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A Few Words from the
Editor
Imagine that you are in a position where you must
simply take someone’s word—where you must entrust to him a great deal
of cash, say, or a secret whose divulging would give his company an unfair
advantage in the marketplace. You wish to do the right thing, but you
cannot avoid the risk that this second party may be less punctilious. Now
imagine that your confidant does not believe in any reality beyond the
immediately visible or tangible. He scoffs at the notion of metaphysics,
of principles whose rigor endures beyond the dissolution of the body. The
odds of getting your cash back, of having your secret preserved, are not
looking good! For what could possibly restrain this person from seeking
material profit except the prospect of a greater profit—or a greater
loss? Unless he senses further, better opportunities to exploit you if he
proves true on this occasion, or unless he fears being disgraced among a
common circle of friends in whose high esteem he basks, or unless he sees
a veiled threat of dismissal or prosecution for malfeasance, his treachery
is money in the bank.
Such situations abound in our post-literate society.
They are enough in themselves to justify a follow-up issue on the subject
which we addressed in the summer: the decline and fall of literacy. Look
at it this way. Literacy makes you talk to yourself, as opposed to the
oral give-and-take of campfire and communal hearth. You choose the book,
you read it at your pace, you pause to draw connections with your
experiences… over a period of several years, you open up and explore
psychological chambers whose echoes scarcely break the surface of your
gestures or habits. You are different, separate: you are an
independent agent fully responsible for his or her choices. Of course,
such responsibility would be meaningless if some of your internal
corridors did not ring with a resonance whose note you overhear in others
and whose scarcely marred cry, indeed, commands that you respect its
presence in others. Moral philosophy is born of these paradoxical strains,
the individual assuming the burden of his difference, the difference
itself but a license to seek deeper unity through all of one’s personal
resources. Without a keen awareness of the subjective—of oneself as
distinct—one could have no complementary awareness of the objective, the
ultimate purpose drawing freedom toward duty and redeeming it from
chaos.
The unique, the many, the whole… is it an accident
that mathematics is also born in human culture at about the same time as
moral philosophy: is literacy not the midwife who delivers both? Writing
not only names things (as oral language also does); it fixes their names
(as orality struggles to do), and it fixes the relationships between them
in the form of grammar. Just as the moral thinker moves through the cycle
of "I… not I… my common destination with others", so the
mathematical thinker ponders the relationships which bind atomic units
into harmonious collaboration. In either case, the activity of labeling
things, formalizing how the labels may be connected in sentences, and
contemplating those formulas at leisure can only have fostered other
activities of naming and arranging. Mathematics is literate reflection
distilled to its most naked form, just as any thoughtful attempt at
written communication dramatizes conscientious moral struggle.
This all smacks of nominalism, some will warn.
Ockham’s theory that names create perceived reality is often said by
moral traditionalists to have poisoned the West’s well with a
"nothing is real, all definitions are arbitrary" kind of
relativism. The same charges are leveled at Immanuel Kant, among others.
The truth is that both thinkers were only describing how we think about
reality, not questioning the existence of something real to think
about. I very much fear that such self-styled traditionalists today are
again missing the point. Reality is there, they say ingenuously.
God created the world and all within it: hence whether we handle creation
with printed tomes or oral chatter, with algebraic equations in search of
geometric figures or blunt computer binarism reducing all to
"yes" or "no", is irrelevant. We must simply accept on
faith that a firm arm is always there to lean on, and be at peace. The
truth will always be there for us, if I may borrow one of those
post-literate clichés which escapes tautology by means of vacuity.
What such false traditionalism, at once pugnacious and
quietist, wholly and clearly lacks is the literate sense of duty,
of the need to get up and do something. Indeed, it is already neo-tribal
in its blurring of self-and-other distinctions and its surrender to
prevailing trend. To be fair, the amoralist with whose portrait I opened
these comments is a late-literate construct. The vaccination of his
literacy did not "take": it has sent him into a sophistical
fever of splitting hairs and counting parts from which no heightened sense
of wholeness—of purpose—emerges. In a way, this person is better than
those genuinely post-literate tribesmen who dance whenever they hear the
drum—better because he is worse, because he is still capable of choice.
Our moral dilemmas will be much simpler in tomorrow’s revived yesterday.
Leave your cash with your blood-brother: if he pilfers it, call a village
meeting. The elders will put your two hands in the fire and see who
flinches first.
My delight at having assembled such a rare array of
perceptive works as we have in this issue is thus faintly overshadowed by
my knowing why such works have become rare. Contributors often tell me
that this or that publisher could not understand an essay which I
find extremely worthwhile. Both of the creative writers featured in this
issue warned me that certain religious audiences might find their work
offensive—a staggering thought when I consider the obvious spiritual
dimensions of their pieces. I can only exhort, Live in the truth, and take
pride in saying it!
~JH
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A Sampling of
Pronouncements
from Our Cultural Elites
by
Steve Kogan
Steve Kogan debuted in Praesidium 1.3
with "Express Train to 1929" (18-26). A native of Brooklyn and
educated at Columbia, Mr. Kogan has taught English for over three decades
at the Borough of Manhattan Community College.
Note: The following passages are a fair sampling of
the mindset in American cultural criticism for the past twenty-five years.
My extracts are drawn from prominent writers, critics, and journals, and
the claims put forward in these passages are based on influential ideas
that have filtered down from modern literary theory, postcolonial and
ethnic studies, new historicism, and Marxist cultural critique. Some of
the founding fathers are listed with honorable mention in the eleventh
extract below. I could as well have chosen passages from any of these
authors or from other writers among their legion of followers. Readers
will note that some of the pronouncements are patently absurd, and, as I
demonstrate in my comments and questions, all of them represent a species
of propaganda that masquerades as thought.
Edward Said:
1) There is no such thing as a direct experience, or
reflection, of the world in the language of a text.
2) ... neither Conrad nor Marlow gives us a full view
of what is outside the world-conquering attitudes embodied by Kurtz,
Marlow, the circle of listeners on the deck of the Nellie, and Conrad….
Heart of Darkness works so effectively because its politics and
aesthetics are, so to speak, imperialist . . .
3) Without empire, I would go so far as saying there is
no European novel as we know it.
4) [In Kim], Kipling… firmly places [the Lama]
within the protective orbit of British rule in India. This is symbolized
in Chapter 1, when the elderly British museum curator gives the Abbot his
spectacles, thus adding to the man’s spiritual prestige and authority,
consolidating the justness and legitimacy of Britain’s benevolent sway.
5) … as Paul Robinson has convincingly argued in Opera
and Ideas—[Verdi’s operas] were almost all intended as political
operas, replete with rhetorical stridency, martial music, and unbuttoned
emotions. "Perhaps the most obvious component of Verdi’s rhetorical
style—to put the matter bluntly—is sheer loudness. He is with
Beethoven among the noisiest of all major composers…. Drop the needle at
random on a recording of a Verdi opera, and you will usually be rewarded
with a substantial racket."
6) Many good things have justifiably been said about
[Orwell’s plain] style, although it is curious how they have often
tended to prevent other things from also being said. For instance, the
plain reportorial style coerces history, process, knowledge itself into
mere events being observed.
7) Orwell’s sustained political writing career
coincides not with his down-and-out-years… but with his re-admission to
and subsequent residence inside bourgeois life. Politics was something he
observed, albeit as an honest partisan, from the comforts of bookselling,
marriage, friendship with other writers,… dealing with publishers and
literary agents.
8) Even the homey terms that were usually Orwell’s
preference over genuinely historical or theoretical
explanation—"England in a phrase: a family with the wrong people in
control"—derive from this essentially humdrum background.
9) Far from having earned the right to denounce
socialism from within Orwell had no knowledge either of Marx or of the
massive Marxist and socialist traditions.
10) When he was not verbally abusing people he
considered opponents or competitors, he was holing up as a reviewer of
more or less unchallenging books. True, he had courage and humanity, but,
we must now say, he also had security and protection.
11) Along with Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Georges
Canguihelm, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Lucien Goldmann, Althusser, Derrida, Lévi-Strauss,
Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, and Bourdieu himself, Foucault emerged out
of a strange revolutionary concatenation of Parisian aesthetic and
political currents, which for about thirty years produced such a
concentration of brilliant work as we are not likely to see again for
generations.
12) No one today is purely one thing. Labels like
Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than
starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a
moment are quickly left behind.
From Culture and Imperialism and Reflections on
Exile
Observations and Questions
1) The disjunction between reality and the written word
is one of the key concepts of modern literary theory, yet it undercuts its
own claim when applied to itself. If Said is right and the world cannot be
reflected in writing, then his statement cannot reflect the reality of the
written word. Cf. Stanley Fish’s dictum that no text can be read
objectively, which, if true, means that we can never know if it is true.
2) The statement is meaningless in its present form,
since a) no one can give us even a partial view of what lies
"outside" his point of view, and b) if Conrad and Marlow do not
give us "a full view", they must still be giving us a rather
large view of other perspectives than their own. Has anyone ever given us
a "full view" of anything? As for "their world-conquering
attitudes", from the first page of Heart of Darkness to the
last, Conrad and his narrator portray reason and civilization as fragile
structures that are surrounded by darkness and confusion. How does this
world view echo the sentiments of real world-conquerors, such as Napoleon
and Adolf Hitler?
