Samir Chopra's Blog, page 110

‘Little Clouds’ and ‘Enemies of Ambition’

Children leave you little time for ‘work.’ Children are work. They displace priorities; many a career ambition runs aground on the shoals of their demands and needs. So goes an exceedingly common complaint, especially from those who consider themselves ‘creative types’: writers, artists and the like. As Cyril Connolly once noted, ‘That enemy of ambition, the pram in the hallway.’ (Wikipedia reports this quote as ‘There is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.’)

I think I know the feeling. Both my reading and writing have suffered ever since my daughter was born last December. A serious philosophy text looks frighteningly impenetrable, and the very thought of constructing a rigorous argument is enough to induce severe anxiety in me. The unread books pile up; the drafts remain drafts. Meanwhile, I’m reduced to reading book reviews and those books on my shelves that seem the most accessible. As for writing, all I can pull off is some dilettantish blogging. My sabbatical awaits, but how will I get any writing done in this sleep-deprived, consumed-by-baby, always-consumed-by-distraction state? I cast envious glances at those who are either free of the cares that consume me, or have, even worse, figured out, somehow, the precarious balancing act that lets them be as prolific as ever without letting their children go to seed. My academic CV isn’t a particularly distinguished one in any case, and now, it appears set to stagnate even further.  My ‘career’ seems to have come to a grinding halt.

Resentment, envy, jealousy and anxiety; I am a fine candidate to be advised to have some cheese with my whine and count my blessings. Which I do, quite often, as I think my posts on my daughter make clear. But human nature being what it is, the anxieties I relate above surface from time to time.

James Joyce‘s ‘A Little Cloud‘–a member of the Dubliners‘ collection–captures an almost pathological variant of this bundle of sensations quite well.  Its ending is worth a re-read:

A dull resentment against his life awoke within him. Could he not escape from his little house? Was it too late for him to try to live bravely like Gallaher? Could he go to London? There was the furniture still to be paid for. If he could only write a book and get it published, that might open the way for him.

A volume of Byron’s poems lay before him on the table. He opened it cautiously with his left hand lest he should waken the child and began to read the first poem in the book:

Hushed are the winds and still the evening gloom,

Not e’en a Zephyr wanders through the grove,

Whilst I return to view my Margaret’s tomb

And scatter flowers on the dust I love.

He paused. He felt the rhythm of the verse about him in the room. How melancholy it was! Could he, too, write like that, express the melancholy of his soul in verse? There were so many things he wanted to describe: his sensation of a few hours before on Grattan Bridge, for example. If he could get back again into that mood. . . .

The child awoke and began to cry. He turned from the page and tried to hush it: but it would not be hushed. He began to rock it to and fro in his arms but its wailing cry grew keener. He rocked it faster while his eyes began to read the second stanza:

Within this narrow cell reclines her clay,

That clay where once . . .

It was useless. He couldn’t read. He couldn’t do anything. The wailing of the child pierced the drum of his ear. It was useless, useless! He was a prisoner for life. His arms trembled with anger and suddenly bending to the child’s face he shouted:

“Stop!”

The child stopped for an instant, had a spasm of fright and began to scream. He jumped up from his chair and walked hastily up and down the room with the child in his arms. It began to sob piteously, losing its breath for four or five seconds, and then bursting out anew. The thin walls of the room echoed the sound. He tried to soothe it but it sobbed more convulsively. He looked at the contracted and quivering face of the child and began to be alarmed. He counted seven sobs without a break between them and caught the child to his breast in fright. If it died! . . .

The door was burst open and a young woman ran in, panting.

“What is it? What is it?” she cried.

The child, hearing its mother’s voice, broke out into a paroxysm of sobbing.

“It’s nothing, Annie . . . it’s nothing. . . . He began to cry . . . ”

She flung her parcels on the floor and snatched the child from him.

“What have you done to him?” she cried, glaring into his face.

Little Chandler sustained for one moment the gaze of her eyes and his heart closed together as he met the hatred in them. He began to stammer:

“It’s nothing. . . . He . . . he began to cry. . . . I couldn’t . . . I didn’t do anything. . . . What?”

