This is going to be a huge post. Sorry.
- - I propose to compare two articles, two essays, on the “classics”, the first of which was published in 1850 in Paris in a liberal newspaper, La constitutionelle, and the second of which was published in L’espresso on June 28, 1981.
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Ahem. Ahem.
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Let’s start with the more
familiar one, Calvino’s “Why read the classics?”. By the time Calvino wrote
this essay, he was a world author. He was working on a novel that even became a
mild bestseller back in the eighties: “If on a winter’s night a traveller…”
Because he dealt in fantasy as well as tickling and trickling out references to
other texts and other genres, for a while they plastered the label
“post-modern” on him. Note: while the futurists, the dadaists, the surrealists,
the symbolists named themselves, this name came from the literary critics.
There was no post-modern manifesto. It turned out to be a good marketing tool,
until it faded, but to my mind never quite crossed the line as a description.
Perhaps for a while, as Marxism drooped and nobody loved the Soviet Union
anymore, the Lyotardian idea of the end of the master narrative made sense –
but in the decade before the Wall fell, we were already stuck in the “no
alternative” narrative, which is a narrative with a vengeance. The master narrative
here just conveniently dropped the utopian aspect for the majority of people,
and put in its place a real utopia for plutocrats and celebrities, for which
outsiders – the famous 99 percent – were given tokens to be fans: this person
fans Hilary Clinton, this person fans Elon Musk, and so on.
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Which is a way of situating
Calvino’s persona. His essay was translated and published by the New York
Review of Books in the U.S. in 1986. It was a good era for world writers:
Kundera, Garcia Marquez, Calvino, even Georges Perec.
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The week before Calvino’s
essay was published in Italy, the NYT sent Franis de Plessis Gray to interview
Italo Calvino in his relatively new digs in Rome. He’d returned to Italy the
year before after a fifteen year stay in Paris with his wife, a UNESCO translator.
Those were the fifteen years in Italy known as the Years of Lead. Mostly, what
is remembered is the left-wing terrorists: the Red Brigade, kneecapping bosses
and kidnapping Aldo Moro and executing him in 1978. Mostly, what isn’t
remembered is the rightwing terrorism, which was more extensive and deadlier,
from the bomb in December, 1969 in the bank on the Piazza Fontana that killed
19 people and started things off to the bomb in the Bologna train station in
1980 that killed 80 people. One difference: the leftwing terrorists, and their
supporters, were often caught and tried, and sometimes given very harsh
sentences. The rightwing terrorists, on the other hand, always seemed just out
of reach. The police and the courts seemed to stumble over technical details
here that kept them from, for instance, imprisoning the bomber of the Milan
bank or the Bologna railroad station or various trains or the murder of various
judges.
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And of course there was an
attempt by the far right to overthrow the government, the Golpe Borghese. Outside of Italy, I would be surprised if one
in ten persons who recognize the name “Red Brigade” would recognize the phrase
Golpe Borghese. Although in the end, the heirs of the failed coup now rule
Italy.
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Calvino missed these things
in Paris. He didn’t “miss” them as a hasty newspaper reader might miss them –
they concerned him, he wrote about them, he visited Italy. But he did not live
in that atmosphere.
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In June, 1981, when Gray
intereviewed him, she found him and his family living in a “spacious duplex in
a 17th century palazzo” a few blocks from the Parthenon.
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Are these details relevant
to reading “Why read the Classics?”
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In the course of his
interview, Calvino refers to his work in progress, If on a Winter’s Night a
Traveller: “It shares something else with most of my fiction: it concerns
individuals confronted by a menace which comes from a powerful, collective,
anonymous source of evil, individuals who have involved themselves in this
danger because of the attraction of a female character.”
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The binary here is a bit
unbalanced: individual/female character. Is this telling? Is the female
character somehow not an “individual”?
Perhaps this is a Freudian binary slip – perhaps there is something at
the heart of the modernist version of misogyny that sees the female as not
exactly individual. She is a force – an attraction.
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Are these details relevant?
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Interestingly, Calvino, a
former communist, goes after the question about reading the classics using a
pragmatic approach that both allows a certain objectivity to the classic – it
is out there, it is on the shelf, you can read it – as well as a certain interactivity
that dispenses with the sociological situation of readers in favor of simply
the reader stripped of class or gender. Yet the essay does not entirely
dispense with the sociology of the reader – the one category that is retained
is that of time: the difference between the old and the young.
