Cosmopoetica

"Groups squabble about literature because they have other than literary uses for the literary. The schools, which are busy finding ways to get the answers to the Test of Time smuggled to their chosen favoritism as coaches slip answers to their players so they may pass the latest examination, will now and then speak of Art and claim a disinterested purity. And there are an unorganized few (the unhappy few whom I should like to represent, "the immense minority," as Juan Ramón Jiménez so significantly puts it) who sincerely love the arts. There are those for whom reading, for example, can be an act of love, and lead to a revelation, not of truth, moral or otherwise, but of lucidity, order, rightness of relation, the experience of a world fully felt and furnished and worked out in the head, the head where the heart is also to be found, and all the other vital organs.

[...]

Inside the Academy, at the Symphony, within Museum walls, each warring faction will boast that God is on their side, and claim transcendence for their values and opinions. This is done by trying to ensure that only their ideas, and works correctly expressing them, get put before the public in the future, and by reanalyzing the past as far back as the library catalog has cards (a deliberately out-of-date metaphor) in order to show, as I previously characterized their internecine struggles, that "it has ever been thus," whatever it is that they say it is now.

Outside, in the vendors” streets, there is nothing but temporary tents. The lasting, the universal, are despised (except by those who are still peddling the classics to old fogies). But who really wants reruns of already winded warhorses? Well, only those arrogant and rapacious revivalists who set Rigoletto in the Bronx and who want Dido and Aeneas to sing about their love while costumed as colonials. Their pitiful originalities would have once brought them to the gibbet or the stake.

The ideal cultural product can come powerfully packaged, creates a mighty stir, can be devoured with both delight and a sense of life-shaking revelation, provides an easy topic for talk, is guaranteed to be without real salt or any actual fat– contains no substance of any substantial kind– so that after you have eaten it, for days you will shit only air."

–William Gass
from "The Test of Time"
found in The Test of Time: Essays (2003)

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I’m an inveterate list-maker and reader of lists. My notebooks are full of lists of various kinds; my otherwise haphazard “productivity” system is based on lists; I love anaphoric poems; found lists are one of my favorite finds inside used-books… so it’s natural that this interview with Umberto Eco charmed me with his discussion of lists of all kinds. Eco makes some interesting observations about lists in literature, considers why we make lists in light of the (practically) infinite bounds of the subjects of many lists, and even ventures into thinking about lists and Google. Good stuff. A few choice bites:

SPIEGEL: But why does Homer list all of those warriors and their ships if he knows that he can never name them all?

Eco: Homer’s work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that. We have always been fascinated by infinite space, by the endless stars and by galaxies upon galaxies. How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn’t have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see. Lovers are in the same position. They experience a deficiency of language, a lack of words to express their feelings. But do lovers ever stop trying to do so? They create lists: Your eyes are so beautiful, and so is your mouth, and your collarbone … One could go into great detail.

SPIEGEL: Why do we waste so much time trying to complete things that can’t be realistically completed?

Eco: We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.

[...]

SPIEGEL: But you also said that lists can establish order. So, do both order and anarchy apply? That would make the Internet, and the lists that the search engine Google creates, prefect for you.

Eco: Yes, in the case of Google, both things do converge. Google makes a list, but the minute I look at my Google-generated list, it has already changed. These lists can be dangerous — not for old people like me, who have acquired their knowledge in another way, but for young people, for whom Google is a tragedy. Schools ought to teach the high art of how to be discriminating.

SPIEGEL: Are you saying that teachers should instruct students on the difference between good and bad? If so, how should they do that?

Eco: Education should return to the way it was in the workshops of the Renaissance…

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Ihab Hassan (who you might remember from a previous entry here) hits another one out of the park with this piece in The Georgia Review, “The Way We Have Become: A Surfeit of Seeming”. A good bit:

Here I reveal my own prejudices about art, about the novel particularly, and about the current clamor of nonfiction (including this very essay).

For me, the Kantian criterion of “disinterestedness”—pleasure “without a concept”—still holds despite the turbid tides of ideologies sweeping over the world since the Critique of Judgment appeared in 1790. The criterion holds, not only because it “suspends” existence for a time, and not only because it permits the “free play of imagination,” but also because, in its self-relinquishment, it invites trust. In that sense, all disinterestedness is spiritual: it turns us into “transparent eyeballs,” for as long as it lasts. “All mean egotism vanishes. I am nothing, I see all,” said the man from Concord. (Of course, the bounties of fiction are not all spiritual; they are also adaptive, evolutionary, as Denis Dutton convincingly shows in The Art Instinct.)

But an ironic serendipity here intrudes: Coetzee himself knows that stories—unlike dogmas, documents, opinions—“tell themselves.” More, in an essay titled “On Authority in Fiction” in Diary of a Bad Year, he notes: “What the great authors are masters of is authority. . . . But what if authority can be attained only by opening the poet-self to some higher force, by ceasing to be oneself and beginning to speak vatically?” For us, who listen rather than speak, a story draws us out of ourselves while the teller’s breath still hangs within the sanctum of our hearing. Isn’t that auricular kenosis?

“Once upon a time”: yes, yes. This “yes” knows a certain truth, the truth of imaginative trust. This “yes” is also what a deep reading of literature demands, the kind of reading implied in Emil Filla’s haunting portrait of Kafka, titled “A Reader of Dostoyevsky”: the very image not just of absorption, but of self-recognition in self-loss.

