Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music - enchantment is the precondition of all dramatic art

When I read Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872) several years ago I was interested in it as a 19th century work, as a key text in the cult of Richard Wagner and an early example of the vogue for fantasizing that stuffy Prussian or Victorian propriety will be de-stuffed by a good dose of the Dionysian, whatever that might be, Tristan and Isolde or subversive satyrs.  Here is the comparable Max Beerbohm skewering the latter.

Nietzsche’s central conceit is that the satyrs saved the Greeks, too.  They had been going through a rational, scientific Apollonian phase, as seen in their architecture, sculpture, and the naïve and beautiful Homer, “the complete triumph of the Apollonian illusion” (3, 29) – Nietzsche’s Homer is not my Homer – until the new cult of Dionysus introduced a new element of passion and nature.  The satyr chorus in particular, its music, an early Greek innovation in the Dionysian ritual, is the “rescuing deed of Greek art” (7, 47), “a copy of a more truthful, more real, more complete image of existence than the man of culture who commonly considers himself the sole reality” (8, 47).

Other Greek festivals also have music, but, for example, “the virgins who approach the temple of Apollo bearing laurel branches… remain who they are” while the satyr chorus “is a chorus of people who have been transformed…  they have become the timeless servants of their gods” (8, 50), and the audience to some extent follows along, temporarily.

It is all downhill from there.  Every step away from the satyr chorus, the pure electric guitar feedback and the suffering of Dionysus, like a narrative, or characters representing ordinary people, moves the balance back towards the Apollonian, until the villain Euripides, or really his puppet-master, the arch-villain Socrates, ruins Greek tragedy.  “[U]p to the time of Euripides Dionysus remained the tragic hero, and that all the famous figures of the Greek stage, Prometheus, Oedipus, and so on, are only masks of that original hero Dionysus” (10, 59).  Euripides killed tragedy when he brought “the man of everyday life” onto the stage, no longer depicting “the great and bold traits” but only “the botched lines of nature” (11, 63), “highly realistic imitations of thoughts and emotions devoid of any trace of the ether of art” (12, 70).  This looks like the argument we – well, some people – have about the novel once in a while: too much realism, or not enough realism.

Plus the music composed by Euripides was bad: “you [he is addressing Euripides directly] never managed to produce anything but a masked imitation music” (10, 62).  Nietzsche of course has never heard a note of any Greek music.

I had half-forgotten how much of The Birth of Tragedy is about the death of tragedy, how much of it is about the destructive “audacious intelligence” (12, 70) of Euripides.  Nietzsche has many insights about Euripides, perhaps because he is forced to give his enemy so much of his attention.

I have much doubt about the truth of Nietzsche’s imagined history of tragedy, and more doubts about its use.  “We did tire later” (I’m quoting Beerbohm; please follow the link up above).  But the origins of the plays are so murky, and the resulting works of art so powerful and complex, that I am happy to have many histories, especially when written with such vigor.

I read Douglas Smith’s translation in the Oxford World’s Classics edition.  The title quotation is from 8, 50.

On Great Writing by Longinus - But greatness appears suddenly; like a thunderbolt it carries all before it

I will deposit my notes on On Great Writing, which is either a 3rd century text by Longinus, one of the great scholars and rhetoricians of his time, or was written earlier and is by someone else.  Who knows.  I will call the author Longinus, and call the work On the Sublime, the title that accompanied the work’s 18^th century entry into the canon of literary criticism.  It hits a number of 18th century preoccupations.

Great writing does not persuade; it takes the reader out of himself.  The startling and amazing is more powerful than the charming and persuasive, if it is indeed true that to be convinced is usually within our control whereas amazement is the result of an irresistible force beyond the control of any audience .  (1, p. 4), tr. G. M. A. Grube)

The move from the “charming and persuasive” to “the startling and amazing” is the Enlightenment moving to Romanticism.

A writer’s “inventive skill” and “the structure and arrangement of his subject matter… slowly emerge from the texture of the whole work”:

But greatness appears suddenly; like a thunderbolt it carries all before it and reveals the writer’s full power in a flash.  (1, 4)

This has something in common with Nabokov urging his students to read not with the head or heart but the spine, and perhaps also with Kafka saying that the only worthwhile art is that which feels like an axe splitting the skull.  Roughly speaking, Aristotle was writing in Poetics about he big overall effect of a work, while Longinus is interested in the best individual scenes or images or lines, but they are both critics asking how it all works.

For much of On the Sublime, Longinus identifies rhetorical devices that are part of passages he finds especially great.  I can see how the author is a professional rhetorician – maybe he can teach me how to make my writing great.  But then I notice how much space he gives to bad writing.  My use of the very same devices will likely produce bad writing.  There is still a lot of mystery here.  The best I can do is emulate Homer and Demosthenes, even asking what these writers would think of my words.  “For as we emulate them, these eminent personages are present in our minds and raise us to a higher level of imaginative power” (14, 23).

Longinus mostly looks back at earlier Greek literature, mostly Homer, the three tragedians, and the 4th century BCE Athenian orator Demosthenes – as usual, mostly Athenians.  It is as if a book about great writing written today took the bulk of its examples from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton, which is not implausible.  I am setting aside the surprising appearance by Moses (9, 17) and the part where Longinus inadvertently saves the first stanza of a great Sappho poem (10, 17).

 This bit is like a Twitter game:

… which should be preferred in poetry or in prose, great writing with occasional flaws or moderate talent which is entirely sound and faultless? (33, 44)

Really, would you rather be the flawed but great Sophocles or the flawless but merely good Ion of Chios?  Longinus thinks that “no sane man would count all the plays of Ion to be worth as much as the one play, Oedipus” (33, 45), so on Twitter it the vote would be fifty-fifty.  I am starting to elan towards Ion of Chios myself, out of pity.

Longinus ends by wondering why the writing today, in his day, stinks so much.  His answer is money.  Such a book written today would likely have the same ending.

I plan to read Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) soon, which will finish off this project.  My memory is that Nietzsche’s book is about two-thirds what it says in the title and one-third how Richard Wagner will save us from the cultural decadence begun by the super-villain Socrates.  I’ll write something up before Christmas.

Notes on Aristotle's Poetics - What are the conditions on which the tragic effect depends?

Aristotle did not invent literary criticism with Poetics (late 4th c. BCE, maybe) – we just read The Frogs – but for centuries it was the base of Western literary criticism, not a source of insight but rather a set of rules.  The Unities, the Tragic Flaw, catharsis, the ranking of forms, with the epic poem on top.  The medieval importation of Aristotle from Muslim Spain was a great advance for European civilization, but it was not always so good for literature.

How prescriptive did Aristotle mean to be?  I am not sure.  His initial impulse is the central one of the enterprise: experiencing a powerful work of literature, he wants to know why it affected him so much.  “What are the conditions on which the tragic effect depends?” (13, 681) So he assembles the evidence, arranging the tragedies by how they affected him, and begins to generalize.  Perhaps he is just describing his own taste, but the patterns he sees are clear enough.  One central action as opposed to many; stories about families; tragic results caused not by “depravity” but “in some great error on [the protagonist’s] part” (13, 682); writing that is a mix of the simple and ornate.  

