CPLT 325 Home Page

Welcome to CPLT 325, World Literature after 1650

Spring 2011 at California State University, Fullerton

This blog will offer posts on many of the authors on our syllabus as optional reading. While the posts are not exactly the same as what I may choose to say during class sessions (i.e. these are not usually exact copies of my lecture notes), they should prove helpful in your engagement with the authors and in arriving at paper topics and studying for the exam.


A dedicated menu at my WIKI SITE contains the necessary information for students enrolled in this course; when the semester has ended, this blog will remain online, and a copy of the syllabus will remain in the Archive menu.

Required Texts

Lawall, Sarah et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Package 2 (Volumes D, E, F): 1650 to the Present.  Paperback, 2003.  ISBN-13: 978-0393924541.

Week 16 -- Wole Soyinka

05/11. Wed. Wole Soyinka. Death and the King's Horseman (Vol. F, 2021-71).
Notes on Wole Soyinka’s and the King’s Horseman

SCENE ONE

This play deals in part with the inability or refusal of one culture to understand another that it has subordinated, but more importantly it deals with the reflection of a culture on its own traditions and values at a moment of crisis.

Briefly, we should note the joyous quality of this scene, the celebratory and processional quality of it. This is what Eleshin has lived for: this day. He and others around him know the significance of the day, and rejoice in the experience and understanding of it. It’s reaffirmative of life and their entire culture, reaffirmative of the continuity between the living and the dead, and it will keep the world centered.

SCENE TWO

3036-43. Sgt. Amusa is horrified when he sees Pilkings wearing a Yoruba mask. Amusa is supposed to have converted to Islam, but he is still astonished to see Pilkings disrespecting the culture from which he comes. It's obvious that the mask retains its power for him: "Sir, it is a matter of death. How can man talk against death to person in uniform of death? Is like talking against government to person in uniform of police." Much of this scene consists of Pilkings showing just how uncomprehending and insensitive he is regarding his colonial subjects. Amusa has collaborated in the repression of his people by helping to stamp out their customs, and Pilkings insults the man nonetheless. He also insults Joseph the servant, who is a Christian, on 3038. And on 3039, it seems that Joseph is the one who makes it clear precisely what may be going on in the Yoruba town: "You mean the chief who is going to kill himself?" This is news to Jane and Simon Pilkings. On 3041, Pilkings reveal something I find interesting about his attitude, and strangely, it turns out later that it would probably have been better for him to follow his own instincts rather than try to stop what's going on. He says, "I don't have to stop anything. If they want to throw themselves off the top of a cliff or poison themselves with the sake of some barbaric custom what is that to me? If it were ritual murder or something like that I'd be duty bound to do something." He sees the King and is Chieftain-servant as nuisances and doesn't really care what happens to them. All the while, the Brits are preparing for the evening's entertainment – a ceremonial ball in honor of his Royal Highness, who is visiting the colony.

SCENE THREE

3043-47. The first half of the scene is devoted to something like a ritual humiliation of Amusa, who is clearly doing the bidding of his Imperial superiors. It is he who has tipped off the Europeans about what is happening here in the market. The women make potent jokes about his manhood or lack thereof, and it stings him to the quick. We notice that under stress, his speech alters markedly from the limited but standard British that he must speak around his employers to the mixed dialect of his own people. The little girls in particular are fun to listen to while they parody the British manner of talking and acting. That is on 3045-46. The older women rejoice in this little performance, seeing in it a great deal of strength and intelligence.

3047-51. This half of the scene, by contrast to what has gone before, is a celebration of Eleshin's masculinity as he prepares for his end. He performs the act of generation with his bride, and then begins to dance and go into a trance with the assistance of the Praise-Singer. There is a question and answer session between those two as the women dance around them. This session seems to be meant to explain the true nature of what is happening and about to happen, and it attests to the readiness of Eleshin to carry out his final action. It is not difficult to catch the sense of connection between the members of this world and the next: the Praise-Singer's words about those who inhabit the other realm do not simply exalt them, but instead an implicit demand is made that they should treat Eleshin with honor.

SCENE FOUR

3051-53. This scene opens with some British ceremony to contrast with the ritual preparation we have encountered in the first three scenes. The Resident shows himself to be a man of very little comprehension regarding Yoruba culture, even as an air of emergency is struck up at the very outset of the scene. All he can do is prattle on about how the natives like bright colors and hats.

3054-55. More interesting is the conversation between Jane Pilkings and Olunde, which is both painful and illuminating: Jane thinks that going to Oxbridge must by now have dashed out all of the ancient culture in this young Nigerian man, but it quickly becomes clear that she is mistaken. Olunde asks, "And that is the good cause for which you desecrate an ancestral mask?" And he goes on to say "I discovered that you have no respect for what you do not understand." This is on page 3054. This mask is itself an emblem for the power of the ancestors and the importance of a meaningful death in this culture. It is a culture in which the dead are not finally dead and their spirits may even be alive in the bodies of their descendents. The death mask is not a trivial cover for pleasantries but rather a conduit that links the living to the dead. Furthermore, when Jane tells him about the British man who blew himself up going down with the ship in the harbor, the anecdote only serves to show how differently the two cultures regard death. Olunde thinks the British Capt.'s actions were justified, but Jane is horrified by them. Much of this Jane seems to regard as arrogance, which is a typical charge leveled by colonial masters against their subjects.

3056-57. Olunde tries to explain what he has learned in Great Britain and from his own reflections as he matures. He tries to explain that his father Eleshin is "protected" by his own traditions and by what has already passed in the mind's eye. Apparently this is an important concept in Yoruba culture: Eleshin has already seen himself going through the ritual action he must perform; in his own eyes and in the eyes of others, he is already a dead man or rather he has passed on to another realm. He does not need protection from European authorities. Olunde's next point on 3056 is that what the white races are good at is survival, pure and simple. In other words, they can talk all they want about commerce, Christianity and civilization as did Dr. Livingston, but they are simply using others to survive. And a lot of their energy, he goes on to explain, is thrown into covering up this fundamental truth. White culture is a culture that thrives upon lying to itself about what it is up to. Olunde has learned the truth about European war from those who suffered through it in his studies as a medical student. We see that Olunde does not accept Europe's right to define his people in comparison to what the West offers as its own story.

3058-59. Olunde reveals that he himself thinks as his father does. He says to Jane, "And anyway, my father has been dead in my mind for nearly a month. Ever since I learnt of the King's death. I've lived with my bereavement so long now that I cannot think of him alive." What the both of them need to do goes beyond individual human will or weakness or grief – it is, as he says, an action to be taken for the welfare of his people.

3060-61. The confrontation between Olunde and his disgraced father is wrenching to contemplate. Olunde says only, "I have no father, eater of left-overs." The man he sees before him does not match the man he has come to contemplate and accept in his mind's eye. Neither does Eleshin think any better of himself. He has failed in what he has spent his entire life preparing to do, and that's all that matters to him now. Jane is at least sympathetic, though I don't think she really understands what's going on. This scene, which began with British pomp and pleasantry, now shows no trace of ceremony at all – just the stark confrontation between father and son.

SCENE FIVE

3061-65. Eleshin tries to explain to Pilkings exactly what he has done by preventing the ritual sacrifice. It is not merely a personal tragedy, but the world is no longer able to sleep, it is not at peace. Eleshin says that there was a particular moment related to the location of the moon that was to be his sign to move on to the next realm. The spirits had given him notice to prepare and be on his way. Yoruba religion is not particularly hierarchical, with a transcendent God or set of gods, but instead relations between this world and the other are transactional and constant. In other words, the two realms communicate. I think that's the case with a lot of cultures – it certainly would be a good description of the way the Greeks regarded the realm of Hades, this world, and Mount Olympus above. Each realm has its own prerogatives but is in communication with the others. There is no more center or security now: Eleshin says, "The world is set adrift and its inhabitants are lost. Around them, there is nothing but emptiness." He sees Olunde as his avenger – the young man has learned the white man's ways, and will find some means to make things, if not right, then at least not so unbearable. On 3063, Pilkings attempts to wield Yoruba sayings against Eleshin, but fails.

3164-65. Even so, as Eleshin explains to his own bride, there is a sting in what Pilkings had said. He tells his bride, "You were the final gift of the living to their emissary to the land of the ancestors, and perhaps your warmth and youth brought new insights of this world to me and turned my feet leaden on this side of the abyss. For I confess to you, daughter, my weakness came not merely from the abomination of the white man who came violently into my fading presence, there was also a weight of longing on my earth-held limbs. This is something like a Garden of Gethsemane moment, wherein Jesus was tempted to let the cup pass, tempted to avoid the sacrifice he knew in his heart must be made. Except that Jesus passed that test – his humanity did not keep him from accepting the heroic burden. Eleshin is very hard on himself; he feels that he has utterly failed in his duty towards his people and his king. He does not use the white man Pilkings as a means of escaping this disgrace. On 3065, Iyaloja is allowed into Eleshin's presence, and humiliates him but at the same time explains accurately the consequences of his failure.

3066-67. Iyaloja insists that Eleshin has revoked his own heroic status, and become a coward and slave to the European colonists. His life had been spent preparing for this moment of following the King as his loyal horseman, and because that was so he was treated royally, eating the best food, dressing in great style, and garnering tremendous respect from everyone around him. His whole life was a celebration in preparation for ceremonial death. He has now rendered his life meaningless. At the bottom of 3066, Eleshin again explains what he thinks is the source of the weakness that struck him down: "It is when the alien hand pollutes the source of will, when a stranger's force of violence shatters the mind's calm resolution, this is when a man is made to commit the awful treachery of relief, commit in his thought the unspeakable blasphemy of seeing the hand of the gods in this alien rupture of his world." He almost saw the intrusion of Pilkings as divine intervention. The question that Iyaloja asks Eleshin is filled with terrible import to him: "Whose trunk withers to give sap to the other? The parent shoot or the younger?" Iyaloja knows that Olunde will sacrifice himself because Eleshin has failed to do his duty. The younger man must lose his vigor and even his life to make up for what the father has done.

