what is a classic

 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.

-          Ahem. Ahem.

-          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.

-          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.

-          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.

-          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.

-          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.

-          In June, 1981, when Gray intereviewed him, she found him and his family living in a “spacious duplex in a 17^th century palazzo” a few blocks from the Parthenon.

-          Are these details relevant to reading “Why read the Classics?”

-          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.”

-          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.

-          Are these details relevant?

-          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.

-          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.

-          “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.

-          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.

-          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.”

-          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.

-          To be continued.

 

-          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.

 

-          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.

 

-          Still. Proust is Proust.

 

-          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.

 

-          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.

 

-          Such is the tangled heart of the life-and-works.

 

-          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.”

-          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?

-          The answer we find in Contre Saint-Beuve is that the first man was a poet.

-          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.

-          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.

-          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.

-          He did not come back a third time.

-          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.

-          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

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-       Even the most rigid formalist makes an exception. The exception is that the territory, the text to be explained, our object to be observed, is attached to an author, formed by an author, a product of an author’s life. Hamlet and King Lear are, for instance, attached to Shakespeare, and Shakespeare is a biographical fact, even if one ignores Stratford on Avon and exams patterns of casuistry in The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure. The critic assumes that there are intimate connections that legitimate writing about, for instance, about Hamlet and King Lear, in a way that is not relevant to the analysis of King Lear and the limericks of Edward Lear.

-          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.

-          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.

-           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.

-          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. 

-          The right move is the rat’s: when the ship is sinking, jump.

-          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:

-          “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.

-          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!

-          Should I put in here that Saint-Beuve once dined with Gogol – and Liszt and Madame D’Agout (Cosima Wagner’s mother) – in Rome?

-          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.

-          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."

 

-          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.

-          What was Sainte-Beuve’s situation in October, 1850, when the Lundi essay, What is a classic, was published?

-          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.

-          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.

-          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.

-          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.

-          I’m not out of here yet.

-          I’m not out of here yet. Where are the exits in this structure?

-          Here we are. Reading “What is a classic?” Published in the Constitutionel on October 21, 1850.

-          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.

-          “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.”

-          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.

-          A proprietary ring is dropped, a property is claimed.

-          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?

-          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.

-          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.

-          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?

-          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 18^th 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.

-          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.”

-          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?

-          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.

-          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.”

-          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?

-          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?

-          That zeugma. The view from the zeugma. The nineteenth century.

-          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!

-          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.

-          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.

-          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.

-          “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.”

-          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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The cowardice of the great: Proust and Sainte-Beuve

 An older post that has to do with the new post I'm going to be putting up.

So here it is. 

Behind Proust’s essay on Sainte Beuve and Baudelaire, one feels the whole experience of the Dreyfus affair, which taught Proust an unforgettable lesson: how much depends upon the cowardice of the great. It is this insight that drove the alienated liberals towards socialism at the end of the nineteenth century. In Sainte Beuve’s treatment of Baudelaire, Proust saw an emblem of the system of relations that put the imagination at the service of the platitude, and the platitude at the service of maintaining, at any price, one’s place in the artificial paradise.

Of course, the essay has capacities, pockets, unexplored frontiers that can’t be reduced to the above thesis. But to understand the peculiar immersion of the artificial paradise – the swallowed commodity that swallows the user (as we restlessly toss and turn in the golden egg) – I want to use Proust’s essay as the torch that lights my way into the vault.

Proust’s problem in the essay is not just to untangle Sainte Beuve’s relationship to Baudelaire – his maddening assumption of superiority, his strategy of deferring the moment of writing about the poet until it is too late, the Cheshire cat language he uses that at one point makes Proust cry out: “quelle vieille bête ou quelle vieille canaille…” like Charlus in the final stages of exasperation – his problem, the deeper problem, is to untangle Baudelaire’s relationship to Sainte Beuve: the unfailing politeness, the sincere delight he took in any scraps thrown him by “l'oncle Beuve.”

These are tangled ties, knots within Gordian knots. The screw turns. Proust’s solution is extremely beautiful.