Giving no heed to him she began to walk up and down the room, clasping the child tightly in her arms and murmuring:

“My little man! My little mannie! Was ‘ou frightened, love? . . . There now, love! There now! . . . Lambabaun! Mamma’s little lamb of the world! . . . There now!”

Little Chandler felt his cheeks suffused with shame and he stood back out of the lamplight. He listened while the paroxysm of the child’s sobbing grew less and less; and tears of remorse started to his eyes.

Amory Blaine’s Disillusionment and Enlightenment

Toward the conclusion of This Side of Paradise, as Amory Blaine as undergoes that educational disillusionment which is our common lot as we ‘mature’, F. Scott Fitzgerald steps up a ruminative commentary detailing the insights his hero is now ‘enjoying.’ These unmask crucial pretensions of the world around him:

There were no more wise men; there were no more heroes….Amory had grown up to a thousand books, a thousand lies; he had listened eagerly to people who pretended to know, who knew nothing. The mystical reveries of saints that had once filled him with awe in the still hours of the night, now vaguely repelled him. The Byrons and Brookes who had defied life from mountain tops were in the end flaneurs and poseurs, at best mistaking the shadow of courage for the substance of wisdom. The pageantry of his disillusion took shape in a world-old procession of Prophets, Athenians, Martyrs, Saints, Scientists, Don Juans, Jesuits, Puritans, Fausts, Poets, Pacifists; like costumed alumni at a college reunion they streamed before him as their dreams, personalities, and creeds had in turn thrown colored lights on his soul; each had tried to express the glory of life and the tremendous significance of man; each had boasted of synchronizing before what had gone before into his own rickety generalities; each had depended after all on the set stage and the convention of the theatre, which is that man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and more convenient food.

In these acute remarks, there are echoes of Nietzsche‘s pronouncement that ‘every philosophy so far has been…the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir’ and thus, not the result of a personal insight into the Great Secret of Being. Amory thus is brought face to face with an awesome–and perhaps terrifying–existential responsibility: he cannot rely on the wisdom of the ancients, for they knew no more than he did, that their ‘philosophies’ were their personal solutions to that which vexed them, their own fumbling gropings in the dark.

And it goes on:

Amory….began for the first time in his life to have a strong distrust of all generalities and epigrams . They were too easy, too dangerous to the public mind. Yet all thought usually reached the public after thirty years in some such form: Benson and Chesterton had popularized Huysmans and Newman; Shaw had sugar-coated Nietzsche and Ibsen and Schopenhauer. The man in the street heard the conclusions of dead genius through some one [sic] else’s clever paradoxes and didactic epigrams.

Amory here has a realization that should hopefully come to all of us. We are often surrounded by thin layerings of superficiality, delicate veneers over gaping ignorance; the complexities and struggles that await us are sought to be sandpapered over by a reliance on glib secondary knowledge; there is no substitute for a personal encounter with them.

Amory has leaned on too many crutches in his life; now he must discard them and attempt to learn to walk anew.

Note: The Nietzsche quote is from Beyond Good and Evil, Chapter 1, Section 6.

Adam Phillips on Self-Knowledge and the Unconscious

Adam Phillips, psychotherapist and essayist, can be a frustratingly elliptical writer. There are allusions, suggestions, shadings and hints in every passage. (I seem to dimly remember a frustrated reviewer in the New York or London Review of Books complaining about this characteristic slipperiness.) From these though, the diligent reader can often find a perspicuous insight, and perhaps even more interestingly and appropriately–given the very indirection of the prose–raw material for speculation of his own.  The following passage is an interesting sample: sometimes direct, sometimes suggestive, sometimes inclined to a mysterious universalization:

If the Enlightenment Freud instructs us in a new science of self-knowing–of familiarizing ourselves–the post-Freudian Freud suggests that the problem of self-knowledge is itself the problem, the symptom masquerading as the cure; as though we have turned the self into an object (the project of the Enlightenment Freud), even an idol, and psychoanalysis can now help us unlearn this modern religion of self-hood. The unconscious–whatever is strange, or seems foreign about ourselves–is exactly what makes our old habits of self, like knowing and understanding, sound irrelevant, off-key. An inner revisionist, it disarms our competence, like someone suddenly pointing out to us that we have been playing chess with the rules of draughts. The unconscious, in other words, is what stops self-knowledge turning, it always does, into self-caricature (self-definition  is always complicit with self-mockery). When we make a slip of the tongue, something in us speaks out of turn. It does not speak more truthfully, but it speaks as well. And at that moment, we don’t know where it came from. It gives us pause. In psychoanalysis, as the critic Mark Edmundson says of poetry, ‘one must affirm invention at the expense of argument.’

