Intended to amuse, and to mildly satirize those literary critics who actually do bother with such things.
Beatrix Potter's brief tale of A Fierce, Bad Rabbit may come off as a simplistic moralizing story, in which the bad guy gets his comeuppance and the good guy is vindicated. And certainly that comic-book morality is at least superficially present in this war of two rabbits. Their differing ethical statuses seem to lead inevitably to their respective ends: the unjustifiably rude “Bad Rabbit” is paid back in deus ex machina fashion by a wandering hunter to the benefit of the good rabbit. But take a closer look at the story and several serious issues begin to raise their metaphorical heads. Firstly, why such a strident condemnation for what is merely a breach of manners (if an inexcusably unprovoked one)? Given her propensity for depicting villains of truly sinister dimensions (the Fox in Jemima Puddle-Duck plans to eat Jemima; Mr. Samuel Whiskers even more horrifyingly makes Tom Kitten into a pie before the unlucky chap is rescued), one may wonder why Potter designates only this schoolyard-bully-esque carrot thief as “fierce” and “bad.” It seems, oddly enough, that this deplorable character's only offense is being unmannerly: in Potter's own words, the height of his offense is that “he doesn't say 'Please.' He takes it!” In sharp contrast to the visceral dangers of her other books, the threat posed by this villain seems perfectly suited to a Jane Austen novel. The second issue one can hardly help noticing upon careful reading is the disjoint between cause and effect involved in the Bad Rabbit's punishment. In the narrative framework most pleasing to authors who intend to moralize, the bad guy is ultimately brought down either by his own evil actions (see Dante's Commedia or Edward Lear's children's verses) or by an adversarial reaction against his dastardly deeds. Yet the cleverly-aimed shot that manages to take off both the tail and whiskers of the Bad Rabbit without harming him is not fired by some good rabbit rising in rebellion against the tyranny of carrot-thieves, nor does the Bad Rabbit try to steal an incendiary device in an excess of cupidity and harm himself in the process. These would be two fine examples of poetic justice, to which parents could point, as they might to the fable of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf,” and say “see children: if you do X then Y will happen to you.” Where in fact is Potter's ethical subtext in this story? Could it be—but it is!—that the Bad Rabbit is worsted by mere happenstance? By the mere fact that this hunter is apparently more than a little near-sighted despite his uncanny skill in aiming and so thinks the Bad Rabbit “a very funny bird”? The good rabbit witnesses his humiliated foe fleeing the field, yet no retribution, properly speaking, has been meted out. Potter seems, I would argue, to be pushing young children to doubt the most basic elements of the moralizing tale, if only subconsciously, in this fascinatingly subversive tale of bad manners and random acts of an indifferent higher power.
29 January, 2011
08 December, 2010
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.
03 December, 2010
La Madeleine
Another, less purely humorous, but still not very serious poem. Since I'm being lazy about blogging of late (think: French thesis, long 20th Century paper, and the pesky little Am Lit paper I still haven't started), I'm just reposting things. Amateur, because this is effectively the first I've written.
The wind sprang up
at nine o'clock.
A sweeter breath
of autumn air
danced through my hair.
A honeyed scent
of falling leaves
and burning ash
breathed in here, now,
and I am back,
small, gazing up,
the summer breeze
quaking the heath
while honey bees
choreograph
spirals through gray
brush and lavender.
The peat moss bows
red caps—a grave
wind-bent salute—
until they brush
the brownish wisps
of younger hair,
then fall from thought.
Till scent breathed in
unearths some hoard;
till rustled hair
exhumes old air;
and kindled there,
autumnal leaves
are seen capped in
scarlet flame tips
tipping closer
as the wind-borne
wood breath dances.
01 December, 2010
L'Autonomie de l'Esprit saint dans la Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette
Apologies to those who can't read French, but I'm posting this largely for the few who can; most importantly my dad, who is a great fan of Georges Bernanos.
Dans la Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette, la question du sort final de l'héroïne reste ambigu. Bien qu’elle meure physiquement, la vraie question, pour un écrivain catholique comme Bernanos, c’est de savoir si elle meurt spirituellement. Son suicide est, bien sûr, un péché mortel au point de vue de l'Église. Mais la représentation de sa mort n’est pas du tout sombre ; au contraire, l'auteur utilise même des images baptismales en décrivant comment elle fixe son regard sur « le point le plus haut du ciel » (181). Ce détail n’est pas une preuve certaine de sa rédemption, mais il en indique bien la possibilité. Il faut considérer le texte dans son ensemble pour bien en saisir toutes les implications. Mais plus important que notre jugement sur l'extérieur de l'histoire est le fait que Bernanos refuse au lecteur toute information qui pourrait décider de la chose d'une manière certaine. C'est peut-être le principal procède de cet auteur par lequel il préserve l'autonomie de l'action de l'Esprit Saint.