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Calvino’s essay moves among
“definitions” – ways of constructing the classic, as it were. It starts like
this: “The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying:
I’m rereading …’, never I’m reading.” The re-, here, must refer us to an
experience stretched on some chronological graph.
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“At least this is the case
with those people whom one presumes are ‘well read’; it does not apply to the
young, since they are at an age when their contact with the world, and with the
classics which are part of that world, is important precisely because it is
their first such contact.”
The difference between the young and the
old is a difference defined, in this essay, by experience – notably, the
experience of becoming, or being, well read. This is a little more complex than
is the case with a linear progress, since re-reading implies that there is some
pleasure, some extraneous matter, offered by the classic. For the young, the
classic offers a certain virtuality – the possibility of re-reading. I’ve seen
this with my twelve year old boy. There are certain movies and tv series which
he sees and tells me that he is going to re-watch them – and he does. When the
old read classics, even if for the first time, they briefly replicate being
young, or at least this moment of youth, this moment defined by the first
encounter; and re-reading, they remember the past, past readings, past
encounters, although of course not exactly and specifically, not the whole
moment of encounter that flows into reading, no, what is remembered is what
George Santayana might call the essence, since for Santayana essences aren’t
Platonic abstractions but are really embedded in our experience. The road I
used to drive to work, the novel I read when I was 25, etc. But there is a
further point to make about this encounter with the classic: the older reader
has a quantitatively greater sum of reading behind her, and thus situates the
classic in relation to that reading.
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Experience, here,
encompasses not simply the mechanics of literacy, the ability to read, but an
emergent property from the exercise of that literacy. We could call this
hermeneutics, we could call this an inductive sense of a pattern, we could call
this a craft. Metis. Wiliness. The older reader is wily.
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And, at the same time,
caught in the wiles of the book. This becomes clear in the movement between
Calvino’s definition 9 (Classics are books which, the more we think we know
them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find
them when we actually read them) and definition 10 (A classic is the
term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a
par with ancient talisman). The movement is mediated, novelistically, by an
anecdote. A charming anecdote. “It is only during unenforced reading that you
will come across the book which will become ‘your’ book. I know an excellent
art historian, an enormously well-read man, who out of all the volumes he has
read is fondest of all of The Pickwick Papers, quoting lines from Dickens’ book
during any discussion, and relating every event in his life to episodes in
Pickwick. Gradually he himself, the universe and its real philosophy have all
taken the form of The Pickwick Papers in a process of total identification.”
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It is relevant, or at least
partially, or for my purposes, as I turn to the article, What is a classic?
Written by the French critic Charles-Augustin Saint-Beuve for one of his
Causerie de Lundi columns and published on October 21, 1850, this essay takes a
surprisingly different tack.
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To be continued.
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Between 1850, when What is
a classic was published, and 1981, when Italo Calvino’s Why read the classics
was published, a bomb exploded: Marcel Proust’s Contre Saint-Beuve, which was
published in 1954, thirty two years after Proust’s death, and which contained a
number of essays about different writers which Proust had planned, at one time
or another, to collect under the aegis of a giant protest against the “method”
of Saint-Beuve.
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In Anglophonia, Saint-Beuve
is better known as the object of Proust’s attack than he is for his own work.
Calvino certainly read Proust; as a Francophile, I imagine he read Saint-Beuve.
In an essay on Conrad, he concedes that the “analytical, psychological
novelists, the Jameses and Prousts, those who tirelessly recover every crumb of
sensation we have experienced” are less “accessible” to him, have less to do
with his writerly practice, than the Stevensons or the Conrads.
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Still. Proust is Proust.
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One of Proust’s pursuits in
Contre Saint-Beuve is to attack what he took to be Saint-Beuve’s method; and
under this pursuit, to attack Saint-Beuve’s meanness – particularly to two
writers, Stendhal and Baudelaire. The latter case is famous: Baudelaire, sinking
under debts and manias, begged for Saint-Beuve to notice him in some Causerie.
Though Saint-Beuve noted such obscurities as Madame d’Epinay and Victor, duc de
Broglie, he never wrote an article about the most important French poet of his
time (give or take Hugo). He gave him, famously, a phrase – Baudelaire was “at
the extreme point of romanticism’s Kamchatka.” A phrase as enigmatic as some
message from the Castle for Joseph K.
