Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Men of Mathematics
As part of my ongoing investigation into the vagaries and varieties of human genius, I am currently reading E. T. Bell's "Men of Mathematics" (1937) as a counterweight to Bloom's analysis of merely verbal genius. Bell looks at 33 mathematicians, plus 8 members of the Bernoulli family (which I will discount from any national distribution as being problematical: are they Swiss or Belgian or Flemish? Any advice on this question will be appreciated.)
Monday, October 11, 2010
Better to Rule in Hell . . .
I must confess from the outset to an absolute antipathy to John Milton that is entirely divorced from his poetry. Ever since earliest childhood, as far back as the first time I read about Edgehill and Naseby and Marston Moor, I have been an unrepentant Cavalier and have roundly despised the Parliamentarians. I would like to believe that I based this upon the iconoclasm and know-nothingism of a Puritanism that regarded a theatre performing "Hamlet" or "Twelfth Night" as a den of iniquity that could not be suffered to remain open, but this may be a rank misremembrance. Quite frankly, to an eight-year-old mind brought up on Howard Pyle and Bulfinch, Charles the First was close enough in kinship to King Arthur to render my regard for Cromwell not very far distant from utter detestation. An introduction to the Earl of Montrose not many years later only served to confirm the prejudice in favor of the monarchical principle, one broad enough to shadow even Louis Seize under its legitimist penumbra.
That said, I must admit that Bloom's sketch made me want to plug one glaring leak in the dike of my education by reading the poem for the first time in the very near future, and this notwithstanding Bloom's uncharacteristic hagiographical lapse:
"The aesthetic puzzle of his poem is its scalding, taunting God, who is simply a great poet's blunder." (p. 56)
The long passages he quotes surprised me by their quality (I had rather expected something very much like Spenser) and my experience of other contemporaneous lyrics of Puritan provenance, like the execrable George Herbert, had not intimated that Milton would be capable of such extended verbal alchemy as these examples tend to prove; his lyrics, which I must have experienced at some point, never struck me as memorable.
Apparently, my error.
That said, I must admit that Bloom's sketch made me want to plug one glaring leak in the dike of my education by reading the poem for the first time in the very near future, and this notwithstanding Bloom's uncharacteristic hagiographical lapse:
"The aesthetic puzzle of his poem is its scalding, taunting God, who is simply a great poet's blunder." (p. 56)
The long passages he quotes surprised me by their quality (I had rather expected something very much like Spenser) and my experience of other contemporaneous lyrics of Puritan provenance, like the execrable George Herbert, had not intimated that Milton would be capable of such extended verbal alchemy as these examples tend to prove; his lyrics, which I must have experienced at some point, never struck me as memorable.
Apparently, my error.
An Emersonian Interlude
Harold Bloom is already influencing my buying, as is evidenced by the fact that I purchased a reading copy of Don Quixote simply because I didn't feel like attempting either the Dryden translation in The Great Books of the Western World or whatever inferior version pops up in The Harvard Classics. Besides [1] Cervantes ($3.75), I found [2] five out of six volumes of Great Religions of Modern Man in hardcover ($.85 each); only Catholicism is missing [3] The Templar Revelation: Secret Guardians of the True Identity of Christ (I know it's trash, but it was like new for only $.85) [4] Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies (both volumes pristine except for the inscription in each at $8.50 apiece) [5] The Cantos of Ezra Pound (new at Borders $15.57) and {6] The Best of Ralph Waldo Emerson in the Classics Club editions I used to collect as a child ($1.70).
Of this last I plunged in and read both the Introduction and "The American Scholar", a strange essay that mightily prefigures Leaves of Grass. Emerson's optimism regarding the young country's cultural potential (Bloom calls him "the mind of America") is unmistakable, but his faith that the great novels of the next few decades would find their place by describing "the lowest class in the state . . . the near, the low, the common . . . the literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life"--in other words, that prose fiction would echo the subject matter of Whitman's poetry--has largely been proven wrong. Henry James portrayed the American ruling class on European holiday, his disciple Edith Wharton their native Manhattan and New England habitats. Faulkner chronicled Southern aristocracy in decline, Fitzgerald prep school boys at Princeton and on the French Riviera, Hemingway those same prep school boys in Paris and Spain, or at war in some exotic European locale. Booth Tarkington's Ambersons were the dynastic family of their town, as were Sinclair Lewis' myriad heroes. William Dean Howells is a less competent Wharton; Jack London wrote of adventures at sea or in the Frozen North; Melville likewise centered his prose on ships and the men who sailed in them.
