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.

Auerbach, Kermode, Benjamin, Frye - an invitation to read some classic literary criticism with me

That was useful.

I have settled on a hybrid plan.  More logical.  More German.

A few shorter books to see how things go, then Mimesis.

End of September: The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1967), Frank Kermode.  Time and apocalypse.  The word “fiction” in the title does not mean “novels.”  Under 200 pages.

End of November: Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (essays from the 1920s and 1930s), Walter Benjamin.  A wide range of topics.  I know that there are other ways to read Benjamin in English now, which was not so true in 1968.

End of January: Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (1963), Northrop Frye.  His “practical” companion to the more theoretical (and longer) Anatomy of Criticism.  More essays, really.

Then we can spend the winter in front of the fireplace with a goblet of claret studying Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), Erich Auerbach.  Mimesis has twenty chapters, and I can imagine a madman, or genius, simply reading through them, but I will want months.  Not sure how many.  Open-ended.

Each of these books embraces a range of traditions and languages.  Their scope is a good part of their appeal to me.  It is the fantasy of knowing everything.  Here are some writers, readers, who got close to that.  Their subject is literature, but also history, language – civilization.

As far as “participating” in a “readalong” goes, do whatever you want, whenever you want.  These books, even Kermode’s, are well suited to rummaging.  I mean, don’t miss the first chapter of Mimesis, but otherwise do whatever is useful and pleasant.  I hope you will find it useful and pleasant to report back on what you have discovered.  Feel free to do so at Wuthering Expectations.

For some reason Arthur Krystal wrote a 2013 New Yorker profile of Auerbach and Mimesis.  This is a book with its own story, worth knowing.

Would anyone be interested in a readalong of classic, or at least good, or at least one hopes so, literary criticism?

My fifth idea is to read some literary criticism.  Classics of.  Books that are great in their own way, perhaps even works of art of some kind.  I have two impulses.

First, to steal ideas, or let’s say to find some new ways of looking at what I read. Spur some thought, if possible.

Second, it is clear that some of the best parts of the blog have been readalongs, and some of my worst ideas for readalongs have actually been my best (e.g., What Is To Be Done?), so why not invite interested people to join in.

The number of participants is of little importance.  A readalong of Melville’s Clarel had only one other reader, and she made an original contribution to Melville scholarship!  And anyway the important thing is that I learn a lot.

Two ideas.  One is to schedule a series of relatively short books, one every two or three months.  A variety of subjects, approaches, countries, forms.  Nothing too Theoretical.  For example, in ten months or a year, with readers joining as they like (all books I have not read):

Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations
William Empson’s Milton’s God
Barbara Hardy’s The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form
Northrop Frye’s The Anatomy of Criticism
Paul Valéry’s The Art of Poetry

Except I feel obligated, for competing educational purposes, to read the latter in French, which seems unlikely, really, so let’s say a collection of essays by Eugenio Montale or Umberto Eco or something like that.

Maybe I am wrong about what is in these books.  My understanding is that they are good books.  But there are many other possibilities.

The other tack would be to tackle a monster.  E. R. Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, Mikhail Bahktin’s Rabelais and His World, Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore.  Books that might take months to work through.

I am thinking of this project as work, maybe more like a study group than a readalong, but the kind of work that can be intensely pleasurable.
A good readalong ought to give the readers a lot to do, right?

Maybe this is a bad bad idea, rather than a good bad idea.  Please let me know what you think.  Feel free to contribute suggestions – favorite books, logistics, anything – even if you have no interest at all in participating.

We all have plenty to read.

without understanding a single consecutive page - advice for book bloggers

Henry Adams is for some reason reading Poincaré’s La Science et l’Hypothèse,

which purported to be relatively readable.  Trusting in its external appearance, the traveler timidly bought it, and greedily devoured it, without understanding a single consecutive page, but catching here and there a period that startled him to the depths of his ignorance…  (Education, Ch. XXXI)

This may be my favorite kind of reading, not so far from my experience reading Henry Adams.  It is rarer than it used to be, but plenty frequent.  “What is this?”  The move from not-knowing to knowing can be a deep, difficult pleasure.

I think many readers are searching for repetitions of youthful pleasures, perhaps from the moment they really fell in love with reading.  Which books will have something that repeats the pleasures of that intense scene in Jane Eyre or The Return of the King?  Not many, but what a search it will be.  I suppose I am doing something similar, even if the great experience was decoding Pale Fire’s index or thinking through the infinite loops of “The Library of Babel” rather than identifying with a character.  Some readers get this pleasure from philosophy, or theory, codes I have never cracked.  That set goes to graduate school in literature, something I never had the imagination to contemplate.

Eventually I discovered that the study of literary history is itself a giant puzzle to solve, and that texts that are not themselves puzzles, and are perhaps even terrible as art, are pieces of a larger puzzle, and that the puzzle thus has an endless number of pieces and no solution, which on a table-top would be frustrating but as an intellectual pursuit is perfect.  What fun.

