John R. Harris, Ph.D. (Executive Director)

Thomas F. Bertonneau, Ph.D. (Secretary)

Helen R. Andretta, Ph.D.; York College-CUNY

Ralph S. Carlson, Ph.D.; Azusa Pacific University

Kelly Ann Hampton

Michael H. Lythgoe, Lt. Col. USAF (Retd.)

The previous issue of Praesidium (Fall 2003) may be viewed by

  clicking here.

©  All contents of this journal (including poems, articles, fictional works, and short pieces by staff) are copyrighted by The Center for Literate Values of Tyler, Texas (2004), and may not be cited at length or reproduced without The Center's express permission.

Pensée de la Saison:

CONTENTS

Appearances notwithstanding, Praesidium is not altering its format to become primarily a journal of book reviews. The lengthy and spirited assessment of postmodern critical theory which Professor Sonnino most graciously sent to me over the winter is, of course, a reappraisal of works once held collectively as the Graduate School Bible (at least if one were unfortunate enough to enter grad school as an English or Comparative Literature major in the late seventies or eighties). I know that a great many of us have shared Dr. Sonnino’s discomfort with Derrida, Foucault, and company for quite some while. When I was still immersed in the academy myself and would attend my region’s annual meeting of the Conference on Christianity and Literature, I clearly recall the odd mix of bright young things reading their papers about "discourse" and "signifiers" while the Old Guard milled about the coffee pot and muttered estimates of how long the trend in impenetrable jargon would last. It was altogether too easy to have a paper accepted for reading in those days if you only sprinkled the right formulas through it, and altogether too hard to understand what the paper could be saying beyond the transparently obvious. There was something de mauvaise foi about it all. To my mind, Dr. Sonnino has driven a stake straight through the dark heart of critical theory’s ambulant corpse. Though making such common-sensical remarks as his out in the open remains somewhat risky in many quarters, the thaw has definitely begun. May the days continue to grow warmer!

Likewise, the reviews which Mark Wegierski and Margaret Turnbull generously submitted to me are not just a couple of perfunctory salutes to new books by large presses. (Have you ever noticed, by the way, how carefully the hack reviewer confines his sharpest barbs for products of the least influential publishing houses?) Both of these scholarly commentators have written about works which happen to treat subjects of significant interest to them as educated observers of a troubled planet. Both also hail from points of the Anglophone world beyond the borders of the United States (Mark from Canada and Margaret from Australia). Since I have every reason to suspect that, even on the Internet, Praesidium’s readership remains mostly American, these perspectives achieved from slightly unfamiliar pinnacles will prove especially revealing, I trust. The experience of reading Blackwood’s Magazine as an adolescent permanently cured me of what is now (with a supercilious fatuity) called ethnocentrism. Mr. Wegierski’s review of Sir James Goldsmith’s book, in particular, recalls my youthful encounter to me, and is bound to surprise the younger or less traveled members of our audience with the vista it offers of a cultural conservatism quite unlike any known to us in the land of Wal-Mart and McDonald’s (where, frankly, we have little culture left to conserve). That Goldsmith’s approach to conserving delicate plants on the human landscape seems less than fully viable is very plausibly (and very charitably) presented in the essay—yet the problems implicit in holding on to the past’s riches are not removed simply by letting the dead bury the dead, as the essay also stresses. We may, indeed, die as a culture (as well as in some more individual, biological, and catastrophic sense) if we do not learn how to cling to vital elements of our human heritage. Dr. Turnbull’s case for the preservation of the English language from promotional double-talk is the perfect companion piece to such concerns. I doubt that I am alone in suspecting that civil society is breaking down—quite overtly dissolving into frustrated, alienated, isolated exiles convinced that they are constantly misled and lied to—because of our linguistic collapse.

My own essay volunteers a partial or preliminary cure to the disease which I have pondered for years: a revival of fine music and the visual arts. If literacy cannot resuscitate itself from frivolity and déraison (it may, in fact, have infected itself through such agencies as Dr. Sonnino’s gallery of rogues—but that’s another story), then might the other arts prove more potent? Would rap music really stand up against a steady onslaught of Bach and Vivaldi? If posters of movie and sports stars had to compete with reproductions of Titian and Turner, would not the adolescent bedroom be transformed? If the mind is currently too cluttered to be approached through images which it must itself manufacture from the printed word, what about a direct assault of good taste upon the eye and ear? The voluptuous Helen is always more appealing to the debased intelligence, as Mr. Inbinder thoughtfully shows; but Athena would certainly win the rest of the beauty pageant, if only we could get beyond the swimsuit segment.

The beauty of the written word, naturally, is in nowise meant to be disparaged by my remarks. Ralph Carlson’s poetry suffices to remind us that words, too, can paint a canvas. For that matter, they can be a lot more fun than hipping and hopping to a multi-decibel drumbeat (which is apparently great fun to some). In evidence of this proposition, I adduce Mr. Davies’ short story.

~J.H.

μονωδία γαρ εν άπασιν εστι πλήσμιον και πρόσαντες, η δε ποικιλία τερπνόν

"For monotony is cloying and tedious in all things, while variety is delightful."

In my essay for last quarter’s issue of Praesidium, I argued that moral goodness is at once forever beyond satisfaction in this life and constantly exigent of particular actions in this life. We cannot fulfill the demands of goodness as we can the demands of a grocery list, yet the pursuit of goodness generates lists without end. Stop lying! Think of the children! Listen to the anger in your words! Fierce cherubs pop up on our shoulder at every turn, their brow knitted and their finger shaking, to remonstrate against our conduct in acutely specific terms. It isn’t that we can transform ourselves into the lordly All Good One who sends these messengers by acceding to each of their demands—but by refusing even one such demand, we become most painfully convicted in our own eyes of unworthiness to stand in that beatific presence.

