Bianca Steele

Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant; Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants

Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot is not the topic of this blog post.  My having finished the reading for the project I mentioned a little while back is.  I did start The Marriage Plot during a break in my reading when I couldn’t get the book I needed next from the library, and I wanted something new to read during an afternoon sick in bed.  I’m about halfway through it, but I put it down to finish the “project.”

I had picked up the first novel for the “project” in the library on a whim.  I thought it would be interesting to write about, but first I wanted to see what else the author wrote.  It turned out that while the first book was interesting (and brief), and the second was long and in a genre that was really not my kind of thing but a good read, the third was simply long.  The more I read it (and it took me a long time, since I could only read at most a chapter or two a day, which can’t have helped), the more I felt that (to paraphrase Wayne Booth) the implied author of this novel was someone I really did not want to spend time with. 

So when I finished, finally, the thought that passed through my head was, “I’m glad that’s over.”  That reminded me of the lines from T.S. Eliot (in the third section of “The Waste Land,” which he gave the title, “The Fire Sermon"):

She turns and looks a moment in the glass,
Hardly aware of her departed lover;
Her brain allows one half-formed thought to pass:
"Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over."

The title of the post is from the same poem, and does almost seem appropriate (surely goatees are over by now).  And while Jeffrey Eugenides and his narrators are probably as far from being the young man carbuncular as can be imagined, I don’t think the idea of the author of a book as a person who is in the room with a reader, for as long as the book’s being read, is a bad one.  The idea of an author being a seducer, much less a rapist, maybe not, though.

Again looking for something light to read, I picked up a fairly recent collection of stories by Ursula Le Guin, Changing Planes, in the children’s section.  I like this passage, from the introductory story:

On the airplane, everyone is locked into a seat with a belt and can move only during very short periods when they are allowed to stand in line waiting to empty their bladders until, just before they reach the toilet cubicle, a nagging loudspeaker harries them back to belted immobility.  In the airport, luggage-laden people rush hither and yon through endless corridors, like souls to each of whom the devil has furnished a different, inaccurate map of the escape routes from hell.  These rushing people are watched by people who sit in plastic seats bolted to the floor and who might just as well be bolted to the seats.

The passage is a good example of how Le Guin combines fiction that’s very interested in ideas with very precise, nearly pictorial descriptions.  She can sometimes be a little too abstract for my taste when she is narrating ordinary stories, but so far the pieces in this book are brief explorations of related ideas, for which her ability to describe people and places with pinpoint accuracy is very well suited.

Anonymous and Oxfordianism

The reviews are pretty well unanimous that Anonymous is a silly film.  If you’ve missed seeing them, the plot involves the theory that William Shakespeare didn’t write plays, but rather acted as a front man for a nobleman, a member of Queen Elizabeth’s court, because the reputation of a nobleman would be harmed if his name had been attached to plays produced for a commercial audience.  There are several different people offered as “candidates” (as those interested in the controversy call them) for the “authorship” of the “works.”  Over the centuries, these have included Francis Bacon (a lawyer and scholar, one of the founders of both modern science and modern philosophy) , Christopher Marlowe (a playwright exactly William Shakespeare’s age, who was killed young under dubious, slightly sketchy circumstances), and Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who is the candidate put forward here.  “Oxfordians” are said to include some prominent Shakespearean actors, including Derek Jacobi, Mark Rylance, and Michael York, as well as several North American literature professors.

There seem to be two or maybe three kinds of issues that concern people who become convinced that “Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare.”  (Here is a link to a discussion thread at an “Oxfordian” site, answering the question, “Why I became an Oxfordian.”)  First, William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon was a middle-class boy who attended state-run schools, and stopped attending them in his early teens—while the plays are considered masterworks of the English language, worthy of study by the most learned of people, and with considered allusions not only to high-level political events and to the best theoretical knowledge of the times, but to ancient Greek and Roman texts, as well.  People have even found in them apparent allusions to esoteric mysteries of the sort that it’s supposed only a scholar like Bacon could be familiar with.  Second, it can appear that the connection between the standard biographies and the available source materials sometimes fail to sustain skeptical scrutiny.  Third, some readers and playgoers report that the plays opened up a deeper meaning to them, culturally and emotionally, once they began thinking of them in terms of the works of a specific human being who is emphatically not William Shakespeare.

I have some sympathy with the second of these.  It actually is not the case that there are no source materials documenting William Shakespeare’s life.  The Riverside edition of Shakespeare, for example, lists all of these and excerpts some, and so does this site (which is maintained by people who find the very idea of “alternate authorship candidates” to be pernicious and anti-intellectual).  These few facts, however, are not enough to build a 400-page biography on.  Biographies of Shakespeare, like biographies of most historical figures of the early modern period (even kings and queens), include a large portion of conjecture and literary reconstruction.  Moreover, throughout the centuries, English and American writers have interwoven their fancies with facts, often producing deeply influential portraits that by now have become part of the culture, as much as the exact words of Hamlet’s famous soliloquies.  James Shapiro (in 1599), no less than Virginia Woolf (in Orlando and A Room of One’s Own), builds literary theories on the basis of a Shakespeare who was presented at court, and even had a room at the castle in which to write.  The skeptical or scientifically-minded student, who may try to investigate the history as if it were, say, a crime still unrecognized and unknown to the police, can quickly become frustrated.

There are good histories that take account of what we know about the history of the period, often by English scholars of the history of the theatre, with full scholarly apparatus.  These even examine practices of collaboration, and of “borrowing” that today we might consider plagiarism.  They are, unfortunately, quite expensive, and they are not necessarily intended to affect the literary discourse, but they are not hard to find and they are not hard to read.  This is far from the conspiracy theory some “Oxfordians” imagine.

The first and third objections, though, are silly, and I think they are connected.  The reason people put Oxford forward as the probable author of “Shakespeare” isn’t just that their interpretation of these canonical works—unlike the accepted interpretation—is that they put forward a strongly aristocratic, Catholic, anti-Reformation point of view, which requires the playwright to have been a Catholic aristocrat who hobnobbed with the Queen’s Catholic opponents. 

It’s also that they want everything they see in the plays (and also in the poems: the sonnets, Venus and Adonis, and The Rape of Lucrece) to have been available to the playwright, fully, and consciously.  The idea that someone who studied Latin in grammar school, but didn’t graduate from college, could allude, as an adult, to Terence and Virgil and Seneca, doesn’t seem possible to them.  The idea that ideas were shared among playwrights, that knowledge of politics was shared among men in coffeehouses, similarly, doesn’t seem possible.

They want to be able to attribute real knowledge to the playwright, to use him as an authority, and they can’t do it if he didn’t quite know what he was talking about, himself.  This is not the way skilled readers encounter literature.  Playwrights (like novelists and poets) write from a subjective, partial, emotional perspective—they don’t get Ph.D.-level knowledge of a subject so they can invent stories that embody scientific or theoretical truths.

In the 1920s and 1930s there was a large amount of amateur scholarship being produced about Shakespeare.  Among lawyers, this sometimes took the form of displaying the depth of Shakespeare’s understanding of law, and then arguing that this meant that the author of the play in question must have been trained in the law.  Physicians, similarly, argued that he was a physician.  This scholarship doesn’t hold up well.  Others went to great lengths to find an actual historical figure who seemed to fit the idea the plays gave them of the author, and they came up with Edward de Vere: a youngish, fairly low-level member of the court, raised in a kind of orphanage run by William Cecil, Baron Burleigh, Elizabeth’s chief minister, specifically for parentless young aristocrats, married unhappily to Burleigh’s own daughter, flirting with Catholicism in the face of Elizabeth’s excommunication by Rome, always complaining about how he was treated and how much money he was being allotted by his betters.