Il importe de considérer l'action de Mouchette sous deux aspects: l'extérieur et l'intérieur. À l'extérieur, on voit se dérouler une histoire assez simple du viol et du suicide d'une jeune fille. Quant à l'intérieur, c'est-à-dire l'état psychologique de Mouchette, l'auteur nous donne à intervalles assez espaces des éclairs fugaces. Ces éclairs suggèrent qu'il y a une pureté d'intention chez Mouchette, malgré son ignorance quasi-totale des principes moraux. Sa loyauté pour Arsène, la loyauté qui le lui fait défendre contre les soupçons de la femme de M. Mathieu, empêche sa pensée de voler « vers l'homme dont elle avait subi l'étreinte » (175). Elle dirige sa haine contre elle-même, pour éviter de la diriger contre Arsène, bien qu'une telle haine soit évidemment un grand péril pour son âme. Plus importante encore, peut-être, est l'instant fugace de tendresse auquel elle faillit se soumettre quand elle veut se confesser à sa mère mourante. Hélas, cette occasion lui est retirée juste au moment où sa résistance cède à ce désir, quand « la petite tête obstinée. . .s'abandonne, avec un gémissement de fatigue, et comme au terme de son effort » (114). L'instant d'abandon vient au moment précis où, selon toute apparence, il ne sert plus de rien. La faute, si faute il y a, n'est pas à elle, mais plutôt aux circonstances. Elle est prête à se livrer, mais les circonstances enlèvent à son geste tout efficace. Ces faits nous laissent imaginer, au moins jusqu'à la quatrième partie, que sa rédemption est une possibilité.
En revanche, L’ entretien qu'a l'héroïne avec la « vieille » dans la troisième partie montre un aspect plus sinistre. Cet évènement fait partie de la matière externe de l'histoire, mais il est étroitement lié à l’évolution spirituelle de l'héroïne; donc, c'est une expérience à mi-chemin entre les deux états de l'être: l'extérieur et l'intérieur. La vieille femme mal-pensante tente la fille avec une description séduisante de la mort, de la paix et la pureté qu'apporte celle-ci: après tout, comme la vieille l'affirme, « tout ce qui vit est sale est pue » (151). Cette tentation viennent juste après les derniers mots de la mère de Mouchette, qui a bien trouvé la paix dans la mort à la fin de sa vie si solitaire, et également après le souvenir de la « paix solennelle » de la mort de son grand-père, en dépit de son « visage torturé » (105). Donc, il n'est pas très difficile pour Mouchette de la croire. En tout cas, elle n'a pas même des outils élémentaires pour clarifier toutes les idées et les images qui se mêlent dans sa tête. L'idée évocatrice de la pureté ici associe à la fois le souvenir de son premier amour pour Arsène, maintenant désacralisé, à la vision presque hallucinatoire du linceul blanc que la vieille lui offre. L'intelligence de Mouchette SE révolte contre cette association, contre l'invitation de considerer la mort comme une libération, un soulagement, et elle crie « Vous me dégoutez, sale vieille bête » (160). Mais cette révolte consciente n'est pas assez forte pour extirper l'attrait de l'idée de confesser son histoire: la vieille la convie à « parle[r] à [son] aise » (161). Inconsciente maintenant de ce qu'elle fait, elle se confesse, mais à son insu et au notre, pour ainsi dire. Comme Mouchette réfléchit à l'entretien qu'elle vient d'avoir, elle se dit que « La merveille est que [la vieille] ait réussi à [m’] arracher son secret » (167).
À cet instant-là, on comprend qu'on est maintenant complètement dans le domaine spirituel. Les gestes extérieurs que Mouchette accomplit ne lui sont plus intelligibles, à nous non plus. C’est de propos délibéré que Bernanos écrit de cette façon oblique. À cause d'elle, la conclusion de l'histoire nous laisse dans l'obscurité quant au salut de Mouchette. Même quand on a prise en considérations les détails que nous venons d'énumérer, on doit reconnaître qu'on ne sait rien de sûr. Mais pour un catholique fervent comme Bernanos, une telle connaissance certaine serait inconvenable. Alors que d’autres auteurs modernes se permettent un accès illimité aux secrets intimes de leurs personnages, Bernanos garde une très grande réserve. Si on pouvait juger Mouchette, on usurperait la connaissance des âmes réservée à Dieu (et à quelques saints). Malgré tous les indices à propos de la trajectoire que suit Mouchette, dans l'évaluation finale il y a toujours place pour la volonté, le choix ultime qui va décider le destin. Et parce que le choix n’est pas fixé, il y a également toujours place pour l'action de l'Esprit Saint dans les actions humaines. Donc, on ne peut pas protester que ce que Bernanos a fait ici nous laisse incapables de dire quelque chose de concluant, parce que c'est un élément intégral de son art. Devant « la brèche à peine ouverte du désespoir dans [cette] âme simple », il ne peut rien de plus que compter sur l'action de la grâce de Dieu et garder l'espoir dans sa bonté (176).
Dans la Nouvelle histoire de Mouchette, la question du sort final de l'héroïne reste ambigu. Bien qu’elle meure physiquement, la vraie question, pour un écrivain catholique comme Bernanos, c’est de savoir si elle meurt spirituellement. Son suicide est, bien sûr, un péché mortel au point de vue de l'Église. Mais la représentation de sa mort n’est pas du tout sombre ; au contraire, l'auteur utilise même des images baptismales en décrivant comment elle fixe son regard sur « le point le plus haut du ciel » (181). Ce détail n’est pas une preuve certaine de sa rédemption, mais il en indique bien la possibilité. Il faut considérer le texte dans son ensemble pour bien en saisir toutes les implications. Mais plus important que notre jugement sur l'extérieur de l'histoire est le fait que Bernanos refuse au lecteur toute information qui pourrait décider de la chose d'une manière certaine. C'est peut-être le principal procède de cet auteur par lequel il préserve l'autonomie de l'action de l'Esprit Saint.