In this essay’s context, I would like to emphasize about the earlier discussion what one might call its aesthetic. The "game" of morality—of classing a certain situation’s imperative option under a universal law, then recognizing in another situation that this law must yield right-of-way, then admitting to oneself that goodness’s essence can sometimes evade the finest legalese—is a tennis match between qualitative and quantitative thought. Every right action, as Immanuel Kant observed in terms much misunderstood, must be conceived of as law.¹ That is, the subject must present it to his mind as a quantity, a clear reality with distinct limits: for nothing short of such a concept would be binding on other subjects—it would be a mere subjective whim without the compulsory quality of an objective duty. Yet quantitative objectivity does indeed characterize the moral imperative as a quality; for, as moral endeavor itself keeps teaching us in a most humbling pedagogy, no law ever foresees all of its proper exceptions or suspensions.

For this reason, by the way, civilized people do not legislate morality in the formal sense of punishing infractions by mulct or imprisonment: i.e., because moral law is subjectively objective—it is objectively compelling, but not incontestably so beyond the details of an immediate situation and a specific agent. To expand its reign in any given case would inevitably be to violate its decrees in other cases. Lying is always wrong, but we make it illegal only when it imminently impedes the practical functioning of society (as in tax fraud or commercial swindle). The person who lies about knowing a celebrity is not arrested or ticketed. If he were, then we should have to punish identically the person who tells his five-year-old that mommy’s cancer operation is just a routine procedure at the doctor’s office.²

I never cease to be astonished at the number of people whose eyes cannot follow the rational tennis ball in this match—or who refuse to sit and watch, perhaps, because the very suggestion of a game over such lofty matter strikes them as seditious. They insist that the boundary lines of moral law are immovable, do not overlap, and rest impervious to all late-coming legal claims. If one appeals to the imperfect, ever-approximating, asymptotic nature of human reason, as I have done, they lean over and give the rug a brisk heave. They protest, that is, that moral law is from God and not from man. They point to holy writ, delivered by some means to which all the strictures of human perception and reflection are irrelevant (yet what could such a revelation be to any human creature, other than a tree falling unheard in a Siberian thicket?), and they insist that no placement of commas or parsing of verb tenses could possibly be a source of controversy in the sacred text. The alternative, as they see it, is to slip and slide in relativism. In fact, they are always (in my experience) quite forthright about this motive for their kind of belief. Their "not one altered comma" intransigence about the holy document’s perfect authority is not a reverence for the document itself, such as one might expect of an unlettered medieval swineherd allowed a glimpse of an illuminated gospel’s first page… no; their high regard for the book’s authority, rather is an afterthought which steadies their dizzy brains as the society around them dances over a moral abyss. At all costs, relativism must be repudiated.

But not at all costs, surely. Not at the cost of goodness itself, in whose holy name moral relativism is less odious than nonsensical. I must not ramble too far from my stated thesis of the aesthetic, especially so early in the essay. Yet all of the misguided objections to moral reason which I have just summarized are indeed, at their foundation, the product of deficient aesthetic acuity. Moral laws are not relative: if they were, they should not be laws. They are incomplete, however—be their mundane entirety ever so grandly ponderous—and they do sometimes make conflicting claims. It is because they make conflicting claims that the human spirit is led up toward a metaphysical dimension where (and there alone) final harmony may be joyfully anticipated. Here on earth, our choice to do good for one party constantly renders us incapable of doing good for another party. Sometimes we must even harm one of the parties through neglect. A prosaic example would be helping Jill with her homework instead of Jack because Jack is fourteen years old and Jill is twelve, or because Jill has a test tomorrow. To insist that the laws sanctioned by God (and, after all, what other laws could be moral?) do not allow of these territorial disputes is to straitjacket oneself within one of two preposterous and, frankly, irreverent propositions. Either sacred duty includes so paltry a number of behaviors that no collision between duties can ever arise, or else the behavior which is "clearly spelled out" in holy writ takes precedence and the option less mentioned or less clearly supported is cut adrift without a qualm. The latter sort of determination is often conducted with a repugnant self-righteousness—that is, with a mistaken righteousness whose origins are egotistical rather than impartial. Jack ends up getting helped at his homework because this sacred passage elevates the household son and heir, or else Jill gets the help because that passage blesses little children.

Such falsely pious buffoonery lacks finesse. It is finesse—sensitivity to qualitative detail, to tone and nuance—which generates moral imperatives for innumerable circumstances. It is finesse which pulls twelve tables or ten commandments or seven cardinal virtues off a cold marble slab or a brittle yellow page and animates them to walk into our daily lives. True worship of the law requires a mind which ferrets out the quality of lawfulness in things. The law’s quantitative rigidity, far from being canceled out by sensitivity to qualification, is ennobled as its stiff line is bent infinitesimally into a heaven-bound hyperbola. Form is brought to life by shade, just as shade is rendered dramatic by the quest for form. The Pyrrhonist splits hairs for the egotistical joy of tearing forms apart. (Yes, the sensitive types—the esprits fins—have their egotistical monsters, too: academe is rotten with them.)³ The truly devout believer in goodness, however, relaxes the boundaries of excessively crude forms that he may find new forms within them. In a healthy, reverent, and tasteful mind, the cultivation of subtlety is nothing other than the invigorated cultivation of intricate structure.