Having accumulated nearly a decade of bloggy wisdom, my advice to new bloggers has not moved beyond “Know thyself,” useful fairly generally.  I knew I needed a strong schedule, I knew I would not take free books, I knew I would write short, although I swelled over time, I knew I was not so interested in “reviews” as such.  But when I started Wuthering Expectations I had been reading seriously for twenty years or more.  Twenty years is two thousand books read, which is twice as many as I had read ten years before.  I cannot imagine starting a literature blog in my twenties.  I have great admiration for the confidence of anyone who does – they, you, are right to do it.

I should have included more posts that were just lists.  People love lists.  I know they love lists; I love lists.  I am suspicious of them as criticism.  They have kind of poisoned popular music writing – ranking every Beatles song is the kind of writing that gets clicks, I guess.  But this is a blog, so relax a little, right?  D. G. Myers was good with lists.  I remember a commenter asking him what database he was using to pick his Top 5 I-don’t-remember-what novels.  “My brain!” he snapped.

I don’t know.  I read a lot of good criticism in magazines, but it was missing something.  I am not sure what.  May be just me.  Literary criticism was missing me.  And now it has had a fair amount of me.

Silly, rotten, derivative, but sane - George Bernard Shaw's The Sanity of Art

George Bernard Shaw’s little books or pamphlets on Henrik Ibsen and Richard Wagner – The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891) and The Perfect Wagnerite (1898) – were so much fun that I rounded out the trilogy with The Sanity of Art (1895).  The three essays have been collected under the boooring title Major Critical Essays, but I read online scans of old versions.

The Sanity of Art is a demolition job against Max Nordau’s screed Degeneration (1892) which was having a vogue in England.  Nordau’s book is a classic in the “everything is going to hell” genre, especially interesting because 1) the sad, terrible irony of what the Nazis would do with this idea (Nordau was a founder of Zionism), and 2) he goes after all of the wrong targets.  It is amazing.  Ibsen, Wagner, Tolstoy, Wilde, the pre-Raphaelites, Impressionist painting, and this art is not merely bad or harmful but insane, which is hardly their fault as they are only symptoms of the overall degeneration of the human brain.

Alternatively, Nordau hits all of the right targets, since everything only gets worse, across the board.  I mean, if you think Whistler, Monet, and D. G. Rossetti are evidence of the end of civilization, wait’ll you see what Picasso, Kandinsky, and Duchamp are going to do.

Shaw argues that the relevant works are “wholly beneficial and progressive, and in no sense insane or decadent” (29), which is perhaps too easy of an argument, too much of a bug-squashing.  He calls it “riveting his book to the counter” with “a nail long enough to go through a few pages by other people as well” (113).

More interesting is watching Shaw work through the central problem of contemporary arts criticism, telling the rotten imitators from the real artists.

Thus you have here again a movement which is thoroughly beneficial and progressive presenting a hideous appearance of moral corruption and decay, not only to our old-fashioned religious folk, but to our comparatively modern scientific Rationalists as well.  And here again, because the press and the gossips have found out that this apparent corruption and decay is considered the right thing in some influential quarters, and must be spoken of with respect, and patronized and published and sold and read, we have a certain number of pitiful imitators taking advantage of their tolerance to bring out really silly and rotten stuff, which the reviewers are afraid to expose, lest it, too, should turn out to be the correct thing.  (69)

I’m not sure if Shaw is being too hard on the reviewers or too easy.  But he is correct that the art of our time almost always looks decadent.  No critic is wrong when he complains that there is too much derivative trivia out there, and too much garbage.

Even at such stupidly conservative concerts as those of the London Philharmonic Society I have seen ultra-modern composers, supposed to be representatives of the Wagnerian movement, conducting pretentious rubbish…  And then, of course, there are the young imitators, who are corrupted by the desire to make their harmonies sound like those of the masters whose purposes and principles of work they are too young to understand, and who fall between the old forms and the new into simple incoherence.  (42-3)

In the identical riff in the section on Impressionists, Shaw says that Whistler’s imitators paint “figures placed apparently in coal cellars,” making them look, if I do not understand what they are doing, insane.  If I do understand, they merely look mediocre and derivative.

The Sanity of Art is bracing for a critic, and is only incidentally itself a rant.  Do your jobs, critics!  Yessir, Mr. Shaw.

Page numbers from the 1907 edition I found at Hathi Trust.

It may be hard on the reader - an inspirational quote from Kyle Gann

First, a reminder: next week we will implement readalong blogging procedures for Knut Hamsun’s Mysteries and Nicanor Parra’s Poemas y Antipoemas. Still plenty of time to read either, or both.  The Hamsun novel is by the far the crazier of the two, but the Parra is fun, too:

The author will not answer for any problems his writings may raise:
It may be hard on the reader
But he'll have to accept this from here on in.