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Proust took Saint-Beuve’s
“method” to consist of reducing the book to the author’s biography, the
author’s exterior life. Yet of course Proust’s objection to Saint-Beuve takes a
flake of Saint-Beuve’s own life and flourishes it.
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Such is the tangled heart
of the life-and-works.
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Proust’s essays are full of
glorious reasonings. This is what he writes:
“And since he did not see the abyss
separating the writer from the man of the world, did not understand that the
writer only shows himself in his books, and that he only shows to men of the
world (or even to these men of the world whose world is that of other writers,
who return back into writers when they are alone) the man of the world who is
like them, he inaugurated the famous method … which consists of understanding
the writer, the poet, by avidly questioning those who knew him or frequented
him to see what they say about his behavior during … all those instances when
the “I” of the true poet was not in play.”
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There is a Vedic myth,
described in Roberto Calasso’s Ka, about the first man, Prajapati. He was
hatched from a golden egg, floating on the primeval waters. But where did the
egg come from? Some said that it was produced by the primeval waters themselves,
who were not immune to desire. Others said that It was produced by Prajapati.
It was he whose seed impregnated the water that carried the golden egg that
carried him. But how can this be? How could the first man have conceived
himself?
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The answer we find in
Contre Saint-Beuve is that the first man was a poet.
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Proust’s charges make
Saint-Beuve seem like a literary critic who did not understand literature. A
sad creature, whose descendants still review novels and poems.
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Proust’s image of
Saint-Beuve fixes him in our mind. We see him in his study. He stands with a
little skull cap, a calotte, on his big head, his face jowly, his nose potato
prominent, his fleeting smile certain of its superiority, his vest, coat, bow
tie and high hitched pants giving him the air of a prosperous banker, his left
hand propped on some picturesquely tumbled tomes, his right hand hitched in his
pocket. In fact, exactly the photograph of him taken around 1860 by Charles
Batell. This is the man who became one of those powerless senators in Emperor
Napoleon III’s mock upper house. This is the man who renounced, in his 1852
essay, his earlier self, his Saint-Simonism, his friendship with Proudhon, his
liberal Republicanism.
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This is the man who came to
teach his first class (in Latin poetry) at the College de France in 1855, only
to encounter that most French of experiences, a student revolt, as he failed to
be heard over their jeers, their contempt for one of the gravediggers of the
Republic. He fled from the classroom. He came back again, only to find the same
students making the same noise.
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He did not come back a
third time.
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This is the man who wrote a
series of literary portraits. Portraits – not lives. Not even lives in brief. A
great portrait extracts an essence from an attitude. Although this essence is a
bit of a card trick – that successful writer photographed by Charles Batell in
1860 was once a mewling infant, a boy, a young man who fell in love with Victor
Hugo’s wife, Adele, a romantic who knew all about the duplex multiplex writer
and invented heteronyms for himself.
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A portrait. I think that,
in part, Proust’s own method, the portraits that succeed one another in the
Search for Lost Time, borrowed something from Saint-Beuve, and that debt needed
to be exorcised by some magnificent act of ingratitude. Proust’s characters
would understand.
- And now I’ve run out of time, out of steam, out of gas, out of patience for the day’s project: plunging into What is a classic. A day goes by.
Ii
A
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So one moves in on an
author’s texts, one connects them through a link that lies outside of formal
analysis, a link that writes letters, dines, jots in a notebook, falls in love,
sleeps with the wife of his best friend, and so on. In this case, the author
Saint-Beuve.
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The Sainte-Beuve of the 30s
and 40s was, in a sense, dismissed by the Saint-Beuve of the 1850s, and that
Saint-Beuve modified by the Saint-Beuve of the 1860s.
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In 1852, Sainte-Beuve penned a masterpiece of
opportunism, Regrets, an essay that is a singular thing in the history of
nineteenth century political thought. Where conservative, liberal and radical
were advocating politics based on a vision of how society should be and should
be governed, Saint-Beuve dispenses utterly with the ethical obligations of
politics. In the essay, it is defined as a game in which winning and losing are
the only aspects that count. With the accession of Louis Napoleon, his side,
the kind of liberalism that moved from Chateaubriand to Tallyrand, the kind
that Saint-Beuve was attracted to, was cast aside. Using the logic of
opportunism, Sainte-Beuve saves himself from the losing side by rejecting them
as, well, losers, and aligning himself with the winners. Pretty much in those
terms. Message: get over it.