3068-71. The only thing left is for the death of Olunde to be attested. His body is the burden of which Iyaloja had spoken rather cryptically moments before. Eleshin must impart a secret message to the body of his son. There is no comfort for Eleshin in any of this, I suppose, for Iyaloja says to him, "The son has proved the father Eleshin, and there is nothing left in your mouth to gnash but infant gums." As Iyaloja explains directly after Eleshin strangles himself before anyone can stop him, even in the other realm, he will be treated as a lesser man than his son. There is no final redemption, no real relief at the point of death for this unhappy man. He has become the emblem of a disrespected culture. In the end, I believe Wole Soyinka is not writing only to protest imperial domination of his homeland, though that would by no means be an illegitimate thing to do. The tragedy that Eleshin suffers is indeed related to that domination, but it is not simply caused by it. His suffering and disgrace also have to do with Yoruba culture itself, for it is first and foremost within that culture that he has failed. And the weakness he describes is, I think it's fair to say, universal in its nature. It is the stuff that led Nikos Kazantzakis to write The Last Temptation of Christ. And what is that last temptation? Simply the desire to live one's life, not to be a hero, to give in to the attractions of this world. This is a harsh burden that many cultures, perhaps all of them, would impose upon the distinguished.

Week 15 -- Dadaism, Kafka, Borowski

05/04. Wed. Dada-Surrealist Poetry: A Selection (Vol. F, 2109-21). Franz Kafka. The Metamorphosis (Vol. F, 1996-2030). Tadeusz Borowski. "Ladies and Gentlemen, to the Gas Chamber" (Vol. F, 2770-86).

Dadaism Notes

Tristan Tzara


Perhaps I should not reduce what Tzara says to something that makes sense too easily, but here goes anyway: abolition of everything that has gone before, including logic, reason, order. It isn’t difficult to see how this movement can be distinguished from modernism –when the author calls for the “abolition of the prophets,” he is suggesting that spontaneity is far more important than knowing the future. The point is that a prophetic speaker speaks from profound understanding of the past and is making a prediction about the future; this kind of speaker would have a firm grip on reality, one that reaffirms reality. That is not what our author here is advocating. There is also something of an attack upon meaning itself; perhaps we can generalize the author’s phrase “lively satisfaction of knowing that it doesn’t matter” to cover just about everything he says. We might at first suppose that writing a manifesto of this sort and rejecting the past strips the present of any chance to become authentic, grounded on something stable, but that seems to be precisely the point. Dadaism talks a lot about spontaneity, and in a sense it is an attack upon the very concept of “meaning.” it is not trying to establish a new set of permanent conventions, a new and stable order of representation. Refer to Tristan Tzara’s “Proclamation Without Pretension”: he uses the word “BEAUTIFUL” to signify such a stable order. It also seems that he keeps multiplying his definitions of Dadaism – that makes sense because simple new definitions must not emerge.

On the eve of the Second World War, Walter Benjamin wrote something in “The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction” that may be appropriate here: Benjamin was interested in the potential of modern technology to liberate art and its audiences from the shackles of the past. Benjamin saw the problem with conventional museum art being that it tended to support the values of the period in which it was produced. Conventional art is inherently conservative. It ratifies the reality of which it speaks or that it presents visually.

When Dadaists conjure reality, they tend to use shocking images and dream sequences –there is a pronounced Freudian tendency in Tristan Tzara’s work and in Dadaism generally. Liberation is to be achieved from anything that ties us to the given order of things and to the given ways of doing things. Including art itself, which takes as its goal permanent defamiliarization. In that sense, Dadaism is revolutionary: consider Leon Trotsky’s notion of permanent revolution rather than a one-time event.

Kurt Schwitters

In “Anna Blume,” the author plays with pronouns in an unconventional way to suggest something like union with the beloved, but the effect is whimsical rather than solemn as in more conventional poetry. He makes an intimate association between the lady’s name and her qualities. This poem is on the one hand sensuous and sensual and yet it refuses easy definition, makes it impossible to get an ordinary realistic sense of what the lady looks like: how else are we to understand a line such as “Blue is the color of your yellow hair”? The poet does not want to capture his love object conceptually so that she is reduced to something ordinary and predictable, just another traditional, conventional Petrarchan lady. This woman’s very name “drips like softest tallow,” which suggests on the poet’s part a desire to refuse even the conventional signification implied by a name.

Paul Élouard
I like “The Mirror Of A Moment” because it suggests something like what I was saying when addressing Tristan Tzara’s manifesto: I mean that it emphasizes the present but not in a way that allows it to become solid. What do mirrors do? Mirrors present or represent reality to us without alteration, seemingly fixing it in stone. The point is to experience the present but not to solidify it and make it available for the future in some stale manner. All descriptions, all definitions, in the Dadaist context –pardon the phrase –must be self-confounding.

André Breton

“Free Union.” This is a descriptive and erotic poem that illustrates very well what I was just saying about Tzara’s manifesto and the brief poem by Élouard –we get a series of very descriptive and overlapping images, but those images do not add up to a coherent picture of the beloved. They are not supposed to. The body of the lover is generative rather than reducible to a solid set of qualities or shapes.

“Vigilance.” This poem has something like a narrative. It suggests that the poet is on a quest of some sort involving reduction by fire, or purification, and then entering a ship of infinite possibilities. Humanity is torn, unwoven, and everything is reduced to “a shell of lace in the perfect shape of a breast.”

Aimé Césaire

I gather from his selections a sense of the effect of wild nature on language and logic – it’s very much like automatic writing, as the Norton editors suggested.

Joyce Mansour

Counter-reduction might be the goal here – is often said that man objectify women, reduce them to what they want them to be. Mansour does something like that to her imagined male object as well.

Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis


There is no shortage in literary history of strange transformations. There is The Metamorphosis by Roman poet Ovid, and there is The Golden Ass by another Roman poet, Apuleius. But in those texts, the strange transformations didn’t happen without a reason that the poet cared to explain –magic was involved, or the transformed person had been trying to escape from someone pursuing him or her, or was being punished for something done. That is not the case with Kafka. His protagonist has nothing but a disorderly dream as warning for his transformation.

The story, as the Norton editors point out, is not allegorical – it is not a tale in which we are to translate the concrete, material image of a creature into some abstract quality, as when we say a lion stands for courage, and so forth. It is tempting to turn the entire story into an allegory that way, into a story that involves the coming-to-consciousness of the protagonist to his previous situation. But the problem with doing that is that Kafka focuses so intently upon the present situation. We are less concerned about the old person than we are about the current insect. I am not even sure that this “insect” is allowed to reflect a great deal on the changes that come over the members of his family as they gradually reject him. He does have powers of reflection, but obviously this is not a narrative from which he is going to emerge alive and a wiser man, or even a wiser insect. The transformation creates an impossible situation which turns fatal, as we might have expected.

Tadeusz Borowski

“Ladies and Gentlemen, to the Gas”


The worst thing about what the author describes is that it all points towards an “order of things,” not simple chaos or wild accident. People do terrible things, crimes of passion and greed are committed, and so forth, but here in the Nazi death camps we have a well-machined, competently staffed system for dehumanizing people and destroying them in the most efficient manner. And while the narrator mentions “pity” as a reason for trying to deceive the victims into thinking that they’re only going to be entering a new life instead of being marched to their deaths, I think that motive applies only to the prisoner-guards, not to the Nazis themselves: their inhumanity shows that their immediate motive for deception would have been crowd control. They wanted doomed people to do as they were told, so they needed to convince those people that things were somehow on the path to normalcy. Otherwise, chaos and unruly violence could have broken out. But it gets worse – there are unmistakable signs of a diabolical “theater of cruelty” in the behavior and language of the Nazi Offiziere and Soldaten: they take sadistic delight in using the language and gestures of civility and then lashing out with barbarous vigor at their victims. Why did they do that? Well, at one level it may have been a desperate, successful attempt on their part to maintain distance from what they were doing: turn it into a highly efficient, often repeated bit of theater, and you’re just playing a role again and again, a role that doesn’t touch you. Partly such theater seems intended to justify what’s being done, as when the Nazis invoked medical and legal language and procedure to condemn people and perform outrageous experiments on them – a show trial or a doctor’s stamp of approval allowed them to do anything they wanted. Or maybe it’s still worse in the current case, in the camps and on the loading platforms – making “theater” of the whole affair might be said to deepen or heighten its reality: the stage has that effect, you know. Children play-act to prolong the satisfaction of the game, and adults sometimes do the same. Borowski describes well how the guards banter pleasantly with one another even as they prepare to brutalize the poor souls who roll in with each train – you’d think they were on a picnic, the way they carry on amongst their peers. Try watching The Wannsee Conference, a film that chronicles the matter-of-fact way in which key Nazi officials decided on the nuts and bolts details of the Endlösung der Judenfrage (“Final Solution of the Jewish Question”) we know as the Shoah or Holocaust.

It isn’t hard to see the relevance of Kafka’s body of work here: we have an unapproachable order like the ones in his novels – an irrational and yet very efficiently managed bureaucracy against which a lone individual (or even a large group of individuals) is entirely powerless. We also confront the issue of guilt, of complicity in one’s own oppression and the oppression of others: everything comes to resemble a human food chain, with each person doing what is necessary to survive. What the Nazis announced in bold black and red was the death of the human spirit itself, or at least the death of all parts of it except what allows for the most sadistic and depraved acts imaginable.

A number of representative acts are crammed into Borowski’s brief account about being a prisoner tasked with unloading and processing the human “cargo” that came rolling in on the railroad tracks regularly to be exploited and destroyed immediately or after an agonizing stint as industrial or agricultural slaves. Guards tossing live disabled children onto a heap of corpses for immediate burning; mothers driven to abandon their children and then reproached for their “unnaturalness” in wanting to survive; crowds confined in cattle cars, gasping for air and crying for water. It’s a hellish vision created entirely by Germans who have stomped the humanity out of themselves with their own jackboots, and forcibly perpetuated in the actions of some of their prisoners, who do what they must to survive.

