Shades of the prison house most especially close in on the growing girl as well as the growing boy--in other words, on everyone. So let us expand the lines from Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode", (quoted in my last posting) turning them into a universal prophecy of a universal fate: "full soon the soul of every child shall take on its earthly freight, and custom lie upon it with a weight heavy as frost . . ." So society, it seems, forces us all into similar strait-jackets.
But now we are forced to think hard about a strangely puzzling question: if Wordsworth's prophecy is as truly universal as it seems to be--a deep truth about all societies at all times, a classical truth--why had no one ever noticed it before? Is it possible that this classic truth (if that's what it is) of civilization and the socialization of children could only have been discovered by a romantic poet? Or is this so-called truth merely a romantic idea--an extraordinarily powerful idea to be sure but not a universal truth?
Whatever we want to call it--universal truth or romantic idea--the idea of society as a prison house and custom or convention as a crushing, freezing, stultifying weight, especially for young women, had a profound influence on the 19th century novel. Think of the great novels that take as their subject the fate (generally tragic) of young women who try to escape the prisons, the stultifying conventions of systematic society, they had been born into: Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, Portrait of a Lady, Anna Karenina. Flaubert virtually invented the modern novel when he wrote Madame Bovary.
Jane Austen is not on this list, for a very interesting reason: in her novels, the best and brightest are not deadened or imprisoned by the customs and conventions of systematic society. Society, for Jane Austen presents opportunities for comic theater. Her heroines and heroes meet and, after a series of comic confusions and misunderstandings, marry. Some people might say that Jane Austen is a romantic; I think it would be truer to say that she, along with the framers of the U. S. constitution, took an optimistic view of human rationality and the pursuit of happiness. Which, considering the fact that she was born in 1775, is not surprising.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Monday, April 27, 2009
Shades of The Prison House
Shades of the prison house begin to close
Upon the growing boy. . . .
I thought of these lines from Wordsworth's great Ode: Intimations of Immortality (1803-6) as I was watching the PBS production of Dickens' novel, Little Dorrit in which the prison house is a metaphorical as well as a literal presence. The house in which the hero, Arthur Clenham is brought up is not a home but a house of business and, as he experiences it as a boy, a prison house as well--and one run on calvinistic principles. (Dickens's hatred of organized religion, especially Calvinism, perhaps, is especially fierce in this novel.) Incarceration and modernity, as is now well understood, go or come hand-in-hand. It was Bentham who designed the first modern prison, which he called the Panopticon, because the prisoners could be kept both in isolation and under constant surveillance. Though I don't think this thing was ever built--Bentham tried unsuccessfully to sell the idea to the British government--out of it emerged the modern penitentiary, so-called because the prisoners were to be given ample opportunity to learn penitence and repent by being kept in solitary confinement. The first of these was built by the Quakers in Pennsylvania where it was eventually discovered that when people are kept in solitary confinement for a long time they go mad.
The prison house that Wordsworth is talking about is more metaphorical than literal; he is thinking of the force or weight of social rules and conventions, of received ideas, of ready-made or pre-formed thoughts--clichés--and in his "Preface" 0f 1800 to Lyrical Ballads the condition of "savage torpor" that the modern mass media (even then!) was reducing the minds of readers to. That is the weight that, in the following lines (also from Wordsworth's Ode), crushes innocence, spontaneity, originality:
Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!
The idea of the body as the prison-house of the soul is a Christian cliché; nobody had ever thought of society in this way--or at any rate, no poet before Wordsworth: it was Rousseau who said that man is born free but is everywhere in chains. Wordsworth was a pioneer in another way also: no poet had ever thought of himself in heroic terms--literally: Wordsworth's autobiographical poem, The Prelude ("Or Growth of a Poet's Mind") is written in the epic style of Milton's Paradise Lost. What's so important about the mind of a poet, as opposed to the mind of a scientist or philosopher--or a great leader or politician, for that matter? Why should the "growth" of a poet's mind be a fit subject for an epic poem? Here is what Wordsworth has to say, in that 'Preface': The man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude: the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly complanion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science. Emphatically may it be said of the poet, as Shakespeare said of Man, "that he looks before and after." He is the rock of defence for human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of differences of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs: in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed; the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth and over all time. The objects of the Poet's thoughts are everywhere; though the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his favorite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge--it is as immortal as the heart of man. If the labors of Men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we materially receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present: he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet's art as any upon which it can be employed. . . If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put, on as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.