Il importe de considérer l'action de Mouchette sous deux aspects: l'extérieur et l'intérieur. À l'extérieur, on voit se dérouler une histoire assez simple du viol et du suicide d'une jeune fille. Quant à l'intérieur, c'est-à-dire l'état psychologique de Mouchette, l'auteur nous donne à intervalles assez espaces des éclairs fugaces. Ces éclairs suggèrent qu'il y a une pureté d'intention chez Mouchette, malgré son ignorance quasi-totale des principes moraux. Sa loyauté pour Arsène, la loyauté qui le lui fait défendre contre les soupçons de la femme de M. Mathieu, empêche sa pensée de voler « vers l'homme dont elle avait subi l'étreinte » (175). Elle dirige sa haine contre elle-même, pour éviter de la diriger contre Arsène, bien qu'une telle haine soit évidemment un grand péril pour son âme. Plus importante encore, peut-être, est l'instant fugace de tendresse auquel elle faillit se soumettre quand elle veut se confesser à sa mère mourante. Hélas, cette occasion lui est retirée juste au moment où sa résistance cède à ce désir, quand « la petite tête obstinée. . .s'abandonne, avec un gémissement de fatigue, et comme au terme de son effort » (114). L'instant d'abandon vient au moment précis où, selon toute apparence, il ne sert plus de rien. La faute, si faute il y a, n'est pas à elle, mais plutôt aux circonstances. Elle est prête à se livrer, mais les circonstances enlèvent à son geste tout efficace. Ces faits nous laissent imaginer, au moins jusqu'à la quatrième partie, que sa rédemption est une possibilité.
En revanche, L’ entretien qu'a l'héroïne avec la « vieille » dans la troisième partie montre un aspect plus sinistre. Cet évènement fait partie de la matière externe de l'histoire, mais il est étroitement lié à l’évolution spirituelle de l'héroïne; donc, c'est une expérience à mi-chemin entre les deux états de l'être: l'extérieur et l'intérieur. La vieille femme mal-pensante tente la fille avec une description séduisante de la mort, de la paix et la pureté qu'apporte celle-ci: après tout, comme la vieille l'affirme, « tout ce qui vit est sale est pue » (151). Cette tentation viennent juste après les derniers mots de la mère de Mouchette, qui a bien trouvé la paix dans la mort à la fin de sa vie si solitaire, et également après le souvenir de la « paix solennelle » de la mort de son grand-père, en dépit de son « visage torturé » (105). Donc, il n'est pas très difficile pour Mouchette de la croire. En tout cas, elle n'a pas même des outils élémentaires pour clarifier toutes les idées et les images qui se mêlent dans sa tête. L'idée évocatrice de la pureté ici associe à la fois le souvenir de son premier amour pour Arsène, maintenant désacralisé, à la vision presque hallucinatoire du linceul blanc que la vieille lui offre. L'intelligence de Mouchette SE révolte contre cette association, contre l'invitation de considerer la mort comme une libération, un soulagement, et elle crie « Vous me dégoutez, sale vieille bête » (160). Mais cette révolte consciente n'est pas assez forte pour extirper l'attrait de l'idée de confesser son histoire: la vieille la convie à « parle[r] à [son] aise » (161). Inconsciente maintenant de ce qu'elle fait, elle se confesse, mais à son insu et au notre, pour ainsi dire. Comme Mouchette réfléchit à l'entretien qu'elle vient d'avoir, elle se dit que « La merveille est que [la vieille] ait réussi à [m’] arracher son secret » (167).
À cet instant-là, on comprend qu'on est maintenant complètement dans le domaine spirituel. Les gestes extérieurs que Mouchette accomplit ne lui sont plus intelligibles, à nous non plus. C’est de propos délibéré que Bernanos écrit de cette façon oblique. À cause d'elle, la conclusion de l'histoire nous laisse dans l'obscurité quant au salut de Mouchette. Même quand on a prise en considérations les détails que nous venons d'énumérer, on doit reconnaître qu'on ne sait rien de sûr. Mais pour un catholique fervent comme Bernanos, une telle connaissance certaine serait inconvenable. Alors que d’autres auteurs modernes se permettent un accès illimité aux secrets intimes de leurs personnages, Bernanos garde une très grande réserve. Si on pouvait juger Mouchette, on usurperait la connaissance des âmes réservée à Dieu (et à quelques saints). Malgré tous les indices à propos de la trajectoire que suit Mouchette, dans l'évaluation finale il y a toujours place pour la volonté, le choix ultime qui va décider le destin. Et parce que le choix n’est pas fixé, il y a également toujours place pour l'action de l'Esprit Saint dans les actions humaines. Donc, on ne peut pas protester que ce que Bernanos a fait ici nous laisse incapables de dire quelque chose de concluant, parce que c'est un élément intégral de son art. Devant « la brèche à peine ouverte du désespoir dans [cette] âme simple », il ne peut rien de plus que compter sur l'action de la grâce de Dieu et garder l'espoir dans sa bonté (176).
25 November, 2010
Explanations and Excuses
The general lack of any original material on this blog of late can be explained away by a few facts.
-I have work to do this semester for what is arguably the first time in my college career. Writing twenty-five pages in French is actually a bit of a challenge. Not super-much, but it still requires a bit of time. Writing a twenty-page English paper is also something to get used to, not because it's hard to fill twenty pages (not at all), but because the usual mindless rhythm of the six page essay is no longer appropriate. One has to consider things like pacing for the first time since high school.