Comme le ciel de la théologie catholique qui se compose de plusieurs ciels superposés, notre personne, dont l'apparence que lui donne notre corps avec sa tête qui circonscrit à une petite boule notre pensée, notre personne morale se compose de plusieurs personnes superposées. Cela est peut-être plus sensible encore pour les poètes qui ont un ciel de plus, un ciel intermédiaire entre le ciel de leur génie, et celui de leur intelligence, de leur bonté, de leur finesse journalières, c'est leur prose. Quand Musset écrit ses Contes, on sent encore à ce je ne sais quoi par moments le frémissement, le soyeux, le prêt à s'envoler des ailes qui ne se soulèveront pas. C'est ce qu'on a du reste dit beaucoup mieux :

Même quand l'oiseau marche, on sent qu'il a des ailes.

(Like the heaven of Catholic theology, which is composed of many superposed heavens, our person, with the appearance given it by our body with its head, which confines our thought to a small bowl, our moral person is composed of many superposed persons. This is perhaps more felt in the case of poets, who have an extra heaven, an intermediary heaven between that of their genius and that of their intelligence, that of their generosity, of their daily canniness, which is their prose. When Musset writes his Stories, one senses again this unknown momentary quality in the quavering, the sleekness, the unfolding of wings that do not extend in flight. Which, besides, is said much better: Même quand l'oiseau marche, on sent qu'il a des ailes.) (my translation)

This is as central an idea to Proust, I think, as the idea of the eternal return was to Nietzsche – and was evoked by the same long experience of the cowardice of the great. Saint Beuve for Baudelaire, Wagner for Nietzsche, and, in Proust’s case, the collective cowardice of the establishment, including the literary establishment – the Daudets, for instance – in the Dreyfus case.

The Letter from Lord Chandos

 

Hugo Hofmannsthal published The Letter (which is almost always translated into English as The Letter from Lord Chandos) in 1903. In turn of the century Vienna, Hofmannsthal, as a young lyric poet, had become the object of a more numerous and public cult than the one (more famous now) surrounding Stefan Georg. And, unlike Georg or Rilke, he was politically and religiously orthodox – a good Catholic, a supporter of the Habsburg order. Herman Broch, in his essay on Hofmannsthal, says that “on the triad of life, dream and death rests the symphonic structure of Hofmannsthal’s complete opus” – which should remind us of Klimt, and the whole Jugendstyl aesthetic of fin de siecle Vienna. It is a mistake to assume that these aesthetes, with their intense interest in hedonism, were somehow opposed to the sexual ‘repression’ of bourgeois Habsburg society, since, in fact, the latter never operated as a machine for repression, but rather as a machine for the distribution of places for sex within class and gender hierarchies. And so it was with Hofmannsthal – as his enemy Kraus liked to observe, he was certainly a man of the status quo.

However, he was also certainly a language man. Hofmannsthal seemed preternaturally gifted with phrases in his early poetry.

This is why the Letter created quite a shock.

The Letter is presented as a reply to a letter written by Francis Bacon to Philip Lord Chandos. Bacon is concerned that Philip Lord Chandos, a promising young maker of poems and masques, had fallen silent. Lord Chandos writes that such have been the changes he has undergone that “he hardly knows if I am the same person to whom you have directed your precious letter”. He goes on to ask if he was the same person as the twenty three year old who, in Venice, under the stony walls of the grand piazza, lived half in a dream of the books to come – for instance, sketches of the realm of Henry the Eighth, or a mythography of the ancient myths, or a collection of apothegmata as Julius Caesar would have written them, a sort of jumble of dialogues, curious knowledge and sayings not unlike Bacon’s own Natural History or New Organon.

“To be brief: all of being appeared as one great unity to me, who existed in a sort of continuous intoxication: the mental and physical world seemed to image no opposites to me, just as little as the world of court and the world of animals, art and un-art, loneliness and society; in all I felt Nature, in the confusions of madness as much as in the finest refinements of a Spanish ceremonial, in the boorishness of a young peasant not less than in the sweetest allegory; and in all nature I felt myself; when I in my hunting cap absorbed the foaming, warm milk that an unkept person milked out of a beautiful, soft eyed cow’s udder into a wooden bucket, it was the same to me as I was sitting in the built in window cove of my studio, sucking out of folios the sweet and foaming nurture of the mind. The one was as the other; one did not yield to the other, neither in terms of dreamy, super-earthly nature nor in physical force, and so it continued through the whole breadth of life, right hand, left hand. Everywhere I was in the middle, never was I conscious of a mere semblance. Or it seemed to me that everything was an allegory and every creature a key to another, and I felt myself to be the man who was able to seize their heads one after the other and unlock with them as much of the other as could be unlocked.”