These, the strange word, the metaphor, the ornamental equivalent, &c., will save the language from seeming mean and prosaic, while the ordinary words in it will secure the requisite clearness (22, 699).

Aristotle is the originator of “make it strange” (but not too strange).

Oedipus the King is the perfect tragedy for Sophocles, with other plays approaching it in power.  It is the best, so other plays should be like it, and then it is just a small step to must.  But it is clear enough that Aristotle valued other kinds of plays.  He criticizes Euripides in many ways but is fascinated by – finds a kind of catharsis in – Iphigenia in Tauris, a tragedy that is not even tragic.  But he has a strong taste for scenes of “discovery,” where the emotional effect turns on sister’s recognizing long lost brothers and so on.

That is one example of taste as prescript.  Here is another where Aristotle is obviously wrong, when he argues that a story should not be about:

… an extremely bad man [] falling from happiness into misery.  Such a story may arouse the human feeling in us, but it will not move us to either pity of fear; pity is occasioned by undeserved misfortune, and fear by that of one like ourselves… (13, 681)

His assumption that the bad man is not like ourselves is kind.  But my point is that many people absolutely love such stories, and also stories about virtue rewarded and for that matter vice rewarded.  Who am I to judge the catharsis of others?  But perhaps those stories are more common in a later, not less but differently fatalistic, Christian culture.

I have been quoting from the Ingram Bywater translation as found in the Modern Library Introduction to Aristotle.  Bywater conceals the key Greek terms.  A different translation might well look like a different argument.  I don’t know Greek, but I can see where they are hidden, where “fear and pity” translates “catharsis” [completely wrong! see comments below, please] – “The tragic pleasure is that of pity and fear” (14, 683).  Up above is the “tragic flaw” or “hamartia” concealed by, translated as, “some great error.”

I’m going to round out my look at Classical Greek literary criticism with On the Sublime or On Great Writing by Longinus (1st c. CE), whoever he was.  On the Sublime is not as play-centered as Poetics, so a bit of a tangent, but it is the major alternative to the aesthetics of Aristotle.  It is full of interesting things, and is perhaps sixty pages long.  I will try to write about Longinus at the end of the month, after the last Menander play.

I am also beginning to wonder if it would be a good idea to take a fresh look at Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872), which is directly related, or about two-thirds related, to this last year of reading, so maybe that will be the final text in the aesthetics series.  Please join me if interested.

Richard Scarry taught me the principles of literary criticism when I was five - "Mouse has just bought a book at the book store"

Rooting around my old things, I found this 1971 set of books written and illustrated by Richard Scarry, mostly.  I believe they originally came in a cardboard sleeve, long lost, also decorated like a building.

I remember them as landmarks, books that taught me to read. Surprisingly, I see that they also taught me the critical principles that have governed my reading ever since.

First, Best Stories Ever. 

On the one hand, of course we become readers because we love stories.  But note the emphasis on the best stories.  Even at this young age, I was encouraged to judge and rank, to stop wasting my time with the typical story.  We will see, in later volumes, that for the imaginative reader story-as-such is not necessary at all, but as long as I want a story, stick with the best.

I also learned that many of the best stories are in verse.  Lyric poems, even.  This book is full of poems.

Leafing through, I am not so sure that these stories, despite some fairy tales and bits of Aesop, are actually the best, but I learned the principle.  That’s the important thing.

Reading is also for Going Places.  I always loved the casual surrealism of children’s books.  A goat in a hot-air balloon, a cat flying a helicopter, a Danish mouse-witch (“All witches must put their brooms away when they have finished with them, “A Castle in Denmark,” p. 19), why not, why not.

Related, but here is where I diverge from most readers: Things To Know.  Many readers of the internetting variety write about what they experienced, while I am more interested in what I learned.  In this book, it was colors, numbers, etiquette (“Everyone likes the polite elephant,” “The Polite Elephant,” p. 49, what propaganda!), but also the names of flowers and birds, and most curiously Epicurean philosophy, as expressed in the 25 pages of “I Am a Bunny,”* where the “thing to know” is not the biological life cycle of rabbits but the jumper-clad bunny’s attitude towards the universe (pp. 98-9):

Yes, that is the bunny on the cover of Best Stories Ever, but his anti-story actually appears in Things To Know.  “Story” can mean a lot of things.  The most curious thing in Things To Know is that it ends with a cluster of Mother Goose rhymes, which are themselves things to know.  In the arts, the only way to learn about things is to encounter them.  Many readers, as far as I can tell, read their dreary novels expecting to “love” them, and are often disappointed, while I read literature in order to learn what it is, and am always happy, and find that love generally takes care of itself.

The best for last: what is literature, really, what is reading, if not Fun with Words?  Now Scarry is giving me the pure stuff.

The first fifty pages of Fun with Words are much like the cover, typical scenes – a supermarket, a firehouse, “A Drive in the Country” - with every possible item labelled ("owl"), perfect for quick vocabulary growth and also for training the taste of a reader who especially loved – still loves – watching Robinson Crusoe unload the shipwreck item by item or Huckleberry Finn looting Pa’s cabin before faking his death.  Sometimes I want the best story, but sometimes all I want is a list, an imaginatively inspiring list.  The most material literature can be strangely abstract.  Fun with words.

The next 125 pages of this book contain an illustrated children’s dictionary full of recurring characters and little stories that unfold over the course of the alphabet.  Innovative!  No wonder I so enjoy novels written like dictionaries or indices or what have you.  I first read one when I was five.

I wonder what equivalent book today’s five year-old is reading.  I am not much of an identifier, but I hope whatever it is includes a scene as identifiable and influential as this one was on me:

 

* “I Am a Bunny” is not by Richard Scarry but by the Danish-American children’s publishing innovator Ole Risom, who supervised the Little Golden Books line and was also a Monuments Man!

What I read in November, all in one place for some reason

What I read in November, in list form, with light opinionation.  No idea what good this is to me, except psychologically, and I doubt that, much less to anyone else.  If I wrote something else, I include the link.

French

La Bête du Vaccarès (1926), Joseph d’Arbaud.  Tourism and other interesting things.

Poèmes : 1919-48, André Breton.  Really just 1932-48.  I would never guess from Breton’s 1930 poems that this is the Surrealism tyrant phase, or the Communist phase.  The poems look a lot like they did in the 1920s.  The “Ode to Charles Fourier” looks different, but that is from 1947.  Breton seems second-rate to me.  Louis Aragon is more linguistically playful, a better poet all around. Benjamin Péret is more pure, more committed to the concept.  Still, I found plenty of good lines, good images, even whole poems.  The little 1934 collection L'air de l'eau (The Air of the Water) seemed especially striking.