3) There is also "no European novel as we know
it" without the development of the printing press, the revival and
translation of classical romances in the Renaissance, the popularity of
romance novellas and pastoral epics in Elizabethan England, Sir Thomas
Malory’s integration of chivalric literature in "a series of
self-contained stories.. drawn tightly and firmly around the
protagonist’s life" (Eugène Vinaver), and the rise of Protestant
thought and institutions. Orwell was not alone in observing that "the
novel is practically a Protestant form of art; it is a product of the free
mind, of the autonomous individual" ("Inside the Whale").
4) This is what actually happens in Chapter 1 of Kim:
wishing, as he says, "to acquire merit", the curator gives the
Lama a notebook and sharpened pencils, "all good for a scribe",
and then asks to see the Lama's old spectacles. He notes that they have
almost the same power as his own and asks the Lama to exchange gifts with
him. The Lama gives the curator an iron pencase with an ancient Chinese
design. "That is for a memory between thee and me—my pencase. It is
something old—even as I am." The curator even wishes that the Lama
would stay and teach him some secrets of Chinese brushwork. If I thought
like Said, I could say from the other side that "this chapter
symbolizes the benevolent sway of Buddhism over British rule in India, and
it also reflects Britain’s desire to learn as much as possible from the
wisest men of Asia."
5) Cf. the dialogue in "Fawlty Towers" where
Fawlty is listening to Brahms’ Third Symphony in his office and his wife
rushes in yelling, "What’s that racket you’re listening to?"
Fawlty comes out of his trance and shouts back, "It’s Brahms’
Third Racket!" Note Said’s implication that Robinson has
"convincingly" redefined fortes and crescendos as
"noise".
6) Critical praise of Orwell’s prose has never
"prevented other things from being said." The idea that the
"plain style coerces" history "into mere events being
observed" has in fact been said a hundred times by his critics on the
left. The underlying attack is against "Anglo-American
empiricism" (Frederic Jameson), as opposed to Marxist theory. The
characterization of Orwell’s "plain style" is itself
erroneous. There is not a single essay, review, or article by Orwell where
observations are not bound up with judgments about history, society, and
human nature.
7) Said implies that being a genuine leftwing writer
requires one to live in poverty, but it is difficult to see how Orwell
could have had a "sustained political writing career" while
sleeping in cardboard boxes in Trafalgar Square, working as a hop-picker,
washing dishes in slum restaurants, etc. As for the "comforts"
of bookselling, Orwell described this stint as a wretched experience. On a
personal level, Said’s remark that Orwell "observed" politics
from the ease of "bourgeois life" is particularly reprehensible,
in light of the fact that he has spent his entire career as a superbly
comfortable English professor at one of the wealthiest universities in the
world. On a scholarly level, Said’s picture of Orwell’s life is
seriously flawed, since he never mentions Orwell’s going from Eton to
seven years in the Royal police force in Burma, his eking out a living in
the 1930s, or his pursuit of writing amid recurring bouts of tuberculosis
and pneumonia, which hardly qualify as a quest for security and
protection. As for the implication that "security" minimizes
"courage", even Marines, firemen, bridgebuilders, fighter
pilots, etc. all have networks of "security and protection".
Elsewhere in his essay, Said remarks that Orwell’s career is marked by
"unexamined bourgeois values", although Orwell explicitly states
in "Why I Write" that "I am not able, and I do not want,
completely to abandon the world-view that I acquired in childhood."
Regarding Orwell’s enlistment with the Anarchists in Spain and nearly
fatal wound, Said merely refers to them as "Orwell’s Spanish
entrance and exit". Note the insinuation that Orwell was only
play-acting in a minor role, as though neither his convictions nor the
bullets were real.
8) The idea that Orwell’s direct and intimate
language "derive" from his "humdrum background" is
stupid in the literal dictionary sense of "obtuse" and
"showing a lack of sense or intelligence", since it assumes that
a writer’s milieu somehow seeps into his pages and creates his style. By
the same logic, writers who were also doctors (Chekhov, Conan Doyle,
William Carlos Williams) ought to sound medical, and all English
professors ought to sound even homier than Orwell, since their lives are
far more middle class than his ever was. There is no need to speculate
about Orwell’s background, however, since he is conspicuously open about
the influences on his work, as in "Such, Such Were the Joys",
"Inside the Whale", the "Autobiographical Note" of
1941, and "Why I Write".
9) Said betrays an essentially academic view of life by
suggesting that one cannot be a socialist and critique Marxism unless one
has gained the proper credentials. Orwell, however, was keenly aware of
his relationship to Marxist ideology, and in his preface to the Ukrainian
edition of Animal Farm writes that "I became pro-Socialist
more out of disgust with the way the poorer section of the industrial
workers were oppressed and neglected than out of any theoretical
admiration for a planned society." He also writes in his wartime
diaries that he knew enough of Soviet writing to intuit the true nature of
Stalin’s rule ("such horrors as the Russian purges never surprised
me, because I had always felt that—not exactly that, but something like
that—was implicit in Bolshevik rule. I could feel it in their
literature"). Most working-class socialists who broke with Stalinism
would have also failed Said’s test. On the other hand, the theoreticians
of Bolshevism who did meet Said’s requirements were not only
excommunicated by Stalin but also murdered, as were thousands of other
Bolsheviks who took part in the October Revolution. Orwell’s escape with
his wife from the Communist purges in Barcelona earned him all the right
anyone would ever need "to denounce socialism from within."
10) "Verbally abusing people." Orwell’s
terms of contempt never rise above the level of "sandal-wearing,
pansy left intellectuals". For real verbal abuse, Said ought to take
another look at Marx and "the massive Marxist and socialist
traditions", whose pages are filled with sectarian hatreds and cries
for the "liquidation of capitalist bloodsuckers, bourgeois
vermin", etc. On Orwell as "a reviewer of more or less
unchallenging books", here is a partial list of the books that he
reviewed: Lewis Mumford, Herman Melville; Karl Adam, The Spirit
of Catholicism; Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer; Franz Borkenau,
The Spanish Cockpit and The Communist International; Adolf
Hitler, Mein Kampf; T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton, East Coker,
The Dry Salvages; F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom;
Jean-Paul Sartre, Portrait of the Antisemite; and Winston
Churchill, Their Finest Hour.
11) Note that, for Said, Orwell’s clear prose is
somehow coercive, whereas French literary theory is "brilliant",
even though it is filled with exaggerations, unverifiable claims, and
pedantic abstractions (e.g., "the death of the author", "I
is nothing other than the instance saying I," and "the absence
of the transcendental signified"). "As we are not likely to see
again for generations." Let us hope so.
12) Even if people are more than their gender,
religion, and nationality, why should they stop being women, Muslims, or
Americans the moment we get to know them? If we followed Said himself
"into actual experience", would his "labels" as a
Columbia professor or a spokesman for the PLO be "quickly left
behind"? The underlying premise is false. No one was ever
"purely one thing".
Chinua Achebe:
1) Marlow comes through to us not only as a witness of
truth, but one holding those advanced and humane views appropriate to the
English liberal tradition which required all Englishmen of decency to be
deeply shocked by atrocities in Bulgaria or the Congo of King Leopold of
the Belgians or wherever.
Thus Marlow is able to toss out such bleeding-heart
sentiments as these:
They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were
not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now,
nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation lying confusedly in
the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all
the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on
unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then
allowed to crawl away and rest.
The kind of liberalism espoused here by Marlow/Conrad
touched all the best minds of the age in England, Europe and America. It
took different forms in the minds of different people but almost always
managed to sidestep the ultimate question of equality between white people
and black people.
2) Conrad’s liberalism would not take him quite as
far as Schweitzer’s, though. He would not use the word brother
however qualified; the farthest he would go was kinship. When Marlow’s
African helmsman falls down with a spear in his heart he gives his white
master one final disquieting look.
And the intimate profundity of that look he gave me
when he received his hurt remains to this day in my memory—like a
claim of distant kinship affirmed in a supreme moment.
It is important to note that Conrad, careful as ever
with his words, is concerned not so much about distant kinship as about
someone laying a claim on it. The black man lays a claim on the white man
which is well-nigh intolerable….
The point of my observations should be quite clear by
now, namely that Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist.
3) Even those [travellers] not blinkered, like Conrad
with xenophobia, can be astonishing[ly] blind. [Marco Polo] said nothing
about the art of printing.… But even more spectacular was Marco Polo’s
omission of any reference to the Great Wall of China nearly 4,000 miles
long and already more than 1,000 years old at the time of his visit.
Again, he may not have seen it; but the Great Wall of China is the only
structure built by man which is visible from the moon! Indeed travellers
can be blind.