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Sainte-Beuve does recognize
that some people in politics hold beliefs. This, he sees as an ever present
danger. Losers, instead of accepting that they lost, tend to hold onto the
belief that the cause they represented was good – in spite of the temporary
verdict of history. So, the belief remains with them and becomes a sort of
infection. If, by some chance, the wheel of fortune spins them into a place
where, once again, they govern, their governance will be distorted as their
beliefs are not so much applied as revenged.
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The right move is the
rat’s: when the ship is sinking, jump.
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Sainte-Beuve has a more
dignified image of this. A, come to think of it, more frightening image. The stopped clock. A
clock breaks when some seismic shift occurs. When there is a violent storm.
When the building in which it is housed falls down. The metaphorical clock of history, carried
about within them by historic agents striving by power, is likewise frangible.
It can be arrested by certain events, the glass facing cracked, the mechanism
immobilized. When Louis XVI tried to escape and was captured at Varennes,
Saint-Beuve writes, the clock stopped:
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“How many watches were thus
arrested during the Revolution at such and such a day of violent buffeting! Let
us try, thus, even when we take no pleasure in the time that is passing by, to
rewind our watches every evening and to align them with the hour. It is an
excellent habit for the intellect.” Even a man as bendable as Tallyrand, who
served every regime from Thermidor to Louis Phillipe, might have been surprised
at the sheer openness of this declaration of no principles – or rather, the
principle of keeping up, of accepting the powers that be and making the best or
it – a cynical pretence to realism that is actually a form of innocence, as if
such decisions were simply and finally private. The powers that be aren’t so easily fooled.
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There is something
Dostoevskian about that image of the stopped clock. One imagines Pyotr Verkhovensky,
the conspirator in The Possessed, coming upon that phrase and laughing out
loud. He always knew it. These stopped clocks, these broken watches – they must
all be tossed out!
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Should I put in here that
Saint-Beuve once dined with Gogol – and Liszt and Madame D’Agout (Cosima
Wagner’s mother) – in Rome?
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I’ve jumped ahead of the
essay on the classics. Jumping ahead – with its implication of texts spacious
enough and time available enough to go forward and back, at one’s ease. This is
what Sainte-Beuve is able to do in his Lundis, an almost unique journalist
perch. To go on and on about a book, or a person of interest from the past,
without a glance at the news. At the new.
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What I meant to do, what I
should do first, is situate Sainte-Beuve. I have his biography, written by
Harold Nicholson (who relied heavily on Andre Billy) to give me the particulars
of the case. I have Harold Nicholson’s puzzlement – he was writing in the late
40s, 80 years from Sainte-Beuve’s death:
“M. Andre Billy, in the massive work from which I have drawn so shamelessly and unrepentingly, asserts that, although Sainte-Beuve lacked the graces of good behaviour, although he was frequently treacherous and full of malice, he was essentially a man of good intention. Frenchmen, when they have passed the age of sixty, generally become mellow
and
therefore tolerant. I regret to observe, however, that many of my French
contemporaries still speak of Sainte-Beuve with vivid personal dislike. M.
Andre Billy is an exception to this
rule; and he should know. On a cold morning in Paris, when he was so kind as to
accompany me on a visit to the sites associated with Sainte-Beuve's life, we
paused together on the Pont des Arts, looking back upon the Institut. The place
is unchanged since the time when Sainte-Beuve would waddle across the bridge on
his way back to his flat. "Why", I said to M. Billy, "do all
your colleagues express surprise that I also should wish to write a biography
of Sainte-
Beuve?"
"Well you see," he answered, "he was always heartily
disliked."
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I could make something of
the interesting community of posterities, for Harold Nicholson was also a man
of good intentions, the biographer of King George V, a follower, as many of the
social set were, of Oswald Mosley for a moment in the early thirties, and has
been handed down to posterity for being married to Vita Sackville-West, who
happened at one time or another to be Virginia Woolf’s lover. Their son Nigel’s
Portrait of a marriage was a shock expose of their open marriage, published in
the 1970s and now also forgotten.
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What was Sainte-Beuve’s
situation in October, 1850, when the Lundi essay, What is a classic, was
published?
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That is what I am getting
to. Twists and turns, though. Like a taxi driver running up a fare – or am I
simply responding to traffic?