(click Anthology, then “Warning to the Reader”)

Now, an inspirational quotation.

Kyle Gann is one of the great critics of what he calls post-classical music, works grounded in one way or another in the classical or Romantic tradition yet distant enough that most supposed fans of classical music hate them, composers like Alvin Lucier.  I have learned so much from Gann, who now is a composition teacher at Bard and thus reserves his criticism for his PostClassic blog, or for books.  His forthcoming book on Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata could make an appearance on Wuthering Expectations.

The quote.  Gann is, in the oldest professorial tradition, complaining about his students.  I’ll skip all that.  I want this part:

No one has ever called me un-opinionated, but when I was 18, I was going to be damned before I would admit that there was a piece of modern music in existence that I couldn’t understand.  I’d listen to the same record a dozen times in a row until the piece started to make sense to me.  I wasn’t committed to liking everything I heard, but I was going to understand every single piece well enough to understand why somebody liked it, even if I didn’t, and I was going to be able to articulate why, of all the complex and opaque pieces ever written, I’d decided I didn’t like this one.  I withheld judgments for years, decades, until I felt I had done sufficient analysis to come to an opinion.

Impassioned Appreciationism.  Of course I admire Gann because he flatters by prejudices.  The last line is challenging, though.  I certainly jump to conclusions too quickly.  Sure, we can do both things at once – judge and withhold judgment.  I am impressed, though, by anyone willing to say “I don’t know” or “I don’t get it – not yet.”

In my own experience, whenever I have put in the kind of work Gann describes I invariably end up liking, or appreciating, or let’s say no longer disliking the piece in question.  I have not just studied the text but extended my sympathy to those who genuinely liked it.  It usually turns out that they were to some degree right.  Why else do I read so much criticism?  Show me what you see.  Maybe then I will see it, too.

We have to stand firm against all this experimentation that a restless age would like to foist on us - Ibsen systems

Yes, that’s the spirit!  What is most curious about Henrik Ibsen’s last twelve plays, from Pillars of Society (1877) through When We Dead Awaken (1899), and including his big chart-toppers like A Doll House (1879), Ghosts (1881), and Hedda Gabler (1890) is the temptation to treat them as a single big work, a thousand page avant garde novel in prose dialogue.  Ibsenists, beginning with George Bernard Shaw in 1891, insist that the plays need to be performed and seen in order, as with Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle.  Has this ever been done?  I did not even read the plays in chronological order, but rather in an order something like most to least famous.

I am certain, as a result, to be hopelessly confused about who appeared and what happened in which play.  Apologies in advance.

Ibsen scholar Brian Johnston has done the most audacious work, building the case that “the twelve plays constituted a single tripartite Cycle whose subject was modern humanity undergoing (in Hegelian terms) a journey of spiritual recollection,” and when he says “Hegelian,” he means it: each play is built around a stage of history as found in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit.  Johnston took the unusual and admirable step of converting his books and research into a website, Ibsen Voyages, which I have used frequently.  It is full of valuable criticism and information even for the reader who finds the Hegel business laughable on its face.  I am unequipped to evaluate the argument, but am thrilled that it exists, a visionary critic’s mad work on a visionary playwright.

And like I said, the impulse is so common.  George Bernard Shaw finds a sustained ironic assault on bourgeois hypocrisy (“idealism,” he calls it), all detailed with verve in The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891).  Robert Brustein makes Ibsen the founder of the Theatre of Revolt (The Theatre of Revolt, 1964).  Hey Henrik, what are you rebelling against?  Whatta ya got?  “The great task of our time is to blow up all existing institutions – to destroy” – this is from an 1883 description of Ibsen expressing his views at a party, found in footnote 1 on page 38 of Brustein.

Here is the temptation, really.  Less subtle followers of Shaw, or really anyone who reads or sees the play, knows that A Doll House is an early feminist protest against the inequities, legal and social, or marriage.  Thus, Ibsen invents realist theater.  Prose, an ordinary family, a social issue reformed, at least for the audience.  Yet in later plays the actions of the heroine are rerun with different outcomes – she considers suicide; later characters do more than consider; she triumphantly leaves her husband; a later trapped wife stays with hers (admittedly, her alternative is not necessarily freedom but life with a sea troll).  If we think of plot as part of the author’s argument, and in doom-laden plays like these it has to be, allowing multiple outcomes in analogous situations undermines the argument of the earlier plots.

It is almost as if Ibsen invents realistic, socially engaged theater in the first four of the twelve plays, and then, once it is an existing institution, feels the need to blow it up. A grand scheme allows the critic to at least blow up received ideas about the plays.

Luckily, I do not understand Ibsen well enough to have developed any grand scheme of my own, so from this point I will just rummage through the plays themselves.  But they do hook back into each other and I will not resist following the connections, no matter how confusing.