Well, now, - if you have been a philosophy student or a lyric poet and not had this feeling, than you are highly in need of an ego. Having a full sense of what you possess when you are young gives you these buttery, milky moments of feeling, as though the crosspatch world has been waiting those dark dark eons just to encounter the revelatory moment of the tearing of the seals which has happened in your head. You are the angel of the Lord. Or you are Krishna, a god man who was pretty conversant, himself, with the ways of milkmaids. At least, so it was with me at twenty one, a fuckin’ mooncalf if there ever was one, but a common enough exhibit of the syndromes of the hyperborean consciousness. Lord Chandos is a recognizable type, the child of the century – his avatars are in Balzac, in Lermontov, in Tolstoy. The modernist moment is marked by the struggle to be impersonal – to deliver oneself from the milky moment – and that struggle requires some terrible sacrifices of ego for an uncertain outcome. One outcome is the Flaubertian artist. Another outcome is… well, as it is described in the Letter.

Perhaps it is a mistake, even, to confine this to the modernist moment, or at least to pretend that the modernist moment isn’t structured according to the precepts of a broader mythology. Wasn’t Prajapati found lying in a golden egg, the first man, Purusa? The egg is both his bearer and his product – for it was born, itself, of Prajapati’s union with Vac, or speech. Laurie Paton, in Authority, Anxiety and Canon, took the story of the Golden Egg and writes this:

“In my reconstruction of the two-phase process of creation, based on several accounts in the Brahmanas, Prajapati and Vac both participate in each stage. The division between the first and second stages of the cosmogonic process is demarcated in certain accounts by the measure of time, generally the period of a year. In the first stage the creator Prajapati has a desire to reproduce and unites with his consort Vac. The Vac with which Prajapati unites at this stage is the unexpressed, transcendent level of speech that is generally identified with the primordial waters. Prajapati implants his seed in the waters of Vac and the seed becomes an egg, which represents the totality of the universe in yet undifferentiated form. In the second stage of creation a child, representing the ‘second self’ of Prajapati, is born and speaks. This speech, which represents the second phase of Vac, is the expressed, covalized speech by means of which the creator introduces distinctions in the originally distinctionless totality of creation represented by the egg, dividing it into the three worlds and manifesting various types of beings.”

What the Letter records is an egg’s inward collapse. For on the brink of becoming an Elizabethan sage, Chandos found himself becoming something else entirely.

All eggs – Prajapati’s, Humpty Dumpty’s – crack. Far from being the kind of thing all the king’s horses and all the king’s men should deplore, cracking is the perfection of the egg, its designed endpoint. The milkfed days of Philip Lord Chandos were, apparently – or so his account would make us believe – appointed to lead him from glorious estate to glorious estate as he became a grandee of great learning. And thus he’d put one foot and then the other out of the egg. But it is a fact that some eggs fail. And it is a fact that promising minds are easily culled and spoiled, that entrance into real life is entrance into a bureaucratic labyrinth in which the many branches are all equally tedious, that energy is delight only as long as the divide between promise and attainment seems eminently surmountable. Hands, necks, cheeks wither. The great work, the grand instauration, the New Atlantis becomes a great mill, to which one finds oneself chained, one day, much like any other slave.

Or… perhaps in a horrible moment, all mental energies collapse, and the egg dies within.

“But, my honorable friend, even earthly concepts escape me in the same manner. How am I supposed to try to describe these rare mental pains to you, this elevation of the fruited branch above my outstretched hand, this retraction of the murmuring water before my thirsty lips?

In brief, my case is like this: the ability to think or speak consecutively over an object, something, has been completely lost to me.”