"If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put, on as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man." In 1818, the wife of a fellow-poet, Mary Shelley, would publish the (much misread and much misunderstood) story of just such a Being, Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus. That subtitle is important and largely ignored. Prometheus was the god, according to an ancient Greek myth or story, who stole fire from the heavens and gave it to us humans (as if were too stupid to figure out how to make it ourselves) thus making civilization possible. 'Frankenstein' is the name of the scientist in Mary Shelley's novel who--stealing fire from the heavens--figures out how to use the power of modern science to create life. Frankenstein is not a mad scientist; his intentions are entirely benign; it is only after he has succeeded that, horrified at what he has done, he runs away, abandoning the virtually helpless human being he has created. That Being is naturally good; it only becomes a monster after being mistreated by his creator, or father, and the human community he desperately wants to join. Mary Shelley's book is like that initially nameless and helpless being: it became a tale of science gone mad because that's what its readers wanted it to be and twisted it into.
Where am I? The preceding paragraph is a sort of foot-note. What I wanted to say is that Wordsworth's (romantic) claims for poetry--and by extension, Art--had never (and would never again) be pitched so high. Shelley would say something almost as grand: poets, he said, are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, an idea that would be echoed by the young, would-be poet, Stephen Dedalus, hero of Joyce's semi-autobiographical novel, Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man(1915) as he exits saying, "I go to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." Joyce himself would never have said anything so naively grand, and certainly no one else would as the catastrophic 20th century crushed the romantic illusions of the 19th.
Wordsworth's ambitions for poetry are clearly excessive (I don't think he knew much about science, or ever entered a scientific laboratory) and characteristically romantic: poetry and the arts generally were redefining themselves but in ways that no one felt clear about. More was expected of poets, but what? It was becoming a little more common for poets to go or be thought mad--like Chatterton, or Smart, or Blake, or Claire or Beddoes, a phenomenon recognized by Wordsworth in the longish poem, "Resolution And Independence": "We poets in our youth begin in gladness;/ But thereof come in the end despondency and madness." Were the poets, then in the early 19th century becoming comparable to canaries in coal-mines? And if so, why? What was it about modernity that they were warning us about? The following lines from a poem by Yeats in 1919 shows us that after a hundred years the question had become more urgent, more suggestive:
What portion in the world can the artist have
Who has awakened from the common dream
But dissipation and despair?
Upon the growing boy. . . .
I thought of these lines from Wordsworth's great Ode: Intimations of Immortality (1803-6) as I was watching the PBS production of Dickens' novel, Little Dorrit in which the prison house is a metaphorical as well as a literal presence. The house in which the hero, Arthur Clenham is brought up is not a home but a house of business and, as he experiences it as a boy, a prison house as well--and one run on calvinistic principles. (Dickens's hatred of organized religion, especially Calvinism, perhaps, is especially fierce in this novel.) Incarceration and modernity, as is now well understood, go or come hand-in-hand. It was Bentham who designed the first modern prison, which he called the Panopticon, because the prisoners could be kept both in isolation and under constant surveillance. Though I don't think this thing was ever built--Bentham tried unsuccessfully to sell the idea to the British government--out of it emerged the modern penitentiary, so-called because the prisoners were to be given ample opportunity to learn penitence and repent by being kept in solitary confinement. The first of these was built by the Quakers in Pennsylvania where it was eventually discovered that when people are kept in solitary confinement for a long time they go mad.
The prison house that Wordsworth is talking about is more metaphorical than literal; he is thinking of the force or weight of social rules and conventions, of received ideas, of ready-made or pre-formed thoughts--clichés--and in his "Preface" 0f 1800 to Lyrical Ballads the condition of "savage torpor" that the modern mass media (even then!) was reducing the minds of readers to. That is the weight that, in the following lines (also from Wordsworth's Ode), crushes innocence, spontaneity, originality:
Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight,
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!