Week 14, Garcia Lorca, Borges, Neruda

Notes on Pablo Neruda


As for politics, well, Neruda’s a Chilean. As I’ve probably mentioned, los Estados Unidos has a long and troubled history in central and south American politics. We have generally supported the business and military interests that suit us, not necessarily the ones that would improve life for people in Chile, or Peru, or Costa Rica, or wherever in Latin America. United Fruit was huge in central America, and in Chile, for instance, you had to reckon with Anaconda and its mining interests. Such multinationals aren’t interested in nation-states except as a hindrance to the flow of capital where they – the companies – want it to go, a hindrance to how they want to deal with labor arrangements and standards, and so forth. When Chile got its independence from Spain in the 1820’s, things may have looked promising, but then the Brits sort of stepped in and got control of many of Chile’s resources, and of course the USA had interests of its own, so we tried to foil the Brits. Anyway, it gets ugly and complicated, and the worst of it is probably our campaign to discredit Salvador Allende, Chile’s socialist but legitimately elected president, in 1973. After which Pinochet established a military dictatorship. I don’t know that the CIA planned the coup itself, and considerable evidence suggests otherwise, but it’s ridiculously obvious that the US benefited from the change and that the militarists were encouraged by the money and effort we put into destabilizing Allende’s presidency.

Neruda became very much a “poet of the people.” But that title seems to come in the course of his political development towards leftism. He starts off as a love & nature poet, moves on to the impure/pure poetry debate, with the “impurists” being something like advocates for surrealist description of objects, not “ego-centered.” That’s not the same thing as realism, of course: the point is rather, I think, to embrace the fully human and reject the too-well-arranged and centered self of the bourgeois ideologue, and to embrace heterogeneity of the object world. See “Walking Around” for this influence (2443-44). In André Breton’s 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, dreams and free imagination take precedence over waking, orderly reality and its prim associations between one thing and another. In the visual arts, think Salvador Dalí. Openness to contradiction is vital. Neruda writes,

"Let that be the poetry we search for: worn with the hand's obligations, as by acids, steeped in sweat and in smoke, smelling of lilies and urine, spattered diversely by the trades that we live by, inside the law or beyond it.

A poetry impure as the clothing we wear, or our bodies, soup-stained, soiled with our shameful behavior, our wrinkles and vigils and dreams, observations and prophesies, declarations of loathing and love, idylls and beasts, the shocks of encounter, political loyalties, denials and doubts, affirmations and taxes.

The holy canons of madrigal, the mandates of touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing, the passion for justice, sexual desire, the sea sounding, willfully rejecting and accepting nothing: the deep penetration of things in the transports of love, a consummate poetry soiled by the pigeon's claw, ice-marked and tooth-marked, bitten delicately with our sweatdrops and usage, perhaps. Till the instrument so restlessly played yields us the comfort of its surfaces, and the woods show the knottiest suavities shaped by the pride of the tool. Blossom and water and wheat kernel share one precious consistency: the sumptuous appeal of the tactile.

Source: "Toward an Impure Poetry," [date 1935] in Pablo Neruda, Five Decades: A Selection ( Poems: 1925-1970), translated by Ben Belitt (New York, Grove Press, 1974), pp. xxi-xxii.

But as he develops, Neruda’s belief in the material-reality-rendering possibilities of language really comes into full play: see “I’m explaining a few things” (2445-46). Why is he rejecting flowery erotic or pastoral poesy? Well, “Come and see the blood in the streets” of Spain during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. That’s the imperative – to bring together the ordinary people against a fascist such as General Franco, whose rule, unfortunately, outlasted his allies Hitler and Mussolini right on through the early 1970s.

In the portion of Canto General that we have, the great Andes mountain, Macchu Picchu, at once seems to swallow up humanity and to become the symbol of its permanence, the permanence of Peruvian and indeed Latin American culture, in spite of what the Spaniards did to the Incas, Maya, Aztecs and other early civilizations. “The Heights” and its imagery, as the editors point out, works against pure linearity as a principle of understanding history; the technique is instead to amalgamate or fuse many memories, many images, many periods into something like a unified vision founded on hope for the future. This is a mainstay of Latin American literature, with its emphasis on what’s often called “magical realism.” The past is never entirely lost; it haunts the present but also affords vision and opportunity to those who are willing to confront and embrace it rather than deny it. All you need do is read Marquez’s Cento Años de Soledad to realize that.

I'll post notes on the other two authors as time permits....

Week 13, Luigi Pirandello

Notes on Luigi Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author

Traditionally, theater has been theorized as providing distance from “real life” so as to afford us perspective and intelligibility. Paradoxically, it achieves this distance by means of emotional intensity – dramatic illusion is actually part of the mechanics, I suppose, necessary to the moral and didactic aims of theater. Aristotle (384-22 BCE) says that of the six elements of a play (plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and song), by far the most important is plot, or mythos. That’s because the plot arranges the incidents of the drama to provide us with the pattern of a single coherent action that rivets our attention, eliciting pity (éleos) and fear or terror (phóbos); the process as a whole leads to catharsis (cleansing, purification, etc.) and, at least in the usual interpretation, teaches us something about ourselves and our relationship to other human beings and to the divine realms.

What Pirandello explores in the present play is not so much the erasure of the usual distinction between art and the rest of life, but rather an experimental alteration in the logic of dramatic illusion. It has become characteristic of post-modern drama to break this illusion or do other strange things with it, but in Pirandello’s day that was still a novelty (even though you can find it at work in Shakespeare). We are in fact watching quite a spectacle and we know that that’s what it is, of course – it’s pretty hard to get around Dr. Johnson’s C18 pronouncement, “The truth is, that the spectators are always in their senses, and know, from the first act to the last, that the stage is only a stage, and that the players are only players” and that “If there be any fallacy, it is not that we fancy the players, but that we fancy ourselves unhappy for a moment.” Still, it seems possible at times to draw in the audience until they feel as if they are something more like participants in a “happening” (to borrow a sixties word) than mere spectators of a dry proceeding on a stage. Pirandello’s way of doing this is by way of a species of mise en abîme, wherein we behold the preparations for a real play (that Pirandello himself wrote) interrupted and taken over by the realer-than-life imaginative projections of characters from an unfinished novel – these characters astonish and captivate the actors onstage, convince il produttore (who initially sees himself as pretty much what a producer is – not a creative agent like the regista or director but rather as a sort of glorified handyman seeing that everything comes off smoothly) to let things tumble on as they subsequently do: the characters generate chaos on the stage when they insist that their passionate melodrama must be acted out and expressed just as they know it has to go. It’s their sole purpose in their fictive life, after all – they’re not just actors who have memorized lines that they then have to din up the feeling to speak. It seems this author had failed them, had failed to round off the necessary actions and give the characters the relief of finality.

In a sense this is absurdist realism: it’s a trick of art to impose order and significance and comforting truisms on the events and emotions that make up life. One of the most powerful views of art is that it’s a species of illusion or deception that lends clarity to other areas of life, opens up a space for reflection on them. That view places art on the side of civilization and order. The illusion created is usually smooth, even seamless. But the modern sense of reality is permeated by complexity, incompatibilities of all kinds, and a strong dose of incoherence: in plain English, it’s messy, not an unbroken, polished surface. In so far as there’s dramatic illusion in this Pirandello play, I suppose, it’s one that tugs us into this messy modern reality: what’s taking place on the stage is supposed to capture our attention and seem real to us or at least as compelling as if it were real, at least at times. Isn’t that what Coleridge meant by “a willing suspension of disbelief”? So the question may not have so much to do with illusion but rather with the nature of the reality that we are being led to experience and contemplate. If the world beyond the play’s confines isn’t one in which people’s passions and actions are easily manageable and ordered to lead to a predictable outcome or a firm set of rules by which to live, perhaps art need not imply such a smooth and satisfying reality. Modernity tends to construe grand concepts like “civilization” itself a species of pleasant illusion or even delusion.

Not that the play is particularly bleak in what it implies about “real life.” The Father character insists that what he and the others want to put on is more real than real life or an ordinary play. His point seems to be that in everyday life, we can squirrel out of being pinned to who we are and in fact we can change somewhat, so our notions about eternal verities always turn out to be premature. By contrast, the situation he’s in is inescapable and eternal, almost a version of damnation: he must keep reliving his reality, while ours turns out to have been an illusion tomorrow. At least we can move on. And this eternal recurrence, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, isn’t one he or any of them can easily or finally embrace. I’d say the relationship the play posits between life and art is uneasy, but not necessarily that its vision of life is hopeless. The possibility of change cuts both ways: we may end up “the puppets of ourselves,” trapping ourselves into various harmful and inauthentic roles, but maybe it doesn’t have to be that way.

Week 12 -- Tagore and Mahfouz

WEEK 12. 04/13. Wed. Rabindranath Tagore. Read all selections (Vol. F, 1671-99). Naguib Mahfouz. "Zaabalawi" (Vol. F, 2527-38). Read also Volume intro "The Modern World: Self and Other in Global Context" (Vol. F, 1579-1606).

Notes on Rabindranath Tagore


Gitanjali



“Deliverance” (1674) and “At midnight the would-be ascetic announced” (1676)


“I will never shut the doors of my senses.” Tagore rejects traditional paths of renunciation, which is a strong emphasis in Hindu tradition. He casts a man who seems to be Prince Siddhartha (Buddha) as misguided, seeking after what is already available to him.


“On the Seashore” (1675)


Tagore’s poem reminds me a little of Wordsworth’s treatment of childhood in “Intimations of Immortality,” where the poet writes,


Our souls have sight of that immortal sea

Which brought us hither,

Can in a moment travel thither,

And see the children sport upon the shore,

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.


“I Won’t Let You Go” (1677)


This moving poem posits a persistent faith in the life-principle even in the face of death. What makes children perfect in their way is what they don’t understand – death. But the poet here makes even mother earth similarly naïve.


“The Golden Boat” (1681)


I find it best to read this poem as drawn from the lesson taught by Krishna that we must not cling to or try to own the results of our actions. The boat will gather the harvest and go where it will, but we will not be aboard. Maybe that’s a melancholy thought, but Krishna doesn’t describe it that way – rather, it’s supposed to be a liberating, ego-reducing thought.


“A Stressful Time” (1681-82)


If I understand the poem rightly, the speaker tells the bird that it must take flight, in spite of its blindness and the many dangers all around. I came across a statement on the Net that resonates here: “He moves with effortless ease from the literal to the symbolic, from the part to the whole, from a tiny detail to the vast cosmos.” http://nirmalyachakraborty.tripod.com/rabi.htm. The bird has only its little wings, but they will do, and have done so before, many times. Then, too, there’s something of the imperative of action in this poem: Krishna says, “If I did not act, all would come to a halt.” Each thing must do what it does, its “duty.”