For consistency and sanity, all quotations from these plays will be from Rolf Fjelde’s translations, with page numbers referring to The Complete Major Prose Plays (1978), Farrar Straus Giroux.  The post;s title is from Pillars of Society, Act I, p. 17.

We should gloat over a book - De Quincey and Stevenson make criticism personal

Thomas De Quincey, insists Pykk.  All right, all right.  “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” (1823), less than two thousand words.  Here are the first 6%:

From my boyish days I had always felt a great perplexity on one point in Macbeth.  It was this: the knocking at the gate, which succeeds to the murder of Duncan, produced to my feelings an effect for which I never could account.  The effect was, that it reflected back upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity; yet, however obstinately I endeavored with my understanding to comprehend this, for many years I never could see why it should produce such an effect.

To crush De Quincey’s masterpiece, what he is doing is trying to pin down a particularly sublime moment at the end of Act II, Scene 3, sublime in the Burkean sense, the aestheticized fear caused by “Sound and Loudness” and “Suddenness,” the titles of Sections XVII and XVIII of A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), although De Quincey, by making a devious argument about readerly sympathy actually inverts Burke.

We are almost tricked by the immediacy of fiction into sympathy with the now-murderous Macbeths, aided by the difficulties they are having in being evil, and thus experience the sudden, inexplicable knocking at the gate as fearfully sublime with the “transfigured” Macbeths, while at the same time the knocking is a sublime relief to us in our more ordinary human capacity as non-murderers, a merciful restoration: “the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.”

Well, I don’t think my mangling of this little masterpiece was too severe.  But I have skipped the point, and the long paragraph about how De Quincey made the above argument.

… my understanding could furnish no reason why the knocking at the gate in Macbeth should produce any effect, direct or reflected.  In fact, my understanding said positively that it could not produce any effect.  But I knew better; I felt that it did; and I waited and clung to the problem until further knowledge should enable me to solve it.

“[I]t is a dream-mystery, and a dream needs someone to dream it,” writes Pykk.  Now that his essay exists as a text, I can treat it as an object composed of an argument and supporting evidence.  But the essay’s insight comes from somewhere else.

De Quincey’s essay is a little too visionary to be a good example for me.  I will close this little series, then with Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Gossip on Romance” (1882), which begins:

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought.  The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.  It was for this last pleasure that we read so closely, and loved our books so dearly, in the bright, troubled period of boyhood.

What could be more personal?  Reading, says Stevenson, is a continual attempt to recapture a childhood love.  Of course modern readers, amateur critics, and bloggers writing their personal reactions and nothing but, nosirree, want to share that love whenever they are lucky enough to find it again.  Of course they want to gloat.

The Paper Garden: an 18th century artist, and a biographer who gets in the way

The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 (2010) is a biography of the 18th century English artist Mary Delany by the American poet Molly Peacock.  Delany’s form was paper collages of flowers, portrayed with a botanist’s attention to detail.  Botanists would send exotic specimens to Delany to “sit” for a portrait.  It was almost a relief to learn that she would at times use a little bit of paint, but every shape and almost every shade of color is cut from paper.  The book is printed on thick, creamy paper designed to show off the numerous images, but nothing can duplicate the texture of the originals.  I would stare at the prints.  Just paper – impossible!

The collages, now owned by the British Museum, would be extraordinary objects under any circumstances.  The book’s subtitle tells the rest of the story.  Delany invented the form at the age of 72, and over the next decade, before her eyesight dimmed, she made 985 flower portraits, individual, innovative, and strangely personal.  Glue, scissors, black ink for the background, and a portfolio of colored paper, and of course a subject, say the winter cherry on the left, which to add to my amazement also incorporates, in the lower right, an actual seed pod skeleton.

Mary Delany’s biography would be of high interest even if she had never made the collages, but the sudden emergence of Delany as a fine and innovative artist puts a frame around her entire life.  How, I want to know, did she get there?

Just the question Molly Peacock asked when she discovered the flowers and conceived of this book.  The biography is organized chronologically, with one of the flowers made to imaginatively connect to the stage of Delany’s life.

Winter Cherry is an analogous name for Mrs. D.’s whole enterprise…  a self-portrait of the artist as a single stalk of a plant, showing her at four of life’s stages: the green lantern of childhood; the fully dressed, bright orange one with slight hip hoops – young womanhood; the lower lantern with part of the dress removed to show the interior of the plant – increasing maturity; and the last lantern, the heart of the aged woman.  The fine ribs of the plant material make the skeleton of the former lantern into something like a rib cage, with the cherry beating inside.  (318-9)

Note the clothing theme; it runs through the whole book.  Some, perhaps much of this is fanciful.  The author is a poet.  She takes some wild leaps.

The wildest is the inclusion at the end of each chapter of her own memoir.  Awkward teen, parents, divorce, first poetry (late, but nowhere as late as 72), happy second marriage.  Some of these episodes have a parallel with her subject’s 18th century life, but obviously not all of them.  Yet Peacock often creates links between her own life and the flower portrait that heads the chapter, sometimes different, even unrelated links.