To some extent, I think, the Oxfordian narrative embodies a particular kind of confusion about how imaginative literature is written, and it could be interesting for that reason.  There have been literary fronts in history (see The Front), and at times literature has been used politically (as Clare Asquith notes, applying her experiences with the arts of the former Soviet Union to the situation of Elizabethan England).  There is a lot of collaboration—huge teams of writers on Hollywood television shows, unnamed script doctors and collaborators on Hollywood films, novel factories that “touch up” stories drafted by the named author—that often goes unrecognized.  There are interesting new-historical questions about “social energies” that are harnessed by great writers, but not literally created by those writers ab ovo—and there are interesting cultural questions about where those social energies really do originate, and how they do.

I somehow have a feeling that Anonymous, from the creator of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, will itself say nothing particularly interesting about those questions.  But since—as more than one reviewer suggested might be necessary to make sense of the plot—I already have some sense of the differences between the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Leicester, and the Earl of Southampton—I will probably watch it anyway.  If you don’t, you may prefer reading James Shapiro’s recent book, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?.  Or watch HBO’s miniseries with Helen Mirren as Elizabeth I, and learn what those differences are.

Melancholia, a film by Lars von Trier

On Friday, after a couple of days of unseasonably warm weather, well up into the 60s, it was surprisingly cold.  Instead of getting into the high 50s, the temperature barely reached 50 degrees Fahrenheit all day.  The leaves were falling quickly, and instead of a curtain of yellow at the back of my house, by end end of the day, out my back window there was nothing longer anything to block the much too early dusk.  It reminded me of this famous poem by Emily Dickinson, which usually makes me think of the lingering February snow:

There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons—
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes—

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us—
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are—

None may teach it— Any—
'Tis the Seal Despair —
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air—

When it comes, the Landscape listens—
Shadows— hold their breath—
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death—

It also made me think of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which previewed on cable the other night.  It was on a channel I didn't even think we get, and I only noticed it because I wanted something to watch while I folded laundry.  I watched it under un-ideal conditions, starting in the middle, then watching most of the first half from the start, not bothering to watch part of the middle, and not under terrific sound conditions either.  But I didn’t like it.  I did like both Dogville and Manderlay, and I could almost see the point of Europa, though I didn’t like it much.  This quasi-review could be considered to be by way of convincing my husband that he—who didn’t like any of those three films the very slightest bit, and who I’d pretty much predicted will absolutely hate Melancholia if he ever sees it—should ignore reviews like the one by Andrew O’Hehir in Salon, and not bother to rent it when it becomes available on DVD.  The post grew out of a series of IM’s along the lines of “did that Salon guy really like it? nothing happened for two and a half hours. and music was really awful. he said what about the music?”

The film has two parts, named for two sisters: Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst, and Claire, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg.  (Like Dunst, Gainsbourg is excellent, but I’m sorry to say that I haven’t seen her in anything.)  These happen to be the names of characters in two of the most important French language novels of the eighteenth century: Julie, or la Nouvelle Héloïse, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the Marquis de Sade’s sadistic response to Julie, Justine.  Claire is not the heroine of Rousseau’s novel, but the heroine’s sensible, somewhat put-upon cousin.  “Justine is a reversal of the Nouvelle Héloïse,” wrote Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony, an exceedingly important book about the Romantic movement that I read a very long time ago.  However, as far as the film is concerned, I don’t know what this means.

In a kind of prologue, we see dream sequences, some imagined and surrealistic and fitting in with the rest of the story, some very strange but from scenes that will become obvious by the second part of the film, and some depicting the time just before and just after the events that end the film.  (This is not much of a spoiler unless you are totally innocent of the film’s publicity.  In fact, if like me you saw the end before the beginning, the beginning might leave you still wondering whether what you thought had happened really did.)

(THERE ARE SPOILERS AFTER THIS.  Skip to the end to reach the more general discussion again.)

The first half of the movie is Justine’s wedding reception, at her sister’s house.  It’s almost impossible to know what’s going on here.  Justine first appears to be a free spirit, then begins to seem unstable, and finally seems—possibly—depressed—but if the word Melancholia weren’t in the title, you might never know.  Her behavior is outrageously inappropriate.  She's hours late for the reception and then leaves the guests further, for hours at a time.  It’s not only as if she doesn’t know how to behave at a wedding: it’s as if she doesn’t know she is actually at her own wedding.

Though others’ behavior is inappropriate, too.  Her boss keeps tailing her throughout the reception, trying to get her to write her daily copy for him.  (She is a copywriter whose promotion to art director, perhaps surprising enough in itself, her boss announces during the toasts.)  In fact, her behavior is just what you’d expect in a dream.  She wanders around the house and forgets what she was supposed to be doing.

There’s nothing wrong with a film that’s dreamlike, but this plot summary makes it sound much more exciting than it is.  Really, nothing happens.  People eat.  People toast the bride and groom.  The wedding cake is cut.  The bride’s nephew is put to bed.  The guests troupe outside and down the bride’s brother-in-law’s private golf course to drink champagne and set off paper balloons with good wishes written on them, like something out of La Dolce Vita.  Every shot is about five times longer than feels necessary.  We're just sitting in the audience, watching.  And what dialogue there is has no connection that I can see with Justine’s apparent depression; it feels thoroughly arbitrary.

It is possible, obviously, to dredge up a coherent storyline from surrealist storytelling like this—and O’Hehir tries—but that seems to me to flatten out what’s most interesting about it, at the same time that it absolves the artist in advance for not really bothering to depict things for himself, and I guess I just don’t see the point.

I must have found the second half more interesting, since I sat through it well past the time I’d intended to go to bed, and even watched all of the first half, in order to find the connecting link: how people realized there was a second planet hurtling more or less in the direction of our own, and how all those people were gotten out of the brother-in-law’s house, leaving only Justine, Claire, and Claire’s husband and child.  The answer to this last question is that the wedding was some time ago, and the guests went home days before.  Now, it seems, Justine is so depressed that she can barely manage to get into a taxicab that someone else has hired and has waiting by the curb.  Claire doesn’t seem especially fond of her sister, but is determined to help her. 

She is worried about the planet, barely glimpsed the night of the wedding, but now discovered and studied and named “Melancholia.  Her husband, however, who is some unspecified kind of scientist, says there’s nothing to worry about.  He chides her for “going on the Internet again,” and says “the real scientists” know that the idea the earth is in danger is simply alarmism.  Well before the end of the film, Claire is herself depressed, and mostly sits on her terrace, often asleep.  All four of them gather there daily to observe the progress of Melancholia.  Will it strike, or will it pass by and leave all of them unharmed?

I sat through the end to find out, and I was sorry I’d bothered.

(SPOILERS END HERE.)

O’Hehir has an entirely different interpretation of the characters’ motivations than mine, which he's entitled to.  He also loves the artistic aspects of Melancholia, which I agree are fine, but which I don’t think add up to anything.

He starts with the assumption that Von Trier’s film is “the ultimate cinematic expression of the German Romantic aesthetic, which was an enormous source of inspiration for Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich,” and gives the Salon reader a deep interpretation along those lines.

First, O’Hehir explains that the score is using some fairly well-known music from Wagner’s overture to Tristan und Isolde, an opera that romanticizes the wish for death.  Then he explains how the movie refers to other well regarded films, including those in which the major actors of this one—John Hurt, Charlotte Rampling, Stellan Skarsgård—have previously appeared.  So, from the point of view of someone who’s educated about film, Melancholia is very meaningful.  I won’t deny that someone who’s very educated about film will have a more worthwhile opinion, in many ways, than someone who isn’t.  But even setting aside that these particular meaningful facts are fairly specialized even for most very sophisticated filmgoers, I do want to deny that allusions are enough to make deeply meaningful art.