I underscored the element of taste above, for it is here that I wish my essay’s emphasis to rest. I have argued often in other quarters that the moral squalor of Western culture today—Western post-culture, I am tempted to write—is in some significant measure due to our aesthetic crudity. Kant believed that contemplation of moral law was a "propaedeutic" (a "paving the way" type of instruction) for artistic appreciation. He seems to have had in mind that un-beautiful species of beauty known as the sublime which haunted the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: scenes of panoramic majesty which inspire the heart to divine God’s presence.⁴ Whatever the merits of that theory, I think it at least as likely that the study of artistic objects "playing" at the pursuit of new forms through finer shades prepares the mind to weigh moral questions maturely.

An example: there is much debate at this hour about whether American troops should or should not have entered Iraq a year ago. I do not propose to saunter into that particular mine field of exchange. Just about everyone will now agree, however, that our tactics greatly complicated a well-intentioned incursion by grossly miscalculating local sentiment in areas of fierce fighting. We did not exercise much subtlety in failing to recognize, for instance, that the last American "liberation" in that part of the world had left hundreds of thousands of Kurds exposed to subsequent slaughter, or that the religious factions most oppressed by Saddam were also closely linked by their beliefs to Iran. I hasten to add that I am not by any means condemning the invasion: I am suggesting that its conception would have profited from a certain qualitative maturity. Yet where was such finesse to be found in a culture which has disparaged and underfunded foreign language instruction for at least thirty years now (i.e., every since the Sputnik scare waned), and which suffers from a shocking deficiency of scholars who read even Arabic, let alone the dozens of other relevant languages in the Near East? Having devoted our resources to the satellite and the microchip (an obsession reflected on college campuses by the healthy budgets of engineering and computer science programs), how could we expect to understand people who lived closer to Homer than to Newton? Having determined long ago that the arts had no "use", what window did we expect to find upon the souls of people who listened to heroic poetry rather than "reality" shows?

Those who vocally opposed the invasion, furthermore, might helpfully have stressed our ignorance of popular sentiment among the tribes and sects we foresaw embracing the dubious prospect of shopping malls and superhighways. (The peddling of this same troubled dream has won us mixed reviews in the quondam Soviet Union, where doctors moonlight as call girls and free enterprise has transferred the throttle from the State’s hand to the Mob’s.) Instead, the loyal opposition sniped and crabbed fecklessly about absurd conspiracies hatched by oil companies and political dynasties with "OK Corral" vintage vendettas. The subtlety lacking on one side was rendered somewhat respectable by the formulaic villifying which proliferated on the other.

On both sides of the aisle, these arguments were more than rhetorical postures. They were moral decisions—or morally valent decisions. They affected the lives of millions, and have collectively precipitated the deaths of some thousands. (My "they" includes the invasion’s critics—for an opponent who cannot abstain from paranoid histrionics becomes complicit in the half-digested judgments he habilitates through his bungling of the resistance. This, too, must be deemed a decision, for all its show of insanity.) Information-gathering is a crucial part of moral conduct. One cannot be absolved of culpability for leaving a loaded gun on a table if one makes no effort first to discover who might be apt to wander through the house.

Yet our foreign policy is also a web of decisions, I reiterate, which might have been favorably influenced by an aesthetic regard for detail. I am inclined to believe that it is primarily this, insofar as it has proved a policy in error. Its stages were agreed upon by experts whose special competence far exceeds anything to which a literary scholar like me could ever lay claim. If such gifted people can nevertheless blunder badly in their reckoning of human motivation, maybe, in some way, they are too expert. Maybe they have forgotten how ordinary mortals live, or maybe they have never known what extraordinary misery does to normal sentiments.

Literature is actually a great corrective to absent-mindedness and under-education of these varieties (quite apart from the study of literature in its original language, with all the specific cultural insights thereby available). Take the classics, that body of texts which was once assumed to paint basic human nature and to express the highest human ambitions. Titus Livy shows us how implacable ethnic hatreds can be. Herodotus and Xenophon show us how bewilderingly soon local upheavals may be absorbed into the status quo within societies long bred to servility. Arrian at least implies (unwillingly, and perhaps unwittingly) that the definitive overthrow of such a tyrant in such a society can create an anarchy where the worst elements rise to the top. Every major oral tradition somewhat refined into recorded res gestae, from the Chanson de Roland to the Nibelungenlied to the Irish Táin Bó Cúalgne (not to mention the Iliad), shows us how ready—and often zealous—to die are young men for reasons little better than that most of their peers fear death.

The reading list for the invasion’s critics, of course, would look somewhat different, but it would run just as long. Tacitus on the self-desctructive lunacy of despots and the savage brutality of their henchmen… Thucydides on the libido dominandi—that lust for political power which can incinerate its votaries by the thousand in a determined self-immolation for a miserable cause… Ariosto on the uproarious bombast of egotism masquerading as idealism… Silvio Pellico and Dostoevsky on life in a narrow cell as punishment for thinking out loud… and, naturally, Solzhenitsyn. But why not, too, some of the very authors who owe many of their laurels to the academy’s reverence for Third World literature? How could someone read Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, I wonder, or García-Marquez’s El Coronel No Tiene Quien le Escriba and still remain comfortably indifferent to the plight of a destitute and bullied populace? Why does vigorous opposition to such outrages require the tawdry motive of plump oil profits to be supposed credible in the world’s wealthiest nation?