“Hide-and-Seek” (1684)


Like William Blake and the English Romantics generally, Tagore privileges childhood. Here, I think, he reminds us that our way of comprehending children, reducing them to something we understand and control, is a delusion. There’s something to them that escapes our control, even our notice.


“No. 27” (1685)


Well, John Lennon said something like, “Time is well spent if you’ve enjoyed wasting it.” That’s worthy of Oscar Wilde. Here, Tagore seems to be on the same line.


“Flute Music” (1686)


What we see around us is illusion, and the differences amongst people are more apparent than real. The speaker is to some extent constrained, though, by his impoverished circumstances. He still gets his moment of transcendence, and preserves the woman from whom he fled, as a sensuous ideal.


“In Praise of Trees” (1689-90)


Ah, the arboreal metaphor: when you think of trees, you think “rootedness,” something that grows slowly and lives much longer than a human being; it has something of the seasons’ cyclical perpetuity. It provides shelter and comfort and serenity to us, and is a thing of great beauty that needs no help from us, drawing its sustenance from deeper sources than some bucket or garden hose. And of course where trees and plants go, so follow other forms of life: namely, us. Here Tagore describes this spreading of life as a kind of language, a linguistic “code” sowing meaning and intelligibility everywhere.


A few examples of trees characterized in the same way – the great tree in Odysseus’ bedroom, a symbol of his strong union with “self-possessed Penelope.” Yeats in “Among School Children”: VIII

O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H. 2.

Old Yew, which graspest at the stones
That name the under-lying dead,
Thy fibres net the dreamless head,
Thy roots are wrapt about the bones....
“On My Birthday” (1691)

This late poem offers a notable construction of language as something that came at first from nature and suffused us with vitality. That’s refreshing in that it corresponds neither to the common instrumental view – we invented language and mostly use it as a tool to get things done and communicate our wishes – nor to the idea that language is a set of arbitrary “signifiers,” as in European structuralism like that of Ferdinand de Saussure.


“Punishment” (1693)


This story begins as a male-dominated one, with brothers Dukhiram and Chidam Rui in charge of what happens. Dukhiram commits a sudden crime against his wife, while Chidam’s lie pins the blame on his own young wife, Chandara. But at 1697, just at the end of Part II, Chandara’s silence turns the tables on them: she won’t play by their rules. Trouble is, as we see in Part III, there’s no escape from the patriarchal tyranny Tagore is describing: her fidelity to her story convicts her. Still, there’s nobility in her final act of rejection: she says of her husband, “To hell with him” (1699).


Naguib Mahfouz. "Zaabalawi" (Vol. F, 2527-38).


“Mahfouz's aim is, I think, to embody ideas so completely in his characters and their actions that nothing theoretical is left exposed. But what has always fascinated him is in fact the way the Absolute--which for a Muslim is of course God as the ultimate power--necessarily becomes material and irrecoverable simultaneously, as when Gebelaawi's decree of banishment against his children throws them into exile even as he retreats, out of reach forever, to his fortress--his house, which they can always see from their territory.” “Naguib Mahfouz and the Cruelty of Memory,” by Edward Said. http://www.counterpunch.org/mahfouz.html.

Week 11, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard

Notes on Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard

Consider the play’s setting, turn of the century Tsarist Russia in the Reign of Nicholas II, son of the conservative Alexander III, who died in 1881. The Romanov line begins with Peter I “the Great” (1682-1725) who wanted to westernize Russia to some extent; Catherine II “the Great” (1762-96) is another illustrious member of the line.

Alexander I 1801-1825 (Napoleonic era)

Nicholas I 1825-1855 (status quo, empire grows; Crimean War against Ottomans leads to Western opposition)

Alexander II 1855-1881 (liberated serfs 1861, a reformer who was nonetheless killed by the Narodnaya Volya)

Alexander III 1881-1894 (conservative, didn’t follow his liberal father’s policies)

Nicholas II 1894-1917 (also conservative, defended monarchy from revolutionary pressures)

The eastern sensibility and feudal past long had a strong hold on Russia in spite of Peter the Great’s campaign to bring the country into the orbit of western Europe, and there seems to have been a distrustful relationship between the monarchy and the feudal lords. During the 1860s-70s, pressure came from the nihilists who opposed both the aristocrats and the bourgeoisie. From the 1880s onward, new pressure came from a nascent proletariat and intellectuals like Trotsky and Lenin who supported it, resulting first in the 1905 uprising and then in the 1917 October Revolution that ushered in the Soviet Union, which lasted until 1990.

Act I

The sway of the feudal past is a good entry point for Chekhov’s bitter comedy: it seems that the play’s protagonist, Lubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya, owner of an aristocratic estate with a beautiful old cherry orchard, is strongly oriented towards this past; she sees in it and in the place that embodies it a refuge from modern life, with its financial imperatives and its failure to appreciate the need for beauty, deep affection, and continuity of identity. These things are important to some of Chekhov’s characters – his plays tend to be about attitudes towards life, not about events, at least not directly. There’s one main event in The Cherry Orchard, and that’s the proposed and then actual chopping down of the orchard itself once Lopahin buys it at an auction. The other events have to do with historical developments beyond the play, not with anything the characters themselves are doing: I mean that Lubov’s plight is really that of the landowning class to which she belongs at the turn of the century; as an aristocracy tends to do, they are becoming more and more hedged in and superannuated. They may have a fine family history, but that doesn’t pay the bills. That’s worth something since, as Oscar Wilde says, “the only way to stay alive in the memory of the commercial classes is by not paying one’s bills.” Even so, not having money has a way of catching up with a person, as it does here in the case of Madame Ranevskaya.

We are also introduced to Yermolay Alexeyevich Lopahin, a prosperous merchant who comes from peasant stock –it’s undeniably his perspective that wins out in the end since he becomes the proprietor of the estate; in spite of his personal attachments to Madame Ranevskaya, who treated him and his family well, he stands firmly for modernity and utility. One doesn’t know quite what to make of him at times, as when on 1536 he calls himself a “pig in a pastry shop.” He can hardly believe how far he’s come in a short time, but such pronouncements may also mask bitterness and resentment at those whose heritage trumps his lowly upbringing.

The servants in this play also deserve attention because the clerk Yepihodov has proposed to Dunyasha the maid, even though she’s mainly interested in Yasha the valet. Together with the proposed Varya and Yermolay match, I suppose, this is where the traditional comic concern with successful marriages comes into play since the domestic arrangements of Madame Ranevskaya have been anything but comic – we find out about the death of her husband, the perfidy of her lover, and the drowning of her young son several years before the time of the play. That drowning is what makes the initial setting – the “nursery” room of the estate – so poignant. It isn’t a happy oblivion to which Madame Ranevskaya is returning after five years in Paris, but a place with both sweet and sorrowful associations. Anya is a conduit to this fact since it’s she who tells us on 1540 about Lubov’s loss of her husband and her son, Grisha.

Well, Lopahin is the man who knows what’s to be done: sto delat’, as the Russians say. Carve up the property around the orchard and the riverbank and lease the parcels to summer vacationers. Meaning, of course, that the magnificent old cherry trees would have to be cut down (1541). Old Firs (1542) remembers that they used to make good money by harvesting and drying the cherries, but that’s a lost art now. “They’ve forgotten,” he says – “Nobody remembers it.”

Towards the end of the first act, Pyotr Trofimov’s dialog with Madame Ranevskaya brings home to us the insight that her orientation towards the past is a complex, troubled one: on the one hand, the estate is a place she loves – on 1544 she speaks fondly of her “innocent childhood,” when she “used to sleep in this nursery.” At the same time, she indicates a need to forget the past: “If I could free my chest and my shoulders from this rock that weighs on me, if I could only forget the past!” Leaving it behind would, no doubt, allow her to accept the useful advice that Lopahin has given her about how to get clear of her debts and generate sufficient income. Trofimov was Grisha’s tutor, so his presence now reminds Madame Ranevskaya of the sad affair of six years ago, when Grisha drowned in the river.

Through it all, Lubov’s brother Leonid Andreyevich Gayev isn’t much help – he fancies himself quite the liberal opponent of the oppressive eighties under Alexander III, maybe even a minor version of the Turgenev-style superfluous man (1547). Leonid is capable of conceiving a number of plans to get his sister and the family out of their money troubles, but isn’t practical enough to execute any of them well. He’s a man without a point or purpose in life, and he tends to go on foolishly about things, until other characters tell him to pipe down.

Act II

In keeping with the play’s emphasis on character’s ties to and attitudes towards their own past and the present as predicament, we hear governess Charlotta musing about her personal history: “where I come from and who am I, I don’t know” (1548). Yepihodov, on the same page, comes across as a hopeless romantic, maybe a bit of a nihilist, with a comic bent. One doesn’t take him too seriously as he’s a creature of books, or so he tells us, anyway. On 1549, Dunyasha tells us that becoming part of the servant family on this estate has made her refined and fearful of change, of forces beyond her control: “I’m afraid of everything.” She also fears rejection by Yasha, that westernizing rascal of a servant to Madame Ranevskaya. She’s right about that – Yasha the allegedly overeducated man is hardly a sentimentalist, and I think Charlotta, something of the Shakespearean fool in her clarity and wisdom, sees through his act. As she says of Yepihodov, “These clever men are all so stupid….”

On 1549, Lopahin continues his promotion of the “cut and lease” scheme, while Madame Ranevskaya admits to her own frivolity when it comes to money – she is simply incapable of managing it in the thoroughly modern way. Her way is one of generous excess with unintended consequences: “the old people get nothing but dried peas to eat, which I squander money thoughtlessly.” On 1550, she provides the details of her unhappy past, what with her husband who “drank himself to death on champagne” and her son who drowned, and her lover who abused and abandoned her to the point of driving her to a suicide attempt. And “then suddenly I felt drawn back to Russia, back, to my own country, to my little girl” (1551), she reveals – this pull of the mother country is quite strong, and it has nothing to do with modernity, westernization, utility, or anything like that.

On 1552, old Firs the servant and former serf reminds us of the futility of trying to make sense of modern times – for him, liberty seems to be more confusing than exhilarating. What he misses is the human connection he felt, the feudal bond between servant and master, one which has been replaced by newfangled notions about mobility and liberty: “there’s no making out anything.” In that larger historical context, of course, this seems like a delusion, as all defenses of feudalism’s purported humaneness tend to be. Marx’s commentary in The Communist Manifesto that capitalism laid bare and owned outright the brutal exploitation of relations in pre-technical times seems on point: feudalism had only dishonestly masked the barbarity of master-slave relations, it had not constituted a bulwark against such inhumanity.