I didn’t recognize the Tristan theme, and without this recognition, the recurring ultra-romantic orchestral music just reads as overwrought and inappropriate.  The cold cinematography and minimalist plot felt spoiled by the inadvertent addition of schmaltz.  Every time I heard the orchestral music, I wished it was something more recent, something twentieth-century, something spare and stark like the Musica ricercata by György Ligeti that Stanley Kubrick used in Eyes Wide Shut.  By now the Tristan theme and music that sounds like it registers simply love, without the death.  Only by recalling the sentence, This is music by Richard Wagner that signifies the Liebestod or Love-Death, would the filmgoer have the experience O'Hehir describes.

Similarly, although I recognize John Hurt, Stellan Skarsgård, and Charlotte Rampling by sight, I’ve seen almost nothing that they’ve appeared in.  I’ve seen none of the films Andrew O’Hehir marks as possible influences for this one.  Yes, that’s my failing and not the filmmaker’s, but the question is, how much energy should an artist draw from other works that he or she alludes to only in the barest, most tenuous, sense?  Is a film (or a novel) that depends, so heavily as this one seems to, on allusions that are detectable only on an intellectual level, and then only at a couple of levels of (sheerly logical) remove, a deep one, or is it shallow? 

And yes, those visual shots are beautiful.  But they are static.  The same angle is shown over and over again, as if the film were instead a painting in some style suspended halfway between nineteenth century decadence and twentieth century minimalist futurism.

What O’Hehir’s insistence that Melancholia is in the tradition of German Romanticism reminds me mostly of are the twentieth century paintings from this exhibition.  One of the most striking things about that show, which divided up artists by region (England; France and Spain; Germany and Russia) was how sentimental and soft-edged the German paintings seemed—for the most part—by contrast with the French ones.  The placards all explained how much the painters had been influenced by the most shocking recent French styles.  But in that age without television, Internet, or cheap color reproductions, few of them can have actually seen the paintings they were trying to imitate.  All they saw were words.

A Long Way to Go to Get to a Post about Philip Roth

Shortly after my last post here, I started a project for a longish blog post that would require a fair amount of reading, which has been taking up most of my time.  I’ve begun and abandoned a few posts to fill the gap, but first the reading turned out to take longer and be much more absorbing than I’d expected (books in genres I don’t usually read, brick-like enough to encourage a glad switch back to the Kindle), and then real-life events intervened, and then the “quick” post I had in mind turned out to need longer to write than I have right now.

(Incidentally, here are things I’d like to see available on the Kindle, or whatever the next generation of e-book reader will be:  More foreign books—it would be nice to be able to buy books from amazon.fr or amazon.de for my US-based Kindle.  And more classics of history and social science from the past fifty years.  There is already a good, though not perfect, selection of recent books on social science, politics, and history, which is probably something we can thank the hordes of tech-savvy wonks and bloggers for.)

So I could blog about the sudden breakdown of my clothes dryer with half my daughter’s wardrobe in it, and how if I’d done the laundry on Friday instead of Sunday, we would have had the whole weekend to shop for a new one—but, also, it might have broken while we were out of the house, and burned all the clothes.  And how I wasted most of a day trying to research new washers and dryers online, figuring it might be time to replace the 1975-era washing machine too (which works perfectly well except that the “warm” water is better described as “cool,” and probably isn’t very efficient, and is so old and low-tech it just plain looks silly), only to discover that the question of the modern high-efficiency washer is a highly vexed one, and give up and decide to buy the simplest dryer I could find—only to learn that the online description of its dimensions was off by just enough that it wouldn’t fit through the door. 

Or I could blog about how, at just about this time last year, and the year before, right after my daughter’s birthday party, I got sick, and how I ended up being sick almost continually last year from November until almost May—though this time I got sick two weeks before the party, and since then so far I seem okay.  Or my attempts to determine whether the sore throat I’ve been waking up with every morning is from a cold, allergies, or acid reflux.  Though it does appear to be the last of these (it can be preempted using Pepcid), and so far I’m not sick, just tired from pre-party cleaning and from swimming in my daughter’s swim class to the deep end of the pool with her, for the first time in half a year and ve-e-ery slowly.

I could write about the movie Howl, and whether it is somehow cheating to have the original Ginsberg poem’s imagery displayed for you on a screen so you can understand the metaphors without doing the thinking for yourself—and whether it is actually possible to read all the words of the Neal Cassady section of the poem without having them read for you as a voiceover to a cartoon.

But I will blog, fairly briefly, about modern literature, and women in modern literature.

One of the novels I value most these days is American Pastoral, by Philip Roth.  The plot of the novel involves a successful Jewish-American businessman whose daughter, in the political turmoil of the 1960s, joins up with the Weathermen and bombs the local post office, killing the owner of the grocery store in which the PO’s located.  She disappears, and twenty years later, he finds her living a life of squalor in a slumland squat, doing a kind of penance and renunciation through a form of Jainism (involving the refusal to do violence to any living thing) which she has worked out for herself through reading and introspection.  Most of the novel consists of her father’s tortured attempts to work out what—in America, in his own parenting, in the belief systems of the other adults who helped her over the years—possibly could have resulted in both her crime and her unacceptable religious beliefs.  He rakes over her situation with the utmost of empathy of which he’s capable, but ultimately he fails to comprehend the path she chose.  He condemns her along with the society that made her that way, even as he is too much of a conformist to stand apart from society in any real way.

It’s the painstaking and thoughtful recreation of the emotional dilemmas faced by the girl and her father, the novelist’s willingness to implicate the father’s own beliefs and his way of life in actions he repudiates, and the selection of both male and female characters to illustrate various modes of being in the society he depicts, that I find appealing.  The moral, if there is any, isn’t on the surface, any more than it is in any other novel—there are some obvious “morals,” if a reader had to have them, like don’t commit murder, or don’t trust in wealth to preserve your family from misfortune, but the question of what could have helped these characters more isn’t answered—and I don’t assume that I would agree in full with Philip Roth’s take on their lives if I knew it.  (In fact, although I’ve been tempted to see these painstaking moments of empathy with female characters as a refutation of the broadly accepted notion of Roth’s general misogyny, I’ve ultimately concluded that they’re overwhelmed by the rest of his writing, that moments is all they are.)

But when I declared, on Internet discussion forums, that American Pastoral, along with The Ghost Writer and Zuckerman Unbound, were my favorites among all Roth’s novels, I was told, by male participants, in no uncertain terms, that I was wrong.  Roth’s best novels are those, like Sabbath’s Theater, they said, that foreground the male id and the issues (in our society and given the realities of aging) that surround exuberant male sexuality.  There was no discussion, there was no admission that a preference for one novel over another may largely involve subjective factors, there was only a flat statement that I was wrong.  There was no explanation.  The idea may have been that those novels are more characteristic of Roth’s writing—maybe given the long view of his work as a whole, maybe given the idea of Roth as essentially a novelist of exuberantly aggressive sexuality and rebellion—and maybe because they took those apparently more characteristic novels as a condemnation of the author, or maybe because they equated characteristic with best.  The idea may have been that those themes always make for better literature, or the idea may have been that those novels are better because they are less political.  The idea may have been that those novels spoke well for the men making the claim, a subjective claim, if surreptitiously so.  Whatever the underlying reasons, if I tried to give reasons for my preference, their response was to insist that no possible reason could cause them to change their minds.

It seemed as if they were claiming that they could speak for the entire literary world, and that no alternative was possible.  They did not seem to envision the possibility of discussion about the merits of one novel over another, or of one way of writing novels over another.  They seemed, on the contrary, thoroughly invested in the concept of modern literature as the self-expression of a callow young man whose interests are eternally opposed to the needs of “the community”—entire shelves of novels the reader could take or leave depending on whether that character’s interests aligned with her own, but with which she could not dispute.

