche before all things, surpassing all thought, whom I call Monotes; and again, with this Monotes there co-exists a power which I also call Henotes,— it is most manifest that he confesses the things which have been said to be his own invention, and that he himself has given names to his scheme of things, which had never been previously suggested by any other. It is manifest also, that he himself is the one who has had sufficient audacity to coin these names; so that, unless he had appeared in the world, the truth would still have been destitute of a name. But, in that case, nothing hinders any other, in dealing with the same subject, to affix names after such a fashion as the following: There is a certain Proarche, royal, surpassing all thought, a power existing before every other substance, and extended into space in every direction. But along with it there exists a power which I term a Gourd; and along with this Gourd there exists a power which again I term Utter-Emptiness. This Gourd and Emptiness, since they are one, produced (and yet did not simply produce, so as to be apart from themselves) a fruit, everywhere visible, eatable, and delicious, which fruit-language calls a Cucumber. Along with this Cucumber exists a power of the same essence, which again I call a Melon. These powers, the Gourd, Utter-Emptiness, the Cucumber, and the Melon, brought forth the remaining multitude of the delirious melons of Valentinus. For if it is fitting that that language which is used respecting the universe be transformed to the primary Tetrad, and if any one may assign names at his pleasure, who shall prevent us from adopting these names, as being much more credible [than the others], as well as in general use, and understood by all?

Aeschylus

Aeschylus - what a name! Apparently, it's pronounced "ehss-kih-lus", so I've learned something new about the guy so far at any rate. In high school I recall, I didn't even bother trying to pronounce it.

His Oresteian Trilogy is, of course, world famous by now. It was world famous back in his day too, but at that time the "world" consisted of the Mediterranean shoreline, so I think we can say this is a bit of a step up for this particular Greek playwright.

All joshing aside, the plays are marvelous. And yes, I tend to have a similarly enthusiastic response to nearly all the literature I read (with the very definite exception of Hemingway and a few others). Nonetheless, I am not alone in this reaction, although perhaps the generally nerdy - in the best of senses - population of UD is no more reliable a gauge for some purposes than I am.

The plot draws heavily upon traditional Greek mythology, so I'll basically recount the story as it's told there. We open in the play with the return of the Mycenaean king, Agamemnon, to his home after the Trojan War. He's coming back to a house and family - the "House of Atreus", as its called - which has been cursed for several generations now. The family patriarchs have a habit of committing gross violations of the natural order of things: Agamemnon's own father, Atreus, is guilty of having killed his own brother's children and tricked the poor guy into eating them (for the record, this was meant to be just revenge for the "poor guy's" affair with Atreus' wife). Agamemnon himself has the grisly record of having sacrificed his own daughter, Iphigenia, in order to win fair winds so that he can sail to Troy, kill some Trojans, and return a conquering hero.

Anyway, as the play begins, we very soon learn that the cycle of violence and vengeance in Atreus' house is not about to disappear anytime soon. Agamemnon's wife, Clytaemestra, has been conspiring with her lover, Aegisthus (the only surviving son of Atreus' brother) to avenge the deaths of Iphegenia and Aegisthus' siblings. They succeed in their plot, but the integrity of their motives is called into question when they promptly seize power and exile Orestes, Clytaemestra's son, and begin to mistreat her daughter, Elektra.

Resenting her mother's bad behavior, Elektra, about ten years later, prays for a champion to come and avenge her father's death. The next thing we know, Orestes shows up, bearing a firm order from Apollo to kill his mother or die trying. He does, and what follows is a vastly fascinating trial which poses the Furies against the gods in a struggle to decide Orestes' fate.

There's a whole lot of complexity in the actual play itself, but the central question is "What is justice, and how do we achieve it?" The play vacillates until the final judgment (and, I would argue, offers no firm conclusion even then) between reading justice as a dark, retributive force meant to restore order to the deepest elements of the world, and seeing it as primarily obedience to the will of the gods.

There's a lot that comes from this question, but I have no space to examine any of that here, obviously. I'd be very much surprised if it doesn't come up again very soon, however. In the meantime, I must say - read this yourselves! It's pretty short, even with all three put together: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, and Eumenides. Definitely worth your time.