- In 1849, Sainte-Beuve came back to Paris, the city he had left during the first fever of the 1848 revolution, and moved into three rooms on the ground floor of a house owned by a friend, Dr. Paulen, at 5 Rue St-Benoît, close to Café Flore, which opened about 20 years after Sainte-Beuve died and is still there, attracting tourists. In time, Sainte-Beuve’s mother died and he moved into her apartment at 11 Rue de Montparnasse, which is where he in turn died, a permanent Senator in Napoleon III’s government, a defender, even, of the liberal wing of that government, or at least of freedom of opinion. A defender of Renan and Taine.
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Death. On August 22, 1850,
Sainte-Beuve, Victor Hugo (his enemy who was once his friend before
Sainte-Beuve fell in love with Adele, Victor’s wife) and Alexandre Dumas were
part of the funeral cortege accompanying Balzac’s coffin into L’eglise
Saint-Phillipe du Roule. This was recognition. Not that Balzac and Sainte-Beuve
liked each other in life, or each other’s work. Balzac once remarked that
Sainte-Beuve’s muse was a bat, not an eagle.
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As to the paper, Le
Constitutionel, in which Sainte-Beuve published – that came about as a sort of
lucky break. Sainte-Beuve had quarreled with the man who ran the Revue des Deux
Mondes – he’s even hit him on the head with an umbrella – so he was looking for
a venue when Dr. Véron
wrote him a letter offering him one hundred francs for a column.
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Dr. Véron could well have been a NPC in
Balzac’s Comedie Humaine. He’d made his fortune manufacturing and
merchandizing a “pectoral balm”, made
out of flower pressings among other ingredients. He’d invested in other venues,
real estate for instance, and he made his ploy for the media market by starting
Le Constitutionel, a paper oriented to the viewpoint of the upper middle class,
as Nicholson calls them. The bourgeoisie. The collaboration of Sainte-Beuve and
Véron was a success,
Sainte-Beuve staying on long after Véron
had sold his newspaper. Sainte-Beuve had all the influence he had ever dreamed
of as the Lundis went on. And they went on, until there were sixteen fat tomes
of them. Literature on the industrial scale – that was the nineteenth century.
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I’m not out of here yet.
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I’m not out of here yet.
Where are the exits in this structure?
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Here we are. Reading “What
is a classic?” Published in the Constitutionel on October 21, 1850.
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A “delicate question”, to
which one has given “varied enough solutions” according to the age and the
season. Sainte-Beuve is a writer who knows the value of the quiet introduction
– not for him the journalistic hook. He follows his delicate question with a
bit of philology, which lands us – by allusions in the text, but no direct
statement – back in the streets of Paris, 1848. The class struggle.
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“The word classic …. begins
with the Romans. Among them, one calls the classici proper not all the citizens
of diverse classes, but only the first, who possessed revenue of a certain set
amount. All of those who possessed an inferior revenue are designated as infra
classum, in the lower class par excellence. Figuratively, the word classicus is
found employed by Aulus Gellius, and applied to writers: a writer of values and
mark, calssicus assiduusque scriptor, a writer who counts, who owns properties
or has investments and isn’t confounded in the crowd of proletarians.”
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I rather admire the
movement here. In a series of deft gestures, Sainte-Beuve has moved us from the
propertied class to the writer’s properties – among which are his writings. And
in so doing Sainte-Beuve gives us a strong sense that the text and the author
are married – less like two human partners than the way the Doge of Venice is
ritually married to the sea.
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A proprietary ring is
dropped, a property is claimed.
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One thinks of the
difference between the classic and the scripture. The genealogical line of
descent from the Romans includes, of course, the Roman claim to be in the line
of descent from the Greeks. But these lines flourish outside of the line of
descent from the Hebrews. Is the classic, then, profane?
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Sainte-Beuve doesn’t’ take
us here. But we know that this is a man who has devoted decades to writing his
history of Port-Royal, and he must have some opinion in the background. Perhaps
some scruple, some delicacy.
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In any case, Sainte-Beuve
makes an interesting historicizing move here. For the “moderns”, the classics
expanded to include exclusively the Romans and the Greeks. Moderns, here, means
what we would call the early moderns. And the “property” of the classic, here,
is to be prior – to be those whose cultural property we inherit.
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But are there no other
classics? Sainte-Beuve rejects the notion that the classics are confined to two
groups in antiquity, the Greeks and the Romans. What about Dante? What about
Cervantes? What, finally, about Shakespeare?