Maybe they were right.  Or maybe they just didn’t understand.

Roth, Pynchon, and Lethem as 9/11 Novelists

I was in New York City the week before the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.  There were some police on the streets, of course, but there always are police, and nobody thought anything of it.  The crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium “evacuated” the stands, and the players returned to the safety of their locker rooms, for quite some time, but that was only because of the heavy rain, and the danger of lightning, and nobody thought anything of it.  Those days are over.  New York has changed, and the way tourists relate to the city when they visit it has changed.

D.G. Myers, now blogging for Commentary, has a long list of 9/11 novels.  Emily Rooney broadcast a shorter one including nonfiction books from Boston Steve Almond (video and a link to the text version of the list).  Most of them are ordinary “social novels,” about people who lived in New York in 2001 or are otherwise affected, in one way or another, by the events of that day.  Adam Kirsch, in the newish Jewish magazine The Tablet, has a different list of novels.  He argues, along with some of Myers’s Twitter followers, that The Plot against America should be considered among them, though Myers begs to differ.

I think Kirsch has a point.  What is most memorable about The Plot against America is, in part, the fear of the adults, and the way that a horrible political event seemed to license behavior that, under normal conditions, those adults would barely consider acceptable even from their children: the panic that event inspired.  And the fascist elements of the alternate society Roth imagines—which so scare the adult characters in the book—are, arguably, only an extension of the armed soldiers that appeared in airports and on city streets, and of the vigilance (and lessened concern for civil liberties) that seemed threatened by the emphasis on security implied by the words “after 9/11, everything is different.”  The novel just isn’t a plausible one in a world where 9/11 has not taken place.

Similarly, I would argue that Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day is a 9/11 novel, at least in one chapter (the one that begins on page 149): in which the boy adventurers of the zeppelin Inconvenience fail to prevent a dangerous monster-enfolding meteorite from being brought into an unnamed city.  The details are different, but the reader’s knowledge of what’s being described will derive from the news stories about that day.

“This city, even on the best of days, had always been known for its background rumble of anxiety.  Anyone who wittingly dwelt here gambled daily that whatever was to happen would proceed slowly enough to allow at least one consultation with somebody—that ‘there would always be time,’ as citizens liked to put it.  But that quarterless nightfall, events were moving too fast even to take in, forget about examine, or analyze, or in fact do much of anything but run from, and hope you could avoid getting killed.  That’s about as closely as anybody was thinking it through—everyone in town, most inconveniently at the same time, suffering that Panic fear. . . .

“On the night in question, Hunter Penhallow had been on his way out of town but, feeling something at his back, had turned to witness the tragedy unfolding along the horizon, stricken into remembering a nightmare too ancient to be his alone, eyeballs ashine with mercilessly sharp images in flame tones, so overbright that his orbits and cheekbones gathered some of the fiery excess.”

Pynchon’s vision here is a kind of anti-9/11: what could have been and maybe should have been, in a Manhattan of the imagination, a nightmare worst case, differing in idiosyncratic but important particulars from reality.  And if there's a sense in which Against the Day might be a 9/11 novel, Chronic City, by Jonathan Lethem, surely is.  In Lethem’s novel, all of downtown is enveloped by a mysterious dark fog, which simply appeared one day and never left; and later, one of the characters becomes unreachable after his apartment building collapses, with no warning, leaving behind it only a deep pit and a police cordon.  Both Lethem and Pynchon foreground the emotionality and weirdness of living under a threat that is nearly incomprehensible, not only in its vastness and in the unforeseenness of what motivated it, but in its vagueness, though neither of them says anything that might unambiguously refer to a real historical event.

The Secret Philosophy of the Postmodern Novelist

The New Republic has given Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom, one of its first negative reviews (behind firewall, I haven’t read it or the novel, only the New Yorker excerpts).  Not that there’s any reason to give Franzen the utmost in kid-glove treatment—though I’m increasingly fond of The Corrections, it is not perfect by any means, and is often very annoying.  The interesting thing is that, a few days later, Adam Kirsch, TNR’s poetry critic, chimed in to defend neoconservatism from Franzen’s insulting portrayal.  Of course, The New Republic has long leant towards neoconservatism itself on many issues.  Not content to defend the politics of his own magazine, however, Kirsch goes on to defend the late philosopher Leo Strauss from charges, more or less, that he agreed with Plato:

“Not many of the millions of readers of Freedom will also have been readers of The Nation or the London Review of Books during the Bush years. But those who were will immediately recognize this passage as an allusion to Leo Strauss—who was alleged, in these circles, to be the secret mastermind of belligerent neoconservatism.

It was Strauss who allegedly taught that “the philosopher” had the right and duty to lie to the public in the service of a greater good, and who used Platonic myths to undermine democracy. It’s not necessary to reargue here the falsity of this understanding of Strauss—who, in fact, wrote about the way free-thinking and rationalist philosophers throughout history used occult writing to outwit the religious taboos of their time.”

Kirsch is wrong.  Strauss (like his disciple, Allan Bloom) held that philosophers have both an esoteric and an exoteric teaching.  The esoteric teaching is specifically hidden from everyone other than philosophers.  The esoteric teaching is different from the exoteric teaching, and the exoteric teaching is, in turn, deliberately intended by the writer as the message that’s to be conveyed to laypeople who read the book.  The purpose of the dual meaning is to keep most people from knowing what the philosophers are saying, because most people—not to mention the authorities—would not want the philosophers’ real beliefs to be widely shared.  (In fact, in the places and times Strauss was most interested in, the authorities might arrest a philosopher who was too clear about his message.)

Strauss wanted to insist that moral truth is always and everywhere the same, yet philosophers in different times and places have disagreed about the nature of moral truth.  To defuse relativism, Strauss developed a theory that explained away the appearance that philosophers have always been relativists (or “historicists”): “Plato and Aristotle (and their medieval followers as well) often concealed their own thought by accommodating themselves to the opinions of their contemporaries....  Thus was born Strauss’s famous doctrine of ‘esoteric teaching,’ his conviction that philosophical texts can contain hidden meanings reserved for an elite readership that knows truly how to read.” *

In other words: The contents of a philosophy text are not reliable evidence of what the author believed.  What the writer believed is, it follows, the esoteric teaching understood by the true philosopher, who has been educated in a philosophical way.  Only philosophers and scholars of philosophy understand what the texts that constitute the history of philosophy really mean.  People who have read only the primary texts—unless they are themselves philosophers, or at least scholars of philosophy—cannot know.  As Larmore says, Strauss’s aim here is to deny that we should take seriously things like Aristotle’s defense of the morality of slavery, because truth doesn’t change, and we know that slavery is wrong.

The same thing presumably applies to books published today.  That is, if a philosopher named Lenny Ostrich writes a book, he will have the intention that philosophers will use his book as evidence of the truth, and everybody else will use his book as evidence of a lie.  If this isn’t lying, I don’t know what would count.  (Obviously, other thinkers have held a similar idea.  For example, Marxism possesses a variety of theories about social and psychological mechanisms that almost make it impossible not to lie to one group of people or another.)  This is something entirely different from writing a book that is simply “difficult,” an evaluation that includes nonphilosophical works like Ezra Pound’s Cantos and Shakespeare’s King Lear, as well as Werner Heisenberg’s Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory and Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures.