-Academia is not my life. Neither is blogging. If it comes down to it, I'd much prefer to spend all my free time (of which there is still quite a lot, marvelously!) cooking large dinners, having dinner parties, talking to people, drinking real eggnog, reading something for fun, or tasting wine on a Saturday evening.
Est modus in rebus, as Horace would say.
-I have work to do this semester for what is arguably the first time in my college career. Writing twenty-five pages in French is actually a bit of a challenge. Not super-much, but it still requires a bit of time. Writing a twenty-page English paper is also something to get used to, not because it's hard to fill twenty pages (not at all), but because the usual mindless rhythm of the six page essay is no longer appropriate. One has to consider things like pacing for the first time since high school.
-Academia is not my life. Neither is blogging. If it comes down to it, I'd much prefer to spend all my free time (of which there is still quite a lot, marvelously!) cooking large dinners, having dinner parties, talking to people, drinking real eggnog, reading something for fun, or tasting wine on a Saturday evening.
Est modus in rebus, as Horace would say.
15 November, 2010
Ragueneau at the Bakery
A very much less-than-serious poem, on the subject of my all-time-favorite French swordsman, Cyrano de Bergerac.
Cyrano:
“Ah ! te voilà, toi, la Sottise !/ --Je sais bien qu'à la fin vous me mettrez à bas; / N'importe. . .
Quelque chose que sans un pli, sans une tache,/J'emporte malgré vous,/et c'est. . .
Roxane:
C'est ?. . .
Cyrano :
Mon panache.”
Cyrano de Bergerac, Scene 5, Act IV
He was dying for love when I first saw his face,
Poor Gascon with a nose like a cudgel of wood
So I gave him a pastry; he saw it was good,
And he wrote me a poem that was full of grace.
I read it with care as a gentleman should.
And what godlike esprit! Quel bon goût! What good taste!
But a fearsome quiver of that thing on his face
Turned my transports to silence, if anything would.
This bemusing appendage, it sets him apart,
Attracting disciples; yet from it springs his art
Of hiding beneath swirls of a rakish moustache
While he oversees others' affairs of the heart.
Well, I keep him well-fed as he plays his sad part,
Writing Christian's je t'aime's in a surge of panache.
Cyrano:
“Ah ! te voilà, toi, la Sottise !/ --Je sais bien qu'à la fin vous me mettrez à bas; / N'importe. . .
Quelque chose que sans un pli, sans une tache,/J'emporte malgré vous,/et c'est. . .
Roxane:
C'est ?. . .
Cyrano :
Mon panache.”
Cyrano de Bergerac, Scene 5, Act IV
He was dying for love when I first saw his face,
Poor Gascon with a nose like a cudgel of wood
So I gave him a pastry; he saw it was good,
And he wrote me a poem that was full of grace.
I read it with care as a gentleman should.
And what godlike esprit! Quel bon goût! What good taste!
But a fearsome quiver of that thing on his face
Turned my transports to silence, if anything would.
This bemusing appendage, it sets him apart,
Attracting disciples; yet from it springs his art
Of hiding beneath swirls of a rakish moustache
While he oversees others' affairs of the heart.
Well, I keep him well-fed as he plays his sad part,
Writing Christian's je t'aime's in a surge of panache.
07 November, 2010
Auden Yet Again
This Auden fellow is really quite insightful sometimes. One further comment on one of the reasons writers generally have very mixed feelings about publicizing their work. It's a bit of an elitist remark in some respects; I think I'd be more comfortable with it in general if the conclusion were "if a good ethos were equally distributed among all men." But still.
Every writer would rather be rich than poor, but no genuine writer cares about popularity as such. He needs approval of his work by others in order to be reassured that the vision of life he believes he has had is a true vision and not a self-delusion, but he can only be reassured by those whose judgment he respects. It would only be necessary for a writer to secure universal popularity if imagination and intelligence were equally distributed among all men.
06 November, 2010
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!'
01 November, 2010
More Auden
"In literature, as in life, affectation, passionately adopted and loyally persevered in, is one of the chief forms of self-discipline by which mankind has raised itself by its own bootstraps."
30 October, 2010
Auden on Writing
"Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about. There is a certain kind of person who is so dominated by the desire to be loved for himself alone that he has constantly to test those around him by tiresome behavior; what he says and does must be admired, not because it is intrinsically admirable, but because it is his remark, his act. Does not this explain a good deal of avant-garde art?"
10 October, 2010
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".
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".
17 September, 2010
Why Style Matters
I've always been rather profoundly disgusted with much modern fiction. Let me express a caveat: I have certainly read very little of it in its entirety. Generally I pick up a book, read a few chapters, and then have to close it in disgust--the style is abysmal.
While digging around in the archives of First Things, I came across a mildly dismissive mention of this article from the Atlantic Monthly by B.R. Myers. Apparently back in 2001, this article provoked a barrage of criticism; no surprise--the entire thing bashes the literary establishment, particularly the tendency of critics to moon over "literary" writers at the expense of all others. I am not enamoured of the basic thesis of the article. Myers is expressing little more original thought than the classic Marxist criticism of elitist literature. He wants Stephen King's horror novels and such to be accorded an equal place in the developing canon of literature as the works of Proulx and McCarthy.
I think there's some merit in being stylistically excellent. The interesting thing is that despite his basic thesis, Myers clearly does as well. In fact the truly interesting part of the article (and the bulk) is devoted to incisive analyses of the prose styles of these darlings of the literary world. He's quite good at this.