I am aware that pleading my case through a strictly literary aesthetic vexes the issue. Literature is the most "engaged" of all the arts, since its constituent elements are human beings and sequences of human events: hence it is also the most plainly, irresistibly moral of all the arts (an attribute which Chinua Achebe famously but obtusely misidentified as propagandistic). Assigning a bunch of policy-makers a list of novels can look very much like serving them with a summons to attend the next rally of one’s favored party. I should more properly say, therefore, that both sides should read both lists. More properly still, I should perhaps exclude all chronicles and memoirs, admitting to the list only creative fiction. In doing so, I would be shifting my emphasis from the literary work’s quantitative dimension—its programmatic convergence on insight, its plot, its "propaganda"—to its qualitative dimension. In literary narrative, that dimension may be called very simply human inner life, or psychology. Psychological depth provides most of the subtlety to be found in any story. Even a naïve fable peopled by stock characters manages to send tingles down the spine with its dark woods and darker caves only because these elements of the setting are really projections of human anxiety (cf. Hawthorne). Events are the story’s architecture: psychology is its play of shadows under the eaves and down the columns.

But we of the West are no longer, on the whole, a culture of readers (and if not we, then who?). I shall abstain from taking aim at an easy target. I challenge anyone, rather, to advance the name of a single prominent political figure today who routinely reads creative works of more than… let us not say one hundred years old, but twenty. Bush the Younger was much derided as a candidate when, upon being asked his favorite book, he offered up the Bible. I do not recall, however, that any of the candidates responded to the same question with Anna Karenina or Leaves of Grass (a work much loved by Lincoln). Autobiographies of public servants, historical portraits of World War Two heroes, best-sellers in the mystery or perhaps sci-fi genre (but wander not too far down this curious path: fantasy can render a personage highly suspect to the electorate)… our leaders would probably like to read more excursively, more leisurely—but they haven’t the time. Their day is dedicated to the absorption of "facts", for their lives are dedicated to being "useful". Their stock in trade is to identify problems and urgently recommend solutions. They deal in quantities: any tremor of discontent is, to them, a possible theme of their agenda’s next symphonic movement.

Frankly, one can speak in no very different vein about the more "intellectual" progressives on the aisle’s left side whose seats are so far to the edge that they occupy the ivory tower rather than the senate house. Most contemporary academics in the Humanities do not read—not for aesthetic pleasure. Perhaps they once did so: perhaps a love of Coleridge or Goethe or Pushkin originally spurred them on to enroll in graduate studies. They, too, however, have become devotees of "the facts". They probably read a great many more literary journals (when they read at all) than other poems, plays, and novels of their special author’s period, for they are necessarily always on the prowl for a "publishable" topic and supporting citations. The most ingenious of them do indeed sniff out a useful commentary in the primary material sometimes, though that area of harvest has now been gleaned with many a fine-toothed rake; but even such genuine scholars seldom have the hours or the energy left to read from an epoch or tradition which can have nothing whatever to do with their specialization. Just look at that staple of undergraduate education, the literary anthology. Specialists have inserted authors whose work minutely reflects each era’s trends or—at strategic points—bristles with an era’s birth or decline. "Facts" arise from the brew and crystallize. The march of history acquires the look of destiny: so-and-so wrote such-and-such because he could not not have written it.⁵ In the meantime, some of the most beautiful works in literary history fall by the wayside. Lamotte-Fouqué’s Undine, Alain-Fourrier’s Grand Meaulnes, and Azorín’s Doña Inez are no more volumnious than Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice—but they will never find their way into Norton’s "must reads" for sophomores. They are too atmospheric, too open-ended: too severely warped toward a "universalist" quest for meaning.

I could not help but be amused recently when observing that Jorge Ruffinelli, editor of Augusto Monterroso’s Lo Demás es Silencio for Catedra, had determined this mainstay of "Latin American progressivist and revolutionary movements" to be "two different, yet perfectly compatible, Monterrosos."⁶ The quandary arises because Monterroso the activist ideologue conceals Monterroso the postmodern metafictionalist. The same man who could denounce Yankee imperialism without a pause to inhale could also write un-stories where nothing that seems to happen is unequivocally happening. The Rest Is Silence purports to be a biography of one Eduardo Torres, and obscure provincial literato in an obscure provincial town. Not only are Torres’s few scholarly opera littered with factual blunders, however, but he appends his own postscript to a work which includes the testimonial of his "widow". Of course, those of us who must move among such trends are familiar with the "Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes" phenomenon ad nauseam. One might as well call it the Tristram Shandy Phenomenon; for it is nothing new under the sun, despite its catalytic effect on the jargon industry, and it was rather funnier when it was only being done for the sixth or seventh time (Diderot, P.G. Wodehouse, Flann O’Brian…).

What I have found newly fascinating about Monterroso and his generation, rather than their not-so-rare humor, is precisely their fierce political activism. Naturally, I and many others have long noticed the paradox that an intelligentsia of voluminous agnosticism should be forever blaring non-negotiable political doctrine from campus soap boxes. For the paradox characterizes the species: Monterroso and Barthes are only two of the most eloquent specimens. How can such incurable perplexity be married to such irascible rigidity? Here we find no Swift or Thackeray shaking his head with a wry smile over mankind’s vanity while deducing therefrom a very circumscribed, chastened political hope… no: we find the most insistent utopianism in fine fettle. As I incubated this essay, I found myself no longer content to ascribe such glaring inconsistency to sheer folly, to careerist gamesmanship, to political opportunism, or to any of the other motives I have seen most thoughtfully alleged. ⁷ I believe that sane people must be coherent at some level, I do not believe the majority of our intelligentsia to be insane, and I do not even believe (not really—not on my better days) that most of them would sell their mother for a promotion. Señor Ruffinelli, at some level, must be right: the two Monterrosos must be compatible… but not for the reason he advances, which is no reason at all. "The preoccupation to maintain the literary work’s independence will not permit [Monterroso] to inflate its prestige through the author’s personal fame."⁸ Pen names are used to accomplish this end, not diametrically opposite styles.