This doesn’t mean that philosophers should write propaganda.**  A philosophy text is not a political act, and its intended audience is philosophers and students of philosophy.  The Straussian idea, on this view, is simply that what philosophers do is nobody’s business but their own (in a way, it’s a kind of hypertrophied zeal for academic freedom).  It isn’t that philosophers ought to have a political project in which they enlist nonphilosophers by misleading them about the nature of philosophy.  But it does include the project of misleading nonphilosophers (not least about the nature of philosophy), and the possibility of someone having a this project like this one should seem at least a little troubling now that education is so widely available (and not least to a journalist like Kirsch).  Five hundred years ago, a writer might want to mislead a few priests and university dons, who wouldn’t want even philosophers to read potentially subversive books: a few people, who had the learning and the time to study deeply, could learn the truth—the others would remain as they were.  These days, the same writer would be misleading large numbers of people (many of whom already nominally agree with him) who had been led to believe what he wrote was important, and who might mistake his untruths for useful information.

And worse: Strauss was a scholar of political philosophy, and his neoconservative disciples have not been scholars but rather practitioners of politics.  They seem to have taken the lesson that philosophy hides, specifically, truths about the world of government and politics.  Moreover, they mostly seem committed to the idea that they themselves belong to the elite that knows all the secrets about this world (if not that they themselves are “philosophers”).  Such a person might well conclude that part of their job is to lie to everybody else about what’s “really going on” behind the scenes.  (Admittedly, their beliefs may have no effect on their actions; most liars don’t need a fancy theory to tell them it’s all right to lie.)

It’s not an uninteresting theory.  And if true, it would make some of TNR’s own writers quite a bit more interesting than they would ordinarily be.  It might even be helpful for interpreting the postmodern novel.

* My quotation is from Charles Larmore’s 1989 essay on Strauss, which was published in The New Republic and reprinted in The Morals of Modernity.

** And it obviously doesn’t turn propagandists into philosophers, either.

Forster, Trilling, Kazin, and Draper

In the course of reviewing a new biography of E.M. Forster, Colm Toibin answers a question I’d wondered about: Did Lionel Trilling know Forster was gay?  As Toibin points out, it doesn’t matter:

"Trilling had enough to write about, including the drama in Forster’s work between freedom and restriction, between the spiritual and the material, between England and its empire, and between one class and another in Forster’s own world. These conflicts were substantial enough for Trilling not to need to know that they also operated as metaphors and systems of disguise, that their power in Forster’s fiction was nourished by his secret sexuality.”

But he says the answer is no.

Trilling is one of a triumvirate of mid-century American critics recommended, in Walking Out in the Evening, by the Frank Langella character.  He assumes that the graduate student writing a dissertation on his novels has never heard of either Trilling, or Edmund Wilson, or Alfred Kazin.  This sounded implausible to me.  Maybe not, since my local library has only two books by Kazin, one of them a collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories that he edited (and the other on religion).  Anyway, Andrew Seal has a brief review of Kazin’s On Native Grounds here.

Season premiere of Mad Men was last night, and Matthew Weiner, the show’s creator, is on today’s Fresh Air.  He confirmed that Don Draper is, in a sense, pretending to be someone he's not: to be the kind of executive Dick Whitman thinks Draper would be.  We’ll see how that plays out in the fourth season.  Draper has gone from being a rising star, but a protégé, of a second-rate firm, to being a principal at a firm that right now is still just struggling to get out of the basement.  He’s losing the false uprightness of the white-shoe executive he probably could never have succeeded in appearing to be, and letting his inner maverick out.  From now on, if the first episode of the season is any guide, his campaigns will be honest about what the companies he represents really are selling, even if the results are crude.  And he intends to be recognized as the genius he is.  He is breaking the barriers that constricted what was permitted to be said.

It’s always difficult for me to avoid seeing Don through Peggy’s eyes, and to ask what it would be like to work for him.  He gave her a break, but now she seems to have come into her own.  It isn’t obvious that anyone will allude to her origins as a secretary from Queens, and her lack of a college degree, ever again.  And she may be beginning to become annoyed with Don.  The saying, “no man is a hero to his valet,” may apply here.  We, the audience, know that Don Draper really is the real thing: his campaigns are groundbreaking, and Peggy of all people knows that they are his.  In previous seasons, Don has been teased for being a “gray flannel suit man”: a managerial, executive type, not really creative.  His willingness to stick with Sterling, Cooper, rather than moving on to a more high-powered, business-oriented firm, suggested that he really identified with that old-fashioned idea of the firm, and so did the way he kept his copywriting staff in line.  Maybe now that his name is on the door he’s willing to show his true colors.

Recent Reading

Some weeks I don’t find a lot that interests me in the New Yorker, but that certainly isn’t true of the April 26 edition.  There is a short story by E.L. Doctorow about a suburban couple haunted by the homeless man who used to live at their address, stripped down and minimalistic in a Barthelmeesque way, and a selection of letters written by the late Saul Bellow.  The following is from a letter to Lionel Trilling in 1953, shortly after The Adventures of Augie March was published:

“It isn’t that Augie resists every function—that would make him a tramp; and while I would not hesitate to write about tramps if I were called to it, Augie is something different.  I was constantly thinking of some of the best young men I have known.  Some of the very finest and best intentioned, best endowed, found nothing better to do with themselves than Augie.  The majority, whether as chasers, parasites, bigamists, forgers and worse, lacked his fairly innocent singleness of purpose.  They had reached the place where they fixedly doubted that Society had any use for their abilities.  I think if you had been aware of their great negativism you might have taken another view of my ‘propaganda.’  To love another, genuinely to love, is the inception of a function, I wished to say.  I suppose I didn’t quite make it convincingly.”

This is beautiful.  We should have had more of Bellow’s criticism as he laid it out in these letters, the novelist talking about the novel.  Instead, unfortunately, what we got is, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?”

In the same issue, Hilton Als has a feature about Tyler Perry.  He compares Perry’s Madea films in passing to movies about white men and women in similar situations, living it up in the single life but ultimately deciding it’s better to settle down and get married.  “The heroes of Perry’s movies bear no resemblance to the young white men in search of a sense of purpose in the comedies of, say, Judd Apatow or Adam Sandler. . . .  The white-boy comedies of the past two decades are about the grating, strained emo charm of never growing up, while Perry’s films are about the necessity of growing up in a largely segregated world.”  Als might have added Kevin Smith to that list without detracting from its accuracy—or, for that matter, Craig Brewer.  Perry also seems to be a data point for Ehrenreich’s account of the prosperity gospel: “[S]peaking of his sixteen-thousand-square-foot mansion, which he named Avec Chateau, Perry said, ‘. . . I realized this house was a testament to my religious faith.”  (A video about Perry, narrated by Hilton Als, is here.)

On politics: Last week TPM Café’s Book Club discussed Jeff Shesol’s book on FDR’s attempt to “pack” the Supreme Court with justices who would not overturn the New Deal, by adding to the size of the court.  The spring issue of Democracy Journal has a series of responses by various liberal and progressive thinkers and writers to the question where liberalism is today, a little over a year after Barack Obama’s inauguration.  John Quiggin, an Australian professor of economics who I read at Crooked Timber, has been raising similar questions here, here, and here.  Quiggin says, “Practitioners of this kind of managerialist quasi-social democracy have found themselves unable to handle the challenge posed by the irrationalist right . . .”  By “social democracy” he means, more or less, welfare-state liberalism.  I don’t see much difference at the moment between that kind of center-left liberalism and what in America is usually called “neoliberal.”  (That is, I don’t see neoliberalism as a center-right position, or equivalent to “classical liberalism.)  We are all neoliberals now, but pretending the managerialists are the same as the irrationalist right—as I think John Quiggin might like to do—is a waste of time.

Finally, Stephen Holden reviews Stephen Sondheim’s career to date, while discussing the new revue, Sondheim on Sondheim:

“In this revue’s videotaped interviews, Mr. Sondheim goes out of his way to praise Hammerstein for teaching him the craft of writing lyrics. But if you compare the two, the inescapable fact emerges that Mr. Sondheim’s lyrics programmatically repudiate his mentor’s optimistic, inspirational ideology.

