Challenge: 50 Books discussion
Finish Line 2011
>
John's List for 2011
2 - The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton WilderReview:
This novel, perhaps more than any other in the history of American literature, asks “Can bad things really happen to good people?” On one day in 1714, the Bridge of San Luis Rey collapses, sending five people falling to their deaths. Brother Juniper, one of the witnesses to the tragedy, seeks to explain how and why this could have happened. The bulk of the novel, a concerted effort on the part of Juniper to justify the ways of God to man, is a carefully woven portrait of their interconnecting and overlapping lives, loves, successes and failures leading up to the day of the bridge collapsing.
The Marquesa de Montemayor, whose daughter treats her with supreme indifference, has just seen her move away to marry her husband, a Spanish Viceroy. She copes mainly by writing beautiful, elaborate letters to her daughter and son-in-law. The Marquesa becomes reclusive and introspective, and asks the local Abbess and proprietress of an orphanage for the company of one of her girls. Pepita comes to live with her and provide much-needed companionship. On learning that her daughter is pregnant, the Marquesa makes a visit to the shrine at Santa Maria de Cluxambuqua. On her return to Lima, accompanied by Pepita, we learn that they are killed on the bridge. We later learn through Brother Juniper that the letters she wrote are gems of the Spanish language and are canonized and anthologized for schoolchildren to learn ages and ages hence.
Another story revolves around two twins named Manuel and Esteban (Wilder himself was a twin whose brother died in childbirth) who, also under the protection of the same local Abbess, grow up to become scribes. Soon Manuel is taken in to compose letters for the extraordinarily talented stage talent who goes by only “the Perichole,” who is in romantic cahoots with both the Spanish Viceroy and a local bullfighter (see Offenbach’s eponymous opera, as well as the short story by Prosper Merimee). After Manuel dies of an infection, Esteban is enlisted to assist one Captain Alvarado on a long voyage, partially in order to pay for a present for the Abbess. On the way to buy the present, Esteban crosses the Bridge of San Luis Rey and his fate befalls him.
Uncle Pio, the Perichole’s assistant, maid, and general counselor, has an interesting life of his own. Growing up as a diplomat, theater impresario, and Catholic shill during the Inquisition, he finds Micaela Villegas (see the historical personage of the same name, whom Wilder has only slightly fictionalized here), whom he trains and refashions in his own image, turning her into the best-known Peruvian actress of her time. After having become thoroughly disillusioned with the theatre and her success, she wishes to enter into proper society and wishes to never talk to Uncle Pio again. After some hesitation, the Perichole allows Pio to take her son and give the curious boy the proper education that he deserves. Leaving the next morning, they are the last two victims of the bridge.
Looking for one common thread to tie all of these disparate lives together, the reader is drawn over and over again to fact that they all see confounded by their personal searches for love and meaning. As much money or success they attain, we see lives beguiled by angst and beset by circumstance. By no means, and Brother Juniper would certainly have noted this in his book, do we find people who “deserved” to die.
But the Bridge of San Luis Rey has a sixth victim, one who didn’t fall hundreds of feet into the ravine below: Brother Juniper himself. Having written his book full of the most diligent and ingenuous research in an attempt to find out why God would let this happen (was it punishment for evil? Or was God just indifferent to human suffering?), the Catholic Church finds his book heresy and they burn him for it. What was so heretical? Perhaps that he would be so presumptuous as to explain God’s plan for the world.
As far as the form and structure of the novel are concerned, the first and last chapters, the only places where Wilder allows himself philosophical divulgence, are a little too cordoned-off for my taste, rendering the deeply resounding questions of theology and meaning merely peripheral. I feel that interlarding them into the lives of the five characters would probably have better achieved what was most likely one of his goals in the first place – to meditate on questions of fate, free will, chance, and mortality. Finally, while to pen, at the age of thirty, a novel this succinct and full of impact is an accomplishment in itself, I feel that tripling or even quadrupling the size of the book would have made the characters more realistic. But if that were the case, of course, it would not have the wonderful quality of being told to you as a griot would tell it, as the scintillating moral fable it is.
3 - A Wicked Company by Philipp BlomReview:
This is an interesting book that provides some little-known connections between the larger-known set of ideas that we largely recognize as the “Enlightenment,” and is especially aimed at the general reader. Those whose knowledge of the intellectual side of the Enlightenment is moderate to extensive will gain little from the book, but it was still interesting to learn about some of the private lives, loves, and feuds of the people involved therein.