First, the mysteries: what does it mean to say that ‘self-knowledge always turns into self-caricature’ or that ‘self-definition is always complicit with self-mockery’? Perhaps that attempts at total self-knowledge runs the risk of constructing distorted images of ourselves? But why the ‘mockery’ and the ‘caricature’? Why not idealization and praise? Phillips goes no further than the bare statements he provides us. What makes them tantalizing–or frustrating, depending on your perspective–is that Phillips had the option of making a much weaker and more plausible claim but chose not to. We are left to puzzle this out.

Second, more interestingly, a  conception of the unconscious as the grab-bag term for whatever is unknown about ourselves. Though it is not clear what is meant by the unconscious being our ‘inner revisonist’ it is transparent what role it plays in our view of ourselves: where we find mystery or inexplicability in our understandings of ourselves, where are our attempts at self-knowledge come to a grinding halt, we point to the unconscious. It is a universal explanans of sorts, one that points to the uncomfortable fact that we are strangers to ourselves and will remain so. And as the closing quote suggests, it is the unconscious that gives us grounds for being inventive about ourselves, for imagining that within us lurks far more complexity than we might have imagined, many more selves than the one(s) immediately visible.

Excerpt from: Terrors and Experts, Faber and Faber, London, 1995.

56-Up: Checking In With ‘Old Friends’

Roger Ebert once referred to Michael Apted‘s Up series as the ‘noblest project in cinema history.’ In writing his review of 56-Up–the latest installment in the story of the Fab Fourteen–Ebert disowned those words as ‘hyperbole’ but its easy to see why he might have thought so. It is as straightforward–and as complicated–a film project as could be: take fourteen children, interview them at the age of seven about their vision of life and what it holds for them, and then, every seven years, meet them again to ‘check in.’ The original premise might have been to explore whether the British class system affected a child’s world-view and whether it locked their lives into unalterable trajectories, but over the years the Up series has grown into something else: an episodic cinematic document of a tiny cross-section of humanity.

Fourteen ‘ordinary’ people; fourteen ‘ordinary’ lives. Hardly the stuff of riveting storytelling, or so you’d think. Thirteen of them are white, one is black, four women, all are English. This is not even a very representative sample of the world’s humanity. And yet. somehow, over the years, they’ve managed to captivate millions all over the world who tune in, faithfully, every seven years.

Every viewer of the series has his or her own personal reasons for remaining riveted to it, for eagerly awaiting the next installment. In my case, it has been because, like many others, I’ve become personally interested in the fortunes of its participants, not out of pure voyeuristic curiosity, but because I’ve been growing too, and often find immediate, sharp, and personal resonances with their lives. There is the sometimes incoherent, sometimes acute vision of the seven-year old, the callow, rash pronouncements of the teenager and young adult, the maturing, sometimes rueful perspectives of the thirty and forty-somethings, and now, the slow, low, sometimes content glow of the mid-fifties. (They’re ahead of me; I’m not fifty yet, though the gap between my age and theirs has shrunk!)

It would be a mistake to say every life examined on this show demonstrates some universal truth or anything like that. Rather, each one showcases, in part, some of life’s fortunes and misfortunes; some get more than fair share of the hard knocks. But it is in the adding up, in the rendering of a composite image that one is able to see a glimmer of the complexity and variety of human existence: present and missing parents, loves–lost and found, illness and good health, passion and anger, ruefulness and exultation.