“. . .

“For all his songs’ universality, the Sondheim philosophy is specific and exclusive. Directed toward his own class — an urbane, well-educated, culturally cosmopolitan gentry — his lyrics define what might be called the Manhattan sensibility: humanist, proudly intellectual, psychologically sophisticated, hyper-articulate, liberal, Jewish and disenchanted.”

I’ve actually finished reading Bright-Sided and will post my notes slowly, as I clean them up and copy over some of them from my spiral notebook.  Non-magazine reading currently includes The Happiest Toddler on the Block.  I’ve also just gotten Michael Bérubé’s book on the campus culture wars, What’s Liberal about the Liberal Arts, from interlibrary loan.  Other than the fact that the plastic-enclosed jacket is unfortunately quite shiny, unread looking, and toddler-attractive, all I can say of it so far is that Professor Bérubé’s published prose style is quite a bit more staid than his blogging style.

Brief Links About Literature

Who would have thought that if you want to do journalism, there’s a book to tell you how to do it . . . unless the kind of journalism you want to do is reporting on the arts.  (Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes)

This seems absurd to me. If a theater catches fire in the middle of a performance and kills everybody inside, there is no shortage of guidance on how to write the news brief covering the fire for the next day’s paper; how to write the extended story about the investigation a few days later; how to write an obituary about an individual victim on deadline, and how to write on the victims collectively for a Sunday-magazine thumbsucker a few months later; how to write a formal editorial condemning the lax building codes that helped accelerate the fire, and how to write the emotional column or op-ed piece demanding more out of our neglectful civic leaders; how to use public records and the Freedom of Information Act to background the parties responsible; how not to libel any of those people; how to decide where to place the story; how to photograph the story and how best to visualize data related to it; how to blog, video, podcast, tweet, Facebook, and SEO the bejesus out of the story; and, after all that’s done, how to have a tedious discussion about the ethics of handling every last one of those things. But nothing on how to write a review that might have persuaded people to do something better with their time that fateful evening.

This sounds so familiar.  Don’t we have a word for it by now?  (Jonathan Raban, LRB)

Red Tory is like a 300-page Sunday sermon, preached by an autodidact country parson whose shelves are stuffed with old blue and white Pelican books on subjects like modern psychology, literature, sociology, government and economics, which the parson (in civilian life, Blond used to be a lecturer in theology) believes must hold the key to the alien and ugly civilisation he encounters on his parish rounds. We have sunk, Parson Blond says, into a condition of ‘rootless cultural relativism’, godless and cynical, in which there is ‘a pervading lack of daily joy’. He blames the Bloomsbury Group, especially Lytton Strachey; the disillusioned war memoirs of Graves and Sassoon; the ‘self-hating cultural elite’ of John Osborne, Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin; the libertarian narcissism of the 1960s; Paul Watson’s 1974 BBC series about the Wilkins clan, The Family, ‘reality television’ in general and Big Brother in particular; the Bloomsburyite economist J.M. Keynes (whose name Blond revealingly pronounced as ‘Keens’ in a televised debate that I watched on the internet) and the pernicious laissez-faire doctrines of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is said to examine “the riddle of atavism”: the racist fear of biologically inferior human specimens living among us.  But, arguably, it’s actually about cocaine addiction, as this suggests (h/t Andrew Sullivan).  If so, the argument that late Victorian horror fiction like Jekyll/Hyde, Dracula, The Time Machine, and Dorian Gray expressed society’s ingrown and irrational racism falls apart.  Could this fiction instead be expressing an entirely rational wish to suppress drug abuse and fight addiction?  And, then, why did the scientifically minded (such as Galton and Lombroso) believe the issue was race?

Brief Links

Matt Bucher has a facsimile of a marked-up student paper from one of the undergraduate classes David Foster Wallace taught in the late 1990s.  I learned something about both Cormac McCarthy and Frederic Jameson, but by the second or third page, the sight of the man’s handwriting was heartbreaking.

An excerpt from Elif Batuman’s memoir (h/t Language Log): She hated creative writing because it involved craft.  This is very strange.  She says herself that what she disliked about it is the focus on making something and perfecting it (not just on what’s often referred to as “narrow technique”).  I have never heard any literary person (much less a would-be novelist) disparage the relationship between an artist and their work in that way.  What are they teaching at Harvard nowadays?

Matthew Yglesias says Fight Club is a critique of a masculinity that’s hypertrophied to such an extent that it becomes mental illness, by way of more or less empathetically depicting people who have in fact veered into such mental illness.  Maybe.  Interpreting Fight Club as a critique depends on interpreting the (unnamed) Edward Norton character as the moral center of the film; which makes sense, as although the character is kind of a cipher, it is with him that we both begin and end the story.  On the other hand, there’s some reason to view the plot in psychohistorical terms, with Brad Pitt’s sociopathic leader Tyler Durden as merely an element of the Norton character’s psyche, in which case Yglesias’s interpretation kind of falls apart.  Then the film begins to look like a mostly sympathetic representation of Durden and his plan to (among other things) get everyone’s debts forgiven by blowing up the banks, from the point of view of a man who admires Durden but doesn’t have the guts to decide to follow him, just as Durden himself claims.  There’s nothing in the film that explicitly says all this is immoral—only the Norton character’s queasiness, which seems to be the same as the viewer’s.

The New Republic has moved a March 17 article I hadn’t seen, mentioning Bright-Sided, to the top of its online version.  The article, tagged “Marcus Aurelius, life coach,” is actually a review of books on Stoicism.  I’d recommend Martha C. Nussbaum’s Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions for those who’d like a densely written and long-winded account of the Stoic philosophy.

Today’s New York Times has a graphic illustrating recent wargaming at the Brookings Institution of a possible sneak attack by Israel against Iranian nuclear sites.  The write-up is by Kenneth Pollack, whose similar wargaming about Iraq was covered by the Atlantic Monthly a few years ago.

Also in the Times, the Museum of Modern Art announced its acquisition of the @ sign.  From now on, presumably, art books wishing to include representations of the symbol will need to obtain permissions.  They ought to be free, given that MOMA paid nothing for the right to control them, but can MOMA hold up publication of works they deem to interpret the symbol wrongly?

I haven’t been posting much lately (Obviously), and Pynchon

Have you bought your kids’ Halloween costumes yet?  This being my first time, I hadn’t realized you were supposed to have that all taken care of well before Labor Day.  I’ll write it down in my calendar for next July.

I have made it—almost—to page 1000 of Against the Day, though.  (For those not familiar, that’s not a typo.  I did mean to write one thousand.)  No matter how much you’re enjoying a book, to still be reading it months and months after you’ve begun, and to feel you’re making no headway at all, to judge by how much closer you are to the end, can be daunting.  It begins to feel like an assignment: like a work task that you’d thought would be just the thing you’d like doing best, but that you now just wish would be over already.  I might not feel the same way if I picked it up only for a couple of hours on the weekend, but then it would feel as if I’d never get through it, and actually I don’t have a couple of two- or three-hour blocks each week.  So I read for fifteen minutes or half an hour every few days.

I think I’ve reached the point where Pynchon has finally become Pynchon.  By Pynchon I mean the writer who—in spite of the hippy stuff, and the nerdy stuff, and the funny names, and the improbable plots—really celebrates sitting on the front porch of a house in a Good Place to Live, with someone you love, and a bottle of wine or a beer, and living in the present.  This is the life that’s always to denied to his characters who’ve gotten caught up in the Cold War and post-Cold War System.  I don’t know if any of his people ever approaches as close to this ideal as the Traverses do.  But even if it was unattainable (though approachable, asymptotically, appropriately enough), the ideal was always present.  In Against the Day, I think, it has only appeared at the end.  And I had really been savoring its absence.