Trofimov’s modern thinking runs in that direction, too – his conversations with Gayev, Lopahin, whom he despises, and Anya are illuminating. What to do? Work, says Trofimov. Don’t look to the past with sentimentality, with nostalgia for some lost ideal, and don’t sit around like the Russian intelligentsia vainly building sand-castles in the air. The new, enlightened Russia must be built, not philosophized into existence. The irony here is that Trofimov is quite the man for waxing philosophical – advocating the centrality of work is, in fact, a central European philosophical move, as evidenced in the work of Hegel and then Marx. But at 1555, his recasting of the cherry orchard as a symbol of the oppressive past is powerful: he says such orchards symbolize Russia’s backwardness in the face of European progress. Labor in building the new Russia would be the way to expiate the landowner’s crimes of the past and pave the way for a less provincial future. Anya admits the effectiveness of this rhetoric on her, but of course she’s seventeen years old; Trofimov’s talk would have no such effect on Madame Ranevskaya, whose affection for the orchard is not so easily moved.

Towards the end of the second act, we first hear the “sound of a snapping string, mournfully dying away.” This sound and the appearance of the drunken beggar to whom Madame gives extravagantly are symbolically charged, a means of cutting through the mutual recriminations and contradictions and incompatibilities of the several characters. What Chekhov is describing, I think, is a Russia filled with competing poses and sentiments, none of which add up to a coherent picture or way of facing the present.

Act IV

What keeps the play from being a tragedy? Well, in a sense it’s simply that only old Firs the servant dies, but beyond that, the destruction of the cherry orchard also implies the possibility of letting go, of liberating oneself or being liberated from the places, things, and people that have kept one from living fully and in the present. Madame Ranevskaya really has no choice in the matter since, of course, she is in the common aristocratic predicament of being land rich and cash poor. Heritage doesn’t pay the bills, and she has no idea how to turn a profit on the estate or its produce, so Yermolay Lopahin the merchant’s advice is the only one that would have led to a way out. And he is the one who finally buys the estate and plans to chop down the orchard to make way for summer cottages and the income they will bring. Sometimes the terms “comedy” and “tragedy” are rather too narrow to do justice to a play.

Week 9, Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud

WEEK 9. 03/23. Wed. Charles Baudelaire. From Flowers of Evil (Vol. E, 1380-98). Stéphane Mallarmé. Read all poems (1398-1405). Arthur Rimbaud. Read all selections (Vol. E, 1411-18).

Charles Baudelaire. From Flowers of Evil (Vol. E, 1380-98).
Introductory: General Notes on Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life

We can use impressionism to draw out Baudelaire. It’s only the roughness of the eye that makes two things look identical. It’s getting harder to perceive anything in a fresh, accurate way. The artist must defend that capacity without rejecting modernity. To lose this ability is to lose your soul — Baudelaire borrows from Christianity (original sin, fallenness of perception, etc.) Seeing is itself a moral act. He’s one of the forebears of aestheticism. Aisthanomai means “I perceive for myself” (not as others try to make me perceive or understand). Expressive poetics aside, this is what the romantics argued when they said it was vital to strip away the “film of familiarity” and see things anew.

But Baudelaire doesn’t tell us to desert the urban site of spiritual corruption. Rather, we begin by seeing our cityscapes clearly. Artists should wrest from Parisian boulevards with their businesslike evanescence something of permanent value, something that will make us see rightly rather than accept stale, conventional perceptions. Denaturalization: art denaturalizes us to our surroundings, makes us see them like intelligent children with expressive capacity.

Baudelaire offers a few different categories for the artist and perceiver: the dandy, a haughty aristocratic pose (Brummel) that remains aloof. And there’s the flâneur, who is a figure for the poet-observer; the aim is to obtain clarity for an instant and to make art register that clarity in a crisp thought or image. Photography would be a good contemporary model: not romanticism—not individuals with their own “passions and volitions” coloring the world with subjectivity or rejecting it stormily. Rather, it is closer to the model of a roving, voracious photographer—the camera as “eye,” taking in everything as it is, this instant. To photograph is not simply to copy.

So Baudelaire captures the way modern art is of two minds about its relationship to the era. On the one hand, there’s immersion with a little still in reserve; on the other, there’s aloofness or ekstasis. In neither case is there simple realism. Even the flâneur as artist treats life as raw material. It is a point of honor to create or capture beauty in the evanescent cityscape. It seems that Baudelaire’s “doubleness” would be a good way to describe modern art, its two tendencies: and literary modernism involves both of them.

Page-by-Page Notes on Baudelaire’s The Painter of Modern Life


Beauty is a double phenomenon: an eternal element and a circumstantial element that depends on “the age, its fashions, its morals, its emotions.” Beauty is here and now, a kind of fashion and democratic realm, and aristocratic, aloof, ideal, standoffish. It is here for us but also leads us beyond the here and now. Artist’s experience themselves in dualistic terms—the pull of the body and the aspiration of the spirit, the rooted and the restless.

Baudelaire is offering a new model of subjectivity. The eye captures fleeting opportunities for clear images, the way a good photographer can catch the ineffable and render it permanently evocative in its ephemerality. Impressionism (cf the reference to Manet) is an enduring model. How does an “I” open to the world perceive the world just for this moment? Pater and Baudelaire are both insightful on this matter. And how best to “paint” my perception? Baudelaire posits a mind engaged with a modern, seemingly unaesthetic world, a world in flux yet entirely capable of offering up its beauty one instant at a time. Baudelaire’s “kaleidoscope” must be set over against high-romantic solipsism, the Byronic man.

Modernity? Well, it is the mutability of one’s age, one’s social life, and so forth, that matters. There is a modernity to be captured in every society: the ephemeral. Ignore it and you lose the chance to capture beauty whole. Only if you capture your era accurately in all its fleeting details and qualities will it pass into eternity, and become a worthy and true “antiquity” in its own right. Rejecting the present as one’s element is a mistake, just as surely as vulgar realism or mere copying would be. Beauty needs context; it isn’t a mere ideal. As Blake says, “eternity is in love with the productions of time.”

How to treat nature? Baudelaire and Wilde are similar on many issues. On art’s relationship to nature, for example—Wilde, like Baudelaire, places art higher. That is defiant pose, but it retains a tie to Schiller’s tradition of culture as an improving power. It also remains tied to romanticism’s emphasis on self-consciousness, even if the model of the self is not that of the romantic expressive individual. Wilde, too, writes that artifice is a virtue—it is natural for humans to be “as artificial as possible.”

Thoughts about the Poems

Stéphane Mallarmé. Read all poems (1398-1405).

Intro: Notes on Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Crisis of Poetry”

Mallarmé is anti-utilitarian and anti-instrumentalist: poetry is an encounter with language as language. We might, of course, ask whether or not this Mallarméan scheme takes anti-instrumentalism and impersonalism too far. It amounts to a complete divorce between ordinary language and poetic language, and perhaps therefore repeats on the level of pure language the isolation of the romantic poets from their society. At least, that’s one way of looking at the matter.

Music, for Mallarmé, is orderly and yet liberatory. We align ourselves as listeners with its successive notes, with its unfolding, and we should experience music as pure play. We should not reaffirm our personal or “tribal” power over nature, but instead connect by means of music and poetry with something beyond ourselves. Mallarmé refers to this realm as “impersonal,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is devoid of passion. Poetry is a supplement—it supplies a lack in the ordinary.

The “French Revolution II” is the movement from the Alexandrine verse of Racine and Corneille to free verse, vers libre. This change is no doubt allied with a shift in social and political arrangements from monarchical, semi-feudal to modern, parliamentary, commercialist nineteenth-century society. Mallarmé isn’t in favor of middle-class vulgarity and self-satisfaction, but the breakup of the Alexandrine is an opportunity not to be missed. It’s an opportunity for poetry to become what it ought to be—both sensuous and ideal, an order that liberates all who come to it. It ought to be personal and yet lead us beyond personality.

The Alexandrine imposed a false decorum and order upon language, taming and imprisoning it. Language was therefore used to ratify conservative French values. Mallarmé’s poetics are anti-instrumentalist, just as he is anti-Cartesian more generally—against the preeminence of mind as opposed to matter, reason as opposed to passion. As for ordinary language, we “use” it to express our feelings and ideas (romanticism) and to refer to things in the external world (realism, everyday living). Both uses are instrumental, and they falsify experience and even the meaning of being human. Language thereby becomes a mere tool shed full of implements, not the House of Being. The point seems to be to get back to a moment before our senses and capacities were so ruthlessly sundered by social imperatives and philosophical constructs, back to a more genuine kind of experience.

But Mallarmé considers language more worthwhile than the fake “autonomous individual” who uses it to shore up a narrow sense of self and world, more worthwhile than the everyday business that can be transacted with it or within its sphere. This anti-middle-class sentiment makes language the new principle of aristocracy, the ennobling force, the power that lets us keep contact with mystery, with “play” (jouissance, as in Barthes and Derrida) and with the holy (Heidegger). Yet, the realm of Language isn’t an empty externality, a metaphysical far-away place we can command. The goal isn’t facilely to get there from here since that would be to commit the same error as instrumentalists commit.

As the Beckett character says, “what matter who is speaking?” Ordinary speech disappoints us because it doesn’t correspond to real-world qualities when we expect it to. We aren’t gods and cannot achieve a one-to-one correspondence between words and things. (Perhaps this is what Paul de Man refers to when he says that even Mallarmé leaves the supremacy of nature untouched.) But poetry liberates us from such selfish demands for pedestrian intelligibility; it’s an impersonal language where the Ideal is at play. It creates an order that we can enter, a sort of mystical realm. There is no need, as far as Mallarmé is concerned, to turn to the “author-function” (as Foucault calls it) as a principle of interpretive stability.