Before Steinbeck's magnum opus of 1939, only Twain regularly fulfilled Emerson's prophecy, and even he devolved into theological fairy tales ("The Mysterious Stranger") and parodies on medieval themes ("A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", "The Prince and the Pauper", "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc"). I ignore Crane because his preponderant work is another Hemingwayesque coming of age in time of war tale, and Frank Norris because he is almost never read. I suppose Willa Cather should be counted, although "O! Pioneers" seems to have more in common with the pluck and luck of Alger and the dynastic hagiographies of Howells than with Huck Finn. O. Henry, homely enough in his choice of characters and settings, did not write novels, and thus is excused from contention.
But there is much richness here, too, a wealth that must repay multiple rereadings and reconsiderations, which is the very core of great writing and great ideas. I was struck by the following passage:
"In the long period of his preparation he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in his speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must accept--how often!--poverty and solitude. . . [He must accept] the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated society." (p.15)
Compare this to Schopenhauer in "The Wisdom of Life":
"The wise man will, above all, strive after freedom from pain and annoyance, quiet and leisure, consequently a tranquil, modest life, with as few encounters as may be; and so, after a little experience of his so-called fellowmen, he will elect to live in retirement, or even, if he is a man of great intellect, in solitude. For the more a man has in himself, the less he will want from other people,--the less, indeed, other people can be to him. This is why a high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial. True, if quality of intellect could be made up for by quantity, it might be worth while to live even in the great world; but unfortunately, a hundred fools together will not make one wise man." (p. 20)
Of this last I plunged in and read both the Introduction and "The American Scholar", a strange essay that mightily prefigures Leaves of Grass. Emerson's optimism regarding the young country's cultural potential (Bloom calls him "the mind of America") is unmistakable, but his faith that the great novels of the next few decades would find their place by describing "the lowest class in the state . . . the near, the low, the common . . . the literature of the poor, the feelings of the child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life"--in other words, that prose fiction would echo the subject matter of Whitman's poetry--has largely been proven wrong. Henry James portrayed the American ruling class on European holiday, his disciple Edith Wharton their native Manhattan and New England habitats. Faulkner chronicled Southern aristocracy in decline, Fitzgerald prep school boys at Princeton and on the French Riviera, Hemingway those same prep school boys in Paris and Spain, or at war in some exotic European locale. Booth Tarkington's Ambersons were the dynastic family of their town, as were Sinclair Lewis' myriad heroes. William Dean Howells is a less competent Wharton; Jack London wrote of adventures at sea or in the Frozen North; Melville likewise centered his prose on ships and the men who sailed in them.
Before Steinbeck's magnum opus of 1939, only Twain regularly fulfilled Emerson's prophecy, and even he devolved into theological fairy tales ("The Mysterious Stranger") and parodies on medieval themes ("A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", "The Prince and the Pauper", "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc"). I ignore Crane because his preponderant work is another Hemingwayesque coming of age in time of war tale, and Frank Norris because he is almost never read. I suppose Willa Cather should be counted, although "O! Pioneers" seems to have more in common with the pluck and luck of Alger and the dynastic hagiographies of Howells than with Huck Finn. O. Henry, homely enough in his choice of characters and settings, did not write novels, and thus is excused from contention.
But there is much richness here, too, a wealth that must repay multiple rereadings and reconsiderations, which is the very core of great writing and great ideas. I was struck by the following passage:
"In the long period of his preparation he must betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the disdain of the able who shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in his speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must accept--how often!--poverty and solitude. . . [He must accept] the state of virtual hostility in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated society." (p.15)
Compare this to Schopenhauer in "The Wisdom of Life":
"The wise man will, above all, strive after freedom from pain and annoyance, quiet and leisure, consequently a tranquil, modest life, with as few encounters as may be; and so, after a little experience of his so-called fellowmen, he will elect to live in retirement, or even, if he is a man of great intellect, in solitude. For the more a man has in himself, the less he will want from other people,--the less, indeed, other people can be to him. This is why a high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial. True, if quality of intellect could be made up for by quantity, it might be worth while to live even in the great world; but unfortunately, a hundred fools together will not make one wise man." (p. 20)
Que sais-je?
I know it will seem tedious that I must continue to disagree with (or express strong reservations over) Professor Bloom's critical judgements, but why Montaigne? Why not Rabelais, or, perhaps more persuasively, Voltaire, as the signal genius of French national culture and personality? Neither of these Gallic titans is suffered to appear, nor are such names as Racine, Corneille, Dumas, or Zola. Granted, the French tragedians may have only a national appeal (despite the fact that I have seen Corneille on stage in Dallas within the past five years), and Zola is largely forgotten, but compared to some of the Iberian ciphers in Bloom's centiad (just as Professor Bloom has no compunction in emulating his deity in the practice of coining neologisms, nor do I), Dumas is a towering genius whose characters live in the minds of modern Western men and women at least as much as Sancho Panza and Dulcinea del Toboso.