Of  the various cinematic techniques invented by directors over the years, I find the epilogue particularly poignant: the passage of time and persons, the looking back, the reckonings and accountings of a life.  Often it is because those episodes are tinged with regret for missed opportunities, sometimes because through them, we are brought face to face with the most basic facts of our existence: life is just one moment after another, the past already gone, the future yet to be realized. The Up series has often felt like a collection of epilogues even as we know–or at least believe and hope–another installment is forthcoming.

And in case you were wondering, yes, I’m looking forward to 63-Up.

School as Preparatory Space for the Workplace

During the course of an essay on Keith Moon and the pleasures of drumming (‘The Fun Stuff‘, The New Yorker, 29 November 2010) James Wood writes:

Georges Bataille has some haunting words about how the workplace is the scene of our domestication and repression: it is where we are forced to put away our Dionysianism. The crazy sex from the night before is as if forgotten; the drunken marital argument of the weekend is erased; the antic children have disappeared; all the passionate music of life is turned off, and a false bourgeois order clothes you with the sack and quick penury awaiting you if you don’t obey. But Bataille might also have emphasized school, for school is work too–work before the adult workplace–and school tutors the adolescent in repression and the rectitude of the bourgeois order, at the very moment in life when, temperamentally and biologically, one is most Dionysiac and most enraged by the hypocritical ordinances of the parental league. [link added]

Bataille, Dionysus; these are some pretty heavy-duty invocations, marshaled to make a point almost every schoolboy knows and senses almost instinctively, deep in the core of his already-repressed self. School is a training and staging ground, a rehearsal space, a green room, for the regimented and regulated world on the ‘outside.’ But it does even more service than that, of course. It also frees up the child’s parents to put in their inadequately compensated eight hours or more in the workplace. School is not preparatory for the workplace; it supports and enables it.

Some schools–like parochial religious ones, appropriately enough–perform this task of preparation better than others: generic school buses, pompous titles for teachers and administrators, prayer assemblies, and most interestingly, uniforms. Why do you think so many perfectly intelligent human beings put up with the idiocy of rigidly prescribed dress codes, which homogenize and straitjacket and which, as the examples of jackets and neckties in hot summers remind us, are so often inappropriate and uncomfortable? If they haven’t worn uniforms themselves, they’ve seen children wearing them; it reminds them of order, a good thing, as we are often old. The bit about assemblies and uniforms remind us that schools are also venues for flirtations with the military: who better to instruct and inspire us on the virtues of order and discipline and immediate, instinctive, unthinking obedience?

Note: It has been said the primary value of a putative employee’s college degree–for employers–is the knowledge it provides them of his or her ability to persist with a structured program for four years, maintain a schedule, read and write with some adequacy, and follow instructions.  This reductive view of a college education seems to be the one uppermost in the minds of those who plan university reform these days. Critical thinking would be a disruptive, subversive skill; better to merely emphasize the routine and the structural, all the better to prepare today’s graduate for the arrangements that await him in the workplace, the enduring site of his or her control, a space where–in the American context at least–the Constitution is put on hold.

A Long, Hot, Sickened Journey

The worst of the heat might have receded from New York City but that’s not going to deter me from churning out another hot weather-related blog post. On this occasion, about a time when a combination of heat and a mysterious ailment combined to induce in me a misery that has, thankfully, not been rivaled since.

In 1979, I went on a schoolboys trip to a national park, one organized by my school. The trip was everything it was promised to be: though we missed out on spotting a tiger, we saw plenty of wildlife, swam in rivers, went on long hikes, and rounded off each day with a festive campfire. It was a boy’s dream; I loved every minute of it and was saddened by the dawning of its final days. Those entailed a long bus ride back home to New Delhi.

It was April, and the summer had settled in on North India. Daytime temperatures were already reaching into the high nineties (Fahrenheit) and past the hundred mark. The journey back, in a non-airconditioned bus, promised to be a  trying experience. It soon acquired a terrifying new dimension.

For by its commencement, I had become sick. Perhaps a stomach bug of some sort, but though there was pain and churning aplenty in my belly, there were no frequent trips to the bathroom. Instead, I felt weak and nauseous, with a head that spun furiously. I told my companions; little interest or sympathy was forthcoming. I informed the master in charge; he seemed nonplussed. Tired, worn out, and to be honest, a little scared, I withdrew–unmedicated–to a seat by a window, and waited.