La Corde au cou (Rope to the Throat, maybe, 1873), Émile Gaboriau.  Most of my French reading energy was for some reason drained into a 500-page proto-mystery.  I want to write separately about this book.  I hereby commit to etc.  It ain’t The Moonstone, but it’s interesting.

Poetry

The Complete Poems (1994), Basil Bunting.  A good Auden imitator in the 1930s, the war and a long break from poetry turned him into his own poet, most notably in the long “Briggflats” (1966), but I need to reread him to know what I mean by any of that.

Rescue (1945), Czeslaw Milosz.

North and South (1946), Elizabeth Bishop.

First Poems (1951), James Merrill.

What I really read here are the relevant parts of volumes of Collected Poems (or selected, for Merrill, From the First Nine), so I don’t know what tinkering and quiet omission has been done.  All three poets are firmly material, in contrast to so many Surrealists and Audenists of the previous decade.  If the poem is titled “The Fish,” it may be about many things, but at least one of them, no matter how lost I might get, is a fish.

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.  (Bishop)

Milosz’s material reality is the destruction of Warsaw and everything around him.  Merrill’s is rather different:

Friday.  Clear.  Cool.  This is your day.  Stendhal
At breakfast-time.  The metaphors of love.  (“Variations: The Air Is Sweetest that a Thistle Guards”)

Narrative

Young Joseph (1934), Thomas Mann.

The Beast Must Die (1938), Nicholas Blake.  The flap said this is often called the greatest detective novel ever written, which is preposterous.  The 1990 Crime Writers’ Association poll put it at #81 which is plausible.  It is cleverly structured, with the detective not appearing until the exact halfway point.  It is quite funny, with some pathos at the beginning and end.  Since “Nicholas Blake” was a poet, I had hopes that his writing would be interesting, but he writes in the conventional commercial style that almost every English Golden Age mystery writer adopted.  It’s better than the Blake I read a couple of months ago, Thou Shell of Death (1936).

Murphy (1938), Samuel Beckett.

At Swim-Too-Birds (1939), Flann O’Brien.  Wild things going on in Irish fiction at the end of the 1930s!  So much fun.

The Day of the Locust (1939), Nathanael West.  Of West’s three little novels, this apocalyptic small-time Hollywood novel is the most conventional, although certain scenes are spectacular.  The chapter where the protagonist wanders through a wilderness of movie sets, for example – Surrealism perfectly harnessed for narrative fiction.  Still, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) feels like the one where the abyss is bottomless.

Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939), Katherine Anne Porter.  Ah, these are great.  Three fifty-page “short novels” (Porter loathed the word “novella”), two of them about her greatest invention, her stand-in character Miranda.  She is a child in “Old Mortality,” working through her family history in East Texas and New Orleans, and a young theater critic in let’s call it Denver in “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” where she is stricken, hard, with the Spanish flu.  Poor “Noon Wine,” a non-Miranda story, is almost lost between them, but it is good, too, a fine piece of American violence.  But it's "Old Mortality" that is like Texas Proust (the Proust of “Combray,” specifically, the best Proust).

Galileo (1947), Bertolt Brecht.

Criticism

The Novel, an Alternative History: Beginnings to 1600 (2010), Steven Moore.  A good way to demolish any simple notions of “firstness” – first novel, first English novel, first (any adjective) novel.  Also to demolish any notion of being well-read.  Moore is limited in his reading only by the energy of translators.  An exercise that would be useful simply as a list is also full of good criticism, with extended sections on The Arabian Nights, The Plum in the Golden Vase, The Tale of Genji, and many more books filled with the most extraordinary things.  Learning that some of these books exist at all is a pleasure, like the burst of Byzantine fiction in the 12th century, or Tibetan religious fiction in the 15th.  So much fun.  I said that up above, too.  I could have said it more.

French literature in "selfish dictionary" form

I present another beautiful literary artifact I brought back from France, a non-mint condition second-hand paperback of Charles Dantzig’s Dictionnaire égoïste de la littérature française (2005), his Selfish Dictionary of French Literature:

Or perhaps not Selfish but Egotistical.  Definitely not Personal, which is to warm and inviting for these 1,132 pages of jokes, aphorism, jabs, and criticism, although it all is truly personal in the sense that they are just his opinions.  The book is a paper brick of opinions.

Dantzig is a pure French literary professional, a poet, translator, critic, essayist, radio producer, and editor at the publisher that publishes his books.  He is right in the middle of things.  I have seen him described as iconoclastic, but I have doubts, and do not care.  I am interested in this book exactly because it comes out of the heart of the French literary world.  I know how American critics and American magazines jabber about books – the rise and fall of writers and issues and fashions – and I want to learn something about how things looked in France, from someone with a point of view.

Dantzig is wrapping up a seven-page entry on Jean-Paul Sartre:

During the 1970s, he was a god to adore, and I suffered a lot from him in high school.  Sartre here, Sartre there, interpreting “existence precedes essence.”  Sartre bis, Sartre ter, Sartre again, you make me do three rounds of Sartre, Sartre, Sartre!  Hell, it was Sartre.  He remained sacred for a long time: in 1991, I published an essay that contained a joke about him, not two, not three, one, very accessory to the rest and accompanied by another on the ignorant people who hated him, two lines out of two hundred pages, and the critic in Le Monde reproached me for them.

That one is more on the personal side.  Dantzig does not have such personal feelings about Maupassant or Molière.  He has insights, though.  In the entry on “Adjectives, Adverbs,” which he defends against so-called good-writing rules, he argues that “French, is one can take a shortcut, is a language of verbs” (11), an idea he explores throughout the book, for example in the entry on “Verbs”: “In effect, rather than a qualifier it is better to choose a verb that includes it” (1079).  I may return to this idea as I write about French literature.  Within my linguistic limits, I have become convinced Dantzig is right.  I have no idea whether this is an original idea or a commonplace.

Much of the Dictionary, of which I have read fifteen, maybe even twenty, percent, remains incomprehensible to me – awfully “inside,” awfully French – but that is much of what makes it so interesting.

The bulk of the entries in the Dictionary are for writers, and the essays are substantial, often six or seven pages.  But there are entries for books and techniques and concepts: Ideas; Idiosyncrasies; Ignorance; Images; Imagination; Impostors, just to pick some cognates from the letter I.  It is a little bit – it is more than a little bit – like Dantzig has taken his book blog and put it in a no-less-arbitrary alphabetical order.  Not to give anyone ideas.  You yourself have written 1,100 pages, haven’t you?  Or far more.  Oh yes, I would eagerly buy the book of your alphabetized blog, as soon as I found a used or perhaps remaindered copy.

Many non-French writers are pulled into the book in various ways, but it is still French literature bis, ter, and again.  But look, just now, for the rentrée littéraire, Dantzig has published a 1,248-page Selfish Dictionary of World Literature.  Follow him on Twitter to see which prizes the book has already won.

texts chosen at random - Fench novels, Virginia Woolf, and a lot more - Auerbach says "write your own book!"