I can only assume that it is Bloom's predilection for characters, and Montaigne's uncanny ability to make himself one of the most interesting characters in Western letters, that earns the erstwhile mayor of Bordeaux this pride of place among French luminaries. I am not aware that his brand of French language became the national standard, as Dante's Tuscan became Italian and Chaucer's God-awful dreck became English, but I defer to Bloom's superior proximity to the Yale Department of French on this point. Having dipped my neocortex into the ocean of Montaigne's wit only very sparingly over the decades, I am indisputably less qualified to rule on his merits vis-a-vis most of the other Frenchmen on Bloom's list; nevertheless, this unwonted preeminence seems idiosyncratic to me, particularly given the large number of the essays that concern themselves with issues particular to a religiously divided seventeenth-century France.
Is Montaigne genuinely above his age?
I can only assume that it is Bloom's predilection for characters, and Montaigne's uncanny ability to make himself one of the most interesting characters in Western letters, that earns the erstwhile mayor of Bordeaux this pride of place among French luminaries. I am not aware that his brand of French language became the national standard, as Dante's Tuscan became Italian and Chaucer's God-awful dreck became English, but I defer to Bloom's superior proximity to the Yale Department of French on this point. Having dipped my neocortex into the ocean of Montaigne's wit only very sparingly over the decades, I am indisputably less qualified to rule on his merits vis-a-vis most of the other Frenchmen on Bloom's list; nevertheless, this unwonted preeminence seems idiosyncratic to me, particularly given the large number of the essays that concern themselves with issues particular to a religiously divided seventeenth-century France.
Is Montaigne genuinely above his age?
Man of Lepanto
Fiercely categorical pronouncements tend to raise my hackles, given my genetic tendency to equivocate and temporize. Witness Bloom on Cervantes: "So original is Don Quixote that nearly four centuries later, it remains the most advanced work of prose fiction that we have." I do not doubt that the novel was highly original for 1605, or internationally popular and thereby highly influential. My quibbles have to do with Bloom's sweeping use of the word "advanced" and his characteristically imperial "we".
Does he mean advanced in the sense of recondite, as advanced mathematics, a purely intellectual accomplishment of progress along a more or less previously stipulated sequence? If so, then Faulkner, Joyce, Woolf, and Borges all are candidates for having produced prose fiction at least as far along, not to mention any number of experimental efforts in the realm of speculative fiction. Or, if it is to moral advancement that Bloom alludes, in the 1950's sense of statements like "I think there's so much that we can learn from negroes", then humanitarian fiction like Ole Rolvaag, Ignazio Silone, or even the lamentable Pearl S. Buck would need to be considered.
I don't question the book's greatness, but "most advanced"?
I almost get the impression that Bloom regards Don Quixote as advanced in the same way that Madame Blavatsky described the Hidden Mahatmas as advanced: a mystical quasi-perfection that exists on an altogether higher plane than our merely mortal coil. Perhaps the ingenious gentleman is the first truly universal character, but, if so, that says more about the development of the European mentality as the result of the advances of the Renaissance than it does about the advancement of Cervantes, an outstanding beneficiary of that change.
As for that "we", to whom does Bloom refer? Surely not the average American reader, who cannot be said to "have" Don Quixote, in the sense of internalized possession through age-old familiarity, as Americans of a previous generation may be said to have had snippets of the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Constitution. No, I suspect that Harold Bloom has spent so much of the past 46 years hobnobbing with the literary cognoscenti and gazing down his rabbinical nose at the unlettered hoi polloi, that he would regard anything less than a full professor of English at Yale as a member of the Great Unwashed.
Sorry, Marjorie Garber.
Does he mean advanced in the sense of recondite, as advanced mathematics, a purely intellectual accomplishment of progress along a more or less previously stipulated sequence? If so, then Faulkner, Joyce, Woolf, and Borges all are candidates for having produced prose fiction at least as far along, not to mention any number of experimental efforts in the realm of speculative fiction. Or, if it is to moral advancement that Bloom alludes, in the 1950's sense of statements like "I think there's so much that we can learn from negroes", then humanitarian fiction like Ole Rolvaag, Ignazio Silone, or even the lamentable Pearl S. Buck would need to be considered.
I don't question the book's greatness, but "most advanced"?