In fact, the portion of the article that I most appreciated was the section entitled "Muscular" Prose, referring primarily to Cormac McCarthy. Now McCarthy is something of a sore spot for me. I've read so many snippets of high praise of his work from Catholic websites (particularly First Things), and yet despite giving him a fair test this summer, I found his prose little less than nauseating. One sentence that Myers quotes, in fact, I went around quoting in mild rage to anyone who would listen for at least a week after I read it: "He ate the last of the eggs and wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate the tortilla and drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth and looked up and thanked her." (The Crossing) Saints preserve us! (No, really!) Have you ever come across such a gratuitous use of repetition? Some writers use repetition to effect something--an emotion, for instance. This instance displays the sort of repetitiveness that, according to my first instinct, and now to Myers' article, seems aimed only at showing off how literary the author can be. I wouldn't take it from Myers either if I hadn't found the exact same thing happening for the five chapters before I had to put it down.
Another caveat: generally speaking, I rather despise arrogant young critics who think that their opinions must become literary doctrine merely because they are their opinions. Even the most revered T.S. Eliot gets annoying when he does that. But that's what I'm doing with McCarthy. So be it. It does at least have some basis in textual reality.
And again, I must admit that I've never managed to complete anything of his. The high praise I read is invariably focused on the Old Testament centric-ness of the work, its Christianity, etc. That may well be; I wouldn't know--my testimony is necessarily one-dimensional. On the other hand, my family has always strongly adhered to the idea that a bit of Biblical imagery and a dash of God language doesn't make something a Christian work of art. A Christian something maybe, but not art. (There are worse examples than McCarthy that I'm thinking of now. Especially various didactic items of childrens literature.)
Another amazingly irritating bit:
I started this book too. Didn't get up to this point. But read it. Ignoring the kind of painful abstraction that McCarthy seems to regularly allow free rein in his descriptions of anything whatsoever (interrupted only in appearance by the sort of mundane "realistic" detail of the previous example) consider the fact that John Grady is a cowboy. My understanding of character in fiction is that the language of the character should be suited to him. I think that's a fairly classical, Aristotelean view. Now, I understand that John Grady is a pretty unusual cowboy. He thinks a lot. He's "deep". But to suggest that he is speaking in the sort of convoluted syntax more appropriate to bad Cavalier poetry, and in terms more appropriate to an advanced philosophy class...that's a very poor use of free indirect discourse. For someone like Jane Austen (brilliant at the technique, by the way), free indirect discourse is indicated less syntactically (:"John Grady asked him..." ) and more by the tone that the narrator's prose assumes (see Austen's passages on Mrs. Norris' reactions to Fanny in Mansfield Park). Nothing that I saw in the first few chapters indicated that John Grady ever had a tendency to sound like that. In fact, one of the things that rapidly turned me off about the novel was just how banal and quotidien the dialogue was...sure cowboys may talk like that, but do you need to torture the readers with their "Nice day." "Sure is." "Goin' somewhere?" sort of exchanges, which far too often seemed to be there as scenery rather than plot-movers.
So, having just written a bit of an invective on the poor man's style, I do think that the derision in which Myers holds his work (and even his character) in is unwarrented. I'm willing to believe that he has nice Biblical themes. I can see justification for his use of Biblical language as the default narrative tone (although that's not helped much by his hyper-realism à la Zola). The first sentence of his that Myers quotes is entirely unobjectionable. Quite good, in fact. And I have heard that "The Road" is excellent.
The real point that irks me about it is simply what Myers put his finger on. It's too self-conscious. Too "artsy," while not being genuinely artistic. And that goes for so much contemporary prose. Perhaps I'll get past that one day and be able to give some of these writers the sort of thematic or plot-centered reading they may or may not deserve. Until then, such vaguely evocative sentences as "War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner" will be to me as Zola or Gide: rather clever in their own way, but dreadfully disappointing as a whole.
Also, it is not inherently literary to despise punctuation.
While digging around in the archives of First Things, I came across a mildly dismissive mention of this article from the Atlantic Monthly by B.R. Myers. Apparently back in 2001, this article provoked a barrage of criticism; no surprise--the entire thing bashes the literary establishment, particularly the tendency of critics to moon over "literary" writers at the expense of all others. I am not enamoured of the basic thesis of the article. Myers is expressing little more original thought than the classic Marxist criticism of elitist literature. He wants Stephen King's horror novels and such to be accorded an equal place in the developing canon of literature as the works of Proulx and McCarthy.
I think there's some merit in being stylistically excellent. The interesting thing is that despite his basic thesis, Myers clearly does as well. In fact the truly interesting part of the article (and the bulk) is devoted to incisive analyses of the prose styles of these darlings of the literary world. He's quite good at this.
In fact, the portion of the article that I most appreciated was the section entitled "Muscular" Prose, referring primarily to Cormac McCarthy. Now McCarthy is something of a sore spot for me. I've read so many snippets of high praise of his work from Catholic websites (particularly First Things), and yet despite giving him a fair test this summer, I found his prose little less than nauseating. One sentence that Myers quotes, in fact, I went around quoting in mild rage to anyone who would listen for at least a week after I read it: "He ate the last of the eggs and wiped the plate with the tortilla and ate the tortilla and drank the last of the coffee and wiped his mouth and looked up and thanked her." (The Crossing) Saints preserve us! (No, really!) Have you ever come across such a gratuitous use of repetition? Some writers use repetition to effect something--an emotion, for instance. This instance displays the sort of repetitiveness that, according to my first instinct, and now to Myers' article, seems aimed only at showing off how literary the author can be. I wouldn't take it from Myers either if I hadn't found the exact same thing happening for the five chapters before I had to put it down.
