Sucked oranges, metaphysical varioloids, hugs in Texas - the wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson

The fact is that I will never remember what is in these Ralph Waldo Emerson essays.  They slip through the brain, which in my case is admittedly rather spongy.  Sponges drain.  The book at issue is The Conduct of Life (1860), a late one.  Emerson was in his fifties.  The essays are titled “Wealth,” “Power,” like that.  Blunt yet somehow unmemorable.

When I write about a book, when I simply type out lines, they are more likely to stick.  I will try that.  I will work on the fourth essay, “Culture.”

In the distemper known to physicians as chorea, the patient sometimes turns round, and continues to spin slowly in one spot.  Is egotism a metaphysical varioloid of this malady?  The man runs round a ring formed by his own talent, falls into an admiration of it, and loses relation to the world.  It is a tendency in all minds.  (1015-6, page numbers referring to the Library of America Essays and Lectures)

One might distinguish between those who read Emerson with pleasure and those who cannot by their involuntary response to “metaphysical varioloid” – do you smack your lips or roll your eyes?

How about this one, which I will have to snip a bit:

In Boston, the question of life is the names of some eight or ten men.  Have you seen Mr. Allston, Doctor Channing, Mr. Adams, Mr. Webster, [etc.]?  Then you may as well die.  In New York, the question is of some other eight, or ten, or twenty.  Have you seen a few lawyers, merchants, and brokers, - two or three scholars, two or three capitalists, two or three editors of newspapers?  New York is a sucked orange.  (1017)

That seems strangely relevant, even if we have expanded the cultural list of what we must experience, and then die.

Some people read Emerson for his wisdom, which is surely overrated, and is in no way applicable to me or to Wuthering Expectations:

Though they talk of the object before them, they are thinking of themselves, and their vanity is laying little traps for you admiration.  (1017)

In no way applicable.  This is not bad, though, where Emerson gives some advice on education, advocating a long leash, so to speak:

He is infatuated for weeks with Halo 4 and Minecraft; but presently will find out, as you did, that when he rises from the game too long played, he is vacant and forlorn, and despises himself.  Thenceforward it takes place with other things, and has its due weight in his experience.  (1021)

Substitute “whist and chess” in the appropriate place for the actual quotation.  Whist and chess!  Perhaps some of our plagues of the moment are not so new.

I should find something about books. 

So, if in traveling in the dreary wildernesses of Arkansas or Texas, we should observe on the next seat a man reading Horace, or Martial, or Calderon, we should wish to hug him.  (1030)

Exactly, exactly.  Emerson does not say that I actually hug him.  Yes, he was a wise man.

Look first or think first - both are honorable and productive

I’m going to steal something from Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn: What Happens after They’re Built (1994) and not write about the book itself beyond this paragraph.  Brand argues that architects should concentrate not just on how buildings are used but how use changes over time, and he suggests how this could happen .  The book is filled with fascinating photographs of houses, factories, and other buildings transforming from one thing to another.  It is very much in the spirit of John Ruskin, of The Stones of Venice, although the prose is entirely conversational and non-technical.   It seems to have already become a classic in the literature of architecture, and is easy to recommend.

I don’t want to follow that thought.  I want this one:

To completely reunderstand buildings would require both of the fundamental approaches to knowledge – observation and theory.  I called them “Look first” and “Think first”… [T]here were two types of people in the world – those who deal with something new by really looking at it, devoid of preconception, versus those who prefer to form hypotheses first and then study the thing to see which ideas were right.  Both are honorable and productive. (211)

Although he uses different labels than I do, Brand has identified one of my most important frames, a tool I use all the time to think about writers and books.  The “Think first” writers are the conceptualists and theorizers, Alfred Jarry and Gustave Flaubert, writers whose works demonstrate their ideas.  The “Look first” authors are those who learn by doing, who have to write in order to discover their ideas.  I do not think I am distorting Brand too badly here – for writers of this temperament, writing is a major part of how they look.

Charles Dickens is the 19th century exemplar of the “Look first” author.  He developed his unique comic voice very quickly, but for every other aspect of novel-writing – characterization, plotting, rhetoric, and so on – his development is visible in his novels, from novel to novel, sometimes even within a single novel.  It is no coincidence that Dickens was the master of serialization.*  I am recycling the example of Dickens, but it is the best one I know.

Why do I bother with these distinctions?  Neurosis is a good answer, but that’s not it.  Understanding the temperament of the writer (or of the book – perhaps writers change from book to book) can provide an entryway to a work.  Conceptual novelists, for example,  often abandon standard components of the novel.  It is the “Think firsters” who are most likely to do without sympathetic characters, or clever plots, or common sense.  The concept they are working with is often explicitly literary, a response to earlier literature.  The writer is not incompetent, but is deliberately isolating the parts of the novel.  The “Look firsters” generally worry less about literature, or about the formal aesthetic properties of fiction, and more about the world around them, the part of the world not contained in books.

Perhaps it is more accurate to imagine a continuum.  Every successful conceptual novelist has to produce an actual novel, not simply describe his idea for a novel.  Every successful exploring novelist has to discover something along the way, something that gives form and meaning to his journey.  All of this is much easier to apply to art history, where the distinctions are often much clearer, where the difference between Pablo Picasso and Paul Cézanne, great innovators of opposite temperaments, is clear enough, without having to resort to, I don’t know, Rembrandt and Yves Klein.  Literature has been fortunate (although poetry has been less fortunate) to have avoided many of the conceptual extremes of 20th century visual art.  Books consisting of a single word repeated ten million times exist, but most conceptual writers still produce novels that are recognizable as novels and poems that behave like poems.  Weird novels, weird poems, but still.

I do not know if this is clearer than any other attempt I have made on this subject, but it is surely useful to define my terms once in a while, especially since I am, on the continuum, a “Look firster” who wishes he were a “Think firster,” a muddled and even disastrous combination.

*  Flaubert serialized Madame Bovary, too, but not before he had written every word of it.

Why so little love for the Germans?

Should I spend more time explaining why the German Romantics – the German 19th century, really – has had such bad luck in the English-speaking literary world? Or wondering why, not explaining, since I don’t know the answer.

There’s something strange about the tone of a lot of Romantic German fiction, something I do not know how to describe well. Sometimes it’s a sort of gentleness or serenity, even amidst the strangest events. I’m thinking of Adalbert Stifter here, or Goethe’s Elective Affinities, or some of Hoffmann’s fantasias. They all take place in a version of the real world that has been shifted, so that everything is just a little off. We are used to this in fantasy and horror stories, but in realistic stories many readers don’t know what to do. That’s a guess.

A few German Romantics are really difficult to understand. The poets Novalis and Hölderlin, for example, or part 2 of Faust. Strangely, these really hard works are often as easy to find in English as more straightforward books by Storm or Keller or many others.

None of this explains the case of Fontane, who writes in a similar style to Flaubert and Turgenev. Effi Briest ought to be as well-known as Madame Bovary. Or how about Heinrich von Kleist, hard to take, but very much a modern writer.

I may be wrong. Penguin Classics keeps a number of these writers in print, which means that someone, somewhere is teaching them. Fontane, Hoffmann, Mörike, just recently a selection of Heine’s prose. Keeping up the good fight.

Compare the status (in America) of 19th century German literature with that of Russian literature. With some trepidation, I’m joining an internet reading challenge for Russian literature. Everyone want to use it as a goad to start or finish War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, that sort of thing. In a German challenge, the focus would be very different – some Goethe, sure, but more Mann, Musil, and Grass, not so much Green Henry or Wilhelm Meister.