Blom’s ultimate emphasis here is on the so-called “radical” Enlightenment, as opposed to the moderate Enlightenment of thinkers like Voltaire. The latter still flirted with the political status quo and entertained deism. After all, Voltaire made his fortune by loaning vast sums of money to European monarchs; it’s difficult to rock the boat of ideas when your financial security depends on it. Those of the radical Enlightenment were not afraid to take reason, science, and materialism to its ultimate limits: there are many of them, but the major figures include Baron Holbach, Diderot, d’Alembert, Buffon, Grimm, and Hume. One figure he decidedly excludes from his radical favorites is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, choosing to portray him, rightly or wrongly, as a paranoid megalomanic.
After giving some initial biographical information of the characters that loom the largest in the book – Diderot, Holbach, and Rousseau – we proceed to learn more about their thought and their circle of what are usually considered more minor friends. Blom intermittently keeps referring back to Holbach’s twice-weekly dinners that would often be attended some of the greatest minds in Europe. At the table at Grandval, chez Holbach, they would sit down to delectable poulets a la Reine, cold pate, and raspberry gelee (they actually give a menu from one of the gatherings in the book) and talk about the philosophy, religion (largely their intense dislike thereof), and groundbreaking science. I thought the conceit of a big dinner party was an interesting one to tell what amounts to a group biography, and certainly helped keep things both entertaining and engaging.
Not only are the lives and ideas of the current characters discussed in context, but Blom also takes the time to discuss those people that influenced their thought, some of which I only now realized I had not fully fleshed out before. He has a very interesting chapter on Spinozist monism versus Cartesian dualism, and how that argument reverberated through the eighteenth century; later in the book, he discusses how through their thorough familiarity with the classics, Lucretius’ “De Rerum Natura” and the Greek atomists Democritus and Leucippus might have been influential in a revival of materialism, too. For the first two-thirds of the book, Blom lets his sizeable bias against Rousseau get in the way of an otherwise much more objective piece of intellectual history. Because of the general nature of the book and the heavy bias toward Rousseau, I can’t in all fairness give this book more than 3 stars. For a more sophisticated and nuanced treatment of the Enlightenment, I suggest Peter Gay’s two-volume treatment, “The Rise of Modern Paganism” and “The Science of Freedom.” The first two volumes of Jonathan Israel’s trilogy, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 and Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752 are equally wonderful.
4 - The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914 by Philipp BlomReview:
“The Vertigo Years,” much like Blom’s earlier “Wicked Company,” is a history for the general reader who wants to gain a feel for the general Zeitgeist of fin-de-siècle Western Europe coming up through the beginning of World War I. If you desire a history of something specifically with “the events leading up to WWI” in mind, keep looking, as this book has almost nothing to do with the complicated set of alliances and feuds that eventually resulted in the death of Archduke Ferdinand. It is, in the purest sense of the term, cultural history. Almost anything and anyone of significant (and many things of insignificant) amounts of cultural relevance are described in the book, but at 400 pages, Blom never grows ponderous. The chapters on Marie and Pierre Curie are just detailed enough to where almost everyone learns something new. And many of the chapters are wholly based around people or events with which I had little or no familiarity, like the political assassin and wife of the former French Prime Minister Henriette Caillaux, as well as the influence of Bertha von Suttner, the peace activist and first woman to ever win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905.
There are fifteen chapters in the book, each covering one year beginning in 1900 and ending in 1914. Instead of trying to write the history of each individual year (which would probably read much more confusedly and frenetically), Blom introduces each year with one seminal person, event, or idea with a striking vignette and uses the rest of the chapter to both branch out and go into some of the finer details of what’s really going on. Some of the most wonderful chapters include the ones on the 1900 World Fair in Paris, Freud’s revolutionary idea of “culture as sublimated sexuality,” and the journalists who broke the story about King Leopold’s atrocities in the Congo. Interspersed through the text are wonderful black-and-white photographs, with quite a few color plate photographs in the middle for visual reference to the varied artists Blom alludes to, everyone from Schiele to Picasso to Derain.
For those who have read Blom’s “Wicked Company,” this book is much, much better. None of the characters here seem to incur the author’s ire like Rousseau does. And while “Wicked Company” is almost a multiple biography of half a dozen characters or more covering a very wide swath of a century or more, this is book is a set of tightly controlled, engaging bits of history with which we should all be familiar. It comes highly recommended for anyone with an interest in turn-of-the-century science, art, literature, technology, and society, and politics.