I almost get the impression that Bloom regards Don Quixote as advanced in the same way that Madame Blavatsky described the Hidden Mahatmas as advanced: a mystical quasi-perfection that exists on an altogether higher plane than our merely mortal coil. Perhaps the ingenious gentleman is the first truly universal character, but, if so, that says more about the development of the European mentality as the result of the advances of the Renaissance than it does about the advancement of Cervantes, an outstanding beneficiary of that change.
As for that "we", to whom does Bloom refer? Surely not the average American reader, who cannot be said to "have" Don Quixote, in the sense of internalized possession through age-old familiarity, as Americans of a previous generation may be said to have had snippets of the Declaration of Independence and the preamble to the Constitution. No, I suspect that Harold Bloom has spent so much of the past 46 years hobnobbing with the literary cognoscenti and gazing down his rabbinical nose at the unlettered hoi polloi, that he would regard anything less than a full professor of English at Yale as a member of the Great Unwashed.
Sorry, Marjorie Garber.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Bloom on Shakespeare Redux
I have never regarded Shakespeare as the ne plus ultra of human genius, which both Oscar Wilde and Harold Bloom would no doubt characterize as Caliban's rage at not seeing his face in the glass. Whether I can name a greater is less significant than that the quest for the lapis philosophorum of a superior mind continues, in all likelihood until Mistress Quickly reports upon my own final curtain.
Bloom's Bardolatry rankles, not because I can cite a figure outside of the Anglo-American literary tradition greater than Shakespeare, but because I am, vividly, well into the second volume of the Victorian novel which will prove to have been my life with only the barest acquaintance with the humane letters of every culture that lies beyond that narrowly circumscribed and constantly stifling tradition. It is just barely possible that the greatest writer of all human history composed in my language, but what are the odds that this is not merely another instance of Anglo-American exceptionalism and triumphalism masquerading as impartial criticism? Would Shakespeare remain the paragon of great literature if his parent civilization were no more politically and socio-economically important than that of, say, the Tuareg or the Xhosa?
Bloom is fond of proclaiming that the major Shakespearian characters seem more real to him than many of the people he knows. He goes further: "Barnardine, in Measure for Measure, speaks only five times, and for a total of seven sentences, and yet we know him completely." My instinctive misanthropy cries out to agree with Bloom that the inventions of great literature outpace the shoddy human products of mere pedestrian existence, but even with my overarching contempt for the ubiquitous dross that comprises humanity, I cannot doubt that there exists a kernel of the heroic lying dormant in practically every person, submerged under countless layers of materialist conformity, lazy irrationalism, vacuous pieties, habitual mediocrity, and soul-killing ennui.
Bloom and I are considerably more in tune when he assails the ongoing decline of American universities. Whereas my contempt for the contemporary Academy is instinctive and largely based upon rumors and legends, Bloom has been at the heart of the struggle against intellectual mediocrity for nearly half a century: if he says things are terrible and getting worse, his reports from the trenches I take as authoritative in a manner which his aesthetic and critical judgements manifestly fail to merit.
(And no, I didn't understand "The Anxiety of Influence".)
Bloom's Bardolatry rankles, not because I can cite a figure outside of the Anglo-American literary tradition greater than Shakespeare, but because I am, vividly, well into the second volume of the Victorian novel which will prove to have been my life with only the barest acquaintance with the humane letters of every culture that lies beyond that narrowly circumscribed and constantly stifling tradition. It is just barely possible that the greatest writer of all human history composed in my language, but what are the odds that this is not merely another instance of Anglo-American exceptionalism and triumphalism masquerading as impartial criticism? Would Shakespeare remain the paragon of great literature if his parent civilization were no more politically and socio-economically important than that of, say, the Tuareg or the Xhosa?
Bloom is fond of proclaiming that the major Shakespearian characters seem more real to him than many of the people he knows. He goes further: "Barnardine, in Measure for Measure, speaks only five times, and for a total of seven sentences, and yet we know him completely." My instinctive misanthropy cries out to agree with Bloom that the inventions of great literature outpace the shoddy human products of mere pedestrian existence, but even with my overarching contempt for the ubiquitous dross that comprises humanity, I cannot doubt that there exists a kernel of the heroic lying dormant in practically every person, submerged under countless layers of materialist conformity, lazy irrationalism, vacuous pieties, habitual mediocrity, and soul-killing ennui.
Bloom and I are considerably more in tune when he assails the ongoing decline of American universities. Whereas my contempt for the contemporary Academy is instinctive and largely based upon rumors and legends, Bloom has been at the heart of the struggle against intellectual mediocrity for nearly half a century: if he says things are terrible and getting worse, his reports from the trenches I take as authoritative in a manner which his aesthetic and critical judgements manifestly fail to merit.