The idea of the body as the prison-house of the soul is a Christian cliché; nobody had ever thought of society in this way--or at any rate, no poet before Wordsworth: it was Rousseau who said that man is born free but is everywhere in chains. Wordsworth was a pioneer in another way also: no poet had ever thought of himself in heroic terms--literally: Wordsworth's autobiographical poem, The Prelude ("Or Growth of a Poet's Mind") is written in the epic style of Milton's Paradise Lost. What's so important about the mind of a poet, as opposed to the mind of a scientist or philosopher--or a great leader or politician, for that matter? Why should the "growth" of a poet's mind be a fit subject for an epic poem? Here is what Wordsworth has to say, in that 'Preface': The man of science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor; he cherishes and loves it in his solitude: the Poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with him, rejoices in the presence of truth as our visible friend and hourly complanion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science. Emphatically may it be said of the poet, as Shakespeare said of Man, "that he looks before and after." He is the rock of defence for human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of differences of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs: in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed; the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth and over all time. The objects of the Poet's thoughts are everywhere; though the eyes and senses of man are, it is true, his favorite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings. Poetry is the first and last of all knowledge--it is as immortal as the heart of man. If the labors of Men of science should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions which we materially receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present: he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of science, not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet's art as any upon which it can be employed. . . If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put, on as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man.
"If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarized to men, shall be ready to put, on as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the household of man." In 1818, the wife of a fellow-poet, Mary Shelley, would publish the (much misread and much misunderstood) story of just such a Being, Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus. That subtitle is important and largely ignored. Prometheus was the god, according to an ancient Greek myth or story, who stole fire from the heavens and gave it to us humans (as if were too stupid to figure out how to make it ourselves) thus making civilization possible. 'Frankenstein' is the name of the scientist in Mary Shelley's novel who--stealing fire from the heavens--figures out how to use the power of modern science to create life. Frankenstein is not a mad scientist; his intentions are entirely benign; it is only after he has succeeded that, horrified at what he has done, he runs away, abandoning the virtually helpless human being he has created. That Being is naturally good; it only becomes a monster after being mistreated by his creator, or father, and the human community he desperately wants to join. Mary Shelley's book is like that initially nameless and helpless being: it became a tale of science gone mad because that's what its readers wanted it to be and twisted it into.
Where am I? The preceding paragraph is a sort of foot-note. What I wanted to say is that Wordsworth's (romantic) claims for poetry--and by extension, Art--had never (and would never again) be pitched so high. Shelley would say something almost as grand: poets, he said, are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, an idea that would be echoed by the young, would-be poet, Stephen Dedalus, hero of Joyce's semi-autobiographical novel, Portrait of The Artist As A Young Man(1915) as he exits saying, "I go to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race." Joyce himself would never have said anything so naively grand, and certainly no one else would as the catastrophic 20th century crushed the romantic illusions of the 19th.
Wordsworth's ambitions for poetry are clearly excessive (I don't think he knew much about science, or ever entered a scientific laboratory) and characteristically romantic: poetry and the arts generally were redefining themselves but in ways that no one felt clear about. More was expected of poets, but what? It was becoming a little more common for poets to go or be thought mad--like Chatterton, or Smart, or Blake, or Claire or Beddoes, a phenomenon recognized by Wordsworth in the longish poem, "Resolution And Independence": "We poets in our youth begin in gladness;/ But thereof come in the end despondency and madness." Were the poets, then in the early 19th century becoming comparable to canaries in coal-mines? And if so, why? What was it about modernity that they were warning us about? The following lines from a poem by Yeats in 1919 shows us that after a hundred years the question had become more urgent, more suggestive:
What portion in the world can the artist have
Who has awakened from the common dream
But dissipation and despair?
Thursday, April 9, 2009
John Updike & Victor Hugo
I should admit right now that I don't know where, exactly, this comparison is going. Here, to get us started, however, are some facts. Both Updike's four 'Rabbit' novels and Hugo's Les Miserables are fictional biographies on an epic scale: both are huge (1500 and 1300 pages respectively) and in both the hero's life is part and parcel of huge transformations--social, political, economic--in every aspect of human life, in the very fabric of history. Neither hero is equipped to understand the way life is changing around him. Jan Valjean is entirely self-educated--to a degree beyond anything that could be rationally accounted for--but knows nothing about history or science and Harry Angstrom, with his typically paltry, high school education knows even less. There similarities cease; Hugo and Updike work from very different assumptions about history. Hugo not only believes in providence and progress but thinks they are fundamentally the same. The memory of the great Revolution and its failure was still alive and kicking for Hugo and many others of his generation. The Revolution lives. History, they believed, has a direction, guaranteed by God: liberty, equality and justice for all. Sound familiar? The men who made the American Revolution and wrote the American constitution had read the same books as the men of '89 and '93.