I am beginning to suspect that the postmodern play of the reflexive (or "self-reflexive", if you’re on your third martini) metafictional self-deconstructing anti-narrative is itself a very surprising manifestation of finesse manquée. One would have thought just the opposite, at first glance. These burlesques without any stable reference seem like finesse run amuck—a mad debauch of finesse. They are too fine by half, like some highly urbane salamander at a soirée who turns everything into a pun or double-entendre. But one may as well say that they are not fine enough, for it amounts to the same thing. A truly discerning artist would know how to deploy the unraveling of finesse within the weave of structure so as to draw smiles at the most embarrassing or most suggestive moments. A "dead man’s" postscript to his own biography is quite amusing: his "widow’s" run-on sentences of three or four hundred words are infinitely less so, especially after the third or fourth ordeal. Their attempt to replicate bourgeois tedium is altogether too successful. The replica, indeed, has far excelled the original in its utter resistance of the faintest interest, and is now something like a defiance of the "rules" of good writing. Something like, but not like… because the send-up, if one may call it so, began in the mouth of a character with no literary pretensions whatever. Or, since all of Monterroso’s characters incline to the same excess, is writing itself the author of such interminable babble? But why, then, is the babble presented as a series of verbal interviews? Or is the literary pretense of the verbal interview being sent up?

The reader—this reader, anyway (who is neither Monterroso’s editor nor a tenure-questing academic)—is not left marveling at the vacuity of signifiers in literary texts, but at the ostentatious, somewhat arrogant pointlessness of these pages in this text. Would anyone read the same lines if they were not known, and very well known, to have been penned by Monterroso or one of his comrades in arms: i.e., by an intellectual deliberately writing folderol? If there is some "self-reflexive" joke engaging here in auto-arousal, might it not really be that the intellectual community has grown so analytically anemic that it titters just because one of its own has written something spectacularly illegible?

Ruffinelli (whose introduction belongs to that banner year of scholarly hermeticism, 1982) cannot resist passing an epic catalogue of critical warriors in review—all bowing, of course, to Monterroso:

Bakhtin studied this phenomenon in a hermeneutic of the text and its reception alike, establishing the possibility that dialogue works through a process of abandoning the "I"—a recognition of alterity and a recuperation of the "I" in the other—which, in his turn, Jauss has called the "state of aesthetic eccentricity", and which would surely be the fundamental premise of the dialogue between the text and the receiver. Yet here I am not so interested in observing the real (and historical) reception as the strategy of a text which in great measure presupposes the reader’s strategies. We could say, employing the time-honored distinction of Umberto Eco, that Monterroso’s [strategy?] has the structure of the opera aperta, conceding to the reader the function of completing it [the strategy? the text?] and complementing it productively (and not passively) in the privileged moment of reading—that moment in which the work acquires the state of existence. Or we could even draw into collaboration the notion….⁹

Yes, and ninety ships came from sandy Pylos. There is something quite deflating about reading dozen-word summaries of theoreticians from whose massive tomes one struggled vainly as a graduate student to strain a remotely comprehensible paraphrase. One entertains the "so that’s what they were saying!" moment succeeded by the "was that all they had to say?" moment. The god’s holy vault is not only empty, but in need of fresh air. On top of that, such masters of perpetual evasion may apparently be piled on the plate one after another in a kind of smorgasbord, or the browser may pick here and pass there according to criteria to be explained later (or not, as the spirit listeth). It seems, further, that the gross distortion which such theoretical perspectives force upon certain texts and the utter oblivion into which they elbow others is no mark in their disfavor; for it seems that the texts must justify themselves before the throne of theory, and not the other way around.

I used to think that this upside-down hall-of-mirrors pageantry betrayed a generation of literary scholars who had misplaced the forest in its trees, just as I came to view the quickly tedious humor of metafiction as over-analysis of structure. And I suppose that those assessments remain valid, in a certain light. The treachery of such a diagnosis is that over-exposure equals under-exposure. Like certain strange diseases where having too much of a nutrient produces the effects of deficiency, too much finesse leaves a mind too blunt. That this should be so is further proof on behalf of my argument that form and nuance (quantity and quality), far from being adversarial, depend upon each other for their very existence. Without subtle degrees of shading, a mass of clouds would be one cloud: without an irrepressible drive to impose boundaries and isolate units, the great cloud itself would merely blur into the sky, which would blur into the horizon… and the human ability to operate upon the environment would vanish. Fine minds are not inimical to laws—they thirst after intricate laws. Law-abiding minds are not inimical to distinction—they thirst after objectively valid distinction.

The decline of aesthetic appreciation in the West has spread the disease of blunt-wittedness, we may say, to the very people whose calling is to produce or ponder aesthetic objects. The absence of purposeful structure within which the parodist’s explosive devices may stir a refined humor indicates that parodists are no longer very refined. The absence of any compulsion to describe the entire literary phenomenon—or at least to explain exceptions to the model—indicates that literary theorists are anything but theoretical in the word’s root sense of "finely observed". Our cultural wits have hardened like a fountain removed to a deep freeze. We do not read enough, and we do not know how to read deeply.