Nothing here would surprise readers of earlier generations. In An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis remarks: “In reading good literature, I become a thousand men. . . . I transcend myself; and I am never more myself than when I do.” Nor is anything here alien to later generations—generations are not cast in iron—that might include, say, a Junot Diaz, Pulitzer Prize–winner for fiction in 2008. A small-town librarian in New Jersey saved him from being “young and knuckleheaded,” from being poor, brown, immigrant, rejected, by opening the wide world of reading for him. Thus, at a recent Sydney Writers’ Festival, Diaz praised readers (not writers, mind you, and not even literature): “We readers will be remembered more than any individual writer for safeguarding that delicate web of human interconnectivity that so many forces wish to buy, capture, enslave, and mine.”

Hear, hear! That “delicate web of human interconnectivity” depends on imaginative trust. (No, literature does not lie.) Still, the Internet is here, not just to stay but to evolve, and the fate of book reading remains in doubt. Studies say this, studies say that, as pols and experts haggle. Meanwhile, young and old alike lead their lives, lost as always in the continual translations of existence, in the play of appearances and whatever reality may be intuited or grasped.

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Whenever I read Homer, I see ample evidence that women were treated abominably in ancient Greece, and I am very thankful that I live now and not then. In fact, I would rather pay a visit to Procrustes than marry any of Homer’s heroes. Fortunately, none of them is asking me. The invitation Homer offers me is a far broader one: to enter a world that was very different from ours, but that in its own “pretheoretical” [a phrase used in a finicky, feminist, politically correct letter referenced earlier in the chapter] way possessed nobility and beauty. If I had to step into a polling booth and vote on Homer’s sexual politics, I’d pull the NO lever strenuously. I am therefore glad that the Odyssey is a poem, not a referendum.

[…]

In a controversial 1996 article in Harper’s called “Say it Ain’t So, Huck,” Jane Smiley wrote that she was “stunned” by the idea “that this is a great novel, that this is even a serious novel.” According to Smiley, one of the book’s disqualifying flaws is Huck’s decision to take Jim down the Mississippi River instead of across it to Illinois. She sees this as a moral failure on Huck’s part, and therefore on Mark Twain’s part as well.

“So Jane Smiley would have crossed the Mississippi to the free state of Illinois with her Jim and freed him without delay,” responded a reader named Anson J. Cameron. (Mr. Cameron hails from Port Melbourne, Australia, and may thus be above the American fray.)

And if she kept her description of the river and the Southern sky to a minimum and the dialogue to just a few muttering about many slaveholder’s houses he was set to raze, she could probably free Jim inside of a page. Now, supposing she should keep writing (and Huck could keep rowing) at this pace, she might invent and free upwards of three hundred slaves in the course of her Huck Finn, whereas Twain, farting around with humor and other such distractions, only got around to freeing one.

I’m with Mr. Cameron. I’m very grateful that Huck Finn and Mark Twain were so inefficient and unethical that they didn’t manage to wind up their book on page 54, a few paragraphs after the raft sets off down the river. (And that Homer didn’t send Odysseus straight home.)

–Anne Fadiman
from “Procrustes and the Culture Wars”
found in At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays

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[…After this he put to death Procrustes, as he was called, who dwelt in what was known as Corydallus in Attica; this man compelled the travelers who passed by to lie down upon a bed, and if any were too long for the bed he cut of the parts of their body which protruded, while in the case of such as were too shot for it he stretched (prokrouein) their legs, this being the reason why he was given the name Procrustes. –Diodorus Siculus]

The Procrustean bed, Diodorus model, suggests itself with dispiriting aptness as a metaphor for the Culture Wars, right down to the blandishments with which Procrustes must have lured his guests over the threshold. (I picture him as a handsome fellow with a large vocabulary and an oleaginous tongue, not unlike the chairman of many English departments.) There’s just one crucial difference. Sometimes Procrustes lopped off his victims, and sometimes he stretched them, but the Culture Wars always lop. I have never seen cultural politics enlarge a work of literature, only diminish it.

By the Culture Wars, I mean that peculiar development of the last two decades or so that takes culture—a multidimensional thing if there ever was one—and attempts to compress it to a skinny line running from left to right. No matter how idiosyncratic, how ambivalent, how anarchic, how complicated, how big, how messy—it’s just got to fit that Procrustean bed. So out comes the handsaw, an WHOP! With a few quick strokes, it’s cut down to size and, as a kind of casual side effect, murdered.

Both armies in the Culture Wars are eager to recruit new soldiers for this limb-attenuation campaign.

[…]

You need not become a conscientious objector—there are plenty of ideas worth shedding blood for—but if in every battle you look around and see the same people fighting alongside you, you should ask yourself whether you are demonstrating an admirable constancy or a Procrustean intransigence.

[…]

College students—over whose souls the goriest battles in the Culture Wars are fought—are, by virtue of their youth, deeply engrossed in character building. Is it wrong to enlist the help of Shakespeare and Plato in this difficult task? But if that’s all that young readers do, then narcissism (Should I emulate Tybalt or Mercutio? If I liberate my soul from dependence on my body, as the Phaedo suggests, can I still have sex with Tiffany?) trumps aesthetics, and great books are reduced, by a process that trims away all the most beautiful parts, to self-help manuals.

–Anne Fadiman
from “Procrustes and the Culture Wars”
found in At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays

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Says Sven:

“For as exciting as the blogosphere is as a supplement, as a place of provocation and response, it is too fluid in its nature ever to focus our widely diverging cultural energies. A hopscotch through the referential enormity of argument and opinion cannot settle the ground under our feet.”

Read the rest of Birkert’s rumination on the Boston.com site…

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Scott McLemee of Crooked Timber has a “real” blog now: Quick Study. Right now I have little time for reading things that aren’t directly related to work, but Quick Study is going on the shortlist.

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“A novel is a two-way street, in which the labour required on either side is, in the end, equal. Reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing…”

Read more from Zadie Smith’s look at literature’s ‘legacy of failure’…

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