Writing a little more than a century after the publication of Les Miserables, Updike shows us how the world looks now--now that all the gods have died. Absent Providence-- Divine, Hegelian, whatever--history becomes literally aimless: just one damn thing after another. And that is how it appears to Updike's "pilgrim" (as he refers to him in his Preface), 'Rabbit' Angstrom--though, of course, Rabbit would not able to talk about the historical transformations he observes and comments on, resentfully, in these terms.
When history becomes aimless and progress is no longer built into the scheme of things, the bottom drops out of the American Dream, which not only assumes that the system is basically egalitarian and basically fair but is becoming more so:
I may have had a rotten deal but my kids will have a fair shot at the good life, i.e. a happy life in Hobbesian terms: continued success in getting and keeping worldly goods. As long as it seemed that the supply of goods was unlimited, all was well with the American Dream. Now we know for a fact that the supply of goods is not unlimited (which now sounds like an understatement) and that success in acquiring them goes to the powerful and the lucky. But of course we've always know that; the American Dream was sustained by hope, and a belief in progress. When hope fails and illusions fade, how do you feel? Resentful?
Resentment is one of the passions that keep our political pot on the boil--it is what the powerless feel when they feel, or are made to feel, how powerless they are. There are more losers than winners, and the losers don’t like being told that they deserve to be losers. The fact that our political culture is both libertarian and egalitarian means that there is a natural audience out there just waiting to have its resentments stroked. And now that the future holds little promise for ordinary people, that audience can only grow larger.
My first thought, as I was reading the 'Rabbit' novels was that it was an epic of resentment. Harry ('Rabbit') Angstrom is a man of ordinary intelligence and imagination, but badly educated like just about everyone else, with no marketable skills, no prospects and many resentments. But resentment is boring, and by the end of Rabbit Redux (Rabbit Returns) I was heavy bored by Harry Angstrom.
Updike had to give Rabbit a boost if he wanted to go on writing about him, and in the third volume, Rabbit Is Rich, he does so. Rabbit without money is a man with nothing but resentments; with money, he can begin to do things that make him interesting and, in scene after scene (the edge of his resentments dulled), richly comic-- like the scene in which Rabbit is trying to read Consumer Reports while his wife Janice, unnoticed at first, is trying to get his sexual attention. I also like the way conversations in this book always make me feel as if I too were walking a sort of tight-rope, a sense of tensions under control but only just. This book is so good, it makes me think I have been unjust to the first two. I have yet to read the last. I'll let you know what I find.
Writing a little more than a century after the publication of Les Miserables, Updike shows us how the world looks now--now that all the gods have died. Absent Providence-- Divine, Hegelian, whatever--history becomes literally aimless: just one damn thing after another. And that is how it appears to Updike's "pilgrim" (as he refers to him in his Preface), 'Rabbit' Angstrom--though, of course, Rabbit would not able to talk about the historical transformations he observes and comments on, resentfully, in these terms.
When history becomes aimless and progress is no longer built into the scheme of things, the bottom drops out of the American Dream, which not only assumes that the system is basically egalitarian and basically fair but is becoming more so:
I may have had a rotten deal but my kids will have a fair shot at the good life, i.e. a happy life in Hobbesian terms: continued success in getting and keeping worldly goods. As long as it seemed that the supply of goods was unlimited, all was well with the American Dream. Now we know for a fact that the supply of goods is not unlimited (which now sounds like an understatement) and that success in acquiring them goes to the powerful and the lucky. But of course we've always know that; the American Dream was sustained by hope, and a belief in progress. When hope fails and illusions fade, how do you feel? Resentful?
Resentment is one of the passions that keep our political pot on the boil--it is what the powerless feel when they feel, or are made to feel, how powerless they are. There are more losers than winners, and the losers don’t like being told that they deserve to be losers. The fact that our political culture is both libertarian and egalitarian means that there is a natural audience out there just waiting to have its resentments stroked. And now that the future holds little promise for ordinary people, that audience can only grow larger.