From "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart
of Darkness"
Observations and Questions
1) For Achebe, the decent opinions of the English are
not those of actual people but of a "tradition" that somehow
generates a robotic instead of a genuine response. The appropriate
bourgeois feelings are "required" and therefore produced. The
idea that 19th-century liberalism was a political sham and avoided
"ultimate" questions of equality can be traced directly to The
Communist Manifesto and is regularly invoked by leftwing critics and
scholars, e.g., Melville recognized the evils of slavery and working-class
oppression but was fearful of confronting them (Ronald Takaki, Michael
Rogin, etc.). These attacks against "worried white liberals"
(Tony Tanner) are dying echoes of Marxist-Leninist propaganda, which
mercilessly denounced Europe’s social democrats.
2) If Marlow felt that the dying man’s claim of
kinship were "well-nigh intolerable", how was he able to
experience "the intimate profundity of that look"? A genuine
racist ought to be incapable of seeing anything human in someone he
despises and fears.
3) Achebe uses his argument about Marco Polo to hammer
home the idea (first elaborated in Said’s Orientalism) that
westerners are incapable of understanding what they are seeing when they
travel to the land of the Other. In fact, they are even guilty of
blindness when they don’t travel to a particular place, as Marco Polo
didn’t know about the wall even though "he may not have seen"
it. Note Achebe’s unintended implication that everyone in the world
should have known about the Great Wall, since it is "the only
structure built by man which is visible from the moon!"
Robert Sklar:
When Rita Hayworth sang "Put the Blame on Mame"
in the 1948 film "Gilda", peeling off her long black gloves, the
message was literal. Film noir’s femmes fatales endangered men through
their willfulness and freedom. Film noir in this sense conveyed postwar
American culture’s injunction to women to give up the independence
gained during wartime and return to domestic life and economic reliance on
men.
New York Times, 6/2/02
Observations
For radicals, everything in life is political: a kiss
("The personal is political"), the rules of grammar ("No
rhetoric is innocent"), a beautiful woman taking off her gloves while
singing in a Hollywood film. In an article on Cinemascope in PMLA
(March, 1993), Alan Nadel similarly claimed that "in the context of
the geopolitical conflicts of 1956", The Ten Commandments on
wide screen reflected America’s postwar global power and its desire to
dominate the middle east. (By the same reasoning, Biblical epics on the
silent screen "reflected" America’s weakness in the 1920s).
Like all leftwing allegories of culture, Sklar’s thesis is invalidated
both by history and the subject itself, in the first case because
noir-like films were being made in the ’30s and during the war, and in
the second because the characters played by Jane Greer et al. have nothing
in common with women who went to work in armament, tank, and aircraft
factories. With rare exceptions, in fact, noir women don’t do anything.
They simply appear out of the dark and function as mediums for seduction,
intrigue, and destruction.
David Thomson:
1) [Chet] Baker, in my view, could not play jazz, and
did not play it. He did torch songs on dead batteries. He was an Okie and
to the end of his days he seldom chose, or enjoyed, black sidemen.
2) Mulligan was white, insecure, pretentious, desperate
for respect, and nearly as ponderous as his chosen instrument, the
baritone saxophone…. Anyway, Mulligan hired Baker into an all-white
quartet that tended to play shuffling, romantic versions of standards with
a hushed, husky intimacy. They seemed to be recording into the bottom of a
glass more than into a mike.
3) It was all as white, druggy, and stricken as Marilyn
Monroe’s blonde hair in her last years.
4) I am sure there were nights—often in Europe—when
some high, some upward swing in his amazing constitution, some flicker of
happiness, made him play well for ten minutes.
5) He could not sing, of course…
Review of James Gavin, Deep in a Dream: The
Long Night of Chet Baker, The New Republic,
6/02
Observations and Questions
1) Just as Conrad was supposedly
"imperialistic" and Orwell a "bourgeois" writer, so
too Chet Baker, a prominent figure in the history of jazz, was not really
a jazz musician and didn’t play jazz. It is typical of radical critics
to describe their object of scorn in the most extreme terms possible
(Conrad as "a thoroughgoing racist", Orwell as a reviewer of
"unchallenging books", and Baker as a torch singer on "dead
batteries"), a tactic of propaganda that leaves no room on the
spectrum for truly negative types, such as Nazis, hack journalists, and
dime-a-dozen performers. The idea that Baker only played "torch
songs" is erroneous. Baker’s favorite lyric works included pieces
by Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Hoagy Carmichael, and Rogers and Hart,
and "Let’s Get Lost", "But Not for Me", "Just
Friends", and "There Will Never Be Another You" are not
"torch songs" at all. Baker in fact played in every jazz idiom
of his time. As for being an "Okie", Thomson uses it in the
hostile sense of "redneck" and associates not only Baker but
also West Coast jazz with racism, even though Baker revered Billie
Holiday, frequently listened to Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool
(with arrangements by Mulligan), worked with black musicians and
arrangers, and writes in his memoirs that in his West Coast days, he was
playing with anyone and everyone. He never mentions race.
2) Thomson uses "white" as a term of contempt
("Mulligan was white, insecure pretentious," "it was all as
white, druggy," etc.). It is inconceivable that he would similarly
write that "Miles Davis was black, strung out, abusive," even
though he was, or that "Bebop was all as black, druggy, and lacquered
as Billie Holiday’s hair in her last years." Thomson’s contempt
for Baker’s addiction seems odd in light of the whole history of jazz.
When asked how he could play so beautifully while drunk, the great 1930s
trumpet player Bunny Berrigan replied, "I practice drunk."
3) How could Marilyn Monroe’s blonde hair be
"white, druggy, and stricken"?
4) Thomson’s hostility to Baker is so great that he
cannot accept any recognition of his talent, not even that of Charlie
Parker, who chose a young Chet Baker to play and record with him in LA.
Unable to deny the fact, Thomson casts doubt on Parker’s judgment by
claiming that he was now a "broken genius". In his memoirs,
however, Baker states that "it was incredible being on the stand with
Bird…. Bird was a flawless player, and although he was snorting up
spoons of stuff and drinking fifths of Hennessy, it all seemed to have
little or no effect on him. I wondered at the stamina of the man."
Thomson would probably call these remarks self-serving, even though
they’re true.
5) Note the Joseph Goebbels’ effect: tell a lie often
enough and it will start to sound true. With the right propaganda drumming
through your head, you could end up listening to a recording by Rubenstein
or Horowitz and believe that "they could not play the piano, of
course."
Stanley Fish:
Let us suppose that I am reading Lycidas. What is it
that I am doing? First of all, what I am not doing is "simply
reading", an activity in which I do not believe because it implies
the possibility of pure (that is, disinterested) perception.
"Interpreting the [Milton] Variorum"
Note
No one in the history of literary study has ever
claimed that reading is a "pure" or "simple"
experience. Fish has merely created a fiction of absolute objectivity in
order to justify his claim that all reading is in reality subjective. The
idea is fundamentally irrational, however, for it can only be true if we
accept the premise that empirical truth does not exist. As Nietzsche
observes in The Anti-Christ, however, one can indeed be properly
trained "to read off a fact without falsifying it by interpretation,
without losing caution, patience, subtlety in the desire for
understanding."
Michael Gilmore:
[Melville’s works] awaken awareness of social
injustice but leave the reader with no thought of changing things.
The Columbia History of the American Novel
Note
Like all world reformers, Gilmore cannot accept the
possibility that cruelty may be inherent in the human condition, hence his
underlying assumption that tragic literature should aim for social
justice. Otherwise, why should it matter whether or not Melville offers a
prescription for change? If we accept Gilmore’s premise, we might even
conclude that it was retrograde to read such works as the Iliad,
Job, the Gospels, and Greek and Elizabethan tragedy, since they not only
"leave the reader with no thought of changing things" but also
point in the opposite direction toward acceptance.
Ronald Takaki:
1) Only rebellion could have saved the workers [on the Pequod].
2) [In Moby-Dick], all workers of color [are]
below deck, serving the interests of Captain Ahab and capitalist
investors.
Iron Cages
Notes
1) Takaki reads Moby-Dick in view of The
Communist Manifesto and does not see the crew as whaling men (and
highly individualized characters at that) but as abstract, joyless
"workers", i.e., wage-slaves and therefore ripe for
"rebellion". Ishmael, however, explicitly states that the
officers and crew seemed to have been chosen "by some infernal
fatality to help [Ahab] to his monomaniac revenge," that the crew
were drawn to whaling precisely because of the dangers, and that they all
shared an impulse toward suicide, as Ishmael says about himself on the
very first page of the novel.
2) Takaki’s image of "workers" toiling
"below deck" is meant to convey a picture of suffering and
repression, as though the crew were galley slaves or the industrial
workers in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. As one would expect of a whaling
ship, however, the crew work mainly on deck and on the sea. It is equally
false to insinuate that "people of color" do all the physical
work in Moby-Dick, since officers and harpooneers all take part in
the hunts, including Ahab himself at times.
Michael Rogin:
1) Ahab acquired authority over his white equals by
appropriating the power of people of color.
2) Moby-Dick registers the dependence of American
freedom on American slavery.
Subversive Genealogies: The Politics and Art of Herman
Melville
Notes
1) Ahab acquired his authority by his expert seamanship
and expert knowledge of whaling, as Melville makes clear at various points
throughout the book. Ahab does not have any "equals" on the
ship. "There is but one God in heaven," he declares. "And
one captain on the Pequod."