I cannot say what may have brought a man as wonderfully erudite as Monterroso to this state: perhaps his sporadic education or the class tensions which a far from pampered youth introduced to him. Considering the great long list of offenders, however, I suspect the presence of a vast cause. If even those who have immersed themselves in fine art can emerge from the pool as dry as a bone, then we must surely be seeing a dominant cultural influence at work: the influence of "post-culture". Assuming that you could read Shakespeare—that indeed you had read Shakespeare, and could recite hundreds of his lines—why should you defend his works to a class of apes? Assuming that you had to win your bread by feeding the appetites of these Yahoos, in what respect would you continue to find Shakespeare relevant to life? In the rubble of post-culture, how would twenty-five hundred years of Western tradition strike you as anything more than a sham, a hall of mirrors signifying nothing? It could strike you, of course, as more real than the dehumanized nightmare of petrified, petrifying "facts"—bills, taxes, wages, prices, deadlines, speed limits, life expectancies, mortality rates—through which we must all sleepwalk daily. To hold on to a greater reality, however, while a lesser one—a chaos of incoherent sensations—assaults our minds with the help of statistical lubricant requires a kind of faith; and faith is not only a gift, but quite possibly (and unfortunately) a very rare gift.

Personal observation leads me to believe that a "sympathy with the unsympathetic" is indeed astir in the stronghold of the arts, and that we cannot sensibly hope for university professors and novelists to lead us farther from aesthetic nullity rather than closer to it. I am no longer a very young man (the sure sign of which is that I light up when an old man calls me young). Already in my own undergraduate days, it was entirely unheard-of for someone in the dormitory to possess Wagner or Rimsky-Korsakov (let alone Bach or Vivaldi) in his record collection. I can recall but a single lad who loved listening over and over again to the cleverly orchestrated over-and-over-again of Ravel’s Bolero—and this exception hailed from England. By the time I was working my way through graduate school, the hostility to classical taste was, if anything, magnified. The comparatists among whom I moved uneasily advertised an enthusiasm (perhaps genuine, perhaps feigned… who could tell?) for any odd collaboration of sounds imported from any clearly non-Western culture. The classicists among whom my anomalous orbit often carried me (for I was something of an intellectual isotope, always warily on the edge of these groups that lived on the edge) seemed, paradoxically, to have no inkling either of any tradition beyond the West or of any Western tradition not covered by their degree program. They partied fiercely, those who socialized at all (and many classicists do not socialize at all). They were the heaviest consumers of pop culture I had seen since the undergraduate dorm.

There must have been other types on campus. When I once attended a live performance by James Galway, the house was packed. Yet I recall seeing none of the many faces I knew from the English, Classics, and Comparative Literature programs at that grand occasion. To this day, if I chance to meander through the offices of a college English department, I find posters or memorabilia enshrining the Beatles or Elvis or Bonnie and Clyde or Apocalypse Now, but almost never anything acknowledging a prior claim to musically or visually artistic fame. Victor Borge’s bust of Mozart, if it depended upon Humanities offices for its circulation, would be the missing referent in a failed punch-line. Even architectural classics, photogenic though they surely are, have been virtually exiled from these hermetically sealed corridors. At most, a professor who did a bit of summer research in Kent or Salisbury has brought back a poster of some fortress or cathedral to commemorate a delightful trip.

I recollect some of Tom Bertonneau’s remarks about his own undergraduate days at Berkeley from a pair of poignant memoirs which we published in this journal.¹⁰ Tom’s taste in music is far more broadly cultivated than mine, and it has happily brought him into contact with people who have not turned their back upon that part of our tradition as my exclusively literary peers had done. Yet the exception proves the rule: Tom’s friends were not exclusively literary. My perception is that they were not even primarily so, in a professional way. By the same token, he has observed to me (and argued in another essay¹¹) that the twentieth century’s greatest science-fiction authors were not formally educated to study or produce literary texts—were not, in most instances, ever enrolled in any School of the Humanities. English Ph.D.s are apt to write metafiction, purchase Blues and "classic rock" for their CD collection, and litter whatever wall space their bookcases leave unclaimed with something between Andy Warhol and Zulu headgear. The rare author who can compose a novel in the magnificent vein of Patrick O’Brian has probably led an active life building bridges or training Third World aviators, the tinkle of Chopin is far more likely to illuminate his study as he does a little Spring cleaning, and his cautious dust cloth stands a far better chance of passing over a Renoir print under glass.

Why is that? I believe it is because, besides being surrounded by the tastelessness of post-literate life like everyone else, those who are educated in literature sometimes feel a kind of vindictive contempt for a proficiency which has marginalized them. Granted, a large percentage of this not-negligible percentage wants to be marginalized since it already is so for less respectable reasons. People who stumble into graduate studies because normal social intercourse paralyzes them (e.g., the anti-social classicist) and people who suffer the stigma of, say, homosexuality seem to relish being hanged for a sheep rather than a lamb. They ransack literary history for the precious, the exotic, the bizarre, and the macabre: the robust durability of a mainstream classic offers no veil behind which to hide their personal strangeness. (Evelyn Waugh’s Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited leaps to mind.) Likewise, I exclude the younger generation of literary scholars which has effectively been denied access to the classics by ideologue professors. If these young people display no finesse in their choice of music and deem visual art to be some Webmaster’s original juggling of icons, it is because we older students of culture have failed them.

I say again that I suspect we owe this failure (for we are the ones who puzzle me) to our having grown so piqued at waking up to find ourselves utterly irrelevant in post-literacy’s vile new world. We despair; and in our despair, we turn angry. Sven Birkerts has written of an odd adventure in his youthful days of buying up used books. A former college professor called in the bookstore’s lads to cart away an immense haul—apparently his entire library. This morose figure had made a very sudden exit from the ivory tower, and in his disillusion he was clearing his basement of all print relics while making room for a career revolution via computer.¹² I could almost have been that man myself. I recently attempted to sell most of my critical-theory library (nobody would buy it)… but I certainly would never have put all my Livres de Poche or my Oxford Classical Texts on the auction block. I was never that angry, or angry in that direction. I was and am angry with the profession, but not with the tradition. Yet I have seen those whose ambitions ran higher than mine wax furious with the very books they loved—furious with that love for costing them any chance of success in life, at least of a success comparable to their lawyer and doctor and accountant and programmer siblings and classmates. These same angry people, who have in many cases often achieved success’s pinnacle by academic standards, now seem to be grinding out books about hypertexts and other forms of pop culture.¹³ They would perhaps have desecrated their Complete Works of Shakespeare less if they had simply sold it for a buck… but that would have been mere passive aggression. They must go on record, it appears, as having washed their hands of everything yesteryear’s stereotypical poet in tweeds held dear.