A Practical Religion

“I fancy,” Benjamin Franklin muses in discussing his famous decision to run away from his apprenticeship, “[my brother's] harsh and tyrannical Treatment of me, might be a means of impressing me with that Aversion to arbitrary Power that has stuck to me thro' my whole Life” (Franklin, 69). This is only a side comment – no more than a note to the main text, in fact – yet it succinctly summarizes the spirit of Franklin's legendary bid for independence. Preceding this symbolic break with the convention of apprenticeship, he had already broken with his family's conventional Puritan religion in favor of a temperate liberal deism, but it was not until several years later that he codified his personal beliefs. The thirteen precepts he outlines focus entirely on moral issues and he refuses to favor any specific doctrinal teachings. Franklin's approach underscores his independence and practicality in all spheres of life. He “conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral Perfection” in a spirit of self-sufficient practicality which led him to renounce the authority of church dogma in favor of the natural virtues which could be ecumenically agreed upon and which a man of any religion could follow to become a model of “Probity and Integrity” (Franklin, 148, 158).

His moral code is marked above all by an ethic of tolerance which stems in part from a laudable desire to respect individual freedom, but also from a distorted definition of humility. In his list of virtues, humility stands at the end as a sort of addendum expressing his overarching concept of religious tolerance. “Imitate Jesus and Socrates” he instructs himself (Franklin, 150). The dichotomy in this instruction, obvious to anyone who understands Jesus as the Answer which Socrates stubbornly denies knowing, seems unapparent to Franklin. He strove for the classic Socratic modesty of “knowing that he knows nothing” and gains “at least the Appearance” of such humility, but it is not the humility of a Christian which arises from actual though unmerited knowledge of the Truth (Franklin, 157). Franklin's definition may indeed suffice for most practical purposes, and his primary concern was “the Utility and Excellency of [his] Method” (157). Through it he hoped to encourage human virtues among all sects. Reserving declarations of knowledge would promote respect for individual freedom with regard to beliefs about God and the nature of life, and adoption of a non-doctrinal code of virtue would, he believed, be in “every one's Interest... who wished to be happy even in this world” (Franklin, 158).

In evaluating the benefits of Franklin's purely moral religion, one must distinguish between its application in the sphere of government versus its application in the individual. Reducing religion to moral precepts discoverable by reason may be justified in the public sphere. Indeed, in a world where the religious turmoil of the 1500s and 1600s still reverberated throughout the West, removing governmental attachment to any “particular Sect” would be wise (Franklin, 157). However, within a church or an individual soul such tolerance becomes no more than false humility. Assuming that churches typically claim to be qualified to lead their members to the truth of Christ (or whatever else they hold to be ultimate truth), they must have certain convictions in context of which other beliefs are considered wrong. The human person, moreover, created for the truth as he is, will (like Franklin) be incapable of attaining true victory over pride, that “one of our natural Passions [most] hard to subdue,” if he does not recognize that there is a truth much deeper than the moral rules man can discover through unaided reason (Franklin, 160). Franklin's ethic of tolerance, then, is a useful guide for the government's approach to religious matters, but it cannot on its own produce the breed of upright citizens he hoped for (Franklin, 162).

Franklin was not alone in his distrust of arbitrary religious authority, this spirit having been predominant to some extent among the early colonists who had been driven from England by the new monolithic state religion. Principles of religious liberty as outlined in the First Article of the Bill of Rights underscore our Republican government's historic attachment to Franklin's Socratic humility with respect to religion. As long as churches have flourished within the consequent atmosphere of tolerance the tendency of this spirit to undermine individual citizens' prerogative to devote themselves to the Truth has been held in check. Today, however, as tolerance becomes more and more an autonomous religion in America and across the world, the Socratic mindset threatens to overwhelm Christian certainty of Truth. Franklin's style of tolerance is now many people's sole “religion” and the morality Franklin so valued, robbed of any firm foundational doctrine, is weakened to the point of collapse.