2) The crew of the Pequod have come to whaling
from all corners of the world and their individual stories have nothing in
common with the history of slavery in America. Even "the little negro
Pippin" is a free man (coming from Connecticut), where "he had
once enlivened many a fiddler’s frolic on the green." In fact, he
is the only one on board who is granted Ahab’s dream of seeing the
universe unmasked, which occurs during an accidental fall into the sea,
where Pip, like Jonah before him (in Chapter 9), "was carried down
alive to wondrous depths" and "saw the multitudinous
God-omnipresent" and His "foot upon the treadle of the
loom."
Adam Gopnik:
… the heartland was in many ways where terror began.
The practice of political terrorism has been refined in Europe and the
Middle East, but its theory—the understanding that in an age of instant
communications killing can be a kind of symbolic speech, a form of show
business, engaged in for its publicity value—was pioneered by Americans.
"Violence as Style," The New Yorker, May
8, 1995
Note
The modern political meaning of the word
"terror" originates in the French Revolution, where the doctrine
of "revolutionary justice" was first established in the period
known as La Terreur. There is nothing comparable in American
history either to the Jacobins or to Lenin, their direct descendant, who
proclaimed that "The example of the Jacobins is instructive. It is
not obsolete, but needs to be applied to the revolutionary class of the
twentieth century, the workers and semi-proletarians" (in "The
Enemies of the People", a concept that also dates from the French
Revolution). Political terror is not a form of "symbolic speech"
but a calculated instrument of force that is destructive of everything
that we normally associate with verbal persuasion and expression.
Simon Schama:
Historically, mainstream American culture is
conditioned to treat calamity… as an aberration, not the norm…. Out
there in the Rest of the World, the unavoidable sadness of wisdom is taken
as read…. Perhaps, in any case, there are worse things than bidding
farewell to the fond illusion that Americans would remain forever exempt
from the ways of the world, calamities included.
"A Whiff of Dread for the Land of Hope,"
The New York Times, September 15, 2002
Note
Schama depicts American history and culture as though
Melville, Poe, Eugene O'Neill, the Civil War, Pearl Harbor, film noir, the
Gettysburgh Address, frontier ballads and the blues, A Farewell to Arms,
The Great Gatsby, the Dust Bowl, The Grapes of Wrath, etc.
never happened.
Christopher Hitchens:
1) In the quite recent past at least two books have
been published to general acclaim—Churchill: A Study in Greatness,
by Geoffrey Best, and Five Days in London, May 1940, by John Lukacs,
which assist in this ramming home of an already nearly unassailable myth.
2) For an instance of the tenacity of the traditional
view, by which one historian underwrites and reinforces the conventional
efforts of another, I cite this excerpt from John Lukacs’s November
20001 review of Geoffrey Best’s Churchill: A Study in Greatness:
One of the stunning phrases in Churchill’s history
of World War I is his description of the First Fleet leaving Portsmouth
for Scapa Flow on July 28, 1914, through the English Channel:
"Scores of gigantic castles of steel wending their way across the
misty, shining sea, like giants bowed in anxious thought." Best
ends his book with Churchill’s funeral, on January 30, 1965, "the
great cranes along the south side of the stretch of the river between
Tower Bridge and London bridge, dipping their masts in tribute as
Churchill’s funeral launch went by, ‘like giants bowed in anxious
thought.’" This is the mark of a great historian.
It is by no means the mark of a great historian. It is
the mark of a recycler of familiar rhetorical themes, and of stale
rhetorical expressions ("wending their way") at that. But Lukacs
is committed to this style in precisely the way he is committed to its
corresponding substance, which admits of no demurral.
3) Just as it’s easy to shock someone whose knowledge
of World War II comes from the movie Casablanca by mentioning the
obstinate fact that the Roosevelt Administration recognized Vichy even
while it was at war with Germany, or the equally obstinate fact that it
never declared war on Hitler but waited for Hitler to declare war on the
United States, so it is easy to upset the Lukacsian world view with a
couple of incontrovertible observations: In 1940 the Churchill government
did not even surrender the Channel Islands. It evacuated them, beaches and
all, and permitted an unopposed Nazi occupation. Churchill himself was
quite ready to discuss Hitler’s demand for some German colonies in
Africa if that would help to buy time, and even contemplated the cession
of some British colonies, such as Malta and Gibraltar.
4) Having vastly and repeatedly overstated the will and
the ability of the French to resist Hitler, and having nearly lost an
entire British army on this delusion at Dunkirk, Churchill became his own
polar opposite and decided that the surviving French naval force was in
imminent danger of being grafted onto the German fleet…. It can
confidently be asserted, based on numerous records and recollections, that
the British bombardment of the French navy [on July 3] put an end to this
period of vacillation.
"The Medals of his Defeats, The Atlantic Monthly,
April, 2002
Observations and Questions
1) When Lukacs praises Churchill, he’s "ramming
home" a myth. When Hitchens goes after the "myth" hammer
and tongs, he’s only trying to set the record straight.
2) Whether Churchill’s description of the fleet as
"gigantic castles of steel" was a "familiar rhetorical
theme" or not, the image is not only vivid but also historically
precise, since it dramatizes England’s strength and prestige in relation
to its feudal past and the industrial revolution, and it also hints at the
eventual decline of the battleship in favor of air power and the aircraft
carrier, as castles gave way to cannon. As for Churchill’s prose, would
"going" or "proceeding" have been more fresh and
direct than "wending their way"? ("Steaming" would
give the wrong impression that the ships were under full power in the
Thames.) Note that a highly "rhetorical style" can be made to
seem as "coercive" as Orwell’s "plain style",
depending on which author a leftwing critic chooses to attack.
3) In light of numerous best-sellers on World War II,
the popularity of televised documentary films of the war, and the
increased awareness since 9/11 of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,
Hitchens’ remark about viewers of Casablanca is nothing more than
an expression of intellectual snobbery. Moreover, the question of Vichy
and Roosevelt’s position toward Germany prior to 1941 should not
"shock someone whose knowledge of World War II comes from" the
film, since one of the underlying themes of Casablanca is that it
is the French Resistance that is fighting Vichy and the Nazis, not
America. The film appeared in 1942 and was based on an earlier Broadway
production, hence the mood of a first national call to arms and sacrifice,
which is dramatized by references to Rick’s recent anti-Nazi activities
in Spain, the German entry into Paris, and Rick’s despair that America
is still "asleep". Hitchens is also in error about Churchill’s
views on the Channel Islands and Gibraltar. Lukacs states in The Duel
that Churchill "still fretted about what he saw as unnecessary
retreats—on 19 June he found ‘repugnant’ the decision of the
Admiralty to abandon the Channel Islands, ‘British territory which had
been in the possession of the Crown since the Norman Conquest.’ He
refused to make a compromise concerning Gibraltar."
4) The predicament of the British Expeditionary Force
was preceded by a long chain of appeasements and miscalculations, and it
is perverse of Hitchens to suggest that Churchill was responsible for its
near defeat. On Churchill’s "delusions" in 1940, see
Orwell’s review of Churchill’s Their Finest Hour: "As he
himself admits, Churchill had underestimated the effect of recent changes
in the technique of war, but he reacted quickly when the storm broke in
1940. His great achievement was to grasp even at the time of Dunkirk that
France was beaten and that Britain, in spite of appearances, was not
beaten; and this last judgement was not based simply on pugnacity but on a
reasonable survey of the situation." Churchill did not swing over to
his "polar opposite" and suddenly decide that the French naval
force was in "imminent danger" of being swallowed up by Hitler.
In Max Ophuls’ documentary film The Sorrow and the Pity, Anthony
Eden states that the War Cabinet agonized over the problem of the French
ships and reluctantly came to the conclusion that "we just could not
take the risk" of the ships passing into German hands. This
melancholy mood persisted after the bombing. According to Lukacs,
Churchill "told Colville that night that what happened at Oran was
‘heartbreaking for me’. This was not a rueful reaction after a cruel
deed…. The night before the tragic day he sent Vice-Admiral Somerville
this message: ‘You are charged with one of the most disagreeable and
difficult tasks that a British Admiral has ever been faced
with…’"
5) The "days of equivocation in May of 1940"
were in fact the days when Churchill took control of the War Cabinet, when
he rejected the French appeal for fighter squadrons, when untested RAF
pilots mounted devastating attacks against the Luftwaffe at Dunkirk
(achieving the same kill ratio as in the subsequent Battle of Britain),
and when Churchill proclaimed, "We shall never surrender."
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**********************************
So Cool
Our usual night for latté and verse,
a rock trio occupies the coffee bar.
The space for less than two dozen chairs
shrinks by half with mikes, mixer, and speakers,
so we wander to an outside table owning lights enough
on a holiday wreath that we can see to read.
Our absences of the month spiral
from the books and notebooks of wordware
we and others have woven through calendared light.
We read, and the thrummed strings
behind the plate glass blare past their own lyrics,
drowning out the turns of phrase
we would like to hear from each other
to savor or recast or question.