Now in my advance from middle age to the muddled age of 67, I have a personal sense of that particular moment. The imbecile gaps are longer; living as I do, now, with my wife and our son, in Paris, where the peeps do be speakin’ French,  I face them in a more tangential way perhaps than other,  more normal people do. When I was a young buck, I was a ready speaker, and could spin a line of bullshit that awed even myself at times. I can still tap mechanically into the old flow, but how easily the references, the memories, the names will suddenly fly out of my head at unbidden moments! I throw the dice and they come up … blank. Which makes me wonder how I never noticed this fourth dimensional surface of the dice. The dice, the web of speech, the golden egg. I’ll babble along when suddenly the web will tear off and fall in the dark – inside my head, of course – and I’ll have that magic, frightening aphasic moment, when the name-world become unfamiliar. It passes, but for a moment I question the whole path that lead me to become a babbler.

Intimations of Alzheimer’s, maybe. But Alzheimer’s simply names a badly understood disease, maybe not even one disease. Rather, in the aphasic moment, what spreads out irresistibly is the embarrassment that takes in my entire life. And the need to keep running it. The need to keep the diligent, unsteady spider weaving. It is as if at the center of the whole project was some covered up glitch. I can taste the poisonous, acrid flavor of this moment on my tongue.

Although I’m not going to exaggerate – this isn’t the kind of thing that makes you slit your wrist with a knife in the intervals. It is merely the kind of thing you don’t talk about with anyone. That Hoffmansthal, a man with the resources of the German language in his hands, could write about makes him a very rare genius indeed.

In his wake,  I write about it because, after all, it is an experience, and as long as I can tell one experience from another, I will write. It is this which makes the Letter a cult object for writers, a source book of failure, a destination that will overtake us all.

A chain of signifiers: Skhlovsky, Barthes, and the spell

 

I’m an inveterate comparer, so much so that I distrust the subjective pivot of comparison only because I compare it with other approaches to the true and the just. I compromise with that distrust by putting all comparison under the sign of quote marks – I mention, but I do not speak in propria persona.

So it is that, reading Skhlovsky’s Zoo, I thought: I wonder if Barthes read Zoo?

Looking around, I have noticed another reader, Linda Kaufmann, in Discourses of Desire, noticed: that Barthes’ Fragments of a lover’s discourse, Derrida’s Post Card, and Skhlovsky’s Zoo, or Letters not about Love have all used fragmentation to understand, or undergo, the spell of love as a spelling, an incorrigibly and frustratingly logo-bent moment, in which indirection is the only direction that can possibly find direction out.  And reader, he doesn’t marry her. That’s not in the cards.  

It is like that, eros and literature and its discontents.

The fragments part, though, those telegraphic, telepathic one sentence paragraphs of Skhlovsky, they fascinate me. Spells are usually a word, a phrase, a formula, which working against the causal current, bring about a result – at least in the once upon a time world – overwhelming both the producer and the receiver. The sorcerer may be distinguished from the sorcerer’s apprentice by the ability to follow the spell with a negation, a limit. But that is bluff.

Or at least out of the once upon a time world, in the world of, say, Berlin, 1923, that has been revealed as bluff.

Revealed once, which throws a demystifying retrospective over the entire past.

In Jameson’s Prison House of Language, Frederic Jameson connects Shklovsky’s style, and the form of his thought, to Vasily Rozanov, the oddest of Russian essayist:

“Rozanov illustrates the resolution of the novel back into its raw materials, into a kind of linguistic collage, made up of journal entries, newspaper clippings, letters, entries noted on stray envelopes and scraps of paper and so forth. From the point of view of content, he may be seen as a kind of Russian equivalent of Pirandello or Fernando Pessoa, with his multiple personalities (he was a conservative columnist under his own name for the Novoe Vremya, a liberal columnist under a pseudonym for the Russkoe Slovo). It is worth noting that for Skhlovsky, even this ideological content is not primary, but only the result of the form which it calls into being…”

What else is a form that calls something into being but a spell?