Our bus drove on, on roads that were sometimes narrow, sometimes bumpy, sometimes dusty, past field and village and town. As the day progressed, so did the heat and my discomfort.  I kept the window open, hoping for a breeze or two, and sank into a sweat-lined heap at its base. I was sick, sick, sick; a bundle of desperate sensations, hoping for relief in any shape or form.

Toward the middle of the afternoon, we approached a scheduled halt. We would rest and partake of lunch in a park. My illness was now at a crest; I felt close to death, hideously miserable and discombobulated. I staggered out and took a few steps toward a shady spot beneath a tree.

And then, the miracle. I vomited spectacularly, bringing up a torrent of unprocessed material from my last meals. My company scattered, perhaps in fear, perhaps in awe. I swayed; my ability to stay on my feet still seemed in question. But a few seconds later, I felt better. The expulsion had, mysteriously and thankfully, possessed a cleansing quality.

A few minutes later, someone pressed a glass filled with crushed ice and a Coke into my hand. I drank it greedily–the sweetest nectar ever. I still had no appetite, but a cold, sweet drink was welcome.

Home was still several hours away, but for the rest of the drive home, though I still felt weak and exhausted, I was never as sick as I had been earlier in the day. I reached my destination at night, back into the arms of my concerned mother and a bemused father.

I still do not know what had afflicted me that day. And I still continue to hope that I will never, ever, approach the desperate depths of discomfort attained that day via a toxic combination of head-spinning nausea and heat.

Memories of Hot Summers Elsewhere

Talking about the weather is supposedly a concession, an admission that a conversation has run aground, spun off into irrelevancies; nothing, it seems, quite shows the lack of an agenda for an exchange of words like a discussion about the heat, the cold, the rain. Well, I admit defeat; I admit I’m tongue-tied and incoherent. This has been a hot summer in New York City, and its driven me to blogging about the heat. More to the point, what has finally sent me over the tipping edge was a rumor floated earlier this week that temperatures in the city would approach 104F. Because I spent the first twenty years of my life in climes calibrated by the Celsius scale, I occasionally still convert temperatures into that set of numbers, to ascertain whether my childhood reckonings of temperature extremes have been tickled or not. And 104F is the Fahrenheit equivalent of a grim marker in Celsius: 40C, the temperature at which, as a boy, I knew the real summer began.

I grew up in a very hot city: New Delhi. (A quick glance at a chart of world temperatures will show that it is, quite easily, the worlds hottest large city.) 40C came early in the year, as early as April, and you could experience 40C days into August. In between, the monsoon intervened, and its drenching showers brought some relief, but very often it would result in days marked by low-lying cloud, suffocating, stifling humidity and temperatures in the high nineties (in the mid to high thirties if we are talking Celsius). For the rest of the time, Delhi baked, day after day, in searing heat that enervated and exhausted, sending adult and child, when possible, into cool refuges, all the while hydrating themselves with any fluids at hand. (A simple injunction I received as a child was: ‘Drink a glass of water when you leave the house; drink another glass when you arrive at your destination.’) Airconditioners were rare; evaporative coolers common.

The serious heat began at finals time, and branded the vacations. School ended, and we retreated indoors. We were glad to not have to ride crowded, non-airconditioned school buses anymore, with their sweat-stained seats, but unless trips out of the city–to, hopefully, a salubrious ‘hill station‘–were planned, we faced the prospect of lengthy confinement at home, hemmed in by a cauldron of hot winds and glaring sunshine. Temperatures climbed into the nineties by 7AM or a little after, and after a few brief forays outside, the more prudent among us quickly retreated. The reckless often ventured out, even in the middle of the afternoon. Playtime at local parks in the evenings began late, after some nominal cooling.

Delhi summer nights and days were often made more miserable by the loss of electricity. To this day, I don’t think I have heard anything quite as terrifying as a ceiling fan grinding to a halt, its supply of electric charge cut off by an errant power grid. And nothing, and I mean nothing, will ever sound quite as sweet as the sound that came to me, as I would wait patiently outdoors in the warm summer night–dazed and confused after being woken up by a power failure–of dozens of cooler fans starting up in my street. That was bliss; every other human pleasure seemed insignificant in comparison.