Another caveat: generally speaking, I rather despise arrogant young critics who think that their opinions must become literary doctrine merely because they are their opinions. Even the most revered T.S. Eliot gets annoying when he does that. But that's what I'm doing with McCarthy. So be it. It does at least have some basis in textual reality.
And again, I must admit that I've never managed to complete anything of his. The high praise I read is invariably focused on the Old Testament centric-ness of the work, its Christianity, etc. That may well be; I wouldn't know--my testimony is necessarily one-dimensional. On the other hand, my family has always strongly adhered to the idea that a bit of Biblical imagery and a dash of God language doesn't make something a Christian work of art. A Christian something maybe, but not art. (There are worse examples than McCarthy that I'm thinking of now. Especially various didactic items of childrens literature.)
Another amazingly irritating bit:
He said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold ... Lastly he said that he had seen the souls of horses and that it was a terrible thing to see. He said that it could be seen under certain circumstances attending the death of a horse because the horse shares a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all horses and makes it mortal ... Finally John Grady asked him if it were not true that should all horses vanish from the face of the earth the soul of the horse would not also perish for there would be nothing out of which to replenish it but the old man only said that it was pointless to speak of there being no horses in the world for God would not permit such a thing. (All the Pretty Horses)
I started this book too. Didn't get up to this point. But read it. Ignoring the kind of painful abstraction that McCarthy seems to regularly allow free rein in his descriptions of anything whatsoever (interrupted only in appearance by the sort of mundane "realistic" detail of the previous example) consider the fact that John Grady is a cowboy. My understanding of character in fiction is that the language of the character should be suited to him. I think that's a fairly classical, Aristotelean view. Now, I understand that John Grady is a pretty unusual cowboy. He thinks a lot. He's "deep". But to suggest that he is speaking in the sort of convoluted syntax more appropriate to bad Cavalier poetry, and in terms more appropriate to an advanced philosophy class...that's a very poor use of free indirect discourse. For someone like Jane Austen (brilliant at the technique, by the way), free indirect discourse is indicated less syntactically (:"John Grady asked him..." ) and more by the tone that the narrator's prose assumes (see Austen's passages on Mrs. Norris' reactions to Fanny in Mansfield Park). Nothing that I saw in the first few chapters indicated that John Grady ever had a tendency to sound like that. In fact, one of the things that rapidly turned me off about the novel was just how banal and quotidien the dialogue was...sure cowboys may talk like that, but do you need to torture the readers with their "Nice day." "Sure is." "Goin' somewhere?" sort of exchanges, which far too often seemed to be there as scenery rather than plot-movers.
So, having just written a bit of an invective on the poor man's style, I do think that the derision in which Myers holds his work (and even his character) in is unwarrented. I'm willing to believe that he has nice Biblical themes. I can see justification for his use of Biblical language as the default narrative tone (although that's not helped much by his hyper-realism à la Zola). The first sentence of his that Myers quotes is entirely unobjectionable. Quite good, in fact. And I have heard that "The Road" is excellent.
The real point that irks me about it is simply what Myers put his finger on. It's too self-conscious. Too "artsy," while not being genuinely artistic. And that goes for so much contemporary prose. Perhaps I'll get past that one day and be able to give some of these writers the sort of thematic or plot-centered reading they may or may not deserve. Until then, such vaguely evocative sentences as "War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner" will be to me as Zola or Gide: rather clever in their own way, but dreadfully disappointing as a whole.
Also, it is not inherently literary to despise punctuation.
01 September, 2010
Grammatical...Existentialism?
Ok, I am busy. But this is far too marvelous to remain unexpressed for long. A bit of background: I am taking Elementary Latin here at UD because I always did fight my mother tooth and nail about taking it in middle school...and here I am having gone to Rome, regretting all the time not having followed her sage advice. Well, as you can imagine, much of the "civilized" world is not up to snuff with their grammar. So the first assignment for this class was to parse several sentences from Genesis and the famously long and tortured opening sentence of Paradise Lost (the exercise decreased my already poor opinion of Milton, I'm afraid). My roommate and I went vastly overboard in completing the exercise, of course. No need to get way down into details like relative clauses and subclauses; the teacher was looking more for "this is a verb, transitive, past tense". One place in particular that had confused us to no end, however, was a line from Genesis that runs: "And God said, 'Let there be light'" , etc. Well, imperatives are always a bit tricky. And the usual rule of implicit subjects that I usually hazily follow when I am compelled to have anything to do with them is kind of hard to apply in this case. Who on earth would God be commanding other than Himself? Which, of course, is an option that works syntactically but not grammatically.
But then there was all this "let be" nonsense (which reminds me unavoidably of that gorgeous conclusion of Hamlet's existential drama)--let being an intransitive helping verb, we later found. And the mysterious "there". What part of speech would "there", used clearly not as an adverb, but to signify the state of something's being in existence be? This is what I've been working up to all along. Wait for it...wait...this particular part of speech is known as the "Existential there". Really! This is no joke. They call it the existential there.