The who-knows-what-amp speakers
blast whatever the cool guys intend as song
out no less than a three-block perimeter
from the coffee bar, although it seems,
as I struggle to hear what you are saying
sixteen inches from my ear,
for all the power of rock commanding
the three blocks of avenue in sight,
a couple teen carloads cruise boredom, and
a black-clad single stands chewing at her cell phone, but
nobody at all
stops to listen.
Ralph S. Carlson
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**********************************
Literature and
Literacy: The Decline of Reading
and the Stultification of Student
Prose
by
Thomas F. Bertonneau
It is conceivable that Greek alphabetic writing was
invented to record business accounts; or that it was repeatedly reinvented
with minor variations in the consonantal system; or that Homer himself
wrote down his poems so that they would not perish… But evidence and
reason reject these [and other] suppositions. We cannot separate the
invention of the alphabet from the recording of early hexametric poetry.
(Barry Powell, Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet)
I
The gulf between the two sorts of literacy posited by
Cynthia Ozick in her poignant essay on "The Return to Aural
Culture"—the truly literate literacy and its merely pragmatic
counterpart—is vast; that gulf arises, moreover, from the difference
between alphabetic literacy, which begins with the Greeks in the Eighth
Century B.C., and all other, either prior or coeval, forms of literacy. In
Barry Powell’s argument in Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet
(1991), Greek alphabetic literacy, in contrast to the Phoenician writing
that provided its basis, was literate from the beginning: it originated in
the need felt by the individual whom Powell names "the adapter"
to make a permanent, easily accessible record of certain poems (the ones
that scholars would later call "Homeric") popular in his native
Euboea in the Archaic period. The Northwest Semitic consonantal script
that "the adapter" adapted was indeed used primarily to
keep track of business accounts and bequeathed to posterity very little
that would bear the adjective literary. The narrative texts from
Bronze Age Ugarit (Ras Shamra), in Syria, employ a cuneiform consonantal
script, which is sometimes incorrectly called alphabetic, but were, like
their Mesopotamian models, liturgical rather than literary; antedating the
Greek Archaic by many centuries, neither the poems nor their system of
notation is relevant to developments in Eighth Century B.C. Euboea.
All early Greek inscriptions, on the other hand, record
utterances for which literary is possibly the best term, in
the sense that they strive toward art and are expressive—for virtually
all the known specimens are either fragments of occasional verse in
dactylic hexameters or captions designating the images (out of the Homeric
repertory) that began to decorate ceramic wares around the same time.
Others are brief proprietary inscriptions on personal valuables (cups,
lamps, and dishes), and yet a significant proportion even of these makes
use of verse formulas. Thus: "I am the lekythos of Tataie, whoever
steals me shall be struck blind," or, "Nikandre dedicated me to
the goddess who shoots from afar, the pourer of arrows" (167 and
170), the former on a cup (lekythos) from Cumae, a Euboean colony
in Italy, and the latter on a kore carved on Naxos and dedicated on
Delos to the local Artemis. Powell notes of the Nikandre inscription that
it conjoins "proper names" with "Homer’s usual epithets
for Artemis" (171), suggesting the author’s familiarity with the
epic cycle and his (or quite plausibly her) practiced feel both for verse
rhythms and poetic diction. These earliest examples of written Greek stand
close, quite close, to Sixth Century B.C. lyric poetry.
Form, cadence, and the intricacies of prosodic
structure—it appears that all of these accompany the use of writing by
the earliest writers of alphabetic inscriptions. They strike Powell as
internal to it, even when the inscription itself might be crude, as though
the writer were trying out the new technique. Anthony Snodgrass comments,
in Archaic Greece (1980), that at the time when alphabetic writing
emerges, Greek society is intensely focused on epic poetry; and he
supposes, as does Powell, that "the peculiar features of the Greek
alphabet were designed as a notation for epic poetry" (82). As much
as from the Phoenician use of writing, Greek alphabetic literacy thus also
differed from its antecedent palace-based literacy of the Mycenaean
period, with its "Linear B" syllabic script. The scribes of
Mycenae and Pylos operated a narrow pragmatic literacy, like their
professional brethren in the Anatolian, Levantine, and Near Eastern
kingdoms. The versifiers of the Hellenic Eighth Century B.C. were engaging
in disciplined expression obedient to a strongly implicit and widely
understood esthetic; they were not professionals but aristoi with
chirographic facility, knowledge of the formulas, and much lore. Writing
has for them the freshness of a new and challenging game that one cannot
take for granted because more people learn it every day and bring to it
their own talents and experience.
Indeed, the very personality takes on a novel sharpness
through manipulating the innovation; and utterance, too, exhibits an
unprecedented polish and fixity as transcription removes it from the oral
realm and ensconces it in a phonologically analytic medium. As Powell puts
it, judging the essential difference: "While not a single
intelligible graffito survives written in Linear B script, not a single
accounting document survives from early alphabetic Greek" (181). Even
the notorious pornograffiti from late Eighth Century B.C. Thera
(evidence of a cult of pederasty) obey the rule of hexametric scansion. A
survey of extant specimens from the earliest decades of the alphabet will
yield, says Powell, "not a single public inscription—decree,
treaty, or remembrance of common martial exploit; not one public
dedication to a god on behalf of a public body; no inventories,
catalogues, records of treasure, or building specifications; not one word
connected with the doings of one state or collective body with
another" (182). In addition to being literary or poetic, then, the
inscriptions cited by Powell likewise correspond to an ethos "wholly
private" (182). Oddly, however, "they do not include private
topics frequently attested later in Greece" (182). Powell finds
"no legal documents, manumissions of slaves, contracts, mortgages,
transfers of land… There is nothing in these alphabetic inscriptions,
either, to suggest mercantile interests, public or private" (182).
The phrase "wholly private" does not, however, exclude the
activity in question from being intensely social in its orientation.
What remains, of course, represents only a portion of
what the people of the time actually wrote; accidental preservation of
inscriptions on non-perishable material, like baked clay, allied with much
benevolent fortune, is the condition of survival. Powell supposes,
however, that the lost corpus of inscriptions—or rather texts—set
down on perishable material, most likely on papyrus sheets, shared the
character of what the centuries have providentially bequeathed:
In studying archaic Greek epigraphy we are studying
archaic Greek society. In the romantic Odyssey, Homer takes for
his theme the home-lusting wandering man who enjoys experience, who even
crossed the river Okeanos in pursuit of knowledge. Homer had his
audience—possibly in the banquet halls of Lefkandi [in Euboea]. For
the view that literate Greek travelers used writing to keep their books,
there has never been evidence. It may be that in the eighth century
B.C., in Pithekoussai, the song of the bard was a valuable commodity.
We should agree that the epigraphic evidence is
consonant with… the suggestion that the Greek alphabet was designed
specifically in order to record hexametric poetry. (182)
Snodgrass, who remarks the centrality of epos to
Archaic culture, comes to the same conclusion: "The rise of the Greek
alphabet… presupposes a vastly more extensive use of writing, both in
length of texts and in range of writing-material, than is reflected by our
tiny sample of early incised sherds and stones"; later: "a
literary purpose was best served by writing on perishable materials"
(83). What kind of men was so busily engaged in copying out Homeric texts
and in composing original enunciations in a kindred mode? In Euboea and in
the Euboean colonies in South Italy (Magna Graecia), Powell sees a trading
and colonizing society newly and robustly reconstituted after a series of
impassioned and bloody wars between Chalcis and Eretria fought during the
decade or so just around 800 B.C. that had attracted involvement from all
over the Greek world. (Thucydides mentions it.) The recent violent
enormities across the Lelantine plain inclined the Euboean ruling classes
to take special interest in the oral stories about a legendary war in Troy
that also involved the whole Greek world. The aoidos, or bard,
would have retailed the deeds of Agamemnon and Odysseus at social
occasions like those depicted in Odyssey involving the festivities
in the royal court of the Phaeacians or in the great room of Odysseus’
palace on Ithaca where the suitors squat. Along with the flute girls and
the dancers, the bard provided the entertainment at the drinking party. In
knowing the legends he also embodied the aristocratic qualities. He became
the teacher. One could hardly imagine these qualities without thinking of
the bard as their source and exemplar. The rapt attention conjured by the
teller of tales and the fascination of his stories sparked a demand for
his poems, made of his recitations, as Powell says, a
"commodity". But the oral répétiteur is an expensive
proposition. He has been professionally trained over many years through
apprenticeship to an older bard; as there are not so many of him, he comes
dear.
Powell imagines his "adapter" as the one who
ingeniously sees that the bardic contes de geste might be written
down, in the manner in which those traders from Sidon and Tyre write down
business agreements in the seaside emporia. Their system seems efficient
compared with some others a sense of which the "adapter" might
also have. Recording the sagas obviates the bard! Once the performances
become texts, anyone who can read can either recite the verses aloud from
the page or memorize and declaim them. In Powell’s hypothesis,
"there was originally a single text of the Iliad and the Odyssey,"
that of the adapter, "and at first only he could read them"
(232); soon, however, "copies of the poems [began to circulate] among
[the] Euboeans, who may have carried them even to Italy" (232-233).