Wrapping up Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis.  He ends with three chapters on the modern novel, mostly French, but covering a lot of territory.

19. “Germinie Lacerteux,” Goncourt brothers, Flaubert, Zola.

This chapter is by itself a history of the 19th century French novel, repeating some of the ideas of the previous Stendhal / Balzac / Flaubert chapter.   It is too bad that Auerbach begins with the novel that is not read much, but it is too useful for his purposes, since it is about a servant, a maid, which links back to the passage from the Odyssey in Chapter 1.  And the background of Germinie Lacerteux (1865) is useful, hilarious – the longtime servant of the brothers dies and they discover that she had her own life, that she was human, thus inspiring the novel.  How do you represent such a person?  Can a novel be built from “the sensory fascination of the ugly, the repulsive, and the morbid” (499)?  I know, now this sounds ridiculous.  It might have sounded slightly ridiculous at the time to a reader who – but now I am repeating my doubts about Zola’s “ideas.”

Auerbach has great fun with Zola.  “Even today, after half a century the last decades of which have brought us experiences such as Zola never dreamed of, Germinal is still a terrifying book” (512).  So-called Naturalism died off because “there was no one left to vie with him in working capacity, in mastery of the life of the time, in determination and courage” (515).

This chapter is so expansive that it includes significant sections on 19th century German and Russian literature, plus Ibsen.

20. “The Brown Stocking,” Woolf and Proust.

The passage with which Auerbach begins is the longest in Mimesis, three and a half pages of To the Lighthouse (1927) in which Mrs. Ramsay knits a sock and thinks, or maybe just exists.  Auerbach then summarizes the passage, which takes him six pages, or perhaps eight.  Woolf’s text is so compressed that merely describing it expands it.

That is pretty much all Auerbach does with Woolf’s text.  He just looks at it.  Looking at it carefully is a lot of work and source of insight.

When I noted a few posts ago that Mimesis was half French, I was understating, since I was counting this chapter as English, when it is actually half French.  Auerbach moves to Woolf to some passages from Proust, and then wanders freely – Joyce, Hamsun, Mann, Gide.  He writes that he “could never have written anything in the nature of a history of European realism; the material would have swamped me” (548).  Well, the book he did write is quite the substitute.

Epilogue

Auerbach describes his method.  Take some texts – passage, really – from each period and use them as “test cases for my ideas.”  Which texts?  “[T]he great majority of the texts were chosen at random, on the basis of accidental acquaintance and personal preference rather than in view of a definite purpose” (556), which is random in a sense but maybe not in some other senses.  He wishes he had been able to cover more “English, Spanish, and German texts” (557).  He wrote Mimesis in Istanbul, in exile, away from a research library.

As useful as always, the commenters at Languagehat pointed me to Edward Said’s introduction to the 2014 edition of Mimesis.  Said argues that some features of the book are personal responses to the war.  France is a conquered country; Germany is the conqueror.  Auerbach is righting the balance.  Maybe so.

In the end, the reader is left to fill in the gaps, pick his own passages from various languages, and write his own book, possibly in some other form.

Which book should we all read together next?  European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages or what?  What will possibly be as good as Mimesis?

Auerbach on Voltaire, Goethe, Balzac - we've reached the modern novel - They will then seem most real.

I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them.  They will then seem most real.  (The Good Soldier, 1915, Ford Madox Ford, Part 4.1)

16. “The Interrupted Supper,” Abbé Prévost, Voltaire, the Duc de Saint-Simon.

The French 18th century, with all that drags in.  “In the literature of the eighteenth century tears begin to assume an importance which they had not previously possessed as an independent motif” (397).  Thank goodness for the “light, agile, and as it were appetizing” Voltaire.  It is Rousseau who poisoned everything.

… [Voltaire] is free from the cloudy, contour-blurring, overemotional rhetoric, equally destructive of clear thinking and pure feeling, which came to the fore in the authors of the Enlightenment during the second half of the century and in the authors of the Revolution, which had a still more luxuriant growth in the nineteenth century through the influence of romanticism, and which has continued to produce its loathsome flowers down to our day.  (407)

For Auerbach, romanticism is long regression, a slide away from reality.

The section on the Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon introduces, a new theme, historicism, which moves us to:

17. “Miller the Musician,” Schiller and Goethe.

More German literature more generally, really.  This is a complex, subtle chapter that will, for readers of Wuthering Expectations, contain few surprises.  German imaginative literature, in the 19th century, was off in its own world, wrestling with the Ideal while other literary traditions made big moves toward the Real, ironically influenced in many cases by 18th century German historicism (Auerbach calls it “Historism”), meaning that a good novel, for example, is not just set in a specific time and place but is in some important way engages with the setting.  Comments on it, critiques it, whatever.  We take this almost for granted now.  Every Trollope novel I have read does this.  Adalbert Stifter novellas do not.  Roughly speaking.

Auerbach blames Goethe, obviously, such a giant that he is responsible for everything that happens in German literature for a hundred years, but more specifically his response to the French Revolution, “his aversion to everything violent and explosive” (447).  Goethe responds directly to the Revolution, but he does so by shifting towards Classicism, towards some kind of Idealism.  I guess I never wrote about this before, but Nicholas Boyle writes about it in detail in Goethe: The Poet and the Age Volume II: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803 (2000).

This is an unusual chapter of Mimesis.

18. “In the Hôtel de la Mole,” Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert.

Many readers should probably skip from Chapter 1 to here, since Auerbach writes about modern novels for the last three chapters.  I know, many of you only care about novels.  That is fine.  You are a creature of the age.  You cannot help it.

Here is Auerbach saying what I just said up above:

[Balzac] not only, like Stendhal, places the human beings whose destiny he is seriously relating, in their precisely defined historical and social setting, but also conceives this connection as a necessary one: to him every milieu becomes a moral and physical atmosphere which impregnates the landscape, the dwelling, furniture, implements, clothing, physique, character, surroundings, ideas, activities, and fates of men, and at the same time the general historical situation reappears as a total atmosphere which envelops all its several milieu. (473)

Auerbach has – obviously! – chosen a chunk of the opening of Père Goriot, the long description of the boarding house, as his representative Balzac passage, a landmark in prose fiction.  I have expressed, all over Wuthering Expectations, a lot of skepticism about the value and even the existence of Realism or even so-called “realism,” so it might seem that I do not have much sympathy with Auerbach’s project.  Yet I spend a lot of time quoting writers describing furniture.  But Auerbach is really writing about, as in his subtitle, the “representation of reality.”  It is the representation that is changing so much over the centuries.  It is the representation that matters.

These last chapters could have been their own little book, and one that more people would have read.

Erich Auerbach on Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Molière, etc. - the lyrico-everyday polyphony

Erich Auerbach has gotten to (early) modern literature.  Things should roar along now.

11. “The World in Pantagruel’s Mouth,” Rabelais, obviously.