That's all I wanted to say, in point of fact. But it's kind of awesome, don't you think? Perhaps not quite as delightful to some, but there's nothing better (I just used it!) than all of the sudden finding a previously hidden potential for puns of epic proportion in, of all things, technical grammatical vocabulary.
But then there was all this "let be" nonsense (which reminds me unavoidably of that gorgeous conclusion of Hamlet's existential drama)--let being an intransitive helping verb, we later found. And the mysterious "there". What part of speech would "there", used clearly not as an adverb, but to signify the state of something's being in existence be? This is what I've been working up to all along. Wait for it...wait...this particular part of speech is known as the "Existential there". Really! This is no joke. They call it the existential there.
That's all I wanted to say, in point of fact. But it's kind of awesome, don't you think? Perhaps not quite as delightful to some, but there's nothing better (I just used it!) than all of the sudden finding a previously hidden potential for puns of epic proportion in, of all things, technical grammatical vocabulary.
22 July, 2010
A note
If I were to expand the post below, I'd add a rant about how capitalism is a completely artificial term as well as being impossibly hard to use. It's just a description of how things work, very naturally, in a free society, and could be seen in the ancient and medieval worlds too (except where feudalism was quite absolute); it's not a system. Unless of course you use it to mean our particular situation in which we're so lamentably removed from the concrete products of our work, in which case the confusion is multiplied.
"Capitalism" was first used, according to the OED, in the 1850s by Thackeray. Then the Marxists took it and ran with it.
"Capitalism" was first used, according to the OED, in the 1850s by Thackeray. Then the Marxists took it and ran with it.
On Capitalism
Thank you Karl Marx. Or perhaps more properly Friedrich Engels.
Capitalism is one of those words that is by this point in history just inherently frustrating. Like "existentialism" or "conservatism", there are by now so many different shades of meaning in the word that there exists by now practically nothing of the common ground of understanding necessary for rational communication on the subject. I am particularly attuned to a lot of this right now, partly because of my recent reading of Marxist criticism, partly because of conversations with friends, and partly because Georges Bernanos loathed it.
While there doesn't seem to be much controversy in protestant circles over it (at least not in your average, prosperity-gospel supporting church), Catholics tend to be dramatically divided between accepting and detesting it. As for the wild detestation, I have to blame some of that on the liberation theology that infected the Church in the 60s and 70s. But the really interesting thing is that this is something hated not merely by the pseudo-Marxist liberals (many of whom really do have the best of intentions in hating it, I think), but by solid, sincere, orthodox Catholics as well.
Why? Well, I think some of it is necessarily rooted in a certain hysteria that has grown up around the word for the past 50 years. Since I am not an economist, I take my basic definition of capitalism from Wikipedia (not originally, but for this post):
Usually Catholics who object to Capitalism are objecting to a habit in society of rampant acquisitiveness, exercised with little or no attitude of responsibility towards the less fortunate (certainly what Bernanos hated, although he also hated democracy...mostly because he understood it badly too). But is that at all what is being outlined in this very basic definition of the system, which is how I and my family have understood it for as long as I can remember? Let's see: lack of state control of the products of individual labor and entrustment of those products to the individual to dispose of as he or she sees fit. Now several things come to mind when I read that. First is the analogy to the liberty of the person allowed for in all realms of life by the United States Constitution; it's the same principle, just applied less universally to the economic sphere. Second, where is greed the rule of the system? It's basic justice that a person is allowed to keep freely the result of his own expenditure of energy, whether physical, mental, or imaginative. Just as governments exist for the sake of preserving this and other rights, without ever having its own independent right (in my opinion) to determine that the citizens must exercise their rights in these particular ways, "capitalism" has no prerogative to demand that this uncensored exchange of goods be carried out in some Machiavellian power struggle of the strongest to benefit at the expense of the weak. Oppression of the poor is not in any way some inherent cardinal rule of capitalism.
However, continue to read on Wikipedia, and you'll soon realize where the confusion comes in. Because "Capitalism also refers to the process of capital accumulation." Now, read that out logically and you'll see that it would refer to a process of making capital accumulation the central activity of life, even the element which gives it its meaning: an "ism", as Chesterton observes, is a thing that preoccupies and monopolizes a life: Nazism, liberalism, Catholicism (the only thing that can properly do that, of course, is the last, because it happens to be true. How nice).
Now, that, I have no problems with objecting to. Of course that will end up being Machiavellian: if your only goal in life is to make more money than the other man, than of course you'll be offending basic principles of justice, society will be greedy and materialistic, and the poor will be crushed (or at least despised) by the rich.
Yet the interesting thing is that whereas Marxist propaganda, starting right back there with Das Kapital , has inspired us to generally accept without question the absurd equation of a fault that the system may allow for (greed) with the system itself (free market). And add to this the further absurdity that this fault is in fact destructive of that first definition of Capitalism. If the economy becomes nothing more than ruthless suppression of the weak by the strong, that free-market principle is no longer a free market principle except for the tiny oligarchy of those at the top. To take some examples from history: that's precisely what was happening in American society in the 1800s. The railroad magnates, mill owners, etc. all treating their workers with complete lack of regard for their human dignity and destroying any form of capitalism for these workers (they were not, recall, in control of the products of their work). Then in the 1920s: rampant stock market speculation (greed), with the economy by now so far removed from concrete products of labor, sent the entire system crashing down and paved the way for the beginnings of the proto-socialist welfare state.