To hell with finesse, they seem to say: bring on robotic efficiency, robotic immunity to despair. And their misfit, self-marginalized colleagues do not cry foul, and their undereducated seminar students have never been introduced to the fair-foul distinction. No, they will not close ranks around the cause of fine things, rest assured—they whose most unkindest dagger ends up in Shakespeare’s back.

So what hope remains? The hope of the alternative’s poverty, perhaps. Human beings are not robots, after all, and one sees signs that the generation presently entering college is not entirely willing to worship amusement and ease at the expense of depth. I recall at least three instances within the past decade of young students positively clamoring for a Latin class (and being denied it, in two out of three cases, by administrators who figured that Latin would not prove cost-effective). Eventually, the careerist fund-raisers and bean-counters will settle into the mausoleum’s dust, and rare beams of light will be allowed to reach rare green shoots. The current cycle of toxic ambition—the feminist ambition to have one’s own letterhead rather than be so-and-so’s wife or mother, the not-very-manly ambition to bring on the deluge because the last satraps has already been appointed—is bound to work its way out of our system. Tenure is dying, temporary employment burgeons, health care will eventually be nationalized, fame and "notoriety" have merged in fact as well as in common parlance before the clear triumph of publicity… good grief, what scope remains open to ambition now? Why need we buy into the politicians’ "dare to dream" cant when Hollywood and the Internet (not to mention the psychiatric/pharmaceutical complex and the illegal drug trade) are peddling dare-free dreams with unlimited refills?

Not ambition, but a craving for basics, will motivate the next generation or two of students, I suspect. Communities have become so flexible—and indeed, so tenuous and implausible—that one scarcely knows where to find the grandstands to which one might play. The vertigo of divorce and remarriage, of termination and relocation, of retraining and Internet degree programs, has made and will increasingly make us a nauseous culture, sea-sick on sea changes from which no coral ever emerges. We will again become, by default, a land of individuals; or, to be exact, as the less intelligent and the more easily exploited continue down the chutes toward some electronic slaughterhouse of the soul, independent thinking in the great plangent mass will become more anguishing, and so more fertile. The anguished few will seek a solid foothold against the drain’s suction, and they will surely find it—whether through Latin, or Shakespeare, or the Beatitudes—in an abstract humanity, a principle of sacrifice whose ultimate objective is not much in evidence at the Mall or on the Net.

If such a "hope" sounds oddly desperate as I describe it, my reservations stem from the tremendous labor of reinvention which oppresses it. Those who might reveal basic human reference points refuse to assume the duty. Naturally, many such points will remain unfound, unrecovered, at least in the specific form which has enriched Western tradition. Great literature will be dusted off, and Hamlet will live to brood over Yorick’s skull another day—sales of Jane Austen and Edgar Allan Poe have actually risen even as presses persist in grinding out extra-terrestrial adventures and Hollywood biographies. Yet how many young people, I wonder, will ever hear of Saltykov-Shchedrin or Jules Romains in this new century, let alone have any ever-so-slight opportunity of reading an offbeat marvel like Niall Ó Dónaill’s Seanchas na Féinne?¹⁴ Remember, these are the same young people whose exposure to music consists largely of Rap or Hip-Hop (whatever the difference is—don’t ask me) or lilting electronic syntheses accompanying—and helping to disguise—lyrics of maudlin sentimentality. Their awareness of visual art is concentrated upon the latest special effects at the movies: digitalization, Clay-mation, lavishly pricey crashes and explosions. While the keenest of this generation may not be content to feed at the trough, they may be reduced to cultivating keenness mostly on their own.

One is not born fine: finesse depends upon an immense inheritance of experiences which have been distilled—through culture—into a kind of ichor. This cultured heritage shows the young how to feel, and is infinitely more corruptible and perishable than the universal laws of logic which guide objective thought. It is aesthetic, to return to the essay’s opening terms. Virtually any human being can understand the objective moral logic which prohibits murder… but what about the wrongness of fracturing the neighborhood’s peace and quiet? What about the degradation of permanently tattooing one’s body with icons and shibboleths as if it were a car’s bumper in need of a sticker?

Many young people I meet are rigidly devoted to what they perceive as moral law. What they lack is precisely a finesse of application. Once again, they have not been taught the subtleties of moral teleology by those upon whom this obligation rested, and so they must assemble the puzzle with whatever few pieces are in sight. Their travail is most evident in their practice of religious faith. They seize upon certain obvious mainstays of moral discipline securely fastened in most religions yet continually ignored by their peers: abstinence from intoxicants, renunciation of sexual promiscuity, hope in the eventual purposefulness of life. One might call these the "classic" virtues—yet several others of that rank, such as courage and honesty, receive far less attention. Already at the cardinal level, moral law requires a bit of finesse. If the Stoics were right, then all virtues must indeed be teased from a single quality, Virtue: goodness in small things implies goodness in great ones, and a simple peccadillo is an indictment of deep pollution. Christianity abandons the absurd rigor of this formula, but it resonates from beginning to end of the New Testament with the notion that goodness mystically surmounts legalism. Perfect in all things, deeds of mercy and not burnt offerings, the two commandments which contain all others, perfect love driving out all fear (try dangling 1 John 4.18 before the vast "fear the Lord" crowd)… clearly the believer is intended not merely to follow a behavioral code, but to dwell in the spirit of goodness.