Pantagruel is a giant, so big that there are people and cities and so on in his mouth. Maybe you are living in Pantagruel’s mouth right now!  We are in a sense a long ways from a “representation of reality,” but of course the great fun of the conceit is the realistic portrayal of human civilization in a fantastic context.  As far as Auerbach’s running themes, we get the increased role of ordinary people in literature, the mixing of styles, and one of the greatest examples of what I call baroque prose, but Auerbach calls “his lyrico-everyday polyphony” (282), a phrase I would adopt if I thought anyone would understand it.

Auerbach wonders if Rabelais really belongs in Mimesis (282 again), except that he is so much fun.  Who would want to omit him?

12.  “L’Humaine Condition,” Montaigne.

Maybe Auerbach should have omitted this one (and published it separately – it is a wonderful essay).  Montaigne offers an extreme case for Auerbach, a “random life” presented in great detail.  For  a page number, see 298, 299, and many others – the word “random” recurs frequently.

13.  “The Weary Prince,” Shakespeare, specifically Henry IV, Pt. 2, but ranging widely, and then Goethe.

In the last few chapters, Auerbach has been concerned that the mixing of styles and levels, Classical and Christian, low and high, is good for comedy and personal essays, but destroys tragedy.   In this chapter, he works in the other direction.

“I open a volume of Shakespeare at random and come across [a bit of Macbeth]” (325) – this is, really, Auerbach’s method.  Start with a passage - any passage - and move outwards.

Auerbach is open about Shakespeare’s “often unrealistic style” (327).  Shakespeare is another example of a baroque style, really, a writer almost too concerned, for Auerbach’s purposes, with linguistic play.  But Shakespeare does everything, so here he is.  How tired we all are of Shakespeare doing everything.

Speaking of which.

14.  “The Enchanted Dulcinea,” Don Quixote, starting with one of the endless great bits of Part 2.

It is possible that I have read so much about Don Quixote that Auerbach’s chapter just looks like one more terrific essay about Don Quixote.  I hope I never tire of reading about Don Quixote.

15.  “The Faux Devot,” Jean de La Bruyère, Molière, Corneille, Racine.

Or the unmixed style, the return to Classicism, especially Racine’s attempt to find a pure form of the tragic style in French, so pure that it strips away much of what Auerbach finds valuable – detail, sociology, anything but the most intense psychology.  “[I]t is comparable with the isolating procedure used in modern scientific experiments to create the most favorable conditions; the phenomenon is observed with no disturbing factors and in unbroken continuity” (383).

Even Molière is surprisingly narrow.  It has struck me as I have read through him in French – his easier prose plays, still, but there are a number of those – how limited his range and rhetoric are compared to Shakespeare.  I would not subject many writers to a comparison with Shakespeare, but Molière can handle it.  The thing he does is perfect of its kind.

I just blasted through Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Molière.  Ridiculous.  Next: the novel.  Exciting!

More is packed into this passage than in any of the others we have so far discussed in this book - Dante's miracle and its consequences

An “earnest and likeable” student has asked Professor Joseph Epstein for a post-graduation reading list.  He fears his Northwestern University education was inadequate.

An obvious answer would have been to tell him to read the Bible straight through – something I myself have never done – and then proceed to read the Iliad and the Odyssey back to back.  Yet this advice, I felt, would only have depressed him; and contemplating it briefly, sound though it was as advice, I had to admit that it depressed me a little too.  (“p. 34, “Joseph Epstein’s Lifetime Reading Plan,” in Once More Around the Block, 1987)

Epstein’s actual advice can be found in this oldie.  Still, the Bible, the Odyssey – I mean, they are going to come up again.  For example, in Mimesis:

8. “Farinata and Cavalcante,” Dante

Auerbach is a real Dante specialist, so he does not need to wander too far from the exemplary passage he chooses.  It does everything.  “More is packed into this passage than in any of the others we have so far discussed in this book…” (178).

Some praise: “But if we start from his predecessors, Dante’s language is a well-nigh incomprehensible miracle” (182).  The divergent Classical and Christian tracks suddenly converge in Hell, in Dante’s rhetoric and language as much as in his big, wild theological system.  The mixing of styles is going to be a running theme for the rest of Mimesis.  In Dante, “nowhere does mingling of styles come so close to violation of all style” (185).

I am pulling out phrases that have some punch, but they are almost always supported by a paragraph or more of evidence.  As evidence of the Dantean linguistic miracle, Auerbach spends a page working on the Dante’s use of the word da, a preposition.

If it is funny that a book on the “representation of reality” hinges on a poet wandering around Hell with a ghost, first, Auerbach finds it funny too, and second, reality has many sides.  “More accurately than antique literature was ever able to present it, we are given to see, in the realm of timeless being, the history of man’s inner life and unfolding” (202).

9. “Frate Alberto”, Boccaccio and some earlier tales for the purpose of contrast

The idea here is that there is a medieval genre of short, funny, pathetic, improving, or obscene tales.  Why are the ones in Decameron any better?  The mixing of styles, especially rhetorical levels, allowing a greater emphasis on sensory detail and characters who are ordinary people.  “Boccaccio’s characters live on earth and only on earth” (224).  But it is his rhetorical skill that allows them to live at all.

It sometimes seems like Auerbach’s is steering the book towards the modern novel, towards Proust.

10.  “Madame du Chastel,” Antoine de la Sale and a bit of Fifteen Joys of Marriage

Narrative passages that are “literary representations of a night conversation between a married couple” (250), one of which is about a wife wanting a new dress. The texts are from the 15th century, but they still feel medieval.  French has not caught up with Boccaccio’s Italian.  But the next chapter is about Rabelais.  Oh yeah!

Auerbach in the Middle Ages - It is a reawakening of the directly sensible

We’re enjoying Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, a chapter at a time, but more briefly than yesterday.

3. “The Arrest of Peter Valvomeres,” Ammianus Marcellinus, The Golden Ass, Augustine’s Confessions

Late Classical Latin, with three genres, history, a novel, and something truly new, Augustine’s memoir.  “Equally at home in the world of classical rhetoric and in that of the Judeo-Christian tradition, he may well have been the first to become conscious of the problem of the stylistic contrast between the two worlds” (72-3), between classical and Christian prose.  That is the kind of thing that is likely to be wrong, but it sounds right to me.

With Ammianus, who I have not otherwise read, Auerbach introduces the idea of Baroque prose.  “With glittering words and pompously distorted constructions language begins to depict the distorted, gory, and spectral reality of the age” (57).  Or else the writer is just goofing around with language.  We can debate this and swing back and forth for the next two millennia.

4. “Sicharius and Chramnesindus,” Gregory of Tours

A complete change has taken place since the days of Ammanius and Augustine.  Of course, as has often been observed, it is a decadence, a decline in culture and verbal disposition, but it is not only that.  It is a reawakening of the directly sensible.  (93-4)

Gregory’s Latin may stink, but he can tell a punchy story.