My first thought, as I was reading the 'Rabbit' novels was that it was an epic of resentment. Harry ('Rabbit') Angstrom is a man of ordinary intelligence and imagination, but badly educated like just about everyone else, with no marketable skills, no prospects and many resentments. But resentment is boring, and by the end of Rabbit Redux (Rabbit Returns) I was heavy bored by Harry Angstrom.
Updike had to give Rabbit a boost if he wanted to go on writing about him, and in the third volume, Rabbit Is Rich, he does so. Rabbit without money is a man with nothing but resentments; with money, he can begin to do things that make him interesting and, in scene after scene (the edge of his resentments dulled), richly comic-- like the scene in which Rabbit is trying to read Consumer Reports while his wife Janice, unnoticed at first, is trying to get his sexual attention. I also like the way conversations in this book always make me feel as if I too were walking a sort of tight-rope, a sense of tensions under control but only just. This book is so good, it makes me think I have been unjust to the first two. I have yet to read the last. I'll let you know what I find.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Flaubert & Modern Realism
In my last posting, I showed you a remarkable analysis of some lines from Madame Bovary. It is the work of the great German philologist, Erich Auerbach, who goes on to characterize Flaubert's style--a style that he, Flaubert, invented precisely to serve the purposes of modern realism--in the following paragraph:
In Stendhal and Balzac we frequently and indeed almost constantly hear what the writer thinks of his characters and events; sometimes Balzac accompanies his narrative with a running commentary--emotional or ironic or ethical or historical or economic. We also frequently what the characters themselves think and feel, and often in such a manner that, in the passage concerned, the writer identifies himself with the character. Both these things are almost wholly absent from Flaubert’s work. His opinion of his characters and events remains unspoken; and when the characters express themselves it is never in such a manner that the writer identifies himself with their opinion, or seeks to make the reader identify himself with it. We hear the writer speak; but he expresses no opinion and makes no comment. His role is limited to selecting the events and translating them into language; and this is done in the conviction that every event, if one is able to express it purely and completely, interprets itself and the persons involved in it far better and more completely than any opinion or judgment appended to it could do. Upon this conviction--that is, upon a profound faith in the truth of language responsibly, candidly, and carefully employed--Flaubert’s artistic practice rests.
You can't write that way without imposing on yourself the strictest discipline. Flaubert showed the way, and some of the finest writers of the 20th century followed him: T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway, for instance.
In Preludes and The Wasteland, for instance, the poet disappears, becomes an invisible presence. Things, places, events seem to speak for themselves. That is an achievement of style.
In Stendhal and Balzac we frequently and indeed almost constantly hear what the writer thinks of his characters and events; sometimes Balzac accompanies his narrative with a running commentary--emotional or ironic or ethical or historical or economic. We also frequently what the characters themselves think and feel, and often in such a manner that, in the passage concerned, the writer identifies himself with the character. Both these things are almost wholly absent from Flaubert’s work. His opinion of his characters and events remains unspoken; and when the characters express themselves it is never in such a manner that the writer identifies himself with their opinion, or seeks to make the reader identify himself with it. We hear the writer speak; but he expresses no opinion and makes no comment. His role is limited to selecting the events and translating them into language; and this is done in the conviction that every event, if one is able to express it purely and completely, interprets itself and the persons involved in it far better and more completely than any opinion or judgment appended to it could do. Upon this conviction--that is, upon a profound faith in the truth of language responsibly, candidly, and carefully employed--Flaubert’s artistic practice rests.
You can't write that way without imposing on yourself the strictest discipline. Flaubert showed the way, and some of the finest writers of the 20th century followed him: T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway, for instance.
In Preludes and The Wasteland, for instance, the poet disappears, becomes an invisible presence. Things, places, events seem to speak for themselves. That is an achievement of style.
Monday, March 23, 2009
Madame Bovary (1859)
The subtitle of the book I quoted from in my last posting, Mimesis(1946) by Erich Auerbach, is "The Representation of Reality in Western Literature." This great and famous book is not (I suspect) as well known as it should be. I know of no other that is even remotely like it.