Evocation and suggestion are better than fact. In somewhat plain terms, we might say that they lead us to a better realm than the everyday one we usually inhabit. Mallarmé might be described as a Platonist, but again that would be rather misleading. He isn’t really pushing a movement from a deluded “here” to a metaphysical “there.” In his view, it seems, language itself is the realm of purity; language is a here-realm of pure play, not a beyond of the sort that philosophical realists posit. Even so, it seems that Mallarmé invests a great deal in this order of language. The Symbolists generally treat language as having magical incantatory power, and (following Schopenhauer), as a refuge from human will and strife. Yeats describes the city of Byzantium in this manner; the holy city disdains “All that man is, / All mere complexities, / The fury and the mire of human veins.”

Mallarmé suggests in his prose an interest in turning what Nietzsche calls the abstraction-making power of language (its tendency to lie about the referential world), to account as music, as suggestibility that creates its own order. Mallarmé is not out to shore up the triumphant individual ego, the narrow shopkeeper-self in us all. Instead, he wants to see the triumph of language with a capital “L,” language as its own order, one that liberates us into what Heidegger will later call “the light of Being.” Language isn’t a tool shed; it is the dwelling-place of genuine humanity.

Faune: Two levels or registers are often being pursued, as in the Faun poem – as the editors say, it’s an erotic poem rather like a classical idyll, and at the same time it makes sense to read it almost in the manner that one reads STC’s “Kubla Khan” -- as a poem about the creation and reality-status of poetic language itself. Did the Faun actually possess the nymphs? Even he isn’t certain either way, and one wonders how much it really matters, if language and imagination are realms all their own, with equal status. Or you can go all absolutist on us and ask, might this poem be about the pursuit of an absolute ideal (Venus?) that remains always out of reach? But again, how much, if at all, does it matter if we can’t get there from here, can’t attain the pure ideal? Don’t we need it anyway?

Poe’s Tomb: I suspect that what they like comes from Poe’s prose – his command over human emotions, his ability to summon up a mood and then construct a poem like “The Raven” to make it happen in his readers. The order of language and its effects takes precedence over the people who come to the poetry. Works like magic. At his best, Poe writes stories and a few poems that have a hypnotic effect on us. You go Poe!

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
`'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door -
Only this, and nothing more.'

Weeks 7-8, Gustave Flaubert

CPLT 325 WEEK 7. 03/09. Wed. Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary (Author bio. Vol. E, 1084-88, novel parts 1-2: 1088-1227). Read also Section Intro: "Realism, Naturalism and Symbolism in Europe" (Vol. E, 1071-83)

CPLT 325 WEEK 8. 03/16. Wed. Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary (Vol. E, 1227-1301).

Balance between the narrator's (a schoolfellow of Charles, it seems) contempt for Emma and Charles and at least some sympathy for them. Concentrate on substantial passages in which Emma's sensualism and aesthetic longings are laid bare, along with Charles' cluelessness and mediocrity.

Augustine – in his case, the aesthetic longing led beyond itself to genuinely spiritual strivings and accomplishments; not so in Emma's case. But why? Perhaps because in her world, that of a well-off peasant woman in mid-century provincial France, nothing leads beyond itself. Her aspirations are a mix of vivid sensations hitched to vague longings for a better life, a life to be filled with fine material things, but with romance and passion and intrigue as well. Are her longings themselves to blame, or should we blame the ruthlessly deterministic crushing of them by her environment? Or both? It seems to me that this environment is one with which we're somewhat familiar: one that's beginning to look rather like Guy de Bord's "society of the spectacle," in which simulacra are constantly served up to us to serve somebody else's interests. What exactly is Emma consuming but fashion magazines, romantic novels, and fine material items from Monsieur Theroux? Who today isn't familiar with a society of easy but ruinous credit, based on certain assumptions about social and economic status and expectations? Sure, we the lenders urge you to buy that million-dollar home in the suburbs even though your income can't sustain it. Everybody's doing it! And so forth. How many people have maxed out their credit cards buying nice things they really don't need? Capitalism thrives on desire, not need. More particularly, it thrives on confounding the distinction between desire and need. Welcome to perpetual retail therapy, with the local mall – in our case the storied U of South Coast Plaza – as Mecca for constantly primed consumer-citizens. And then of course there's the raciness of such a society – we must constantly be thinking about sex because that's mainly what sells products. Emma's erotic longings are at least in part driven by novels, magazines, fine things and the promise of more of them: those things and images fill a void in her spirit that may not be caused by the society in which she lives – I'd say it's instead fundamentally human – but that isn't healed by that society. She hasn't much to work with, in the final analysis. Lack of originality might not be a problem – if, that is, Flaubert is suggesting it is one – if the environment allowed each person to experience the same good things for themselves. But obviously Emma's options are quite limited, given where she's from and where she now is, in provincial France near Rouen, 1840, in the reign of the bourgeois King Louis Philippe.

This is certainly realism with an attitude -- we are let in on Emma's thought processes, but at times in a clinical manner that makes it clear the narrator has little respect for what she thinks are her terrible struggles and wild aspirations. Who is this narrator, anyway, and why is he able to be so dispassionate when he comes from much the same place as Charles? Or was he among the richer students, as there were some of them? That's my assumption since he seems to be able to wrap his mind around Charles and Emma so easily. Well, we might consider by way of challenge to this sarcastic emphasis the extent to which it's actually possible to sympathize with Emma and take her part against everything and everyone ranged against her.

Part 1, Chapter 1

Questions/comments: why start with Charles? Well, I suppose we need to know what's in him. What will Emma have to work with? Not a lot, it seems – the parents are a work of art, with dad a second-rate retailer of Revolutionary primitivist ideals. Charles doesn't measure up even to that nonsense.

Part 1, Chapter 2

Questions/comments: Circumstance, opportunity is almost fiendish in its appeal to the pedestrian instincts of such characters as Charles – they're passive, just take what comes their way.

Part 1, Chapter 3

Questions/comments: Same comment as for Ch. 2 – opportunity accepted. Emma, we see, is budding romantic – this wedding establishes the pattern; she ends up accepting the commonly done thing, the cultural script, custom and tradition.

Part 1, Chapters 4-5

Questions/comments: GF determined to describe everything in minute detail. Why? It's more than authorial pride, I think – he sees realism as a duty. To understand Emma's reality, I suppose, is to know her plight. In this sense, the descriptions of homes and locales, etc. is loaded towards sympathy with her.

Part 1, Chapter 6

Questions/comments: Emma's memories, a precocious aesthete! Emma loves the mystery-suggestive surface of things. I can't really blame her for this – it's just who she is. Mention the Augustinian context: signs leading us onwards to spiritual understanding. But of course it doesn't work that way here – the written influences, etc., just lead to rebellion, dissatisfaction with dull, insightless authority.

Part 1, Chapter 7

Questions/comments: The first of several instances in a pattern of hopes raised and dashed that wears her down eventually. Emma's detached and resentful stance against poor Charles, who has no interiority and can't recognize anyone else's, gives way to hope in the form of an invitation beyond her station: "betters."

Part 1, Chapter 8

Questions/comments: Emma's ecstasy gives way to stark disillusionment, a rage that causes her to mistreat others.

Part 1, Chapter 9

Questions/comments: Neither Charles nor his professor can conceive of a woman having an inner life in anything other than purely "medical" terms: basically, this is like the American Mitchell's "rest cure" about which Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote so well. Pregnancy is brought in in that stark way it often is: a sudden question mark, a game-changer. How will this inflect Emma's emotional path?

Part 2, Chapters 1-2

Questions/comments: Okay, hope-inducer #2: Léon the Naïve. Consider closely exactly what draws Emma and this young man together: what is the ground of their affinity? I'd say they've found in those sentimental books and ideas an objective correlative for their own perfectly unoriginal longings for something better.

Part 2, Chapter 3

Questions/comments: This chapter renders Emma's thoughts about gender – her desire for a male child makes sense. She and Léon cause some rumors to float about – typical small town, everybody knows everybody and people will be talking. Partly that's moralism, partly it's that they have nothing better to do. Flaubert does a good job of delivering to us, especially, just how oppressive life could be in a little town.

Part 2, Chapters 4-5

Questions/comments: More bonding with Léon over that sentimental and idealistic stuff – have a look at some of it. This is a good chapter to examine the psychological process of compensation as denial that GF so often attributes to Emma. Emma is like an actress playing a role, but inwardly she is going crazy with frustration and desire. Monsieur Lheureux's timing is, of course perfect, almost diabolical – he represents the vapidity of materialist culture at its worst: an endless succession of things to which we can attach our desires. But these things don't lead up and out; they just lead in a circle chaining us to our pettiest, objectified desires.

Part 2, Chapter 6

Questions/comments: Church bells – as George Herbert says, "something understood"? No, not in this novel – Emma's old aestheticism comes to a false rescue. The Abbé is truly a one-dimensional man, has absolutely nothing to offer Emma except some dietary advice. Stomachs, not souls, are his concern. This is a savage, almost Voltairean portrait of the Catholic Church at the local level coming from GF.

Part 2, Chapter 7

Questions/comments: Emma relapses into illness, and now we're introduced to a new sort of consciousness: the wily cad Rodolphe. He's a sexual predator, and nothing more, whatever his capacity to cover nature with artifice. A perfect embodiment of the sharklike environment GF is describing: assume others are wicked or shallow, and treat them accordingly. The objectification Rodolphe practices almost makes us appreciate plodding, kind Charles. Almost.

Part 2, Chapter 8

Questions/comments: Well, it doesn't get any better than this – a show! But the boring speeches are masterfully interwoven with Rodolphe's sleazy, slick courting of Emma. Worth looking at for GF's skill with dialogue at cross-purposes. While the pol pitches vapid patriotism, R serves up an enticingly spiced bowl of nothing to Emma.

Part 2, Chapters 9-10

Questions/comments: Focus on the mild resistance and easy seduction scene here. Yet Emma is transcendent, one with her romance heroines after this banal experience. Rodolphe's thoughts are rather interesting, too – the difference between how he processes her appeal, and she his. But Emma's guilt soon reasserts itself – she'll never cut the mustard with Nietzsche!

Part 2, Chapter 11

Questions/comments: Nothing like a botched surgery to liven things up. "Losing!" GF's medical descriptions are impressive. Charles is an idiot, so Emma excuses all her bad behavior – not one of her finer moments in the novel. Nice portrait of a more respectable country doctor – see his matter-of-fact amputation job.