Barthes was another such a maker of spell books. In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (a beautiful title), Barthes writes that the question that follows him around (like the rain cloud that follows Joe Btfsplk in the L’il Abner cartoons) is “what does this mean?”:

“This mania never allows for futility: for example, if I notice – and I force myself to notice – that in the country, I love to take a leak in the garden and not elsewhere, I want to know what this means. This rage to make the simplest facts signify socially marks the subject like a vice: one must not break the chain of names, one must not unchain language: the excess of namings is always ridiculous (M. Jourdain, Bouvard and Pecuchet)

(Even here, save in the amanuensis, of which it is precisely the price, one never records anything that one does not make signify: one doesn’t dare allow the fact to be left in a state of in-significance; this is the movement of the fable, which pulls from every fragment of the real a lesson, a sense. One can imagine a completely inverse book: which reports a thousand “incidents” while forbidding itself to ever pull out of them a line of meanings; that would be exactly a book of haikus.)”

Incidences without senses. Such is the threat posed by filling up a book, a thing of pages and pages. The novelist is always trying to give an impression of something going on without bogging it down to much in the material of incidence – or at least one kind of novelist is. The novelist that selects the mirror, that instrument which lacks the elements of editing, to be his or her symbol. Joyce, though, knew better: Stephen Dedalus chooses the cracked looking glass of a serving girl.  

Science, magic, the teller, the tale, and the critic who trails behind. Skhlovsky and Barthes are both writers first, even if they accumulate the outer look of critics, or at least essayists. And that essayistic melange was always destined to creep into, to infect, to invade, the other genres. The poem, the novel, the story.

Well. Let’s go bowling, dude.

 

My Mount Rushmore: DIDION MALCOLM ADLER HARDWICK

 

I have been thinking of Laura Kipnis’s applaudable and much applauded review of Lili Anolik’s book comparing the wondrous Eve Babitz -according to Anolik, her own personal discovery – and the evil Joan Didion. Kipnis makes short work of this nonsense, but she does knock Didion inthe process, implying that her influence is too great and it is time (accordingto the clock of literary reputation) to take Didion down. 

My Rushmore of the women essayists of the latter half of the 20^th century is: Joan Didion, Renata Adler, Janet Malcolm and Elizabeth Hardwick.

All Rushmores are a little ridiculous. My Rushmore could have included, say, Audre Lord or Toni Morrison. It did not have to be so white and upper class. But this is my paper mache Rushmore, my sense of the looming presences presiding above my own little fingers dancing on these keys.

Only Janet Malcolm avoided fiction altogether, although her work on reporters exposed a good deal of fictivity in the late twentieth century style of grand reportage. I would also say that Adler, however much I appreciated her essayist style, was better in her two novels, Speedboat and Pitch Dark. Didion’s novels, to my mind, got better as she went along – got more sharded and lethal. Democracy is more like Speedboat than it is like Play it as it lays. Hardwick, too, pared down to the parataxis beneath the plot – a very late seventies notion, where plot became a thing of dread, an instrument that was used against you. There is no better marker of the cultural mood in the States in the Seventies than Sleepless Nights.

Didion, though, was always special. From the very beginning she knew how to make style cast a spell. And in that beginning she was definitely a Goldwater girl, John Wayne’s erring but adoring daughter. The culture of the seventies, the reverb from Watergate and the, well, inelegance of the coming monster mash with Reagan, drove her away from thinking that the woman who bragged of hanging out at the gas station with the boys could accept these boys, all too visibly frat boys, on the right were of the same issue. She moved, as a novelist and essayist, to a thinker on the margins. With the advantage that she knew Anglo society in her bones. So with the short books – El Salvador and Miami – she adjusted her hearing.