What does Auerbach mean by 'representation'? 'Mimesis' is the ancient Greek word for 'imitation.' It is the word that Aristotle uses in his Poetics when he says that epic poetry, tragedy, comedy and music are forms of imitation. We needn't concern ourselves here with trying to understand what Aristotle meant by 'imitation'(I don't mean to imply that I do); 'representation' is how Auerbach understands it and that's good enough.
How, Auerbach asks, does literature 'represent' (or 'reflect'?) reality? What can we infer about a writer's world from his or her use of the available stylistic and rhetorical resources? What can we infer from a particular style about how the writer understands the world? Or thinks the reader ought to understand the world? These questions are crude, abstract; I'd do better if I showed you an actual case-study: Flaubert's' novel of 1859, Madame Bovary as a triumph of pure style. And I do mean 'pure': it's as if the narrator, the author, had disapeared and the facts were speaking for themselves. This ideally pure style became the goal of several generations of future writers, including Eliot and Hemingway.
Here are few lines from Madame Bovary , part 1, chapter 9, with analysis and commentary by Auerbach. (If you are not already familiar with this novel, Emma Bovary is a beautiful, charming and rather shallow young woman, recently married to a decent but dull young small-town doctor. Her mind, such as it is, has been formed by a steady diet of early 19th century pulp-fiction, highly 'romantic' stuff, not exactly bodice-rippers, but moving in that direction. Finding that her life is not the least bit romantic, she is not only bored but revolted by her husband, her surroundings, her life, everything.)
But it was above all at mealtimes that she could bear it no longer, in that little room on the ground floor, with the smoking stove, the creaking door, the oozing walls, the damp floor-tiles; all the bitterness of life seemed to be served to her on her plate, and, with the steam from the boiled beef, there rose from the depths of her soul other exhalations as it were of disgust. Charles was a slow eater; she would nibble a few hazel-nuts, or else, leaning on her elbow, would amuse herself making marks on the oilcloth with the point of her table-knife.
The paragraph presents a picture--man and wife together at mealtime. But the picture is not presented in and for itself; it is subordinated to the dominant subject, Emma's despair. Hence it is not put before the reader directly: here the two sit at table--there the reader stands watching them. Instead, the reader first sees Emma...and he sees the picture first through her; directly, he sees only Emma's inner state; he sees what goes on at the meal indirectly, from within her state, in the light of her perception. The first words of the paragraph, "But it was above all at mealtimes..." state the theme and all that follows is but a development of it. Not only are the phrases dependent on the prepositions "in" and "with", which define the physical scene, a commentary on "she could bear it no longer" in their piling up of the individual elements of discomfort, but the following clause too, which tell of the distaste aroused in her by the food, accords with the principal purpose both in sense and rhythm. When we read further, "Charles was a slow eater," this, though grammatically a new sentence and rhythmically a new movement, is still only a resumption, a variation, of the principal theme; not until we come to the contrast between his leisurely eating and her disgust and to the nervous gestures of her despair, which are described immediately afterward, does the sentence acquire its true significance. The husband, unconcernedly eating, becomes ludicrous and almost ghastly; when Emma looks at him and sees him sitting there eating, he becomes the actual cause of her boredom and despair; because everything else that arouses her desperation--the gloomy room, the commonplace food, the lack of a tablecloth, the hopelessness of it all--appears to her, and through her to the reader also, as something that is connected with him, that emanates from him, and that would be entirely different if he were different from what he is.
(to be continued)
What does Auerbach mean by 'representation'? 'Mimesis' is the ancient Greek word for 'imitation.' It is the word that Aristotle uses in his Poetics when he says that epic poetry, tragedy, comedy and music are forms of imitation. We needn't concern ourselves here with trying to understand what Aristotle meant by 'imitation'(I don't mean to imply that I do); 'representation' is how Auerbach understands it and that's good enough.
How, Auerbach asks, does literature 'represent' (or 'reflect'?) reality? What can we infer about a writer's world from his or her use of the available stylistic and rhetorical resources? What can we infer from a particular style about how the writer understands the world? Or thinks the reader ought to understand the world? These questions are crude, abstract; I'd do better if I showed you an actual case-study: Flaubert's' novel of 1859, Madame Bovary as a triumph of pure style. And I do mean 'pure': it's as if the narrator, the author, had disapeared and the facts were speaking for themselves. This ideally pure style became the goal of several generations of future writers, including Eliot and Hemingway.