Part 2, Chapters 12-13

Questions/comments: Emma's self-pity is nauseating here, and Lheureux's timing is again impeccable. Focus on how predictably the whole elopement plan falls apart, with Rodolphe's letter-box musings leading him back to the stony narcissism that defines him. Emma suffers he third bout of illness – this time it's quite serious.

Part 2, Chapters 14-15

Questions/comments: Money asserts itself – again, Lheureux's baneful influence. Charles is ensnared, too. Emma's turn to religion is again in vain. And the theater episode simply defies belief – Charles can't figure out why he shouldn't leave a young man alone with his flighty, susceptible wife. The man belongs in a Chaucerian farce, except that he's so nice!

Part 3, Chapters 5-6

Questions/comments: Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive! The two lovers are deceiving themselves, sentimentalizing what they’re up to and who they are; the materialization of Emma’s airy fantasies is commodities – fine stuff brought to you directly from the U of SCP, Yonville. Lheureux has a field day now that he suspects her adulterousness. Emma's turn to religion is again in vain, and her tastes run to the corrupt and decadent; even Léon is tired of her. What makes her common is that her efforts tend to go in the most predictable destinations.

Part 3, Chapter 7

Questions/comments: The law closes in on Emma (and Charles), and there’s no help anywhere. Illusions are just about entirely stripped away at this point, with Emma more or less resorting to an attempt at prostitution.

Part 3, Chapter 8

Questions/comments: Consider how accurate the poisoning effects are; Flaubert evidently knew a lot about the subject, did his homework. Emma dies hard, since a heavy dose of arsenic isn’t an easy way to go. Arsenic is a heavy metal like lead and mercury, and the symptoms are horrifying to behold.

Part 3, Chapter 9-11
 
Questions/comments: The ending seems almost sneering in its matter-of-fact handling of the Bovary family’s devolution, downward mobility. It’s hard to forgive Charles for forgiving Rodolphe, and the economic sins and omissions of the parents are visited on Berthe. These final chapters take on the caste almost of an anti-bourgeois Grimm’s fairy tale, as commercial and social reality close in on the Bovarys and finally crush them like ants under someone’s boot. The amoral Homais is the only winner in this situation – he’s too shallow even to have a conscience, and he prospers. He’s a creature of his environment. After Emma’s gruesome death, old patterns reassert themselves for most of Yonville; only Charles seems transformed – I like him the better for it, but of course the change proves to be the death of him. It seems like a bit of a Romantic flourish on Flaubert’s part, but you could also say Charles is merely imitative in his love and admiration for Emma, so much so that he even copies her tastes. Emma’s rejection of the oppressive environment, we might say, makes her, too, a creature of it, but not an adaptable one – her attempts to break out of the mundane world surrounding her, to realize her true individuality or authenticity, come to nothing and she takes her husband and child down with her. In the end, it doesn’t matter. So that’s the upshot of Flaubert’s realist method: to render a banal, materialistic provincial society in exquisite detail, heaping contempt on its values and suggesting that there’s really no way out once you’re born into such a society.


Which brings us to the value of realism – its primary virtue is honesty in representation, an unsparing commitment to craft and to truth in analyzing and describing characters and their environments. Often there’s a political and critical edge to such work – consider George Orwell’s realistic accounts of the Spanish Civil War, or the element of realism in 1984, with its gritty portrayal of a fictional authoritarian regime not unlike the Soviet Union or perhaps Nazi Germany. But as for the mid-C19 realism represented by Flaubert, it has its defenders and detractors. Henry James, writing towards the end of the nineteenth century, insisted that people shouldn’t make too many demands on novelistic form or content because it’s the high privilege of novelistic fiction to capture and render life as it is, to embrace the world as best we can determine what it is, how it works. At the other end of the spectrum would be critics such as Oscar Wilde, always the lover of symbolism, comedy of manners, and in general any kind of art not tied to the doctrine that art consists in an “imitation of life.” Wilde can come across as sort of glib about such matters, but his dislike for most realism is insightful: he thought art and literature should help us realize our own imaginings, that it should enrich and ennoble life, give us visions of something and somewhere and someone better – not just show us “the way things are.” What ought they be like? That’s not just smugness or aristocratic posing on his part, or on the symbolists’, either – it’s a view going all the way back to Plato’s distrust of poets as “liars” who just follow their own inspiration or desires rather than rendering for us a vision of beautiful order by which to live. Of course, Plato thought this so-called world of appearances was itself already a pack of lies – even if you copied things as they seem to be, you’d still be lying, as far as he is concerned. But the C19 realist felt committed to describing things as they are, here at the material and social level. They did not idealize or prettify what they saw.

Week 6, Alexander Pushkin

Week 06.  3/02. Wed. Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin. "The Queen of Spades" (Vol. E, 863-83).

European Romanticism and Pushkin

Pushkin is in a sense a kindred spirit to Goethe; I mean that while both are associated with European romanticism, neither is easily confined to that category. Goethe's work shows him to be something like an historian of romanticism as an international movement and a concept or set of attitudes and beliefs about art and society. Pushkin keeps his distance from romanticism's intuitionism and emphasis on passion as salvational. He befriended Nikolai Gogol', another of Russia's finest writers. All in all, it's difficult to fit Russia's literary productions neatly within pan-European categories except for realism during the mid-to-late nineteenth century with Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, Chekhov and Maxim Gorky. On the whole, however you classify the authors, what they produced during the C19 is among the world's greatest literary flowerings, rivalling that of the Elizabethan period's drama and poetry or the British Romantic movement led by Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats, and Shelley, with Jane Austen beside them for Regency (1811-20) emphasis. 

Пиковая дама, Queen of Spades

The story "Queen of Spades" certainly casts its characters as driven by various passions, but there's nothing particularly salvational about such deep feelings and obsessions. Instead, a character like Hermann is driven by money; his need to come by a fortune overwhelms any sense of decency or chivalry he might have had, and his relationship to Lisaveta Ivanovna is purely an object-relation. His imagination becomes fixated on those cards.

Genuine religious feeling is replaced by superstition, and love is a construct of social codes, for the most part. The Countess keeps Elizaveta in thrall to her needs.

The old Countess, as the Norton editors point out, is at the center of this kind of society; she is essentially a worn-out, corrupt old woman who followed her own passions and whims in her day, and the truth is that she hasn't changed in that regard. Her prototype seems to have been rather badly dealt with since she was a famous and accomplished woman: Princess Natalya Petrovna Galitzine, née Chernysheva or Chernyshyova (17 January 1741, St. Petersburg, Russia – 20 December 1837).

The fancy card games they play – faro and such – here seem like a metaphor for the vapidity of the characters' lives. They don't do much honest work, but rather spend their time gambling, trading on their established positions to get still more reputation and wealth. Pushkin's view of this world is scathing, which makes sense because he was a reformist and had friends who participated in the so-called Decembrist Uprising against the new Tsar Nicholas I in 1825, who succeeded Alexander I of the Napoleonic Era (1799-1815; Napoleon became First Consul by a coup in 1799, Consul for Life in 1802, and Emperor in 1804; at war with Brits from 1793 onwards, but 1803-15 most intensively).

In a French deck, the Queen of Spades is pictured as the Greek goddess Athena. I suppose Russian aristocrats would have been using a French deck, so the association may be pertinent. The Countess is an impressive figure, an imposing woman who showed genuine independence of spirit in the fashion of the European Enlightenment, during the 1770's, which is the period Pushkin allies her with by her insistence on keeping up that time's fashions.

Week 5, Goethe

NOTES ON GOETHE'S FAUST, PART 1

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Faust (Vol. E, 678-780). Read also Section Intro: "Revolution and Romanticism in Europe and America" (Vol. E, 651-61).

European Romanticism of Herder, Rousseau, Goethe, etc.

Neoclassical and Enlightenment thinkers tended to emphasize the orderly collective, the reason-based and structured community, with perhaps "the passions" yoked as instruments in the service of reason. (See Plato's Phaedrus for its depiction of the fiery steeds of good and bad passion, both of which need to be controlled by Reason, which alone guides us towards the Good and the True.)

The Romantics emphasize the potential of the individual – some of their favorite notions are imagination, genius, particularity, passion – that is, the individual in all his or her eccentricity and emotional intensity, in fact, is often set forth as the universal. William Blake is the strongest advocate for that kind of striving towards the universal not as a neoclassical abstraction but instead as something inextricable from that which embodies it. "One thought fills immensity," he says, and how about his opening to "Auguries of Innocence"?

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

Walt Whitman sings a "Song of Myself" that turns out to be a song about everybody else at the same time, no? But all this is common to Romantic thought, in one way or another. It is intuition, emotion, imagination, and in some versions (Wordsworth and Rousseau, for example) love of natural beauty and process, that grounds our hopes for progress, for transformation, and a more beneficial and free social order.

Neoclassical and Enlightened art sometimes amounts to a Horatian uplift or affirmation campaign based on "imitation" (mimesis), with the aim being to give you what you have already been led to think, only in a more elegant, memorable form: "whatever is, is right," as Alex Pope says. The artist chooses to represent and ornament a good, rational order as the ideal, and make us fall in love with it. (This need not involve lying about the way things really are at present.)

Romantic art can be isolated, brooding and withdrawn (examples would be Byron's Manfred on the alpine mountaintop, or Shelley's poet-nightingale singing to soothe itself), but often it is confrontational, expressive, ambitious. Both expressive theory and mimetic theory tend to advocate an ethics and an agenda, but the ethics and agenda are very different. Romantic art wants to change you, shake you up; Romantic lyric and music want to turn your head, refocus your attention, start the social and perceptual revolution with you – yes, you! Neoclassical satire, by contrast, may be wonderfully confrontational, but in a piece like Candide, Voltaire wants to tear down your delusions and propose rational, particular "fixes" or offer limited, sage advice; that is because Enlightened thinkers deal with society and man as a kind of machine or edifice, while the Romantics conceptualize society as a living, changing organism, and one moving pretty quickly towards liberation and self-expression, at that. Who knows where the changing will take us, or even whether it will end?