But artworks let us leap centuries.  Artwork to artwork, hand to hand, time falls away in the presence of the marvelous.  (229)

Well, sometimes.  The metaphor elides the effort, or strain, required.  There is some strain.  The memoiristic parts are always at the end of the chapter, and have their own heading.  They could easily be skipped or skimmed.  Why does the biographer weave her own life in with that of her fascinating subject?

I found the answer in Chapter 11, which is not about Mary Delany but about her great-great-great-great-great-great niece Ruth Hayden, author of Mrs. Delany: Her Life and Flowers (1980), the book that brought Delany’s life and work back to public attention.  Hayden was 58 when she completed the book.  Her formal education had ended when she was twelve.  Here, then, is another woman finding her “life’s work” at a late age.  Her story is not as remarkable as that of her distant aunt’s, but whose is?

How we have three women who took up significant creative and intellectual work at an unusually late age.  By pursuing a poetical conceit, Peacock is making an argument about the nature of creativity.  Some kinds of creativity, at least; her own, Hayden’s, and Delany’s. 

Who doesn’t hold out the hope of starting a memorable project at a grand old age?  A life’s work is always unfinished and requires creativity till the day a person dies.  (5)

Peacock describes her book as “a narrative collage in response to her visual collages” and makes clear that she did not set out to make a particular argument but rather discovered it along the way – “unconsciously Mrs. Delany’s invention of collage would seep into my own writing process.”  I am quoting from a letter Peacock sent to the book blog Alison’s Book Marks.  Is that not cool?

The Paper Garden  is a terrific book.  If Peacock’s autobiography were absent, I would not miss it, but I likely would, then, miss some of the larger meaning that can be taken from Mary Delany’s story.

The book has a website, with lots of links, including to the British Museum collection.

Also, see Rohan Maitzen’s review of the book, the kind of personal response for which the book is made.  Maitzen used the winter cherry, too.  It is irresistible.

A whiff of the providential - Austen and Eliot, for example, changed my life

Today I look at two recent books that directly mix memoir and criticism, Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch (2014) and William Deresiewicz’s A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me about Love, Friendship, and the Things that Really Matter (2011).  Maybe I should omit the subtitle so as not to prejudice readers of Wuthering Expectations, who are mostly thinking “yuck.”  Not the target audience.

I have not read the entirety of either book, but have rather spot-checked them.  I do have them at hand, so you cannot just say “Well, the part you did not read is completely different.”  I can check.

Deresiewicz’s book is organized with a chapter per Austen novel, while Mead has a chapter per Middlemarch chapter.  Mead loved her book from childhood and finds that the meaning of the novel deepens as life goes on, while Deresiewicz despised Austen until he had a graduate school epiphany, after which he became an Austen scholar and began learning various lessons from Austen.

Love, I saw, is a verb, not just a noun – an effort, not just another precious feeling.  (158)

Sorry, I did it again, as if I am trying to sabotage the book.  Let me get this out of the way.  Deresiewicz is writing a graduate school memoir, which in and of itself is a mistake.  Graduate students are the worst (the link is to a 30 Rock clip).  Then the structure of linking the events of his life to a particular novel, followed by a series of character-improving lessons, is bizarrely constricting, even if true – no, especially if true.  Deresiewicz presents himself as one strange bird.

If I just ignore the memoir, though, it turns out that his writing about the Austen novels is excellent.  His plot summaries are outstanding, his character portraits swift and vivid.  They are clear, efficient, and expert at deploying details and quotations from the text with enough elegance that I at first did not notice how many little slivers of the book he was really using.  The above “love” passage is preceded by a one-page run through the importance of the words “exertion,” “duty,” and especially “useful” in Mansfield Park (157-8).  If I had written that page as a blog post, I would have been pleased.

He does this first-rate close reading, and then writes about how he began to hang out with some wealthy Brooklynites, which made him appreciate Fanny Price in Mansfield Park and learn that rich people can be jerks.  I don’t get it.

Deresiewicz’s book is memoir plus close reading (with some biography) – Deresiewicz constantly links himself to Austen characters.  Rebecca Mead’s book is really a short Eliot biography with her autobiography and some criticism folded in, so she more often makes connections with Eliot herself.  In the old days, if a New Yorker writer wanted to write an Eliot book, all of the memoir would have been compressed into the foreword or afterword.

This is Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Chace Family Professor of English at Yale, reviewing Mead’s book in the April 24, 2014 New York Review of Books:

What is nonetheless a bit disheartening about My Life in Middlemarch is the apparent assumption that literary criticism and even biography will be most appealing to contemporary readers when packaged as memoir.  In George Eliot’s novel, few words carry a more consistently ironic charge than “Providence” or “providential”…  Though Mead is scarcely under such a delusion, there is still a whiff of the providential about some of the connections she traces between her own history and Eliot’s.  (59)

Or, less politely, the memoiristic passages should have been cut, some of the connections are inventions, and the fault is likely that of an agent or publisher (true for Deresiewicz, too, I’ll bet).  The review is otherwise pretty glowing, although it is mostly about how deeply interesting Eliot is.  And really, at this point, Eliot vs. Mead is not a contest, right?