I will not tire the reader with a catalogue of ways in which our churches, ever more aware of the young (if not ever younger), favor the moral laundry list while discouraging profound reflection. The qualitative dimension, of course, survives in the contemporary religious service. In my opinion, it has taken the service over. Hand-shaking, hand-clapping, hand-wringing, hand-waving… Sunday morning in the sanctuary has almost become an aerobic event. But recall that too much is too little. Just as the postmodern anti-narrative is so analytical that it leaves nothing to analyze and turns obtuse, so these swaying, sniveling, shouting "hours of power" decant too much fluid emotion for the mind to come away knowing why it has felt, or even exactly what. The cathedral’s vaults struggling upward into shadow have been replaced by theatrical tiers of seats and a central stage. The fugue which chased after an elusive angel has become, first a guitarist on a stool, now a couple of electric guitars and a drumset. The emotions thus uncorked are visceral: a response to the close press of bodies, a response to the singer’s amplified plaints, a response to the prayer’s almost sobbing tones (enhanced by an electric organ, reserved for these occasions rather than for hymns). The aesthetic experience of the service has been grossly debased.

Need we wonder that the young mind thus tutored in feeling out the subtleties of experience should not be particularly uncomfortable with lies "if they help rather than harm"? Is it a surprise that a person raised to confuse the trembling of long exposure to high decibels with the Holy Spirit’s visitation should not be able to parse tortuous moral issues? Murderous tyrants are wicked, but one people should not criticize another people’s way of doing things… a volatile regime should not be allowed to stockpile biochemical weapons, but our troops should not be put in a position where more than one or two must die… The faithful and the agnostic among us seem to slip on the same stones when forced to cross these rivers, especially if they are young. Even if they read Shakespeare as well as the Bible, they have grave difficulty sorting out their feelings. They may feel deeply, but they struggle in vain to feel coherently. For finesse, in a way, is the enemy of feeling—of a certain kind of feeling, of sloppy sentiment. Finesse demands convergence upon form even as it relaxes the boundaries of forms too harsh. A lot of feelings or a great surge of feeling cannot redeem the sentimental failure of a feeling which renounces purposeful struggle.

I have ranged unusually far and wide in this essay as I myself have struggled after the sense of our cultural senselessness. That we are collectively wading through a moral quagmire surely needs no demonstration, and that our best and brightest have actually led us into the quicksand more often than pointing a way to safety needs but little further observation to come clear. I will also not have surprised many readers of this journal in saying that a deeper species of literacy than we now practice would be very salutary to us, nor in expressing my pessimism about our soon embracing the task of renewal. As I have revisited a great many propositions and concerns vented in these pages before, however, I have sought this time to emphasize the role of our aesthetic debasement. It has occurred to me lately that literacy itself can perhaps be helped out of its cultural sinkhole by a revival of musical and artistic taste—or that the three, perhaps, can help each other out. What effect would a vertically thrusting cathedral have on an insipid religious service? What effect would Freshman Oil Painting have on Freshman Composition? What effect would fifteen minutes per day playing a musical instrument have on our national policy-makers?¹⁵ If a tenured professor of Literary Theory were somehow induced to attend the symphony every month, would he or she be quite so rabidly nihilistic?

I propose to examine such possibilities in forthcoming issues of Praesidium. I shall attempt to contribute something to the discussion myself, but I must warn that there are those much better prepared to do so. Perhaps this open invitation—rambling, polemical, and as full of indemonstrable propositions as it is lean on footnotes—will induce some of our musically and artistically accomplished audience to come forward. By way of impressing a certain urgency upon the invitation, I again advance the claim that aesthetic discernment enhances moral discernment: i.e., that we not only may be interested in the beautiful, but ought to be. None of my propositions has been less testable, yet none seems to me more vindicated by common sense. Surely a person practiced in noticing fine detail as he picks a guitar or fills a canvas will be more apt to notice and include in his calculations the "collateral damage" of innocent bystanders attendant upon some just crusade or noble rescue mission. The good person’s objective is not to cripple his active will with a haunting prescience of incidental tragedy: it is to do what he must do without being surprised by necessary costs. We have in many respects "over-determined" our environment to the point that tragedy and misery are simply clichés or stage props in whatever genre we happen to be "playing" at. The reality underlying the "video arcade" obstacle appears to shock us when it pierces the formula in widow’s wails or child’s screams. The salvation of the oppressed by "smart missiles" is not supposed to leave toddlers without arms and legs. The purgation of DDT from the planet is not supposed to leave babies dying of malaria.

In other respects, however, we grow so drunk on debauches of unrefined emotion that we cannot hear the clichés dripping from our own mouths. The risk of several dozen young lives is not necessarily unconscionable if thousands more will certainly be lost through inaction. And though such calculations should never be a mere contrast of projected body counts—for dehumanized life is worse than death—the quality of survival is precisely what we now have greatest difficulty reckoning. We want no one hurt, either way—a kind of pipe-dreaming which can turn fatal for all involved.

When refinement sickens, command of basic arithmetic also takes ill. A person whose vision grows blurry cannot count the number of limbs on a tree, let alone the number of sparrows on a limb; and a person whose taste is coarse cannot understand why a tank in the plaza will not necessarily secure peace. Unless we learn how to distinguish better among the essential things of our world, we shall very soon lose our awareness of which things truly exist, and which belong to our troubled fantasies.

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