5 - Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars by George L. MosseReview:
This book, one of the best and most insightful I have read in a long time, rests at a cross-section between art, culture, sociology, and memory. At 225 pages, it is both extremely short, and yet scholarly, well-argued, timely, and convincing.
Does the sudden emergence of trench warfare in any way transmute the ways in which we walk about and experience war? Did the shift from monarchy to burgeoning nation-states during this time period change soldierly ideological motivations in wanting to engage in warfare? Why did separate cemeteries appear for soldiers, completely unheard of before the nineteenth century, suddenly start appearing in France and Germany? These questions form a group of concerns the book discusses, yet Mosse manages to touch on a number of other topics, as well.
About 600,000 soldiers died during the American Civil War, while just two generations later in World War I, almost 9 million perished. Mosse argues that facts like this, along with the horrors of trench warfare, gave rise to a construction of civic religion centered around remembrance and a search for human meaning as a way to cope with heretofore unknown amounts of barbarism. This remembrance, along with the various ways of glorifying and sanctifying battle that would arise, Mosse refers collectively to as the “Myth of the War Experience.”
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the constitution of many armies gradually shifted from conscripted poverty-ridden peasants to bourgeois, well-educated professional soldiers, who envisioned themselves fighting for Aufbruch (a nascent national-democratic spirit). Suddenly, going off to war was no cause for angst and concern, but rather a chance to fight for the fatherland, and an opportunity to get to see new and exotic places (see the work of soldier-poets like Lord Byron and Theodor Korner). Aesthetic representations of triumph were built from both classical pagan imagery and Protestant piety, which were used to create “communities of the dead” (military cemeteries) where soldiers could rest pure, away from mere civilians.
Mosse claims that culture and art, too, have a definite place in shaping the ideology of the Myth of the War Experience. The Italian Futurists (like Marinetti) and German Expressionists added to the Myth Experience a sense of camaraderie to war in which a “new man” would be created, forming a society free of hypocrisy and tyranny (highly ironic, as Marinetti is perhaps best remembered for his flirtations with fascism). Youth now symbolized manhood, virility, and pure energy. Death was no long an unfortunate loss, but a sacrifice and a chance for eternal resurrection (again, that Christian imagery) for a glorious cause.
A retroactive Romanticism was also invoked, full of its images of bucolic hills and untainted, rural countryside, and used to symbolize purity away from an ill, noxious city (the literature of the nineteenth century is replete with metaphors of the city as rotten and diseased). Movies touting the moral virtues of mountain climbing as a “manly” conquering of nature filled the screens, effectively masking the dangers of death and destruction while at the same time shoring up ideas that were attractive to far right political elements, like adventure, domination, and conquest.
The Myth’s appearance in popular culture was perhaps inevitable, but had a most interesting result: the “process of trivialization.” There are several photos in the book depicting the war as a humorous, quaint, distant affair. There is a German postcard of a rabbit laying eggs with the caption “Frohliche Ostern” (Happy Easter), one from Au Bon Marche showing two little girls stomping all over a helpless German toy soldier, and perhaps most disturbingly, a father cradling his baby boy and looking aside admiring another of his boys with the caption “The New Conscripts.” Some artists, including the German Rudolf Grossmanns, made a career producing nothing but kitsch showing heroic boys yearning for the joys of the battlefield. Closely related to trivialization is the brutalization of political discourse in which themes and tropes of militarism and aggression gave additional emphasis to notions of manliness, a trend which continued until World War II.
But around this time, these ideological means started to outgrow their political and historical usefulness. After German defeat in the First World War, it could be effectively argued that the courageous Germans had not actually lost the war, they just hadn’t yet won. But after losing another World War, the Myth was too tendentious and suspicious to garner populist support for the political right. Thus the fiery rhetoric of manliness and sacrifice in the name of one’s country saw its last days.
For anyone convinced that “ideology” is just a word used in the ivory towers of academia, or that popular culture doesn’t drastically affect the way we perceive and experience some of the most fundamental aspects of our world, this book will forever change your mind. It is most highly recommended for anyone interested in the history of war memorials, changing perceptions of war and the soldier, and the politics of the interwar years.