I think I will just point towards Rohan Maitzen’s recent review for more, including lots of useful quotations that show Mead’s skill and some of her better and worse attempts to justify the exercise.

Neither of these books is a bad book, and I can imagine plenty of readers getting a lot out of them.  But I can also imagine the shadow books where the authors got out of the way, with all of the autobiography moved to the end, for example, so the artificial demand for connections is relaxed.  Those books seem like they would be better.

Next I want to look at Molly Peacock’s The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 (2010), which does much of what I am complaining about here, but I think with more success.  That will have to wait until Monday.

Personal criticism - two case studies - Then a chastened being, I began my new intellectual career.

Now, two examples of criticism that blend life and literature, that as Arnold says successfully “create a current of true and fresh ideas” by violating “disinterestedness.”  The authors get in the way of the reader first, then get out of the way.

They’re both essays that I had filed away as exceptions to my skepticism.  I might grumble about excessive memoirism in criticism, but then think “Yeah, but what about…”

Rohan Maitzen’s 2010 essay on racism in Gone with the Wind begins with a 740 word account of her history with the novel over a long period.  It was a favorite book; she had read the book many times;  her life had moved along.  Then what looks like a nostalgic description of her thirty year-old paperback takes a surprising turn:

This is the kind of metadata an e-book can never accumulate—but then, an e-book would also not leave me with quite the dilemma I now face, whether to keep the book on my shelf or to hide it away, to own or disown it.

My reading of Gone with the Wind this summer, my thirty-second, was my first really honest one, the first one during which I unequivocally named what I had always seen.  

The remaining 4,800 words develop a careful argument about the ethical and aesthetic content of the novel based on the usual range of critical tools: close reading, historical context, comparisons with other novels, some theoretical help from Wayne Booth.  The argument is specific yet easily detachable from this particular book in the sense that it provides a useful way of thinking about any ethically problematic text.

Thus the value of the memoir.  Maitzen models not just how to interpret the book but how to live with it.  Interestingly, the memoir also becomes a source of authority, a declaration of credentials, necessary for such a controversial argument.  Certain lines of attack are closed down, others left defiantly open, almost as traps (“You’re not from the South”).  What looks like a biographical preface becomes a support structure for the argument.

Another favorite of mine is Judith Pascoe’s “Before I Read Clarissa I Was Nobody: Aspirational Reading and Samuel Richardson’s Great Novel” from The Hudson Review, Summer 2003, 239-53.  The article used to be online in a PDF, but it is now hidden in JSTOR, sorry.  Clarissa was one of the smash hits of the 18th century, and also possibly the longest novel in English.  The book is a bizarre mix of tedium and tension, moral uplift and depravity, pure stasis and bursts of excitement, or horror, or sorrow.  It is a sad, sad book.

Pascoe loves the novel, has read and taught it frequently (at the University of Iowa), which is madness, and wants the well-read Hudson Review readers to set aside a couple dozen other, easier, faster, lighter books for this “book with the size and heft of a two-pound sack of flour” (239).

Some of the personal history passages (like Pascoe’s  “escape” from high school science teaching) do not do much.  There is some creative non-fiction filler.  “It is January in the Middle West an people are sliding across the iced campus walkways, their faces freezing into death grimaces whenever a stiff wind gusts off the river” (247), although “death grimaces” is funny.  Jokes soften me up for anything.  But Clarissa is such an unusual book.  Pascoe is not just delivering a blast of enthusiasm but also showing, through her own story and that of her students, how a problematic book like this can lead to such enthusiasm, how this unlovable book can be loved, and how you, too can “be initiated into the exclusive coterie of people who have read Clarissa in its entirety” (247).

In moments of honest personal inventory, I realize that I may never distinguish myself among readers of Clarissa, but, still, here we all are: Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Mary Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Henry James, Virginia Woolf – along with Dan from Council Bluffs, Jessica from Cedar Rapids, and me. (253)

Back in 2003, this kind of personal advocacy was not so common.  I remember discussing this article with Rohan Maitzen at some point.  She wondered just how many articles like this a person could write.  It is a good question.  It is not just ordinary reading that make Clarissa or Gone with the Wind so important.  Maitzen has , in fact, written a couple more pieces along these lines, like this one about Josephine Tey, but this well can’t be too deep.  My deeply felt essay about the 14th most important book in my life will likely lack oomph.

To be honest, I doubt I could write even one of these.  But essays like Maitzen’s and Pascoe’s give me an idea about how to use the personal writing to guide me into the book.