This is the first of Pynchon’s novels that I’m reading at about the time it first appeared.  It’s the first of his novels that I’m reading after having read enough other, more or less similar novels to make sense of it.  The absence of that theme I’d just described was enough to make me question whether I’d misread his earlier books, in fact, whether finding the hobbits safe home in Bag-End wasn’t as important to them as it had seemed to me at the time.  Now, I find myself wondering whether the new stuff I thought I’d seen in this novel was really there—whether the passages I’d mentally marked for re-reading are worth the bother.

So, is that all there is?  What about the ways in which this one appeared to be different, for the one thousand pages up to this point?  It’s a long slog of a book to go through it all again, unless you were an English major and you reflexively outline everything you read (indexed, because you learned that skill in the pre-computer age).  Frank Traverse’s sketchy adventures in coffee bean engineering are interesting, but his repetitive yet never-repeated-twice pseudo-spiritual insights are getting on my nerves; I get it, already, and I’m ready to say goodbye.  Should an annoying last fifth of the book end up overbalancing hundreds of pages that I found especially, if intermittently, delightful?

I’ve been finding it surprisingly difficult to find time and mental energy just to draft blog posts even on topics where I know exactly what I want to say and the order I want to say it, much less to revise and rewrite (I remember reading a young journalist whose dad is also a journalist solemnly advise his online readership that this is the only way to write for the public, so I’m self-conscious).  More to come, eventually

I'm Okay, You're Dumb (The Dumbest Generation, by Mark Bauerlein)

My local public library has purchased a copy of Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation.  I may be the first person in eleven months to have turned pages past the midpoint of the book, but they do have it on the shelf.  I picked it up several months ago, opened it randomly, and said, “this doesn’t make sense,” so I put it back.  Then I saw it again at Border’s, and this time I noticed that there was a chapter titled “The Betrayal of the Mentors” that appeared to talk about what has gone on in academic humanities departments over the last thirty or forty years.  I didn’t agree with it on a first glance, but on a second glance it seemed thoughtful and thought-provoking.  On a third and fourth glance I’m puzzled and, strangely, almost, insulted.

I figured the book would discuss why, in spite of increasing access to higher education, young people evidently score less well than their seniors on social scientists’ measures of knowledge and skill.  Since Bauerlein is an educator who has written as a conservative activist, he would presumably focus on what liberal college professors believe and on what education schools advise regarding lower-level schools (both topics conservatives consider important).  Instead, we find a complaint to the effect that reading, of the kind Bauerlein teaches and was himself taught, and the kind of reading all educated people (according to Bauerlein) have practiced for centuries, is dying out.

That is the argument of the first two chapters, especially:  The Internet has been around for between ten and twenty years, depending on how you count.  Therefore, American kids now finishing high school and beginning college have grown up with the Internet and we can expect them to display whatever advantages Internet is actually able to confer.  The Internet contains lots of information about topics of civic and academic interest, so kids who have grown up with it ought to know a lot.  They don’t, though.  The reason for this is that they don’t read; reading provides all kinds of benefits that help kids do better in school, and readers acquire all kinds of information as they engross themselves in books and reflect on what they say.  Kids don’t really acquire information in school, so it’s natural that their leisure-time activities are what determines how well they do on standardized tests and in college.  Bauerlein pulls the elements of this argument from a smorgasbord of sociological studies.

He appears to take the incredible yet still increasing popularity of the Internet as obviously the reason for the decline he feels exists.  The book is addressed both towards people who are interested in the rise of this new technology and also towards people who are interested in culture and reading.

As Bauerlein reads the studies, working with computers appears to improve a kind of putative intelligence which is actually bad. (He does not describe what it is, or at least not in any detail, but presumably he knows it when he sees it.)  Thus, the book will make those who work with computers consider whether they have been missing anything.  And, correspondingly, it will make those who are interested in culture and reading, and who suspect that those who work with computers are missing something, more sure that they are right.

I don’t personally find this argument convincing, but Bauerlein covers the bases very neatly.  The data for the arguments are not Bauerlein’s, so if they are questionable, he is not responsible.  And he emphasizes frequently that lots of people appear to be highly intelligent yet are (in his opinion) unable to read.  Those who disagree with him and cannot make sense of his argument may conclude they fall into this category.

Which raises the question who he thinks his audience is.  Because he has lost the people for whom critical thinking involves evaluation of evidence, as well as felicity in word choice.  He has lost the people who are turned off immediately by statements like the one I peeved about last week.  He has lost the people whose response, when faced with huge metaphysical arguments like the ones that English professors today are so fond of, on one of which I presume Bauerlein implicitly bases this book, is WTF?  And I’m not sure whom that leaves, other than college professors, the more credulous sort of journalist, and maybe the clergy.  Yet his book is published by a nonacademic press. 

To a large extent, he is criticizing educators like himself, yet his book is addressed to a general readership.  I get the sense he is trying to rally nonacademics to join in his critique of a subgroup among his fellow academics, something that conservative college professors have been doing for two decades, at least.  Because the book reads, essentially, like an (ever so mildly worded) jeremiad.  Yet it seems ungracious to harangue his lessers for not correcting his own colleagues and even himself.  Why would he do that?

Perhaps to make readers feel guilty or indignant enough that they would urge their legislators and other elected officials to support the educational policies Bauerlein promotes (vaguely described as these are).

Perhaps to intrigue future teenagers who feel they are smarter and more moral than their peers, who after reading this book may feel inspired to major in English and put into practice the high-flown sentiments they’ve learned from reading it.

Perhaps to console middle-aged and retired autodidacts and former English majors, who know they know how to read and are frustrated by the fact that they can’t express their own opinions without being challenged.  Perhaps to give them talking points for responding to such (explicit or implicit) challenges. 

Perhaps to encourage what general readers may actually remain (and have time for books like his) to discuss the ideas it contains with their friends and colleagues after work or during their lunch hours.

Of course, it’s more than probable that Bauerlein had no such rhetorical intention.  Perhaps he is simply articulating the beliefs of those he considers the entire educated class.  In fact, I have little real doubt that he sees himself as doing something quite different from what I describe above.

As a conservative and an English professor, naturally, I think, he writes a kind of book that is really rather traditional.  He assumes no subject matter expertise and, indeed, prefers no such expertise.  Though he seems to have no problem turning reading itself into an expert skill.  He assumes a unitary culture and even proceeds as if one existed.  Though, at the same time, he is continually discovering individuals and groups that don’t properly belong to it.  Though he dehumanizes those he disagrees with by referring to them as a faceless horde with an ugly name like “technophiles” or “technovangelists”: almost a metaphysical cause in itself—like Tony Kushner’s imagination of what an angel is—here, though, a fallen, Satanic angel.  It’s the continual casting out of the other that really grates, but maybe I ought to ignore that.  After all, none of us are without sin.

He is writing for a general audience: not political, not professional or technical.  He is writing an old-fashioned kind of book, the kind of book that can be read by all educated men and women.  His book is not at all of a type that can be read and be of use only to wonks, to bureaucrats and technocrats and low-level government clerks.  His book is, precisely, a book that informs educated men and women of what’s going on behind the scenes in the social and governmental institutions that determine what their lives will be like (on those infrequent occasions when they interact with such institutions).  His readers do not themselves work within those institutions, and they don’t have any influence on the controlling beliefs within those institutions either (except the small incremental influence any one of us has, and uses when we talk among ourselves or raise concerns with authority figures).  His readers are educated and at least vaguely conservative and much like himself.

This interpretation, however, while generous to Mark Bauerlein, leaves this particular reader out in the cold. 