Now we skip five hundred years, because “so few texts that can be used for our investigation have survived from his period and indeed from the entire half of the second millennium” (95).  We’re not supposed to call this the Dark Ages anymore, but Auerbach is right.

5. “Roland against Ganelon,” The Song of Roland

Here I will stop to note that there are sixteen chapters left, and the linguistic division is: two Italian, two English, one German, one Spanish and thus (I will need all of my fingers) ten chapters about French literature.  Which sounds about right to me.  Auerbach only glances at Russian literature because discussion “is impossible when one cannot read the works in their original language” (Ch. 18, 492), and he completely ignores American literature because he, I don’t know, does not care, however much I would love to read his (imaginary) chapter on Moby-Dick.

Mimesis is half French.  And Auerbach, and for that matter the translator, Willard Trask, assumes we all read French.  Long passages are translated, but untranslated sentences and phrases are scattered everywhere.

6.  “The Knight Sets Forth,” Chrétien de Troyes

As marvelous as the Arthurian romances of Chrétien may be, to Auerbach they are a regression, a move away from the depiction of reality.  In a familiar move, he criticizes the world-building of the Arthurian romances.  How does the economy work?  Who is paying for all of these isolated enchanted castles?  Not that he is wrong, but it is amusing.

7.  “Adam and Eve,” a 12th century French Christmas play, Mystère d'Adam, plus texts by Bernard of Clairvaux and Francis of Assisi

 I’ll just note that Auerbach assumes no one has read the play, since he describes it in some detail, but of course everyone knows the basic story.

With the help of mystery plays and writerly saints, we are on our way to Dante and Shakespeare.

Ezra Pound's Literary Essays, or "the science of being discontented"

Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (1954) is a selection of Pound’s critical, scholarly, and ranting writings from say 1914 through 1934, heavily weighted to a glorious period from say 1916 through 1922 when Pound was reading everything, old and new, and writing about it with the greatest possible energy.  T. S. Eliot selected the essays, and while Pound’s criticism is no more insightful than Eliot’s – might be less, even – it is more fun to read.

So maybe sometimes Pound sounds like a crackpot.  Not that often, and Eliot protects him from his worst side.  By crackpot, I mean something like the sudden appearance, in a long, complex essay on Guido Cavalcanti, of Gabriele D’Annunzio, who is “[t]he only living author who has ever taken a city or held up the diplomatic crapule at the point of machine-guns, he is in a position to speak with more authority [about poetry!] than a batch of neurasthenic incompetents…” (192).

This is a late essay, from 1934, when Pound’s cracks are more visible.  Yet the very next page is full of insights about translating Cavalcanti, his own translations and D. G. Rossetti’s.  About poetic translation in general, really:

What obfuscated me was not the Italian but the crust of dead English, the sediment present in my own available vocabulary – which I, let us hope, got rid of a few years later.  You can’t go round this sort of thing.  It takes six or eight years to get educated in one’s art, and another ten to get rid of that education.

… Rossetti made his own language.  I hadn’t in 1910 made a language, I don’t mean a language to use, but even a language to think in.

It is stupid to overlook the lingual inventions of precurrent authors, even when they are fools or flapdoodles or Tennysons.  (193-4)

He is usually this casual, almost as if he is speaking.  He is naturally aphoristic.  “Beauty is a brief gasp between one cliché and another” (“Notes on Elizabethan Classicists,” 241) is one I like.  He means, he explains a bit later, historically.  “For every ‘great age’ a few poets have written a few beautiful lines, or found a few exquisite melodies, and ten thousand people have copied them, until each strand of music is planed down to a dullness” (243-4).

Pound’s demand to “make it new” is really to “make it great,” but with the assumption that who are we kidding the retreads of the old stuff, however skilled, will not end up in that “great” category.  In an early essay, “The Renaissance,” Pound lists “his own spectrum or table” of the greats, beginning with “Homer, Sappho, Ibycus, Theocritus’ idyl of the woman spinning with charmed wheel” (215), then moving on through the Romans and so on.  Catullus, “[n]ot Virgil,” a handful of his beloved Provençal poems, Dante and “The Seafarer” and Villon.

But not too much, really.  “A sound poetic training is nothing more than the science of being discontented,”  (“The Renaissance,” 216).  The poems that make us discontented with other poems, those are the great ones.  Different poems for each of us, of course.

Quite a collection.  Full of surprises, at the level of word, line, subject, and idea.

Northrop Frye's Fables of Identity - the conventions of literature contain the experience

The latest book in my reading of classics of literary criticism is Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (1963) by Northrop Frye, a collection of magazine writing and so on from the 1950s and early 1960s that serves as a sequel to another Frye classic, one that I have not read, Anatomy of Criticism (1957).  “That very theoretical book stated in its preface that a work of practical criticism was needed to complement it” (p. 1), and this is in effect that.  This, a different “this,” the quotation, explains why I wanted to read Fables of Identity more than Anatomy.

The essays take as their subjects Spenser (specifically The Faerie Queene), Shakespeare (the sonnets, The Winter’s Tale), Milton (“Lycidas”), Blake, Byron, Dickinson, Yeats, Stevens, and Joyce (Finnegans Wake).  They are full on useful insights.  I “tested” some of them, re-reading the Shakespeare play and the Milton poem, as well as quite a lot of Wallace Stevens.  It was a good experiment.  Well, I did not really follow the argument in the Stevens piece, which constructs a metaphysics from single lines pulled from thirty years of poems.  I think I followed the rest.  They are magazine pieces, or talks.  They are meant to be followed.

To jump back to my little project, compared to Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending Frye is a model of clarity and compared to Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations his ideas have not been so thoroughly sponged up.  It also does not hurt that Frye occasionally uses humor:

Many readers tend to assume that Spenser wrote [The Faerie Queene] in the same way that they read it, starting at the beginning and keeping on until he collapsed with exhaustion.  (69)

Mild, but a relief from the weight of Spenser.

The “fables” and “mythology” in the title are meant broadly.  They can be taken to mean something like the elements that are common among works of literature rather than those that are individual to the text.  The epic form, the pastoral elegy, the hero quest, stories structured around seasonal change.  That sort of thing.  Some of it explicitly uses existing mythic stories, some of it – like Blake’s big poems – tries to turn old myths into new, and some is unconscious.  To the extent that texts fall completely outside of this framework, Frye ignores them.  Maybe everything fits.  I don’t know.

In “Nature and Homer,” Frye generously suggest that everything fits, that the study of Shakespeare and comic strips is just “exploring different literary conventions” (50), that “[w]herever he goes in his imaginative verbal experience, the conventions of literature contain the experience” (51).  Fables of Identity is for readers who enjoy literature itself, literature as such.

OK, come back in a couple of months for Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, or however much of it I have read at that point.

A riffle through Illuminations - “This is how one pictures the angel of history”

Thinking about a more ideal Walter Benjamin collection, I imagine dropping “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), which is perverse but the problem is that is like a building that has been completely dismantled, its materials used as the structure of a hundred other, newer buildings.  I can imagine its explosive force – now I am imagining it as a bomb – in English in 1968, when so many people were ready to not just write about but theorize about television, rock music, comic books, and so on.