The abecedary and its rules of combination would have been exported along
with the poems. The rhapsodes of whom we hear from the Classical
writers were, in Powell’s explanation, not oral poets, but men who had
memorized verbatim from texts and could recite from rote. The civic
performers hired by the Athenian tyrants in the Sixth Century B.C. would
have been such men. Because the alphabet was so easy to learn and so
flexible a means of recording speech, however, it swiftly dissociated
itself from the "adapter’s" special purpose and from the
rhapsodic profession and became an autonomous technique. Soon, "even
potters learned how to write" (233), although, before the Sixth
Century B.C., they tended, just like everyone else, to write verse in
heroic meters.
In his Paideia (1933), Werner Jaeger notes that
"when the Odyssey depicts the existence of the heroes after
the war, their adventurous voyages and their home-life among their
families and friends, it is inspired by the life of the aristocrats of its
own day, projected with a naïve realism into a more primitive epoch"
(I 16). Jaeger also calls attention to exaltation of "intellectual
and social virtues" (20) in the saga of Odysseus, the hero whose
"chief merit is his cunning—the fertile practical insight which
saves his life and wins his return home through lurking dangers and
powerful enemies" (20). Refinement and courtesy contribute equally to
the aristocratic ethos along with discipline: "the deliberate
formation of human character" (19). We recognize these traits as
belonging to the description of the Greek Archaic society given by
Havelock in Preface to Plato and elsewhere, to the mimetic-acoustic
order that writing, in his scheme, so obstreperously stymies and
eventually overthrows. Yet in overthrowing the acoustic-mimetic order, the
new chirographic order—the one in which consciousness is transformed by
alphabetic writing—will assimilate and reproduce in subtle ways certain
of its characteristics. The intellectual sharpness, even the wit, embodied
in the figure of Homer’s Odysseus is one of them.
We can indeed see how writing inveigles and challenges
the old orally based mentality, embodied by the aoidos, in so
modest and early a specimen of the alphabetic inscription as the Nestor
Cup, from Pithekoussai (modern Ischia), dated between 735 and 720 B.C.
Not one but two amateur poets took a hand in making the
brief dedication that adorns the cup. The first of the two offered a
mock-heroic blandishment on the object itself —"I am the cup of
Nestor, a joy to drink from" (164)—which is, in fact, a direct
allusion to Iliad: for Nestor of Pylos owns a marvelous drinking
cup so heavy with ornament that only the hero himself can heft it to the
tipple. Perhaps the real owner of the cup actually bore the name of
Nestor. That would be part of the joke; the other, more important, part
has to do with the epic allusion, since the present wineglass is a piece
of modest ceramic, making the identification humorously absurd. The second
composer has responded to the learned reference of the first with two
equally absurd hexameter lines of his own: "Whoever drinks from this
cup, straightaway that man the desire of beautiful-crowned Aphrodite will
seize" (164). If this were indeed Nestor’s Cup, the second composer
jests, then we who drink from it might well be lovers of the goddess. (Right!)
Some third party, remarking all this spontaneous
felicity, has scratched down the three lines on the cup, thereby
immortalizing them; he has even added punctuation―the vertically
arranged double dots of the colon used to separate the individual words
and to mark the clauses of the iteration. Ronald S. Stroud notes
the "lighthearted" character of the diction (Senner, The
Origins of Writing 112); he also remarks that the retrograde
(right-to-left) inscription is "very competently scratched through
the glaze" (112). One might examine the inscription itself to verify
Stroud’s assessment. The Nestor Cup tells us not only of the rapidity
with which the Greeks mastered alphabetic writing after its appearance but
also suggests how inseparable that mastery was from the social milieu
in which it occurred.
Consider the phenomenon of the symposium: at the
beginning of Plato’s dialogue of that name, we learn that a lively
drinking party constituted an event the word of which might persist for
many years and provide a kernel of intense curiosity. The unnamed friend
of Apollodorus hails him and asks for news about the memorable speeches on
love that the dinner guests delivered during the celebration in honor of
Agathon’s prize for drama. In his account, at second-hand, of the
evening, Apollodorus gives the picture of an intensely social table at
which men of the upper classes show off their knowledge of poetry,
science, politics, and the arts; at which they indeed compete with one
another in a contest of verbal skill and knowledge. The three lines of
verse on the Nestor Cup in fact anticipate the richly dialectical
character of the sequence of speeches in Plato’s masterpiece. One of the
Pithekoussan dinner guests responds to another and completes the
enunciation; a third writes it all down. So, too, at Agathon’s house,
one speaker follows another, building on the prior speaker’s words,
until, based on oral accounts, Apollodorus rehearses it in detail for his
friend or Plato writes it all down. As do the encomiasts of the Nestor
Cup, the participants in Agathon’s soirée make allusions, bold
and subtle, to the heroic cycle, citing the poets and turning allusions
into satires on the moment. Coincidentally, Aphrodite is a topic on both
occasions. Powell, noting the unusual double lambda in the word καλλίστεφανο
(beautifully crowned—just in the middle of the third line), says
that it betokens "the inscriber’s sensitivity to metrical
requirements" (164). In this we see a demonstration both of
Havelock’s claim that the alphabet stimulates an unprecedented awareness
of language and of Ong’s claim that literacy alters consciousness.
As in Jaeger’s description, the archaic symposium
forecasts the intensification of intellectual life that Plato so vividly
posits of its classical successor: the symposium constituted "for
Greek men—through its free friendly companionship and its fine
intellectual tradition—the capital of the newly conquered realm of
individual liberty" (I 129). Jaeger argues that early lyric arises
from the good-natured yet erudite versifying over wine and meat in the
clubs. Thus "the drinking-song of Alcaeus presupposes a drinking
party of his comrades, and a love song or a wedding song of Sappho
presupposes the society of young girl-musicians who were her friends"
(129). It is important that Jaeger mentions Sappho in this context: it
reminds us that the literacy revolution of the archaic cultural flowering
was not a patriarchal conspiracy and that women too participated actively
in the Zeitgeist. Indeed, as Jaeger puts it, "the marvelous
process by which the inner soul of man shapes itself in Aeolic lyric
poetry is no less miraculous than the contemporary creation of philosophy
and the constitutional state by the Greeks of Asia Minor" (128). One
immediately thinks of Sappho’s allusions to and jibes at the Homeric,
military ideal of beauty in her best-known lines, "To Anactoria,"
and of her use in that poem of a complicated “μεν…
δε” structure ("not this… but that" or
"whereas… and yet") such as occurs also in the logical
analyses and philosophical disquisitions of the Pre-Socratics. Sappho’s
"not this… but that" is in fact a "neither this, nor
this, nor this… but that," and involves backlooping in a way that
would not likely occur in a pre-literate, primary oral utterance. Sappho
works out a kind of ironic visual punning that depends on the reader’s seeing
the name of the god Ares in the word for
"excellence," arête. One must infer the concept of war,
and the particular allusion to Homer’s account of the hostilities at
Troy, from the glancing and entirely optical allusion to the name of the
god of battles. In the rise of the alphabet we witness, swiftly, the
subversion of the acoustic-mimetic paideia by the literate and
philosophical style that finds its paradigm in Plato’s dialogues, to
which much later writers like Plutarch or the younger Pliny look back for
the model of their own book-based learnedness.
II
There is a paradox in Powell’s assertion, which we
are now in a position to resolve, and which has a bearing on the
contemporary situation―a meaning, as we
shall see, for student prose. As the rehearsal of arguments by Eric
Havelock, Walter Ong, and others, shows, the effect of the
alphabetic revolution was to create a new medium of thought that swiftly
became divorced from the "natural" medium of spoken language and
then changed thinking. We see this happening, as the rhetorical
display, the toast, on the occasion of the symposium becomes an
inscription incised through the glaze of the otherwise unremarkable oenochoe.
Yet as Powell says:
Early Greek writing is frankly idiosyncratic in its
concern to represent accurately the phonetic elements of speech. (115)
The ancient Greek alphabet was… a rigorous phonetic
system. In the archaic period every Greek territory recorded regional
variations of pronunciation in its inscriptions and, to a lesser degree,
in its local literary tradition… In archaic Greece, a fundamental
principle of writing was that the written word should faithfully reflect
the way the word was spoken… [The archaic Greek writer] listened with
cocked ear to the very sound of words, ever striving to record words
just as he heard them. (117)
The social milieu that fosters Greek literacy is
not, then, at the time of the "adapter’s" adaptation,
literate; it represents, rather, a
particularly highly developed instance of primary oral culture, to use
Ong’s special lexicon. Initially, alphabetic writing heightened a
defining trait of orality―the subject’s keen attunement to the
sound of language and to the deportment, to the gestures and facial
expressions, of the speaker. The bard, whose salience on the scene
alphabetic writing would soon diminish, embodies traditional authority; he
is the mimetic teacher whose voice the early didactic poets like
Theognis borrowed. The bard, to cite Powell, makes his impression and
consolidates his own reputation by "by thinking aloud for his
audience, replacing their thoughts with his own" (223). As soon as I
transcribe the bard’s words in an accessible manner, however, and can
backloop among them, my thoughts begin to take precedence for me
over his. But my words too, once I write them down, become
vulnerable to a like criticism; I am not immune from this "etic"
procedure. Writing does not reinforce a raw subjectivity, but rather
reveals the extra-personal objective world in which careful judgment
replaces both opinionated ego-assertion and the social demand that
everyone conform to the received dispensation. In so doing, it recreates
subjectivity in a new form. Self-assessment from an external point of
view—seeing one’s own character according to objective criteria—is
perhaps the first stage in social analysis and in the critique of the
folklore that "everybody knows". If so, it would also be the
first stage in the emergence of a new kind of subject who is independent
of the mimetic pressure of the acoustic paideia.