In an even broader context beyond art, this organic/emotional versus mechanical/rational contrast profoundly affects European politics from the C18 onward. The American Founders, men of the Enlightenment, drew up contracts of sorts, documents enumerating grievances and setting forth rational, discrete "fixes" and constraints. That's where we get the salutary notion that there ought to be limits on what government can do to us or make us do to others. The French Revolution might have begun that way, but it turned into something much more organic, expressive, dynamic, violent, and transformational. France was never the same after the Revolution of 1789: it led to a near-total alteration of society and politics. I think our Romantic moment or baptism of fire came with the Civil War – Lincoln's Gettysburgh Address reads like it was written by an expressive poet, and he speaks of the birth and death of nations, and of souls struggling to break free. But it's fair to say that America didn't come into its own until the First World War, when our power became manifest as we helped to settle a great European struggle.

Having said all this, I should add the following: Romantic art is not only ambitious, it is at the same time intensively self-reflective, intensely self-questioning and philosophical – it turns on its own central concepts and submits them to the fires of introspection and critique. It's true that the Enlightenment fostered the spirit of critique, most notably in the formulation of Kant's injunction sapere aude. But Romanticism does this with unparalleled feeling and intensity. So ideas such as intuition, imagination, revolution, social and poetic/linguistic organicism, etc. – are by no means left unquestioned. Emotion or passion is construed as the ground of human universality, yet who has more closely looked into the risks of such deep passion, the possibility that it may take a tailspin towards mere fantasy, irrationalism, self-delusion, and despair? Who has noticed and reflected more darkly on the potential that imagination has not only to renew the world but also to trap us with its own productions and isolate us from humane engagement with things and people as they are? Who has more strongly emphasized that glorifying "the individual" at the expense of the community might well lead nowhere but to narcissism, solipsism, and incomprehensibility? Or that it might in fact worsen the primal eldest curse, alienation, which, after all, Romantic poets and other artists tend to take as the absolute precondition of authentic humanity? Count Manfred on the Alps is grand, but not a happy man. Besides, the Romantics themselves weren't generally so superior and removed: Lord Byron died of a fever in 1824 helping the Greeks organize the fight for their independence from the Ottoman Empire (1821-30). Not exactly an alienated recluse, was Byron – he was more like a rock star with a scandalous personal life and a principled politics.

With this mention of "passionate self-critique," we should move right into Goethe, who was both an early proponent of emotionalist art or "Sturm [stormy passion] und Drang [impulse or stress]" (as in Werther) and a critic of that impulse when, along with Friedrich von Schiller and others, he moved towards what came to be known as "Weimar Classicism" (Weimarer Klassik) from the 1770's through the first decades of the C19. To be sought were balance and perspective in and through art and artistic education. The aim was to promote human integrity, wholeness, clarity well-roundedness – to synthesize the best of the Romantic and the Enlightened outlooks. Read Schiller's brilliant Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man -- I can't recommend this book highly enough as a meditation on the difficult but ultimately promising relationship between aesthetics, society and political change. Anyhow, in Goethe we see not only the propensity for self-criticism but also a particularly strong dose of wit and humor in doing so – he's quite the intellectual's poet, isn't he! In truth, his own erudition probably rivaled that of Doctor Faust, since there's just about no branch of learning in which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe didn't dabble in a long life that stretched from 1749-1832. He was a true polymath – artist, scientist, philosopher, you name it.

The Protagonist, Heinrich Faust:

Marlowe's Faustus was nobler in that he at first made his pact with the devil's helper because of his desire for forbidden but genuine knowledge: ultimate understanding of the universe and its secrets. True, he also wanted to experience the sensual side of life to the fullest.

Goethe's Faust makes his bargain when he has already rejected the quest for such ultimate knowledge. Now what he wants is more human extremes, a total openness to experience of any kind, be it pleasure or pain. In sum, he aligns himself with his own romantic or "Sturm und Drang" definition of human nature as restless, perpetually unsatisfied and striving. The way up is through humanity itself, the inner space of human nature, so to speak.

Margarete, or Gretchen:

She is somewhat more complex than what we might expect: she isn't as pure as Faust insists she must be: she is easily seduced with gifts and kind words, and puts up no real resistance to Faust's advances. She isn't bad – just ordinary, basically a good woman in difficult circumstances. After all, Mephistopheles had said the witch's potion would make Faust think every woman Helen of Troy.

Mephistopheles:

Goethe has updated him and given him a wry sense of humor – a new tradition that lasts to this day. Gretchen sees him in his lineaments nonetheless: repulsive, unsympathetic, antipathetic to love's attractive power.

What is Goethe apparently trying to accomplish with this respinning of the old story in which a learned doctor is condemned for seeking forbidden knowledge at the expense of his humanity?

He turns the usual moral fable neatly on its head: our incompleteness is our greatness; that's the new Romantic paradigm. But the lesson and path are more complicated than that. Goethe is mature enough to act as historian and philosopher to the movement with which he is associated, European Romanticism. Faust's pursuit of extreme experience is by no means purely admirable: in fact, it begins with a species of utter boredom and a self-pitying kind of irony: "Was it for this empty, high knowledge that I've spent so much of my life?" In the end, Faust isn't condemned in Part 2 as we expected he would be. His movement away from narcissism and towards compassionate intersubjectivity is enough to earn God's favor. But the narcissism is there, and it's acknowledged rather than papered over.

For further discussion, refer to the audio mp3 file of my comments in class, available from www.ajdrake.com/wiki.

Week 4, Voltaire

NOTES ON VOLTAIRE'S CANDIDE


François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire. Candide (Vol. D, 517-80). Read also Section Intro: "The Enlightenment in Europe" (Vol. D, 295-303).

What are the basic premises of the European Enlightenment and of philosophes such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, d'Alembert, Diderot, and Montesquieu?
1. Universe is intelligible and orderly, governed by natural forces we can comprehend by the use of reason and applied science. Deism is a religious corollary, and so is an insistence on observing tolerance and following moral standards that we have drawn mainly from within ourselves.

2. Individuals and indeed human history can be understood on rational terms. Knowledge implies responsibility for exercising control over ourselves individually and our affairs collectively.

3. Humanity is improvable, perfectible. Locke's tabula rasa notion of childhood stresses education since environment is critical. We can make progress in science, government, and society.

4. Notions of perfectibility, knowability, and control lead to a democratic impulse in Enlightenment thought, even if many intellectuals favored "enlightened autocrats" like Frederick the Great.  If we made our own institutions over time, we can change them when they no longer suit us.

The Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) sums up the European Enlightenment well. Kant said that the essence of the Enlightenment could be captured in the phrase sapere aude, “Dare to Know.” Humans possess the power of reason, and they are responsible for knowing the sources, operational principles, and limits of that power. That is what the three famous Critiques are for: Critique of Pure Reason (how we can perceive and know); Critique of Practical Reason (Ethics); Critique of Judgment (Aesthetics). We are free rational and moral agents living in a world that we ourselves largely render intelligible by means of our powerful mental faculties. We are not determined by nature or bound to natural necessity; we give laws to Nature, and our standards derive not from an external source (God) but rather from our own capacity to act morally.

Voltaire and the French philosophes were publicizers, popularizers, and practical reformers, not ivory-tower thinkers.

Voltaire was exiled for a while to England for insulting a French nobleman, the Chevalier de Rohan. He favored a dash of English government and British empiricism – healthy alternatives for French Cartesian rationalists and political absolutists. He opposed Europe's addiction to war, issuing the remarkable comment (to paraphrase), "murder is strictly punished unless you do it in great numbers and to the sound of trumpets." He also favored civil liberty and opposed the Catholic Church in his famous cry, "écrasez l'infâme," by which he meant superstition and bigotry, in particular the Catholic Church with its long history of persecution against free-thinkers and intellectuals. This sentiment is optimistic because it assumes that removing obstacles systematicaly will open the way to improvement of the human condition.

In Candide Voltaire is considering the problems of personal autonomy, determinism, and the possibility of social and political justice. It's all well and good to cook up theories and "oughts," but how have people always treated one another? There's plenty of evidence for a strong search into that question, so let's have a look. Well, let's have an an outrageously satirical, over-the-top look, anyway. Yet, how far beyond realism are the events of Candide? Is human history devoid of brutal sadism and torture, mass rape, horrible pestilence, total war, and so forth? No! It's an awful thought, but what you get in Candide – silly stuff about El Dorado and all the ridiculous recognition scenes aside – is concentrated realism. A modern equivalent might be something like Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, though that film is considerably more pessimistic in its outcome than Voltaire's text.

In a sense, Candide is atypical of Voltaire as a philosophe, or at least it isn't to be taken on its own, in isolation from his larger body of work. Rather we should probably read it as an antidote to the mistaken assumption that Voltaire might run to extremes in his bold advocacy of humanity's prospects in the face of a long, ridiculously hideous history constituting evidence to the contrary. Candide deflates the scientific pretentions, the cocksure absurdity of the -ism associated with the late C17 rationalist philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in particular: optimism. Voltaire doesn't reject optimism in a general, non-philosophical sense. Rather he tries to prevent it from rigidifying into a system of the sort that Dr. Pangloss advocates. Whenever that happens to a philosophy, it loses much of its insight and value. He's a philosophe, not a dogmatist. To be hopeful and positive-spirited is not to be an oblivious fool. Vigilance is the watchword, and the upshot of Candide, the moral lesson, is simply we must cultivate our own gardens. In other words, keep it real and do something tangible that benefits you and those around you. Do not fail to see what's really going on, and don't build intellectual and desire-based sand castles in the air. But don't give up, either -- that just runs against human nature and it makes life impossible, stagnant, intolerable.


Main Points about Candide: The text confronts you with raw experience, shocking things. This representation dumps a vat of acid on C18 optimist and rationalist pretentions, corroding the frameworks commonly used to control and understand people and things. The point is to reveal the underlying reality of events and circumstances. Voltaire is, therefore, a good Baconian empiricist and an honest historian, and optimistic views don't correspond to real life. We might be able to see that if we just stopped blurting out formulae and precepts and instead opened our eyes. As they say, "denial isn't just a river in Egypt," and a huge amount of human energy seems to go towards the denial of everything from our own mortality to the atrocities we are capable of committing. And truth, as Nietzsche will later inform us to our discomfiture, very often looks suspiciously like a species of error that makes us feel good about ourselves. In the best sense, this philosophe Voltaire is anti-systemic in his insistence on vigilance, his opposition to religious and philosophical dogma.

Let's run through the text's highlights....


For further discussion, refer to the audio mp3 file of my comments in class, available from www.ajdrake.com/wiki.