Benjamin, who mostly sticks to film and photography, keeps brushing up against the concept of pop art.

Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art.  The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. (227)

May the Village Voice and a million pop culture blogs bloom.  Every art – the creators, the audience – has had to wrestle with Benjamin’s notion that the individual art object has some kind of “aura” that is dimmed or destroyed by mass reproduction, by technology.  He is not against this, but he is a creature of literature, which had long accommodated itself to the printing press – heck, the scriptorium – rather than of visual art, where the response has been to everything possible to keep the aura, so that the original embodiment is worth a fortune and the exact reproduction is kitsch.  Theater and dance have made their own less insistent, less neurotic negotiations with film.

Benjamin thinks about the case of literature in “The Storyteller” (1936), nominally about Nikolai Leskov but more about the modes of literature:

The earliest symptom of a process whose end is the decline of storytelling is the rise of the novel at the beginning of modern times…  What can be handed on orally, the wealth of the epic, is of a different kind from what constitutes the stock in trade of the novel. (87)

He takes Leskov as an example of the epic or storyteller type, even within the form of modern fiction.  He mentions Poe and Stevenson as other examples.  I am not sure this is true; Benjamin’s Leskov only distantly resembled the one I remember.  I wonder if he had read Sholem Aleichem.  Now that is an imaginary Benjamin essay I would like to read.

The essays on individual authors that he did write, on Baudelaire, Proust, Brecht (a close friend), and Kafka, are outstanding and accessible, by which I mean, as we all mean, written at or just above my head.  Like “Unpacking My Library,” these essays remind me that Benjamin is an unusual creature, a philosopher who is a true literary critic.  I mean that he deals with literature as literature, with Kafka and Baudelaire as artists, creative people, with whom he has personal affinities.

I have some doubts about, because I did not understand, the final piece, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), which has to be retained because of the single paragraph in which a Paul Klee angel takes on cosmic, apocalyptic meaning – “This is how one pictures the angel of history” (249) – one being you, Walter, but the “one single catastrophe” he sees the angel seeing is upon him, so what do I know.  With these few lines Benjamin willed into being Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987) and Laurie Anderson’s Strange Angels and I assume much many more unusual works of art.

I was planning to write about Illuminations, to the extent that it can be said that I have written about it, in December, but then I thought I would tack it onto GermanLiterature Month, why not.

In early February, I will continue my reading of classic literary criticism with Northrop Frye’s Fables of Identity, which should be something different than Kermode or Benjamin.

Kenneth Burke's Counter-Statement - a turn from the stress upon self-expression to a stress upon communication

Walter Benjamin logistics:  In my memory, used copies of Illuminations were everywhere, but it seems that lovers of critical theory and children’s literature have read so many copies to pieces that the market is not so flooded.  A new edition is being published in January.  It looks like it has a new cover, but otherwise looks like the same old thing.  It is a little odd that this specific configuration of Benjamin has been so enduring.

My point is that my plans are in no way changed, so that I plan to read the most battered, underlined copy of Illuminations I can find and write something on it in early December, or maybe in late November sneaking it in for German Literature Month – in its eighth year! – but if you planned to read along and prefer some new-book crispness in your reading matter, there will be a new book.  You may want to wait a bit.

Then there is a new configuration of Benjamin from Tess Lewis and NYRB in March.  Interesting.  But that is something different.

Meanwhile, I have continued my own reading of the greats of 20th century literary criticism with Kenneth Burke’s Counter-Statement (1931, although I read the expanded 1968 edition).  Counter to what, exactly?  As Burke notes in the preface to a subsequent edition, he is vague on this subject.  He is not a Marxist critic, not a Freudian, not a disciple of T. S. Eliot.  Whatever is going on in criticism in the late 1920s, he is not doing it.  He is doing something else.

The first essay is portrait of three art-for-art’s-sakers, Flaubert and Pater and Remy de Gourmont.  The second, “Psychology and Form,” moves the subject to readers and their expectations about forms, and the way writers use those expectations.  Burke describes this as “a turn from the stress upon self-expression to a stress upon communication” (223-4).  This turn continues through the book, perhaps through Burke’s career (Counter-Statement is his first book).  Burke like both, by the way, just as he likes a diversity of readers.  He is a generous critic.

I thought the first essay was terrific, with a Flaubert who looked a lot like my Flaubert, a Pater who behaved like the one I read, and a lot of interesting stuff about Gourmont, who had been a rumor to me.  Another highlight is a dual essay, “Thomas Mann and André Gide,” full of surprising parallels.  Burke was an early champion of both writers; he sees them both as “trying to make us at home in indecision…  trying to humanize the state of doubt” (105).

But of course I prefer – understand – Burke when he is writing about specific writers.  In the second half of Counter-Statement, he becomes more abstract, more of a systematizer, with essays titled “Program” and “Lexicon Rhetoricae” and “Applications of the Terminology,” which are not as dull as they sound, but were harder on my teeth.  “Program,” a move towards literature as sociology, may be as dull as it sounds.  I wonder if it is parodying something.

When I read Burke or Kermode or Benjamin, am I studying criticism or the history of criticism?  Some of each.

Kermode on our endless epoch of transition

The Christian story of the beginning and end becomes damaged, replaced, by scientific discoveries.  Myths turn into literature.  That is how Kermode moves into the literature of his own time.

I mentioned that literary fictions changed in the same way – perpetually recurring crises of the person, and the death of the person, took over from myths which purport to relate one’s experience to grand beginnings and ends.  And I suggested that there have been great changes, especially in recent times when our attitudes to fiction in general have grown so sophisticated…  (Ch. II: Fictions, p. 35)

Kermode uses the word “fiction” broadly, including political and legal and religious fictions as well as novels.  My sense is that in 1965, when he gave the lecture, there was enough countercultural activity that he was right.  The established fictions were getting thoroughly worked over, being “seen through,” to use Orwell’s old phrase.

But Kermode is wary, and works on another fiction, the moment of crisis, or the temptation to live in a moment of crisis, a time of transition that is paradoxically unending.  Some moments of crisis are real, as is obvious enough in retrospect.  But:

Crisis is a way of thinking about one’s moment, and not inherent in the moment itself.  Transition, like the other apocalyptic phases, is, to repeat Focillon’s phrase, an ‘intertemporal agony’; it is merely the aspect of successiveness to which our attention is given…  Our own epoch is the epoch of nothing positive, only of transition.  (Ch. IV: The Modern Apocalypse, 101-2)

This describes the novel in general here, isn’t he?  There is a stable beginning, a satisfying ending, and the writer and I spend all of our time in the transition between them, the novel itself.  I enjoy the transition, am surprised and moved and perhaps learn something, all along the way.