Here are few lines from Madame Bovary , part 1, chapter 9, with analysis and commentary by Auerbach. (If you are not already familiar with this novel, Emma Bovary is a beautiful, charming and rather shallow young woman, recently married to a decent but dull young small-town doctor. Her mind, such as it is, has been formed by a steady diet of early 19th century pulp-fiction, highly 'romantic' stuff, not exactly bodice-rippers, but moving in that direction. Finding that her life is not the least bit romantic, she is not only bored but revolted by her husband, her surroundings, her life, everything.)
But it was above all at mealtimes that she could bear it no longer, in that little room on the ground floor, with the smoking stove, the creaking door, the oozing walls, the damp floor-tiles; all the bitterness of life seemed to be served to her on her plate, and, with the steam from the boiled beef, there rose from the depths of her soul other exhalations as it were of disgust. Charles was a slow eater; she would nibble a few hazel-nuts, or else, leaning on her elbow, would amuse herself making marks on the oilcloth with the point of her table-knife.
The paragraph presents a picture--man and wife together at mealtime. But the picture is not presented in and for itself; it is subordinated to the dominant subject, Emma's despair. Hence it is not put before the reader directly: here the two sit at table--there the reader stands watching them. Instead, the reader first sees Emma...and he sees the picture first through her; directly, he sees only Emma's inner state; he sees what goes on at the meal indirectly, from within her state, in the light of her perception. The first words of the paragraph, "But it was above all at mealtimes..." state the theme and all that follows is but a development of it. Not only are the phrases dependent on the prepositions "in" and "with", which define the physical scene, a commentary on "she could bear it no longer" in their piling up of the individual elements of discomfort, but the following clause too, which tell of the distaste aroused in her by the food, accords with the principal purpose both in sense and rhythm. When we read further, "Charles was a slow eater," this, though grammatically a new sentence and rhythmically a new movement, is still only a resumption, a variation, of the principal theme; not until we come to the contrast between his leisurely eating and her disgust and to the nervous gestures of her despair, which are described immediately afterward, does the sentence acquire its true significance. The husband, unconcernedly eating, becomes ludicrous and almost ghastly; when Emma looks at him and sees him sitting there eating, he becomes the actual cause of her boredom and despair; because everything else that arouses her desperation--the gloomy room, the commonplace food, the lack of a tablecloth, the hopelessness of it all--appears to her, and through her to the reader also, as something that is connected with him, that emanates from him, and that would be entirely different if he were different from what he is.
(to be continued)
Sunday, March 22, 2009
The Politics of Boredom in THE RED AND THE BLACK by Stendhal
Boredom makes its first appearance (in the West) in Stendhal's novel The Red And The Black (1830). Having quoted the passage in which the hero, Julien Sorel, complains of being bored out of his mind, Erich Auerbach (Mimesis, 1946) comments as follows:
The boredom which reigns in the dining room and salon of this noble house is no ordinary boredom. It does not arise from the fortuitous personal dullness of the people who are brought together there; among them there are highly educated, witty, and sometimes important people, and the master of the house is intelligent and amiable. Rather, we are confronted, in their boredom, by a phenomenon politically and ideologically characteristic of the Restoration period. In the seventeenth century, and even more in the eighteenth, the corresponding salons were anything but boring. But the inadequately implemented attempt which the Bourbon regime made to restore conditions long since made obsolete by events, creates among its adherents in the official and ruling classes, an atmosphere of pure convention, of limitation, of constraint and lack of freedom, against which the intelligence and good will of the persons involved are powerless. In these salons the things which interest everyone--the political and religious problems of the present, and consequently most of the subjects of its literature or that of the recent past--could not be discussed, or at best could be discussed only in official phrases so mendacious that a man of taste and tact would rather avoid them. How different from the intellectual daring of the famous eighteenth-century salons, which to be sure did not dream of the dangers to their own existence which they were unleashing! Now the dangers are known, and life is governed by the fear that the catastrophe of 1793 might be repeated. As these people are conscious that they no longer themselves believe in the thing they represent, and that they are bound to be defeated in any public argument, they choose to talk of nothing but the weather, music, and court gossip. In addition, they are obliged to accept as allies snobbish and corrupt people from among the newly rich bourgeoisie, who, with the unashamed baseness of their ambition and with their fear for their ill-gotten wealth, completely vitiate the atmosphere of society. So much for the pervading boredom.