From The Broom of the System, by David Foster Wallace

This is possibly my favorite passage in Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System:

"Now, Weight Watchers perceives the problem as one involving the need to have as much Other around as possible, so that the relation is one of minimum Self to maximum Other.  This is a valid though, as I've seen this afternoon, by no means exclusive way to attack the problem.  Are you getting my drift, Vigorous?"

"Well, a drift is such a--"

"It occurs to me that I couldn't care less.  A full universe, Vigorous, Ms. Beadsman.  We each need a full universe.  Weight Watchers and their allies would have us systematically decrease the Self-component of the universe, so that the great Other-set will be physically attracted to the now more physically attractive Self, and rush in to fill the void created by that diminution of the Self.  Certainly not incorrect, but just as certainly only half of the range of valid solutions to the full-universe problem.  Is my drift getting palpable?  Just as in genetic engineering, Vigorous.  There is always more than one solution."

. . .

"Of course one other advantage of my approach to the Yin/Yang problem is that dieting becomes the worst possible thing to do.  I find dieting makes me extremely angry at everything.  Dieting makes me want to murder everyone around me."

"Instead of merely appropriating their space."

"You are not un-sharp, are you?  Rather like your father.  Your father whips a mean carrot.  I could, of course, leave selected small corners of the universe unfilled for those who might arouse in me feelings of affection and attachment."

"I'll get back to you, probably, if things begin to crowd."

This is not, of course, a light-hearded view of the universe.  Corporate CEO Norman Bombardini has rethought the idea of universal complements as an idea of aggression: taking a gentle theory and importing an entirely different idea into it, making it something very dark.  He appears not to have considered the possibility of a middle ground between total equivalence and total domination--or, at best, if he did consider such middle ground, it seems he had not been able to discover any appropriate stopping point between these two extremes.  But it is a fascinating personalization of what I personally feel to be a problem in philosophy or in logic.

"All Summer in a Day"

It has been raining around Boston for a really long time, and the Globe editorial page is reminded of Ray Bradbury’s 1954 story, “All Summer in a Day,” which

describes a gloomy world where it rains all the time, and where the inhabitants see the sun for an hour every seven years. . . .  Bradbury’s story revolves around a maladjusted schoolgirl who’d emigrated from Earth. The mean Venusian kids lock her in a school closet, just as the long-hidden sun is about to peek out.”

Like a great deal of mid-century science fiction, Bradbury’s story is usually understood as a commentary on 1950s (McCarthyite, conformist) America, and in Bradbury’s writing, the science fiction foundation usually serves mostly as background for a rather conventional story, the kind of thing the Saturday Evening Review Post or Redbook might accept.  “All Summer in a Day,” accordingly, illustrates various truisms: Children (and by extension, people generally) can be cruel, especially to those who are different.  Careless actions can have serious consequences.  It can be more difficult to go without something one remembers having had, once, in the past, than never to have had that thing in the first place.  Some events, once done, cannot be reversed or repaired.  No one would quarrel with these statements, as possible “morals” for the story.

Without this historical and political context, however, the psychological meaning is outlined clearly, and the story might appear to be only about metaphorical darkness and a metaphorical “closet.”  That is not to say that the closet represents Margot’s denial of her own homosexuality, only to say that she is denying something.  Subjectively—from her own point of view—she feels “as if she has been locked in a closet and cannot get out to see the sun.”  But a closet is always something one puts oneself in, never the fault of another.  By depicting Margot’s suffering in the closet as having been caused by the deliberate actions of another person (a person whose overt intentions were malicious towards her), the story appears to be a fantasy, written from Margot’s point of view, improperly relieving herself of responsibility for her own actions.

It is not necessary to read the story as written from the child’s point of view.  It could be read from the point of view of an adult who cares about children, or of any adult generally who thinks scapegoating and bullying are wrong.  It could be read as speaking from the omniscient, or “God’s eye,” point of view.  However, the omniscient stance is unfashionable these days (and since fiction writers are themselves not omniscient, the idea of pretending they can represent omniscience raises questions).

Without knowing the convention that stories like this one are expected to present a unique, even eccentric individual, and ask the reader to “identify with” him or her for the duration of the reading, there is actually little reason why one might not read the story from the point of view of someone who sympathizes more with the schoolhouse bullies than with Margot.  Bradbury even provides hints as to how that might be done.  The other children are excellently adapted to their gloomy world, where they hardly ever see the sun they don’t remember in the slightest, where the rain creates such oppressively effusive growth.  They take real joy in their two hours of sunlit outdoor play, and can expect similarly ecstatic joy at regular intervals, even if those intervals are for children unimaginably long.  Margot makes them feel bad about what little they have even though she can really expect no better—she makes herself feel bad about what is really pretty good.

However, that reading emphasizes our feelings about what the characters “are like,” as if they were real people, over and above the actions that actually form part of the narrative.  It discounts narrative (in the sense of story, of actions the characters engage in, and way they interact with one another), viewing it as an unavoidable obstacle to expressing what the author supposedly really wants to say.

Also, the interpretation I’ve offered is almost certainly not compatible with Bradbury’s intentions in writing the story.  At best, Bradbury’s probable libertarian streak—incompatible, as he illustrates, with the prevailing mores of society—could be understood as a pathology: to preserve the interpretation that the story is a criticism of society, it could become a criticism of the way society failed to prevent this pathology.  That is obviously ridiculous—maybe there’s a theoretical way to express it that makes it sound better, though I hope not.  Whatever one thinks about “authorial intention” as a guide to interpretation, it is undeniable that someone who interpreted “All Summer in a Day” in that way would be incapable of understanding Bradbury’s work as a whole (what would become of works like Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles?), and probably also incapable of understanding most popular or “genre” writing of the period.

(Via Wikipedia: It seems that the US Department of Defense has placed “All Summer in a Day” online for the use of K-6 educators worldwide.  Is this really a story for ten- and eleven-year-olds?  Apart from what the television censors call the “thematic content” of the piece, most sixth-graders are still reading from children’s books and from textbooks specially written to be level-appropriate.)

"The Pale King"

This interested me.  On his blog at Harper's, Wyatt Mason gives three possible sources for the title of David Foster Wallace's forthcoming, posthumous novel, The Pale King.  Since what he posted is pretty much entirely quotes from other people's writing anyway, I'm going to include nearly the whole thing below.  (I assume "Percy" is a retelling of the Parsival story.)

So for this edition of the weekend read, I offer you and allusive trifecta: the three sources (so far) from whence Wallace may have nabbed his title.

From More’s “Percy”—

Elwina: I wrought it for my love—there, now I’ve drest him.
How brave he looks ! my father will forgive him,
He dearly lov’d him once—but that is over !
See where he comes—beware, my gallant Percy !
Ah ! come not here, this is the cave of death,
And there’s the dark, dark palace of revenge !
See, the pale king sits on his blood-stain’d throne !
He points to me—I come, I come, I come.

(She faints, they run to her; DOUGLAS takes up his sword, and stabs himself.)

Douglas: Thus, thus I follow thee.

Edric: Hold thy rash hand.

Douglas: It is too late. No remedy but this Could med’cine a disease so desperate.

—the complete text of which you can download here.

As to those other sources mentioned before. There’s Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton’s “King Arthur”—

Forests of emerald verdure spread below,
Through which proud columns glisten far and wide,
On to the bark the mourner’s footsteps go;
The pale King stands by the pale phantom’s side;
And Lancelot sprang—but sudden from his reach
Glanced the wan skiff, and left him on the beach.

—which you can download here.

And from Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King”—

…when the dolorous day
Grew drearier toward twilight falling, came
A bitter wind, clear from the North, and blew
The mist aside, and with that wind the tide
Rose, and the pale King glanced across the field
Of battle: but no man was moving there …

—which you can download here.