The self-directed irony of the Nestor Cup gives
evidence of that ability to see oneself clearly that Luria found
conspicuously lacking in the illiterates and semi-literates whom he
studied in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan between the wars, and that Ong and
Havelock remark in their discussions of the transition from orality to
literacy. So do the poems of Sappho, Alcaeus, Archilochus, and above all
Anacreon. As intellection shifts its interest from the spoken to the
written word, its context undergoes alteration: from a purely receptive
crowd addressed by a uniquely knowledgeable speaker, there emerges the
isometric company of learned enthusiasts whose resentment,
channeled into competitive analysis and creativity, preserves and drives
onward the cooperative endeavor of revealing the human condition through
art, literature, science, and philosophy. The personae in Plato’s
Symposium, however we might chide them for their individual flaws,
add up to the type of group in question. One cannot think of Greek
literacy―one cannot think of any
genuine literacy―without such a communitas spiritualis
or cultura animi as its context.
One reason why contemporary college students stumble
and flail so badly in fronting serious reading or in responding to it in
writing is that they have never enjoyed membership in that type of
community; nothing in their experience has guided them, by a close mutual
pressure, toward refinement or cultivation or endowed them with definite
knowledge as opposed to casual lore. They have a group, to be sure.
It takes various forms: circles of friendship, cohort affiliations in
middle and high school, athletic comradeships (which, however, do not
carry over into college although new ones might be established there); but
these tend to be overwhelmed by commercially defined associations such as
those involving an investment in currently popular music, television
shows, and movies. Some students were or are in the marching band, or play
a team sport; some went to the same high school; some follow business or
education majors. All students are massively assimilated to the
great electronic audience of radio, television, the Internet, the compact
disc, and the multi-screen cinema located at the mall. None of this―to
assert what ought to be a truism but what, in the present climate, must be
forcefully reiterated―is literate in the strong sense in which I am
using the term in these pages. It is, however, a powerful source of
conformism across sex, class, and race among late-adolescents
including those bound for college.
A big part of the conformist order among youth is
verbal limitation, a confinement to slogans and ready-made
"opinions", and indeed a noticeable satisfaction (the peers will
not disapprove) in not knowing much beyond one’s casual likes and
dislikes. An evasive "whatever" and a shrug of the shoulders is
often a student’s response to the request that he consider something in
its details or switch, as Luria says, from an existential to a theoretic
scheme. Now it was in a context of cultura animi that Heraclitus
could assert his claim that "all men should speak clearly and
logically and share a body of thought in common, just as the people of a
city are under the same laws." This is the obligation that each
member of the drinking club places implicitly on every other; the poets
undertake a similar incumbency concerning elegance and wit, and the
result is a delicious fillip like the one that begins, "I am the Cup
of Nestor." The joke depends exactly on the dinner guests sharing the
Homeric, the incipiently literate, "body of thought" among them.
Sharing it, they can also jest about it with a flippancy hardly imaginable
in the sacrosanct domain of the oral/acoustic tradition. They can distance
themselves from Homer. This implies, as already suggested, a budding
capacity for depersonalized observation and criticism of received lore,
such as we find in the ethical dicta of the Presocratics. In
addition to defining the condition of articulateness required by civic
life, let us remember, Heraclitus also criticized popular culture: he
questioned, for example, the esthetics of the Dionysiac rites and wondered
about the political acumen of the people. A thinker whose thought partook
of Havelock’s "separation of the knower from the known"
inherent in alphabetic writing, the Sage of Ephesus could step back from
the sensorium and view it from a distance.
We have sampled elsewhere student reaction to
Heraclitus’ self-explanatory prescription that "all men should
speak clearly and logically," a founding insight of civilization and
high culture. The typical student response is again relevant:
This quote reminds me greatly of the thoughts of
American culture. We are all taught to think rationally and organized,
and be able to share thoughts together without our peers. For example in
school we are taught to read and write about a topic, even share these
thoughts and be able to except [sic]feed back, positive or negative.
I’m more of a rebel with my thoughts and I believe that all men
don’t have to speak clearly. Who are we, fellow men to judge who is
clear and intelligent and who is not. We should embrace everyone’s
thoughts and be able to give feed back whether the person speaks how we
do or not. Outlandish thoughts should be accepted too. We are all
individuals and our differences are what makes us (the USA) such a great
country. We don’t have to have anything in common but we can still
live with one another and respect different. I think that we should all
have a common ground with the laws of the land, but how would we learn
anything new if everyone was the same?
Note first the absence of specific references. The
paragraph likely enough represents an honest attempt to respond to
Heraclitus’ single sentence, but lacking real knowledge the writer finds
it difficult to focus his reaction. The phrase "American
culture" (once we extract it from the confusing "thoughts
of") either betokens something large and diffuse or it is a
pretentious label for the writer’s own limited experience. Mention of
the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution would sharpen the
discussion, but this would not serve the subjective (the oral)
claim that external criteria stymie personal expression. I suspect that
the details of our polity simply do not impinge on the student’s
awareness, not because he disdains them but because no one has ever taught
him either that they exist or what they are. His jingoism and his
egocentricity are one and the same. The subjective argument thus takes its
root, so to speak, in the student’s very lack of literate knowledge
("cultural literacy", as E. D. Hirsch has named it) and in his
non-cognizance of genuinely literary texts and important political
documents.
The student’s position is, in a word, without a
context. The assertion that "I’m more of a rebel with my
thoughts" tells, again, of the oral person taking up his agonistic
posture, as does the rhetorical question that follows it. The exordium
that "we should embrace everyone’s
thoughts and be able to give feedback whether the person speaks how we do
or not” represents someone else―the current collective
authority―speaking for the student, as the bard spoke for the
community in early archaic Greece before the advent of alphabetic
writing and literacy. “Feedback” (which the writer’s training has
led him, in his term, “to except”) comes as a piece of technical
jargon from the electronics of voice and music amplification―an
appropriate “neo-oralism”, as one might say. That "we
don’t have anything in common" (that we are all absolutely and
incommensurably "unique") is another proposition from the
existing menu of mandatory postures, and it resonates with the writer’s
typical claim to non-pareil status. (He calls himself a
"rebel," after all.) Yet the writer cannot by his prose
differentiate himself from his peers. This is what makes us wince when he
stakes his claim, putting it in the form of a dismissive question, that no
one would ever "learn anything new if everyone was [sic] the
same," committing the same error of interpretation as three out of
four of his classmates. His awkwardness of utterance assimilates him to
them, as in the wonderfully insouciant sentence that says, "we are
all taught to think rationally and organized, and be able to share
thoughts together without our peers." The impossible notion of sharing
thoughts together without our peers is hardly unparalleled in
contemporary student expression.
One additional characteristic of the paragraph needs
attention. Not only does the writer not adhere to any standard (because,
as we may surmise, nothing in his K-12 experience ever suggested a
standard); he is subtly but aggressively indisposed to standards. That
much he has learned. Two of his
sentences―“we should embrace everyone’s thoughts and be able to
give feed back whether the person speaks how we do or not” and
“outlandish thoughts should be accepted too”―sum up the
attitude. In sum, the student’s expression is without context.
Pragmatically he has taken his ABCs some distance. Purely as a
material technique, writing serves him, but it has not become for
him a tool of analysis or the entry into a wider intellectual world than
the one circumscribed by the folklore of contemporary North American
secondary orality. We can guess at the origin of the attitude: he has
learned writing as a tool of occasional self-expression, but he is not a
reader and therefore not a student of anything, say of grammar or
vocabulary, in any meaningful sense. Holders of the doctoral degree might
find it difficult to believe, but a literate education, of the kind
already available in the time of Plato and increasingly available in
middle and later Antiquity, entails a certain capacity for humiliation and
a certain willingness to consider novel theses on their own terms before
reacting to them intemperately. What I know is as a point compared to
what I do not know, as Emerson more or less said, summing up what I
take to be the genuinely literate attitude. Just this capacity to sense
one’s limitation in comparison to authority, or to an ideal, is visible
in the self-irony of the Nestor Cup writers; but that it was or soon
became a positive concept, an axiom of learning, is attested by a raft of
ancient documents beginning with the Platonic dialogues.
It is often quite touching when Socrates acknowledges
an authority, as he does even to Protagoras and to Gorgias, both of whom
he roundly criticizes. In the case of Protagoras, there is probably
something ironic in such praise, but even then there is probably also
something sincere and humble in it. In the case of Gorgias, the kind words
about him in Phaedo and other dialogues than the eponymous one
suggests that no irony here undermines Socrates’ admiration. He has
learned much, Plato’s master says, from Gorgias. We should not take our
own condition—of academic rancor and rebuke, of petty egos in even
pettier clashes over vanishing flyspecks of significance—as the
legitimate model of scholarly discourse or of genteel literate behavior.