And now look at what we have. Greed infecting society on all levels, not the prerogative any more of a few clever businessmen, but everyone's right. And what are we getting now? Strengthened capitalism? Are you seeing increasing control of the money you earn (or if you happen to be a farmer, the goods you produce)? Isn't it more the fact that the attitude of greed supposedly inherent in and peculiar to socialism has in point of fact led directly to an all-encompassing state-regulated economy in which more and more of the individual's earnings are put at the disposal of a Big Brother government to ensure that the avarice which has infected modern society ever since we decided that money is the only thing to live for is at least partially sated...so that we have a populace increasingly dependent on the government for its bread and circuses and no means to the financial independence that could allow us to follow our principles and help our neighbor instead of fund the video-game addiction of some down and out punk who never wanted to work anyway?
Capitalism is one of those words that is by this point in history just inherently frustrating. Like "existentialism" or "conservatism", there are by now so many different shades of meaning in the word that there exists by now practically nothing of the common ground of understanding necessary for rational communication on the subject. I am particularly attuned to a lot of this right now, partly because of my recent reading of Marxist criticism, partly because of conversations with friends, and partly because Georges Bernanos loathed it.
While there doesn't seem to be much controversy in protestant circles over it (at least not in your average, prosperity-gospel supporting church), Catholics tend to be dramatically divided between accepting and detesting it. As for the wild detestation, I have to blame some of that on the liberation theology that infected the Church in the 60s and 70s. But the really interesting thing is that this is something hated not merely by the pseudo-Marxist liberals (many of whom really do have the best of intentions in hating it, I think), but by solid, sincere, orthodox Catholics as well.
Why? Well, I think some of it is necessarily rooted in a certain hysteria that has grown up around the word for the past 50 years. Since I am not an economist, I take my basic definition of capitalism from Wikipedia (not originally, but for this post):
"Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned; supply, demand, price, distribution, and investments are determined mainly by private decisions in the free market, rather than by the state through central economic planning or through democratic planning; profit is distributed to owners who invest in businesses, and wages are paid to workers employed by businesses."
Usually Catholics who object to Capitalism are objecting to a habit in society of rampant acquisitiveness, exercised with little or no attitude of responsibility towards the less fortunate (certainly what Bernanos hated, although he also hated democracy...mostly because he understood it badly too). But is that at all what is being outlined in this very basic definition of the system, which is how I and my family have understood it for as long as I can remember? Let's see: lack of state control of the products of individual labor and entrustment of those products to the individual to dispose of as he or she sees fit. Now several things come to mind when I read that. First is the analogy to the liberty of the person allowed for in all realms of life by the United States Constitution; it's the same principle, just applied less universally to the economic sphere. Second, where is greed the rule of the system? It's basic justice that a person is allowed to keep freely the result of his own expenditure of energy, whether physical, mental, or imaginative. Just as governments exist for the sake of preserving this and other rights, without ever having its own independent right (in my opinion) to determine that the citizens must exercise their rights in these particular ways, "capitalism" has no prerogative to demand that this uncensored exchange of goods be carried out in some Machiavellian power struggle of the strongest to benefit at the expense of the weak. Oppression of the poor is not in any way some inherent cardinal rule of capitalism.
However, continue to read on Wikipedia, and you'll soon realize where the confusion comes in. Because "Capitalism also refers to the process of capital accumulation." Now, read that out logically and you'll see that it would refer to a process of making capital accumulation the central activity of life, even the element which gives it its meaning: an "ism", as Chesterton observes, is a thing that preoccupies and monopolizes a life: Nazism, liberalism, Catholicism (the only thing that can properly do that, of course, is the last, because it happens to be true. How nice).
Now, that, I have no problems with objecting to. Of course that will end up being Machiavellian: if your only goal in life is to make more money than the other man, than of course you'll be offending basic principles of justice, society will be greedy and materialistic, and the poor will be crushed (or at least despised) by the rich.
Yet the interesting thing is that whereas Marxist propaganda, starting right back there with Das Kapital , has inspired us to generally accept without question the absurd equation of a fault that the system may allow for (greed) with the system itself (free market). And add to this the further absurdity that this fault is in fact destructive of that first definition of Capitalism. If the economy becomes nothing more than ruthless suppression of the weak by the strong, that free-market principle is no longer a free market principle except for the tiny oligarchy of those at the top. To take some examples from history: that's precisely what was happening in American society in the 1800s. The railroad magnates, mill owners, etc. all treating their workers with complete lack of regard for their human dignity and destroying any form of capitalism for these workers (they were not, recall, in control of the products of their work). Then in the 1920s: rampant stock market speculation (greed), with the economy by now so far removed from concrete products of labor, sent the entire system crashing down and paved the way for the beginnings of the proto-socialist welfare state.
And now look at what we have. Greed infecting society on all levels, not the prerogative any more of a few clever businessmen, but everyone's right. And what are we getting now? Strengthened capitalism? Are you seeing increasing control of the money you earn (or if you happen to be a farmer, the goods you produce)? Isn't it more the fact that the attitude of greed supposedly inherent in and peculiar to socialism has in point of fact led directly to an all-encompassing state-regulated economy in which more and more of the individual's earnings are put at the disposal of a Big Brother government to ensure that the avarice which has infected modern society ever since we decided that money is the only thing to live for is at least partially sated...so that we have a populace increasingly dependent on the government for its bread and circuses and no means to the financial independence that could allow us to follow our principles and help our neighbor instead of fund the video-game addiction of some down and out punk who never wanted to work anyway?
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