Didion, like Janet Malcolm, could hear a text. She understood the art of citation – damning the establishment with their own words in their own media organs. For instance, in Miami, she does a marvelous rap on Miami’s purblind Anglo establishment by spotting things in the Miami Herald. For instance, a two page, dryly comic bit that begins with this innocent intro:

On the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Dade County, in February of 1986, the Miami Herald asked four prominent amateurs of local history to name “the ten people and the ten events that had the most impact on the country’s history”. Each of the four submitted his or her own list of “The most influential people in Dade’s history”… She presents this newspaper turn to celebratory history for a page, just quoting, And then:

“On none of these lists of “The Most Influential People in Dade History” did the name Fidel Castro appear, nor for that matter did any Cuban, although the presence of Cubans in Dade County did not go entirely unnoted by the Herald panel. When it came to naming the Ten Most Important “Events”, as opposed to “People”, all four panelists mentioned the arrival of the Cubans, but at slightly off angles (“Mariel Boatlift of 1980” was the way one panelist saw it, as if this arrival had been just another of those isolated disasters or innovations which deflect the course of any growing community, on an approximate par with other events mentioned, for example the Freeze of 1895, the Hurricane of 1926, the opening of the Dixie Highway, the establishment of Miami International Airport, and the adoption, in 1957, of the metropolitan form of government, “enabling the Dade Country Commission to provide urban services to the increasingly populous unincorporated area.”

The Miami book strikes the note that Didion made her specialty – the differand between the white establishment’s view of American history, up to the present, and the reality of what was actually happening in America. The Miami Herald, in its notion that Miami was an Anglo city in the New South even as it became 56 percent Cuban, Puerto Rican, Haitian, etc., could be paralleled by the Washington Post’s quaint notion that the very heavily black city of Washington, D.C. existed merely as a backdrop – one that needed proper taming! - to super important connections being made in Georgetown. Perhaps the most powerful piece Didion did was on the Central Park Jogger case, the case of the woman who was raped while jogging in Central Park on April 10, 1989, the case that was “resolved” by  the roundup of six black or Hispanic teen boys, who were given all  the accountrements of a trial as they were disappeared down the sewage line leading to the penitentiary system. While Didion’s piece did not argue that the teens were innocent, it did argue that their presumption of innocence was grossly violated by the media frenzy, followed by the political frenzy, a freakout of the white establishment that revealed their “innocence”, to use Didion’s curious term – their lack of knowledge of the world that they presumed to own.

Sentimental Journeys, published in the New York Review of Books, was received as an insult and provocation when it came out. In 1992, Hedrick Herzberg, a 100 percent Clintonite liberal, gave her points for digging up the black viewpoint, but ends with this grave judgment:

“Ms. Didion plainly finds the “black” vison of systematic oppression morally superior to the “white” vision of systematic mayhem. But both visions are contemptible exaggerations, and it is far from clear which, in New York, is the most damaging.”

Oh, we are so close here to a Sister Soulja moment! And the oddity is, “Ms. Didion” is the Sister whose “contemptible exaggerations” we have to get rid of.

Louis Menard, in a review of a book about Didion, provides a good abbreviation of the way Didion’s comparative method works:

“The journalistic nut of the Jogger piece is the case of Laurie Sue Rosenthal. She was the mistress of an assistant city commissioner for elevator and boiler inspections, a man named Peter Franconeri, who happened to own an apartment at 36 East Sixty-eighth Street, between Madison and Park, and a house in Southampton. On the night of April 26, 1990, Rosenthal called her parents, in Queens, from the Sixty-eighth Street apartment and said she was being beaten. Sometime after that call, she died. In the morning, Franconeri rolled her body up in a carpet, put it out with the building's trash, and went to work.

The story did get into the papers, but officials downplayed the significance. "There were some minor bruises," said a spokeswoman for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. A police officer complained to a reporter about Franconeri, "Everybody got upside down because of who he was. If it happened to anyone else, nothing would have come of it. A summons would have been issued and that would have been the end of it."

Essentially, it was. Laurie Sue Rosenthal was determined to have suffered an accidental death from the combined effects of alcohol and Darvocet. Franconeri pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and got seventy-five hours of community service. The suspects in the Jogger case got sentences of five to fifteen years, for crimes including a rape that, it turned out, they had not committed. But the Central Park suspects did not belong to what Didion called "the conspiracy of those in the know, those with a connection, those with a rabbi at the Department of Sanitation or the Buildings Department or the School Construction Authority or Foley Square, the conspiracy of those who believed everybody got upside down because of who it was, it happened to anybody else, a summons gets issued and that's the end of it."

I will miss, oh I will miss, Didion reporting about the Luigi Mangione case.