7 - The Good Soldier by Ford Madox FordReview:
“The Good Soldier” follows two well-to-do couples, John (the narrator) and Florence Dowell and Edward and Leonora Ashburnham through the course of their relationships, especially Edward’s endless philandering with any woman who will submit to his relentless sexual advances. The story, told long after the events have actually transpired, details Dowell’s conversion from innocent onlooker in the four-way friendship into a man whose world has been turned upside down by the discovery that his wife has tried to seduce his best friend. Even then, Dowell chalks up Ashburnham’s dalliances to mere “sentimentalism,” a need to paternalistically place himself in a situation where he is seen as the selfless hero, as the “good soldier.” While Dowell is sometimes more than fair with Ashburnham, at times he relentlessly mocks him, commenting on his stupid expressions and his petit bourgeois concern with “keeping up appearances,” even in the face of a sham of a marriage. Ford seems to be looking for answers to explain such behavior, but doesn’t even seem convinced by his own dubious explanations.
Marked by a radical break with the earlier, traditional Victorian novel, “The Good Soldier” is highly evocative of the society novels of Henry James, Edith Wharton, and even some D. H. Lawrence. Adultery is discussed frankly and directly, and instead of the morally certain, honest, objective narration that we see in work before it, Ford’s narrator is bereft when he finds his search for meaning and simplicity an empty one, finding in its place an ambiguous and unreliable world. This is a hard pill to swallow for those who have been weaned on Dickens, Thackeray, and Trollope. Its subtlety and sensitive psychological representations mirror the complexities of people, not stock characters.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the story is how utterly conflicted Dowell remains throughout the novel. The authority of his narrative voice waxes and wanes (mostly wanes) through the entire story, which might be frustrating for some readers, but was a welcome relief for me. Concomitant with this voice is an overall ambiance of moral turpitude and decadence, and not simply as a result of Florence and Ashburnham’s affair. Dowell is never slow to remind the reader that he knows little, that he might be wrong, that this was only the way things seemed to him. It is hardly a surprise that Ford, who considered himself an “impressionist,” has very much up to the name and written a novel of fleeting impressions and reminiscences which always fall short of cohering into a unified story whose characters motivations are convincingly delineated.
One of the results of Ford’s technique is that it breaks with one’s usual response after having completed a novel: since Aristotle, we have come to find some sort of intellectual catharsis from tragedy, but this is a story that complicates that expectation, even if we are afforded some sort of edification in human moral psychology. The novel was written in 1915, no doubt a perilous time in European history. At the risk of committing an egregious post hoc ergo propter hoc, it may be that Ford’s narrative is indicative of a world on the precipice of the Great War, whose social and cultural orders have shifted from firmly hierarchical to nebulous in less than a generation.
Even if you do not care for the novel itself, it would be difficult to deny its important place in a canon of works that need to be carefully and thoughtfully read to have a fuller and more appreciative knowledge of twentieth-century English literature. I cherished it, and its characters seemed like some of the most artfully drawn I’ve ever read. Weeks after having finished the novel, the various tête–à–têtes and interrelationships continue to dance through my head while I imagine sitting down next to Dowell while he tells me his story.
8 - A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David HarveyReview:
David Harvey, whose professional background as a geographer has slowly led him astray into the fields of economics and cultural criticism, has written a interesting, if dense, intellectual history of neoliberalism, in both theory and practice. While not nearly as consequential as some of his other work (especially “The Condition of Postmodernity” and “The Limits to Capital”), it is nevertheless a highly compelling, critical account of the prevailing economic ideology of our time. As someone with a much greater interest in the theoretical side of matters than the pragmatics, I was somewhat disappointed that Harvey spent a lot of time discussing what neoliberal policies have perpetrated in various countries (Chile, China, the United States, and Sweden) as opposed to focusing on its formation and instantiation about a generation ago. The theory, for the most part, is discussed only in the first two chapters, while the rest of the book is dedicated its various effects.
According to Harvey, after the end of World War II, the social democracies of Western Europe were dominated by what he calls “embedded liberalism,” an amalgam of “state, market, and democratic institutions to guarantee peace, inclusion, well-being, and stability,” and which was marked by the regulation of free trade and the belief that full employment and the social welfare of the citizenry were at the heart of a healthy economy.” The postwar economies that operated under embedded liberalism saw gradual growth and prosperity throughout the 1950s and 1960s, but eventually began to falter under a new set of emergent economic ideas.