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He does not ask, what about
Rabelais, or Ronsard, or Montaigne. Sainte-Beuve’s idea is that France – like
Germany – has a relatively recent literature. Unlike Spain or Italy or England,
France’s first classics come in the seventeenth century, under Louis XIV. This
idea became, I should say, institutionalized in France, so that the teaching of
French literature in the schools is still under its spell. The “classic age” is
fixed. Its figures are fixed: Corneille, Moliere, Racine, Pascal, La Fontaine.
And then, the writers of that happy age, the 18th century. The last
century, even Barthes remarks somewhere, where good French was written – that
is, flowed onto the page naturally. “It
was only after the beautiful years of Louis XIV that the nation felt, thrillingly,
and with pride, that such felicity had now happened here.” The classic writers
are the bearers of national pride, and in turn, that pride is now, in a sense,
their property. It is not that aesthetics has its sphere and politics has its
other sphere – the pride that is the spirit of national politics derives from
aesthetics seen in the highest sense, the citizens that are above the common:
the writers.
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Which does bring us to the
revolution. Preceded, first, by the revolution in the relationship between the
ancients and the moderns. For if the moderns could be classics, the question of
what is a classic falls back into a larger, epistemological question: how would
we, how do we, recognize a classic? “Good old La Fontaine [taking the side of
the ancients in the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns] did not
perceive that he himself, in spite of his lapses, was on the eve of finding
himself classic in his turn.”
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This creates a certain
crisis in the properties belonging to the classic. If it is not priority, if it
depends on the age, what is it that is general to the classic, that binds us to
the past and the future of the classic?
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Shakespeare, here, plays a
role. Shakespeare, Sainte-Beuve contends, would not have been found a classic
by Pope – that is, if we take the classic to be a matter of balance, of reason.
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In fact, that there are
modern classics creates a zeugma, a partnering of opposites: to be prior is not
to be contemporary, and yet Sainte-Beuve wants to say it is possible for a
writer today to be classic. He resolves the zeugma like this: [an author] who
speaks to all in a style proper to himself and which is also that of everybody;
in a new style without neologisms; new and antique, easily contemporary of
every age.”
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Ah, haven’t we all heard
this rhetoric? It is the humanistic abstraction which still forms part of the
official rhetoric of culture – even as it actually traces an impossible
program. Could, say, Jane Austin be recognized as contemporary by the sages of ancient
Athens? Could we in turn unreservedly recognize their contemporaneity, with all
its attitudes (for instance, the acceptance of slavery)? Is that how we
actually understand them?
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In other words, doesn’t
this view of the classics either flatten them into banalities, or force on to
overlook the shocks that might have made them (un)contemporary and, in fact,
lifted them out of the mass?
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That zeugma. The view from
the zeugma. The nineteenth century.
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Sainte-Beuve finds his way
out of the dialectical difficulties that he has wandered into with some help
from Goethe. Sainte-Beuve is a great admirer of Goethe, and he quotes with
approval his dictum: “I call the classic the healthy, and the romantic the ill.”
It is the opposition between the healthy and the ill – the classic and the
romantic – to which the question has ascended. A question for all modernity!
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By changing frameworks from
the happy age of the eighteenth century, the classic author is no longer
defined by either balance or reason; instead, the author is defined by
vigor. Vigor (and under that word,
manliness), as the model of the healthy, is also the mark of the classic. And
the unhealthy – the decadent, the inward, the feminine – is the mark of the
romantic.
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It should be obvious that
my fishing expedition in Sainte-Beuve’s essay, and Calvino’s, is bent by the
gravitational pull of the canon – that question that vexed cultural
institutions in the 80s, and is still unresolved in the era of the witchhunt
against the “woke”. As is proper – cultural institutions in our contemporaneity
are still at the foot of the Zeugma.
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Sainte-Beuve, I think,
should be recognized as one of the founders of our cultural lingo – our
rhetoric. Indeed, his solution would come off the tongue of a Harvard President
making a speech with a buttery zest.
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“The temple of taste, I
believe, must be rebuilt – but in the rebuilding, it is simply a question of
making it larger, letting it become the Pantheon of all the the noble people,
all who have gathered together the sum of pleasures (jouissances) and titles of
the mind.”
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But among the proletariat,
outside of the city, someone emerges, a Pauline arriviste: “Then Paul stood in
the midst of Mars Hill and said: ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all
things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions,
I found an altar with the inscription: to the Unknown God.”
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