(And no, I didn't understand "The Anxiety of Influence".)
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Prospectus for a Book Club in the Humanities and Social Sciences
History
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy--Jacob Burckhardt (1860)
The Autumn of the Middle Ages--Johan Huizinga (1919)
The Old Regime and the French Revolution--Alexis de Tocqueville (1856)
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life--Richard Hofstadter (1963)
The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan--Ivan Morris (1964)
Psychology
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis--Sigmund Freud (1920)
Modern Man in Search of a Soul--Carl Gustav Jung (1933)
Love and Will--Rollo May (1969)
Man’s Search for Meaning--Viktor Frankl (1946)
The Farther Reaches of Human Nature--Abraham Maslow (1971)
Theology
The Courage to Be--Paul Tillich (1952)
On Being a Christian--Hans Kung (1974)
The Imitation of Christ--Thomas a Kempis (15th C.)
Fear and Trembling--Soren Kierkegaard (1843)
The Varieties of Religious Experience--William James (1902)
I and Thou--Martin Buber (1923)
Philosophy
Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason--Rene Descartes (1637)
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion--David Hume (1779)
Thus Spake Zarathustra--Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1883)
The Ethics of Aristotle (4th C. BCE)
On Duty and The Tusculan Disputations--Cicero (1st C. BCE)
Political Theory
Perpetual Peace: a Philosophical Sketch--Immanuel Kant (1795)
Democracy in America--Alexis de Tocqueville (1835)
A Theory of Justice--John Rawls (1971)
The Politics of Aristotle (4th C. BCE)
The Conservative Mind from Burke to Eliot--Russell Kirk (1953)
The Revolt of the Masses--Jose Ortega y Gasset (1929)
Aesthetics and Criticism
The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry--Walter Pater (1873)
The Sense of Beauty--George Santayana (1896)
The Nature of Gothic--John Ruskin (1853)
The Poetics of Aristotle (4th C. BCE)
Axel’s Castle: a Study in Imaginative Literature 1870-1930--Edmund Wilson (1931)
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays--Northrop Frye (1957)
Literature
Labyrinths--Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
The Golden Notebook--Doris Lessing (1962)
The Grapes of Wrath--John Steinbeck (1939)
Atlas Shrugged--Ayn Rand (1957)
The Man Without Qualities--Robert Musil (1930)
Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort--Roger Martin du Gard (1999)
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy--Jacob Burckhardt (1860)
The Autumn of the Middle Ages--Johan Huizinga (1919)
The Old Regime and the French Revolution--Alexis de Tocqueville (1856)
Anti-Intellectualism in American Life--Richard Hofstadter (1963)
The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan--Ivan Morris (1964)
Psychology
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis--Sigmund Freud (1920)
Modern Man in Search of a Soul--Carl Gustav Jung (1933)
Love and Will--Rollo May (1969)
Man’s Search for Meaning--Viktor Frankl (1946)
The Farther Reaches of Human Nature--Abraham Maslow (1971)
Theology
The Courage to Be--Paul Tillich (1952)
On Being a Christian--Hans Kung (1974)
The Imitation of Christ--Thomas a Kempis (15th C.)
Fear and Trembling--Soren Kierkegaard (1843)
The Varieties of Religious Experience--William James (1902)
I and Thou--Martin Buber (1923)
Philosophy
Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason--Rene Descartes (1637)
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion--David Hume (1779)
Thus Spake Zarathustra--Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1883)
The Ethics of Aristotle (4th C. BCE)
On Duty and The Tusculan Disputations--Cicero (1st C. BCE)
Political Theory
Perpetual Peace: a Philosophical Sketch--Immanuel Kant (1795)
Democracy in America--Alexis de Tocqueville (1835)
A Theory of Justice--John Rawls (1971)
The Politics of Aristotle (4th C. BCE)
The Conservative Mind from Burke to Eliot--Russell Kirk (1953)
The Revolt of the Masses--Jose Ortega y Gasset (1929)
Aesthetics and Criticism
The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry--Walter Pater (1873)
The Sense of Beauty--George Santayana (1896)
The Nature of Gothic--John Ruskin (1853)
The Poetics of Aristotle (4th C. BCE)
Axel’s Castle: a Study in Imaginative Literature 1870-1930--Edmund Wilson (1931)
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays--Northrop Frye (1957)
Literature
Labyrinths--Jorge Luis Borges (1962)
The Golden Notebook--Doris Lessing (1962)
The Grapes of Wrath--John Steinbeck (1939)
Atlas Shrugged--Ayn Rand (1957)
The Man Without Qualities--Robert Musil (1930)
Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort--Roger Martin du Gard (1999)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