During the late 1970s and early 1980s in China, England, and the United States, the shift away from policy finally began to catch up to the growing disenchantment among elites with embedded liberalism. The markers on the way to a final transition were obvious: in 1973, a U.S.-led coup in Chile in which we provided the economic minds to completely deregulate Allende’s social-democratic system and install a fascist who respected no boundary between the state and the corporation; in 1979, a total restructuring of U.S. monetary policy under the direction of Paul Volcker (who still rears his head in policy-making decisions three decades later); and soon afterward the elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. The changes, too, were just as apparent: the increasing amounts of deregulation in private enterprise, the investment of capital in foreign economies, and the promotion of a regressive tax structure in which the super-rich pay the same percentage in taxes as the poor.
Harvey explicitly makes two arguments about the pervasive growth of neoliberalism: 1) some of the ways in which it is practiced making it a veritable contradiction in terms, and 2) neoliberalism has successfully rebuilt and sustained a lasting class differential and formation of capitalist class power which the working poor and middle classes have to continually fund. First, while one of the main tenets of the neoliberalism is to keep state interference in the economy to an absolute minimum, it turns out that the state conveniently intervenes when it is in the best interest of economic elites who run the system (see Paul Bremer’s opening up of the Iraqi economy and banking system to foreign investment and business, as well as the aforementioned United States intervention in Chile). Secondly, the idea of continued and increased economic growth is a shibboleth. Aggregate growth rates after the inception of neoliberalism – which declined from 3.5% in the 1960s to a current approximate 1% after 2000 – show it to be less and less a set of economic policies which actually produce wealth in an egalitarian manner. While a formation of an ultra-rich capitalist class would have been unheard of in socialist China or Russia forty years ago, the vastly uneven distributions of wealth have allowed for exactly that.
One of the most interesting parts of the book is when Harvey discussed neoliberalism is when he talks about how the concept of “freedom” is deployed to rhetorically shore it up. Whenever you hear neoliberal policies discussed by politicians, you always hear about how open markets create more “freedom,” which Harvey does not admit is true, at least in a sense. What he does emphasize is that it excludes other notions of freedom, such as access to a wide array of social services, the ability to collectively negotiate for wages, and appropriate working conditions.
This comes highly recommended for anyone interested in left-wing politics, criticism of the economic policies of international institutions (especially the International Monetary Fund and World Bank), and an answer to laissez-faire capitalism broadly speaking.
9 - The Captive Mind by Czeslaw MiloszReview:
“There are occasions when silence no longer suffices, when it may pass as an avowal. Then one must not hesitate. Not only must one deny one’s true opinion, but one is commanded to resort to all ruses to deceive one’s adversary. One makes all the protestations of faith that can please him, one performs all the rites one recognizes to be the most vain, one falsifies one’s own books, one exhausts all possible means of deceit.” – Arthur Gobineau, from ‘Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia’
“The Captive Mind,” written in the early 1950s immediately after Milosz was awarded political asylum in France, is one of the first attempts to articulate the appeal of Communism (or, more broadly, dialectical materialism) to the intellectuals all over Eastern Europe.
Central to the novel are four characters identified by Milosz only as Alpha, Beta, Delta, and Gamma (but who we know enough about to identify as the very real authors Jerzy Andrzejewski, Tadeusz Borowski, Jerzy Putrament, and Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński.) Each of the four has uniquely different relationships to writing, and thinks differently about the way dialectical materialism affects their writing. In Alpha’s youth, his far-right politics calls him into writing with the force of “moral authority.” He later eschews these politics and becomes a Catholic who speaks out against anti-Semitism. After World War II ends, Alpha’s writing ideologically aligns itself with the puppet governments that set themselves up on Eastern Europe, and he is later seen only seen as a literary prostitute by his former friends. Beta, a poet who spent two years in Auschwitz and Dachau only to later be released by American soldiers, later swallows the pill of Murti-Bing and writes hard-line ideological defenses of Leninism and Stalinism. The experiences of Delta and Gamma are equally typical accounts of when the mind of an intellectual bumps into an intractable ideological system which inevitably evolves into “ketman,” meaning an outward acceptance of an idea while still holding on to unspoken reservations. In fact, this word, originally from the Arabic, was imported into English by Arthur Gobineau himself (see the quotation above).
