Hazlitt's body under the bed

 

Two images of the artist’s posterity – that shaky successor of the afterlife. Not that, as is generally said in an overview of this type, the afterlife is dead. I think that, on the contrary, the vast majority in all regions of the World still believe in some kind of afterlife. But among the makers of public opinion – the college educated, the managerial, the “creatives” – the afterlife, like a lightbulb left on too long, has gone out.

Yet among that same group, it is easy to get a contest going by, for instance, proposing a list of names of the contemporary philosophers who will be remembered – or artists, or poets, or actors, etc. Being remembered/being the greatest – this is both a parlour game and the serious business of culture, which is not only a matter of social reproduction but of memory reproduction.

Two images, then; The first is from Diderot, who staked out a strong pro-posterity position. He claimed, in a series of letters to an artist named Falconet, that posterity acted as the great motive to the artists. It is, when one considers it, an odd claim for a man whose own work was so often written under a pseudonym or distributed in such an underground fashion that one of his key works – Rameau’s Nephew – first appeared in a German translation by Goethe some forty years after Diderot’s death. Yet perhaps not so odd, for Diderot’s image of posthumous fame is a firm twist on the notion of the name being handed down for generations.

« Because it is  sweet to hear, during the night, a flute concert that is performing some distance away, and of which there is carried to my ear only some stray sounds that my imagination, aided by the fineness of my hearing, succeeds in piecing together, out of which it makes a coherent song that charms it all the more in that it is partly its own work – I believe that concerts which are performed in closer quarters also have their value. But my friend, can you believe it ? I think it is not the latter but the former that are the most intoxicating.”

Diderot was surely aware, when he wrote that, of the work of putting together fragments of ancient texts that grounded the contemporary knowledge of ancient culture. The image, however, is startling in its frank pleasure in way contemporary reading “makes up its own song” from these fragments. Posterity, here, is transformed from the image of the monument that has long been associated with it – the imperial power that demands homage from future generations. The keyword of the Enlightenment, Roberto Calasso has contended, is “sweet” – using a remark by Tallyrand as the key to 18^th century culture: Nobody born after the French revolution will ever know the sweetness of that time.

I can accept Diderot’s image of posterity in that spirit. Posterity, the afterlife, is not thrust upon us, but comes as an intermittent music that we are either entranced by and add to or that passes us by.

The second image is more romantic, or even, to use a detestable “post” word, post-romantic. Or more accurately, it images the “creative” in the new world that has substituted industry for the patronage upon which artists used to rely – for good and ill.  Hazlitt, who depended for his existence on the press, was among those who Carlyle disdainfully called a “thing for writing articles” – count on Carlyle for the contemptuous epitaph. The thing died in a lodging house in 1830, having lived into the era of consensus among the Tories and the Whigs that saw Britain, after Napoleon’s defeat, as the great imperial upholder of wealth and liberty. For Hazlitt, of course, it was a great era of toad-eating.

So there he was, and there he died, in Mrs. Stapledon’s Frith Street lodgings. Mrs. Stapledon’s ideas of posterity were, no doubt, orthodox Anglican or at least Methodist. But her idea of the Jetz was much more practical. Hazlitt died owing her rent, and she sold off his effects to even the account. However, she was not unfeeling. She bought a box for his corpse. And, when showing his rooms to potential renters, she hid it under his bed. When his friends came by, she hauled it out, and they gazed their fill on his remains. Then they commissioned a death mask, and the hat went round, and Hazlitt was even buried.

Still – the body of the writer in a box under his bed while potential renters poked through his stuff and measured his windows for new curtains – what an irresistible situation in which to imagine the writer’s afterlife! Did Kafka ever read about Hazlitt? I guess it doesn’t matter. Kafka intuited that situations like this must exist, and that they formed a sort of labyrinth under the official culture.