Tomorrow: can this work at book-length?

Title from Pascoe, p. 240.

The great art of criticism is to get oneself out of the way - Arnold's disinterestedness

I am going to bend Matthew Arnold a bit today, but I do not believe I will break him.

A long chunk of “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” is devoted to the critical principle of “disinterestedness,” or rather an accusation that English critics lack disinterestedness, that the critics and their magazines are too concerned with “the practical spirit,” which sounds like it might be an ancestor of today’s battle of STEM and the humanities, but in fact is a reference to political and religious controversy.  Catholic journals  review these books in this way, Whig journals review those books like that, and nobody reviews writes about the books especially well.  Nobody in England – French and German critics are more effectively disinterested.

I do not know the extent to which any of this is true.  Arnold, or his followers, are moving toward some notion of objective and scientific criticism.  As Arnoldian as I am, I am also enough of a creature of my own time to know better than to argue for objective literary criticism.  Much less, Lord help us, scientific, which is not really Arnold’s word.

In a narrower sense than our normal usage, though, I will defend Arnold’s objectivity.  He calls criticism “’the endeavor, in all branches of knowledge… to see the object as it really is’”  (“Function,” Arnold is quoting himself).  Emphasize “endeavor,” which can come from many directions, take decades or centuries, give little more than glimpses even after great effort, and often fail entirely, and we are not so far from the common usage of “subjectivity.”

To try and approach truth on one side after another, not to strive and cry, nor to persist in pressing forward, on any one side, with violence and self-will, – it is only thus, it seems to me, that mortals may hope to gain any vision of the mysterious Goddess, whom we shall never see except in outline, but only thus even in outline.  (“Preface” to Essays and Criticism)

Not one side or another, but one side after another.  Arnold uses words like “perfection” and “truth” and, snort, “mysterious Goddess,” in ways that would not be useful now, but passages like this one remind me that much of the difference between his idea of good criticism and mine are largely rhetorical.

To the extent that the varied pieces in Essays and Criticism are demonstrations of Arnold’s principles, they look a lot like the kind of thing published today in the New York Review of Books and London Review of Books, just longer and with more extensive quotations.  Arnold’s model won the fight for the center, at least for a time.  “[T]he great art of criticism is to get oneself out of the way,” he wrote in “Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment,” another of the pieces in Essays and Criticism.

Now I will bend Arnold.  It has become clear to me through book blogs that many thousands of intense, dedicated readers reject Arnold’s model as too impersonal.  They want the critic to get in the way sometimes, maybe all the time.  Criticism is part of the endeavor to see the subject – the self.  Literature becomes a means to reveal the self.  Disinterestedness?  You have got to be kidding.

Memoirs and personal writing are of course forms with their own value, but this hybrid of criticism and memoir seems to me like something new.  For a long time, I have been skeptical of its value.  I read or have read hundreds of blogs, but I have typically read around the memoiristic stuff in search of insights about literature, which I do often find.  My skepticism has weakened, though, and perhaps ironically reading objective Arnold finally did it in.  I should look for “the best that is known and thought in the world” wherever I can find it.  I should learn a new approach, maybe not learn to do it but at least to read it.

For the next couple of days, let’s try a few of these out.

they may have it even in criticizing - Matthew Arnold flatters me

Matthew Arnold is among the greatest literary critic of the 19th century, and among the greatest in English.  A long series of subsequent critics – Pater, Wilde, T. S. Eliot, to pick the ones I am sure about – defined themselves against him in some important way.  Arnold did not particularly care about fiction, which has perhaps caused a bit of a devaluation compared to Henry James now that we live in, or recently lived in, the Age of the Novel.  But since a good part of Arnold’s importance comes from his arguments about criticism and the role of the critic his importance is to a large degree independent of the fact that he mostly wrote about poetry, a form that almost no one reads any more, just as John Dryden’s immense value as a critic remains even though he wrote almost exclusively about Restoration plays.

I recently read the book now usually called Essays in Criticism: First Series (1865).  The curious thing about the book is the randomness and even inconsequentiality of the subjects of Arnold’s essays, typical for a collection of magazine reviews, but not really commensurate with my idea of Arnold.  Spinoza, Marcus Aurelius, Joubert, Heine (random); the French poet Maurice de Guérin along with a separate essay on the journals of his sister Eugénie de Guérin (inconsequential, however good they sound).  This is the greatest critic of his time?  What is going on here?

Well, one thing is that Culture and Anarchy  comes later (1869), as does the “second series” of Essays in Criticism which is mostly about English poets, along with Tolstoy and (who?) Amiel, so I should not put too much wright on this early book, however good it might be.  And it does have “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” which by itself is almost enough to make a critic’s reputation.