The first two chapters are incisive in evoking the spirit of the Communism-addled writer who struggles to balance his “priorities.” But the middle chapters on the writers seem as untrue – not false in the strict sense, but lacking the clarity of the moral-political-aesthetic themes with which he was trying to deal - as the ideology with which they are struggling. While they are presented as individuated, personal characters, the reader gets the feeling that Milosz is to turn them into archetypes while at other times working deliberately against this, which has an odd way of turning them into alienating abstractions for the reader.
Perhaps most of all, this book serves as a tocsin. By now, an entire generation of Europeans has had the ability to write, think, and speak publicly about whatever they wish, the very fact of which possibly renders Milosz’s book a peculiar curio from the doldrums of intellectual history. For many Americans, whose questions of freedom are restricted to whether or not one is allowed to burn their draft card or a Koran, or utter a prayer in school, reading “The Captive Mind” may very well have a stultifying effect. If that happens, the book runs the risk – we all run the risk – of it becoming still even more relevant than it is now.
10 - Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus: From the Great Philosophers, Volume I by Karl JaspersReview:
In an effort to be very fair, I will review this book for what it is, and not what I wanted it to be. What is it? A highly serviceable introduction to the lives, thought, and influence of the four titular historical personages. I cannot stress the word “introduction” enough here. Unless you have had no exposure to the figure that you are curious about, you will be hard-pressed in learning anything new about him. This, however, wasn’t my first encounter with any of the four figures.
What did I want this book to be? Considering the reputation of Jaspers, I was expecting something more scholarly, yet I should have known better from the length of the book (just under 100 pages, not including the endnotes and bibliography). Considering he is mostly known for his “Philosophy and Existence,” I thought that he might try to take a syncretic approach, blending his own brand of thought with these paradigmatic figures of the past. No such luck. I also thought that it might have had something other than strictly a “summary” type of feel that it did. It reads like lecture notes in that it’s somewhat disjointed, a lot of the thoughts he explores do not go fully developed, and you are left wanting more.
Unfortunately, much of the stuff here is derivative and fails to shed any new light on the material it covers. Since this series pulled together from a variety of different sources in Jaspers’ own writing (edited by his mentee, Hannah Arendt), it is difficult to tell whether or not this is the way he intended it to be. However, as I mentioned above, the book is not without its audience. It would be very suitable ancillary material for an introductory course in world religions.
11 - The Authentic Confucius by Annping ChinReview:
With the ascendancy of New Age religion and metaphysics, if one can even bear to grace them those names, it has been increasingly difficult to discern the scholarly from the hogwash, the learned from the those whose aimless spirits are drawn to the next universal panacea. The problem is only compounded when we see the convergence of these ideas with those in Buddhism, Hinduism, and other Asian traditions. Thankfully, Annping Chin provides us with a carefully thought out perspective, a deep reverence for the history of both China and Confucius’ life in particular, and the much-appreciated scholarly credentials. After studying mathematics, she received her Ph.D. in Chinese Thought from Columbia, and has taught at both Wesleyan and Yale. Her husband, renowned author and sinologist Jonathan Spence, who is also at Yale, wrote one of my favorite books, “The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci.” (Incidentally, Ricci, a sixteenth-century Italian Jesuit priest, was the first to Latinize Confucius’ name from the original Chinese Kung Fuzi, and would also later translate much of the Confucian corpus into Latin.)
Chin does a sublime job at contextualizing Confucius’ political thought. He was born in the time commonly referred to as the Spring and Autumn period, spanning some three-and-a-half centuries, when China was in a state of existential crisis, riven by familial conflict and discord. Matters came to such a head that he spent 14 years, from 497 to 484 B. C., in exile passing from feudal state to feudal state. Only later does he return to his home state of Lu as a reluctant political advisor. In such a mess, the principle concerns of Confucius’ thought make much more sense. In emphasizing the rites, customs, and social mores that he saw as the fabric of Chinese society, he thought that he could restore order, propriety, and that piety that had been lost in all of the fighting. These inherently conservative ideas (in the purest sense of the word) were utterly essential to work one’s way into Chinese civil service up until the end of the Qian Dynasty, which fell in 1912 (with a moribund resurgence five years later). While that is no longer the case, the ripples of his influence are still very noticeable Chinese culture.