Except perhaps, the taste of cold water after a stint in the sun.

The ‘Victims’ of ‘Realistic Literature’

In 1965, Gordon Lloyd Harper interviewed Saul Bellow for the Paris Review (9.36, 1966, 48-73). During the interview the following exchange took place:

INTERVIEWER

It’s been said that contemporary fiction sees man as a victim. You gave this title to one of your early novels [The Victim], yet there seems to be very strong opposition in your fiction to seeing man as simply determined or futile. Do you see any truth to this claim about contemporary fiction?

BELLOW

Oh, I think that realistic literature from the first has been a victim literature. Pit any ordinary individual—and realistic literature concerns itself with ordinary individuals—against the external world, and the external world will conquer him, of course. Everything that people believed in the nineteenth century about determinism, about man’s place in nature, about the power of productive forces in society, made it inevitable that the hero of the realistic novel should not be a hero but a sufferer who is eventually overcome.

Bellow might be accused of a little overstatement but perhaps not too much. After all, didn’t George Orwell say, in one of his characteristically cheerful moments, that ‘every life when viewed from the inside is but a series of defeats?’ (Orwell’s quote, captures quite well, I think, the ‘common unhappiness’ of man, which  psychotherapy, with its alternative narratives, attempts to ameliorate.) ’Realistic literature’ often might be that same view conveyed from the ‘outside’: a tale of implacable, indifferent, forces arrayed against human endeavor, with ambitions and aspirations running aground on one shoal after another.

But these series of wrecks do not have to be caused by man being ‘determined’ or ‘determinism’ or anything like that; after all, why would it not be possible for some humans–even ‘ordinary individuals’–to have a bright future ‘determined’ for them? That does not seem statistically improbable. Rather, it is that at any given moment, no human can be conceivably aware of all that may render his or her plans moot. That ‘all’ includes not just the forces of nature but more often than not, other humans’ objectives and efforts.

And that is what may make the language of ‘victim’ appropriate. To use that term for a human afflicted by nature alone seems inappropriate; nature seems far too blithely unconcerned about man’s doings for such a personalized description to resonate. Man can only be a victim of others like him; victimhood is a state attained at the hands of humans. It is the ‘productive forces in society’, the economic and material circumstances and engines that alter and shape the world around man, that turn ‘ordinary individuals’ into ‘victims.’  It is they, driven by contrary human ambition and desire, that lend the fate of man a particularly grim hue. These opponents of ours, those supposed to be our fellow travelers, turn out to be, on closer inspection, precisely those that induce God’s supposed laughter at our putative plans.

Note: The interview with Bellow is reprinted in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews. Third Series, ed. Alfred Kazin. (London: Viking Press, 1967). 175-196.

Kundera on the Novel’s Powers of ‘Incorporation’

In ‘Notes inspired by The Sleepwalkers‘ (by Hermann Broch), Milan Kundera writes:

Broch…pursues ‘what the novel alone can discover.’ But he knows that the conventional form (grounded exclusively in a character’s adventure, and content with a mere narration of that adventure) limits the novel, reduces its cognitive capacities. He also knows that the novel has an extraordinary power of incorporation: whereas neither poetry or philosophy can incorporate the novel, the novel can incorporate both poetry and philosophy without losing thereby anything of its identity, which is characterized (we need only recall Rabelais and Cervantes) precisely by its tendency to embrace other genres, to absorb philosophical and scientific knowledge.

The modern novel is often said to begin with Miguel Cervantes‘ Don Quixote, but as Kundera’s sweeping claim and the history of the novel suggests, precise markers of provenance do not do justice to such a polymorphous entity. For Kundera is right about the novel’s well-known and enduring ‘powers of incorporation’: the philosophical novel is a commonplace as are novels in verse.

But I am not sure he is correct about the incorporation going in just one direction.