The critic’s job, says Arnold is “simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas” (“simply,” very amusing), and “to keep man from a self-satisfaction which is retarding and vulgarizing, to lead him towards perfection, by making his mind dwell upon what is excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of things.”  Preposterous, but there is a satirical strain in Arnold that I have not yet learned to read.  “Perfection” and “absolute” may be squishier words than they first appear.  But maybe not.

More appealing to me are a couple of other instructions to the critic.  One is his emphasis  on “the world” – thus the Heine, Spinoza, and French poetry – and the effort to read widely.  He argues that English critics and literary magazines are narrow and parochial.  So it will ever be.

The other is his insistence that criticism is a creative act, not ranked as high as the making of original work, but nevertheless a source of “true happiness”: “They [we; I] may have it [happiness] in well doing [original art], they may have it in learning, they may have it even in criticizing.”  Learning includes reading, so reading is also a creative act, “the free play of the mind upon all subjects” which is “a pleasure in itself.”

Arnold is in many ways very flattering to book bloggers.  Our sense of what is “best” and “true” necessarily varies a lot, but amateur criticism is an Arnoldian enterprise, aside from one enormously important aspect of it that he would loathe.  Tomorrow: “disinterestedness.”

Reading Ruskin candidly - none of these things very glorious

Ruskin is arguing that “Letters are always ugly things,” meaning in paintings, not in a book.  Maybe also in a book.  This is in Volume 5, Chapter 7, “Of Vulgarity.”  In a long footnote attached to this point, Ruskin finally answers a question of mine:

I do not wonder at people sometimes thinking I contradict myself when  they come suddenly on any of the scattered passages, in which I am forced to insist on the opposite practical applications of subtle principles of this kind.

Ruskin traces his ideas about the ugliness of letters through a number of texts, or actually insists that I do the same, after which “you… will be brought, I hope, into a wholesome state of not knowing what to think.”  Suitably confused, I am prepared to read a few more passages in The Stones of Venice and thus to a resolution, maybe:

If truths of apparent contrary character are candidly and rightly received, they will fit themselves together in the mind without any trouble.  But no truth maliciously received will nourish you, or fit with others.

Oh, so it’s my fault, is it?  But perhaps it is.  How should I read Ruskin (or anyone) if not candidly?

Ruskin ends Modern Painters with a chapter titled “Peace,” his openly religious call for social change (“When the time comes for us to wake out of the world’s sleep, why should it be otherwise than out of the dreams of the night?”).  A few chapters earlier, though, is an alternative, non-Utopian argument, Chapter 9, “The Two Boyhoods.”

One boy is Giorgione, the other Turner.  Giorgione grows up in 15th century Venice, surrounded by beauty, constantly confronted with beauty, natural and man-made.  “All ruins were removed, and its place filled as quickly as in our London; but filled always by architecture loftier and more wonderful than that whose place it took, the boy himself happy to work upon the walls of it,” for example.  Thus the Venetian kid becomes the painter Giorgione.

Now, Turner.

Ruskin directs me to his childhood home in Covent Garden – “a square brick pit,” “a few rays of light,” “an iron gate,” “a narrow door,” a window “filled in this year (1860), with a row of bottles.”  “No knights to be seen there, nor, I imagine, many beautiful ladies”:

of things beautiful, besides men and women, dusty sunbeams up or down the street on summer mornings; deep furrowed cabbage leaves at the greengrocer’s; magnificence of oranges in wheelbarrows round the corner; and Thames’ shore within three minutes’ race.

None of these things very glorious; the best, however, that England, it seems, was then able to provide for a boy of gift…

Here Ruskin sees Turner’s attraction to ugliness, like “anything fishy or muddy… black barges, patched sails, and every possible condition of fog.”  One might think that the words “beauty” and “ugliness” are being overstretched.  “No Venetian ever draws anything foul; but Turner devoted picture after picture to the illustration of effects of dinginess, smoke, soot, dust, and dusty texture;  old sides of boats, weedy roadside vegetation, dung-hills, straw yards, and all the soilings and stains of every common labor.”

That Turner also develops an unusual sympathy for the poor, and for seafaring stuff (sailors, masts – “better for the boy than wood of pine, or grove of myrtle”) is more conventional biography.  Turner becomes not vulgar but “very tolerant of vulgarity,” this because of “the original make and frame of [his] mind… as nearly as possible a combination of the minds of Keats and Dante.”

Yet after all of this Turner becomes Ruskin’s Turner only after a chance summer in the Yorkshire hills, where he discovers “Loveliness at last…  Beauty, and freedom, and peace…”; in other words, landscape.

So taught, and prepared for his life’s labor, sate the boy at last alone among his fair English hills; and began to paint, with cautious toil, the rocks, and fields, and trickling brooks, and soft, white clouds of heaven.

It is all a mystery, then, although partly visible in retrospect.  The artist of genius creates with whatever is at hand.  Sometimes the result is beautiful.  The critic of genius studies the artist and – what does he do?  He writes a great chapter in a great book, I am sure of that.