Ping’s ability to marshal the gaps in ancient Confucian historiography is just as remarkable. Her primary sources are small in number, almost wholly limited to the Analects, the Zuo Zhuan, and Sima Qian’s biography, all of which date anywhere from one hundred to five hundred years after the Confucius’ death. The hagiographic nature of a lot of these materials, especially those written by his students, makes painting an accurate portrait even more difficult. Ping uses these sources not only to create a biography, but to provide illustrative vignettes that shed a lot of insight into what Confucius considered the most important in both the individual and the state.
This is a highly reliable introduction to the history, thought, and influence of Confucius, all couched nicely within the political context he was continually at odds with, and should come highly recommended for anyone interested in the historical Confucius or the history of the Warring States period.
12 - The Great Code: The Bible and Literature by Northrop FryeReview:
“The Great Code” really re-configured the way that I conceive of the Bible as a literary document. After two centuries of historical criticism (or narrative criticism as it’s called when applied to the Bible), it is refreshing to see a whole new interpretive methodology which looks inward at the Bible, instead of trying to test its significance by how well it correlates to something outside of itself. And that is the central thesis to Frye’s argument – that the Bible is a unified mythology, replete with its own literary devices, that hardly needs confirmation from history or archaeology to successfully tell the story (mythos) that it tells. Because of this, the book has been the target of a number of appropriate historicist critiques, all claiming that one can’t cut wholly separate the work of literature from its social and cultural context. Although these criticisms aren’t all fair themselves, as Frye even considers the structure of certain metaphors (like the ubiquitous flood myth) modulate themselves repeatedly via literary transmission into new texts.
The first part of the book consists of a highly condensed theory of language which Frye employs in the second half. I found this part just as useful, yet often elided in critical reviews. According to Frye, his own ideas are highly influenced by Vico’s “Scienza Nuova” which posits the idea of a cyclical theory of language wherein each human epoch uses language in a unique, irreducible way. In his tripartite interpretation, there is the hieroglyphic stage in which words have the pure energy of potential magic, the hieratic stage in which words begin to reflect an objective reality of a transcendent order, and the demotic stage, where prose continues its subordination to “the inductive and fact-gathering process,” and seems to be the stage we remain in today. If this evolution has taken us full circle from feel the pure immediacy of metaphor, how are we supposed to read the Bible (whose language is, of course, one of pure metaphorical immediacy)? Nietzsche said that God had lost his function, but Vico (and Frye in turn) might have replied that the Bible is simply entombed in a lost part of the cycle, inaccessible and unable to be interpreted by the demotic. His neo-Viconian theory of language goes some way in offering a theory for the vulgarism that so often takes the name of Biblical interpretation: “With the general acceptance of demotic and descriptive criteria in language, such literalism becomes a feature of anti-intellectual Christian populism” (45).
The second part begins the literary criticism as one would more formally recognize it. According to Frye, the Bible can operate independently precisely because it functions and maintains its own body of rhetorical devices, including metaphor, and type, antitype, and archetype. “We clearly have to consider the possibility that metaphor is not an incidental ornament, but one of its controlling modes of thought” (54). Metaphor and trope become the sole measure of the Bible’s inner verbal consistency. The “type” and “antitype” are essentially import; he construes the entire Bible as a series of musical call-and-response gestures between the Old and New Testaments: the Resurrection is the response to the Old Testament Promised Land, the baptism in the River Jordan is the New Testament’s answer to the Old Testament’s Red Sea. He also integrates a number of other complex typologies, including the Creation-Incarnation-Death-Descent to Hell-Harrowing of Hell-Resurrection-Ascension-Heaven motif and a nomenclature of types, including the “demonic,” “analogical,” and “apocalyptic.” This universe – multiverse, even – of complex metaphor, meaning, and type are the ones that we continue to recognize, read, and struggle with today, which accounts for the fact that myth goes a long way in exploring who we are and what we do as a community. Notice how Frye deftly bypasses any theological or strictly philosophical concerns. As Frank Kermode would comment almost a decade after the book was published, “Just as he exiled questions of value from the Anatomy [of Criticism], he exiles from his Biblical criticism questions of belief.”
I was considering giving this book four stars, because of my occasional disagreements with it (including the arguments from historicism mentioned above). But I can’t in good conscience do that. Just for the interpretive vistas that it opens up, I feel that anything less than five would convey an impression that I was less than impressed, which certainly is not the case.
