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.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
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.
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.'
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.'
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