Kermode is skeptical of the uniqueness of the feeling of crisis or transition.  Maybe this is just ordinary psychology.  It is enjoyable how much of his discussion of his contemporary literature can be transferred to our contemporary literature with only a change of authors and titles.  He spends most of the fifth lecture on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938) – “This book is doubtless very well known to you” (133) – and plenty of time on Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, and Iris Murdoch, as representatives of the new ideas.  He clearly dislikes the newest of the new ideas, meaning William Burroughs.  “[N]on-communicative triviality” (121).

But it is the skepticism that I find interesting.  How new is the new?  What are today’s avant-gardists doing that the French novelists of the 1950s had not already done?  And then, what did they do that etc., etc.

In a recent interview with Alexandra Schwartz, Rachel Cusk describes her fiction in terms that reminded me of Kermode’s discussion:

I’m trying to see experience in a more lateral sense rather than as in this form of character. Which, as I said, I don’t actually think is how living is being done anymore…

I think this is a moment in culture, generally, where people are suddenly looking again at everything that was accepted, voices that have been ringing in our ears forever, and suddenly thinking, “I’m really sick of this, and I don’t want to read it anymore.”

As I understand Cusk, “character” means something other than the representation of personality.  “How much does character actually operate in a person’s life?”  The word that jumps out is “anymore” (the first instance).  Novels used to represent reality, “living,” when character existed, but not anymore, so new kinds of representation, new kinds of novels, are necessary.

Or things have not changed that much, and one of the most stable things is the useful fiction that things have changed a lot.

Since Sartre’s Nausea was not at all well known to me, I read it, and I will save my hapless flailing on that subject for next week.

Please come back in early December for more literary criticism, Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, which will, I hope, be over my head in different ways than The Sense of an Ending.

The Sense of an Ending and its great charms - time, apocalypse, crisis

Frank Kermode is thinking about literary fiction, fictions more generally, as representing reality in some way.  They do not have to do so.  But that is the argument for a different book, maybe a response to The Sense of an Ending.  I would enjoy reading that book.

In this book, though, reality is a premise.  Anyone planning to join me with Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis next year will find some useful ideas in Kermode.

So, given some interest in reality, one strange thing about fictions as expressed in books is that the books begin and even more strangely, end.

We cannot, of course, be denied an end; it is one of the great charms of books that they have to end. (23)

I am not sure that books do have to end, exactly.  There are readers who clearly find it more of a nuisance that books end, readers for whom the endless fantasy or detective series is the ideal.  The story of Superman has been published continuously for eighty years, and is not ending anytime soon.  Maybe that book arguing with Kermode should be written by some kind of fantasy writer.

Kermode takes the charm and strangeness of endings seriously.  He looks for endings in reality.  There is death, personal death.  There is apocalypse, the end of everything.  Apocalypses are themselves fictions, even literary fictions, particularly the ones based on the 1st century Christian fantasy novel Revelation.  Kermode is interested, in this example, in how the fiction is used in reality, how the expectation of the imminent end of the world is expressed in the world itself, the psychology of apocalypse, so much of it tied into the imagery of Revelation.

The world constantly fails to end.  Geology and cosmology pushes the beginning of things further into the past, but the apocalypticist can just shift his fiction to keep the possibility of apocalypse.  Even if the year 1000 is not imminent, or, apocalypse (not) repeated as farce, Y2K is in the distant past, the psychology of “crisis” takes over.  The disaster is off in the distance, and this, right now, is the moment of crisis.  The moment of crisis is, essentially, perpetual, which is a great part of its attraction: “the stage of transition, like the whole of time in an earlier revolution, has become endless” (101).

Roughly speaking, Kermode begins with the end, the apocalypse.  He discusses the nature of time, from Augustine on through Aquinas in the third lecture.  The third lecture is quite difficult.  Medieval Christian philosophy.  I imagine, with pity, that original lecture audience.  I doubt that Kermode adds anything to Augustine on this subject.  I doubt that anyone ever has.  This is the first half of the book.  In the second half, Kermode turns to modern literature, and to regular old novels, which greatly eases the philosophical burden, even in Exhibit A is Sartre’s Nausea, which gets most of a lecture to itself as a type specimen.

That is something like a summary of The Sense of an Ending.

Tomorrow, I will write a bit about the last half of the book – novels, the crisis, then and now.  How we love the crisis.

Beginning Frank Kermode's The Sense of an Ending - You remember the golden bird

My imagination was for a time haunted by figures that, muttering “The great systems”, held out to me the sun-dried skeletons of birds, and it seemed to me that this image was meant to turn my thoughts to the living bird.  (William Butler Yeats, A Vision, 1925, from Book II: The Completed Symbol, Chapter XVIII)

Funny, I know – Yeats was an odd fellow, or pretended to be – but true, yes?  Ornithologists truly love the living bird, and they indulge, express, and manifest their love by studying bird skeletons, perhaps prepared with a little more care than letting the sun take care of it.

So we read criticism because we love literature.  Unless – there are layers here – literature is the skeleton and the living bird is something else.  Life, perhaps.  Reality.  What is criticism, then?  A drawing of the skeleton?  A discussion of the skeleton?

The tragedy of the Yeats quotation is the phrase “meant to.”  Yes, of course, but the skeletons themselves are so interesting.  Just a little more time with the skeletons.  By “tragedy,” I mean “comedy.”

Tragedy, we are told, must yield to Absurdity; existential tragedy is an impossibility and King Lear is a terrible farce.  (Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending, 1967, Ch. I: The End, p. 27)

There is an earlier step, actually.

The end is now a matter of immanence; tragedy assumes the figurations of apocalypse, of death and judgment, heaven and hell; but the world goes forward in the hands of exhausted survivors…  This is the tragedy of sempiternity; apocalypse is translated out of time into the aevum.  (Ch. III: World without Beginning or End, p. 82)

Then comes the collapse into absurdity (or Absurdity), as King Lear and Hamlet collapse into Waiting for Godot and Endgame.  The survivors, they is us.

That’s one story Frank Kermode tells, relatively directly, in The Sense of an Ending, the move in Western literature from apocalypse to tragedy to absurdity, where we still languish, or flourish.  It is a book that sprays ideas in all directions, ideas he cannot possibly follow, a generous book.  Maybe someone in the audience picked them up.  The book collects a series of six lectures at Bryn Mawr.  What the audience possibly understood, I cannot say.  I have wondered the same thing about the lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and they were not half as specialized.  “You remember the golden bird in Yeats’s poem” (Ch. I, p. 3) – uh, I can look it up.  “Sailing to Byzantium,” yes, that is a really famous poem.  But I had to look up the bird.  Curiously, it is a bird without a skeleton.

A couple more days on Kermode’s sun-dried bird.  In some ways – e.g., “aevum” – it is a difficult book.  Which is exactly what I wanted.  I had to read it twice.  Some readers might want to skip past the medieval theology to the second half, to Lecture IV or maybe Lecture V: “as soon as the subject is the novel the argument drops into a perfectly familiar context” (Ch. V, 128).  So true.