The boredom which reigns in the dining room and salon of this noble house is no ordinary boredom. It does not arise from the fortuitous personal dullness of the people who are brought together there; among them there are highly educated, witty, and sometimes important people, and the master of the house is intelligent and amiable. Rather, we are confronted, in their boredom, by a phenomenon politically and ideologically characteristic of the Restoration period. In the seventeenth century, and even more in the eighteenth, the corresponding salons were anything but boring. But the inadequately implemented attempt which the Bourbon regime made to restore conditions long since made obsolete by events, creates among its adherents in the official and ruling classes, an atmosphere of pure convention, of limitation, of constraint and lack of freedom, against which the intelligence and good will of the persons involved are powerless. In these salons the things which interest everyone--the political and religious problems of the present, and consequently most of the subjects of its literature or that of the recent past--could not be discussed, or at best could be discussed only in official phrases so mendacious that a man of taste and tact would rather avoid them. How different from the intellectual daring of the famous eighteenth-century salons, which to be sure did not dream of the dangers to their own existence which they were unleashing! Now the dangers are known, and life is governed by the fear that the catastrophe of 1793 might be repeated. As these people are conscious that they no longer themselves believe in the thing they represent, and that they are bound to be defeated in any public argument, they choose to talk of nothing but the weather, music, and court gossip. In addition, they are obliged to accept as allies snobbish and corrupt people from among the newly rich bourgeoisie, who, with the unashamed baseness of their ambition and with their fear for their ill-gotten wealth, completely vitiate the atmosphere of society. So much for the pervading boredom.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Boredom
First, in the 15th century, there was the adjective 'tedious' from the latin 'taedium' (weariness, disgust). Lydgate uses it apologetically, (I quote, loosely, "I won't say anymore about her sorrow lest it prove tedious...") and Tindale uses it the same way in translating Acts, 24.4: "Lest I be tedeous unto thee . . .". Some of the citations in OED are amusing: Tillotson, in one of his sermons (1694)says, "I may be tedious but I will not be long." And in J. Mitford's Letters and Reminiscences (1845): "Johnstone ain't a drinking man nor a wife-beater, but he makes her a tedious husband." The word has also taken on, as early as 1509 the sense of our modern word 'boring' ("so when the father is tedious and old." It wasn't until 1692 that the abstraction, 'tedium', began to appear. That word sufficed until 1852, when Dickens in a stroke of his usual genius not only coined the word 'boredom' but identified it as a 'malady' (in Bleak House 2.28.253). But that word didn't appear out of nowhere; before there was boredom there was the noun (roughly the same as 'ennui') and verb 'bore' which appear more or less simultaneously and unacountably out nowhere around 1750--"etymology unknown" says the OED. The first person to be 'bored' was Byron who remarks in Don Juan (1823) that "Society is now one polished horde,/ Formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored." The word 'boring' (i.e. the practise of annoying or wearying others) didn't show up until 1868 when it was identified as a "fine art."
Why wasn't the English languaage content to make do with the French word 'ennui'? After all, look at all the other words we have happily taken over from that language.
'Ennui' perhaps is too abstract, too generalized: a kind of spiritual emptiness or melancholy or, as the OED says, "The feeling of mental weariness and dissatisfaction produced by want of occupation, or by lack interest in present surroundings or employments." A bore however is someone who bores--and here the sense of being drilled or bored into is probably relevant; boredom can be a malady that one suffers from, but it can also be a form of suffering that one inflicts on others. Either way, word or thing, boredom is quintessentially part of the modern condition.
Why wasn't the English languaage content to make do with the French word 'ennui'? After all, look at all the other words we have happily taken over from that language.
'Ennui' perhaps is too abstract, too generalized: a kind of spiritual emptiness or melancholy or, as the OED says, "The feeling of mental weariness and dissatisfaction produced by want of occupation, or by lack interest in present surroundings or employments." A bore however is someone who bores--and here the sense of being drilled or bored into is probably relevant; boredom can be a malady that one suffers from, but it can also be a form of suffering that one inflicts on others. Either way, word or thing, boredom is quintessentially part of the modern condition.
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