On the contrary, the existing ethos among scholars in the age of the
culture wars all too painfully resembles the untutored rhetorical
bristling of the students who react to Heraclitus as though, in
recommending reason and clarity, he were guilty of lèse majesté.
What the ancients themselves expected from a literate
education we can learn from a number of sources. A particularly good
source is that remarkable document of pedagogical theory, psychological
insight, and anthropological acumen by a Late Antique follower of Plato,
Plutarch’s essay On Listening.
While the ancients, as Ong has pointed out, never quite
managed to formulate the speaking/writing dichotomy, an awareness of it is
implicit in their discourse, as soon as alphabetic writing appears. Yet
because of the rarity of texts, recitation remained the primary medium in
Antiquity for apprehending discourse; for many people the auditory and the
lectionary were not entirely separate, even though they might have been
skilled in writing and habituated to reading. It should not surprise us
that there is much—not only the title—in On Listening that
reflects the importance of oratory in ancient intellectual life. Plutarch
made his living, during the middle decades of his life, as a professional
lecturer in Greece and in Italy, visiting Rome at least twice in this
capacity. Even the most cursory acquaintance with his work, however, will
reveal his strong orientation to the written word. Quotation from
ascertainable sources is central to his style. He habitually maintained
notebooks into which he entered ideas, notions, quotations, and
commonplaces for later consideration or for inclusion in some formal
context. On Listening began as a lecture, to be declaimed in the
forum, but for publication via the copyist he gave it the form of
an admonitory letter to a former pupil, Nicander, just now embarking on
the higher phase of his education. In its complexity of construction, in
the grammar and syntax of its sentences, On Listening clearly makes
its appeal to the eye rather than to the ear. It works within a theoretic
scheme and it constitutes an independent setting-forth of the requirements
of intellectual receptivity. As such it separates the knowledge that it
formulates from the actual presence of him with whom that knowledge has
its origin. The sender dispatches his missive, his text as distinct from
his speech, at once across a distance and into the future under the
assumption that it is sufficient in itself as a plausible argument.
As Oswald Spengler puts it in The Decline of the
West, writing symbolizes "the Far". Giambattista Vico
reasons similarly in his New Science (1725) when he says that only
the developed languages (his generic third stage in the tripartite
evolution of language) might be identified with "epistolary", by
which "men at a distance... communicate to each other the current
needs of their lives" (140). Early languages, argues Vico, confined
as they were to "hieroglyphic" expression, remained attached to
"poetic style" and concerned themselves with "fables",
whereas "rational or philosophic universals" could only appear
"through the medium of prose speech" (154). So we might describe
Plutarch’s real topic in Spenglerian or Viconian terms as paying
attention to or learning to concentrate on something other than
an immediately present interlocutor; or even as following an argument—as
distinct from following a speaker—in itself, timelessly, and on
its own terms. Thus does this heightened attention or concentration
entail precisely those mental acts that Ong, Havelock, Powell, and Jaeger
attribute to literacy rather than to orality: assessment of logical
structures, which can only be accomplished by carefully recalling earlier
portions of the speech in connection with the present portion; awareness
of plausibility in assertions apart from the character of the speaker; and
a deliberate suspension of any emotional reaction to the argument. The
discipline of proper listening emerges in Plutarch’s analysis of it as
not only epistemological but ethical in its aims: "Proper listening
is the foundation of proper living" (50). The primary advice that
Plutarch offers Nicander is thus to keep his counsel, to stay quiet, and
not to express himself prematurely. Writes Plutarch:
it is noticeable that most people... practice
speaking before they have got used to listening, and they think that
speaking [as opposed to listening] takes study and care, but benefit
will accrue from even a careless approach to listening. It may be the
case that in ball games, learning to throw and learning to catch the
ball are simultaneous, but in dealing with speech proper receptivity is
prior to delivery, just as conception and pregnancy precede the birth of
viable offspring. (29-30).
Listening belongs to "the divine leadership of
reason" (29) and to "philosophy" (30). Not to be informed
by "rational discourse" (29) means to remain a natural person
moved by impulses and appetites rather than by "external tendencies
implanted by words" (29). Only "good arguments" can chasten
and tame "nature" (29). Plutarch thinks of language in
remarkably modern terms, as a system related to the civic order. Through
language, reason (λóγος)
makes itself known. Of course, not every instance of language corresponds
to an instance of reason; there is much useless palaver. Those who have
not learned to contemplate meritorious speeches quietly, rehearsing the
arguments to find the syllogisms and testing whether the premises are
valid, run the risk of being taken in by easy talk: "if they come
across anyone with a story to tell about a dinner party or a procession or
a dream or a slanging match he had with someone, they listen in silence
and cannot get enough" (30). Note that Plutarch makes the same
criticism of idle chatter that defenders of literacy in a modern context
have been making about television and so-called popular culture since the
middle of the last century. Says Plutarch of those same untrained youths,
"if someone attracts their attention and gives them some beneficial
instruction or necessary advice... [they] become impatient and, if they
can, they make a contest out of it, resist his words and try to argue him
down" (30). A contemporary example of the same impetuous behavior is
the common student response to Heraclitus, the one that characteristically
reverts to the rhetorical ploy of asking, who is he to posit criteria?
The implication is that criteria, even the grammar rules of orderly
speech, always constitute the oppression of the complaining subject.
Plutarch’s contentions on these matters resonate with
Sandra Stotsky’s criticisms of modern writing curricula for the
secondary schools. These are the curricula which most decisively shape the
concept that students have of written exposition. In Losing our
Language (1999), Stotsky notes the emphasis placed on expressive or
personal writing in high school English programs:
Certainly, personal writing may be useful to get
students started as writers, and there are volumes of anecdotal accounts
by teachers detailing their successes in using personal, or
experience-based, writing to motivate beginning or reluctant writers.
The value of personal writing has long been an article of faith among
English teachers at all educational levels, but in my exhaustive review
of research studies, I found no evidence that could contribute to the
pedestal on which personal writing has been placed. As a frequent
practice, it may well promote self-centered thinking and limit
students’ capacity to understand abstract concepts from a more
analytic or distanced perspective. (270)
Recently, Stanley Fish made a similar argument, in even
more forceful terms than Stotsky’s. As for Stotsky, her invocation of
"distance" links her analysis to those of Ong and Havelock, as
well as to the case for what we might call non-expression as a condition
of intellectual development being made by Plutarch. Expression is simply
not a discipline; it is, rather, a natural propensity that requires
training and as such gets badly in the way of tuition, as Plutarch shows.
The pity in the predominance of the expressive model in secondary the
writing curriculum is that even a little tuition soon inclines the student
into "aiming at truth rather than winning an argument" (31), in
Plutarch’s words. As Ong says, with reference to Luria, "it takes
only a moderate degree of literacy to make a tremendous difference in
thought processes" (Orality and Literacy 50).
An extended paragraph-sequence in On Listening
examines in detail how envy and resentment, two strong emotions, prevent
the assimilation of just advice and hinder the acquisition of objective
knowledge as against untested opinions. Holding one’s tongue, one of the
disciplines that Plutarch recommends to Nicander, aims at suppressing
invidious reactions to persuasive arguments that irritate the natural
person precisely because of their integrity and stylishness. The exchanges
of purely oral people, which tend toward the egocentric and rancorous,
cannot tolerate silent pauses, for to indulge in one would give the
impression that the tacit party has conceded the contest to his opponent.
There is no time, in oral contestation, to meditate on significations and
tropes. Only with the silence that imitates the mute character of the
letters does the space for a philosophical apprehension of words at last
open. In a related essay, How to Study Poetry, Plutarch affirms the
value of a literary curriculum to intellectual development provided that
it concerns itself not only with story and image but with grammar,
etymology, and what a later age would call the semantics of the poem. When
teachers guide their students through the poets, Plutarch urges, they
should take care to make them attend to γλώτται,
"glosses" (117), or nuances. Words take on slightly different
meanings or connotations in different contexts: they can have "one
signification at one time, and at another time... another" and a
learned connoisseur of poems will thus "observe closely this
distinction and discrimination of words" (119). The student will not
acquire this capacity for detecting nuances immediately; the acquisition
will rest on many a layered foundation, beginning with the child’s
abecedary and progressing through the adolescent’s exercises in grammar,
vocabulary, and the accessible classics.
Cynthia Ozick discusses these requirements in her essay
on "The Return to Aural Culture" (from which I have already
quoted) when she describes a classroom anthology used in the New York City
Public Schools early in the twentieth century when her grandmother
attended them: "Nine tenths of this inventive book is an anthology
engaging in its richness, range, and ambition" (Washburn and Thornton
81). Ozick lists some of the contents:
"Lochinvar" is here; so are the Declaration
of Independence and selections from Shakespeare; so is Shelley’s
"To A Skylark"; so is the whole "Star Spangled
Banner." But also: "Description of a Bee Hunt,"
"Creation a Continuous Work," "The Sahara,"
"Anglo-Saxon and Norman French," "Conversation,"
"Progress of Civilization," "Effects of Machinery,"
"On the Choi |