The novel that seeks to provide a coherent statement of a philosophical doctrine–either through its main narrative, the actions or pronouncements of its characters or even by its form–has incorporated philosophy into itself, but it is just as plausible to suggest the philosophy in question has compelled the choice of the novel as the form for its statement. That is, the philosophical doctrine has ‘incorporated’ the novel into the various forms necessary for its statement. The novelist could have after all, written a philosophical tract, but chose the novel instead; it is the chosen vehicle for the delivery of the doctrine.  And perhaps that is because the nature of the statements, arguments and conclusions at hand, indicate to the novelist that this is the correct choice to make. It is no coincidence that certain philosophical doctrines–such as existentialism, for instance–have such extensive flirtations with the novel; their central principles are often best expressed and illustrated by its form and structure. (The novelist appears as a philosopher, one obliged to turn to the novel’s form.)

Similarly for a poem in novel form. The poet’s statement is such that it demands the novel as its form; in doing so, poetry incorporates the novel into the various forms of its expression.

What these remarks suggest, I think, are two things. One, that both poetry and philosophy are perhaps not as well defined–in either form and content–as might be imagined by some. Second, an insistence on the unidirectional nature of the inclusive capacities of the novel runs the risk of rendering it an entirely indeterminate entity. (The experimental efforts of avant-garde and postmodern novelists might have already done that, of course; more to the point, that might not be such a bad thing for the novelists that lie in our future.)

Note: The essay on Broch is included in The Art of the Novel, Perennial Library, Harper & Row, New York, 1988.   Excerpt on page 64.

General Petraeus at CUNY: Poor Judgment Under Fire

General David Petraeus‘ $200,000 deal with CUNY is no longer on; he will now teach in the fall at CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College for the princely sum of $1. Yesterday, I participated in a Huffington Post Live segment–along with Cary Nelson, former president of the American Association of University Professors and Kieran Lalor of the New York State Assembly–to discuss this development in the Petraeus at CUNY saga; like everything else in the sordid tale that preceded it, this latest bit of news, announced by the New York Times, merely adds to a picture of confused communication, insensitivity, and poor judgment.

In accepting a salary of $1, Petraeus is now posturing as the Magnanimous Public Servant[tm] showering the largesse of his knowledge and experience on the unworthy at CUNY. This is the same man who could barely contain his glee at salaries elsewhere–’you won’t believe what USC will pay per week’–during the course of his grubby-enough negotiations with CUNY. What accounts for the change in heart? You, dear reader, get precisely one guess. (It has something to do with exposure in the press.) This sort of rapid retreat to an untenable position, under fire, does not speak well of Petraeus’ judgment. But it should not be surprising; this is the same man, after all, who thought it would be a good idea to try to negotiate a swanky deal, not with a private think-tank or consultancy group, but with a budget-deficient urban public university. Slipping into this condescending role should come easily to him. (As has been pointed out by many, Petraeus should have indicated a willingness to teach for the same salary that all adjuncts draw at CUNY: approximately $3000, with no benefits.)

The elitism does not end there, of course. Enrollment in the class is limited to sixteen students, and Petraeus, gallingly enough, will be assisted by, count ‘em, two graduate students, at a university where faculty members have no teaching or research assistants that are not paid for by their grant funds. But it gets worse: three additional graduate students not from CUNY’s Graduate Center, its doctorate granting institution, will help him ‘assemble the syllabus’. These students are from Harvard. Nothing but the best for the General. Why would he ever deign to have a syllabus ‘assembled’ by the lowly students of the Graduate Center?  What could they offer this shining Messiah, descending from on high?

As I noted on the Huffington Post Live segment yesterday, this deal, and the sensibilities that underwrote it, have been dreamed up and implemented by an unholy blend of the management consultant and the corporate executive. It’s all there: the importation of  the rainmaking CEO, the inflated salary and perception of self-worth, the content-free mumbo-jumbo of the ‘value’ that Petraeus will bring to CUNY.

General David Petraeus does not strike me as a very smart or perceptive man. He–along with CUNY administrators–seems to lack the most elementary knowledge of the realities of public education, something that would have helped him adjust the parameters of the deal he could negotiate with CUNY: the content of the course, his salary, his assistants. And his response to a bout of sustained public criticism resembles nothing as much as panic.

CUNY students could, and should, take their leadership lessons from elsewhere.