13 - A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by Danilo KisReview:
Danilo Kis is someone whom I have wanted to read ever since I heard Susan Sontag share her admiration for him in an interview several years ago. This novel, really a collection of short stories whose characters are thematically interwoven over space and time, details a series of lives as they encounter revolutionary movements, and how those revolutions eat their own children. Being a Yugoslav, Kis’ primary interest might have been the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, but the story set in the fourteenth-century shows the universality of Kis’ concern. Regardless of setting, each of the stories is set against a mental landscape of prisons and human abattoirs where suffering and horror are par for the course. Kis uses a lyrical, detached style which softens and distances itself from the horror we know is occurring, creating a kind of “litterature verite,” full of horrible whimsy, making the stories irresistible to read.
He is deserving of a bigger audience in both Europe and the United States.
John wrote: "12 - "The Great Code: Bible and Literature" by Northrop FryeReview:
“The Great Code” really re-configured the way that I conceive of the Bible as a literary document. After two centuries of hist..."
A great review. It makes me want to read the book. You are one smart cookie!
14 - The Lord Chandos Letter (and Other Stories) by Hugo von HofmannsthalReview:
Hugo von Hofmannsthal is one of a litany of writers whose fantastic reputations have dwindled since their own day. Considered a literary phenom in fin-de-siecle Vienna, and highly regarded as Richard Strauss’ librettist for some of his finest operas, including Elektra (1909), Ariande auf Naxos (1912), and Der Rosenkavalier (1911), he hadn’t even hit the age of age of twenty before his writing began to draw serious attention. Today, he is mostly known for the eponymous story originally published as “Ein Brief,” known much better today as “The Lord Chandos Letter.”
Hofmannsthal’s writing, at least all of the short stories drawn together in this short volume, have a patina of existential crisis and concern which he manages to manifest in the most interesting of ways. Old literary preoccupations like character development and conventional plot have largely been sacrificed to communicate the message that something is deeply and terribly wrong. His characters all have trouble resolving where, quite literally, they began and the world beyond them stops. Hofmannsthal makes a conscious effort to functionally blunt the senses of the reader in much the same way his characters’ senses have been blunted, by the use of other-worldly, mystical, automatic associations. Descriptors that readily come to mind when I think of the best of these stories are oneiric and magical (sur)realist.
In some stories, Hofmannsthal is able to take a common message – in this case, the imminence and ubiquity of mortality – and reworks it into something wholly innovative and compelling. In “Tale of the Veiled Woman,” a miner’s wife eagerly awaits the return of her husband from work. We see her wring her hands, running through her mind on a loop the dozens of things that could have gone wrong at the mine that day. At the mine, the husband encounters the woman in the veil, whose presence preternaturally attunes him to the concerns of another world. When he arrives home, he notices that his body no longer casts a shadow against his house and this, quite rightly, worries him. Over the dinner table, he tries to avoid the light of the kerosene lamp; he has noticed that the face of his wife, beautiful, young, and milky that morning, is now a skull stretched over with a piece of tallow-colored skin, a walking corpse. Unable to cope with this horrible vision (is it just a vision?), he readies a chariot and escapes from his family.
In “Tale of the 672nd Night,” a man lives a solitary life, accompanied only by his faithful servants who, in carefully sustained paranoid delusion, he thinks are always watching him. Seeking a debouche from his house, he sets out to escape them, only to find himself chased by a series of characters that he slowly discovers are actually avatars of his servants Caught in a dead end, trying to find still another escape, he is kicked by a horse. Efforts by local townspeople to help him are futile, and he dies in a small, dark room, totally antithetical the gigantic, empty manse he is used to. But at least he is free of the help.
The title story takes the form of a long letter to renowned scientist Francis Bacon, written from one among his circle of literary friends who wants apologize for the recent lack of literary output. In his letter, Lord Chandos details a most peculiar symptom: he is unable to formulate the most simple of thoughts. (Yes, he is writing this in a lengthy, eloquent reader, so you need a healthy suspension of disbelief.) Here, too, Chandos claims moments of heightened sensation or afflatus, but they are of no use in helping him overcome his newfound crisis: “As soon, however, as this strange enchantment falls from me, I find myself confused; wherein this harmony transcending me and the entire world consisted, and how it made itself known to me, I could present in sensible words as little as I could say anything precise about the inner movements of my intestines or a congestion of my blood.” For anyone deeply invested in the task of writing, this story haunts the imagination like a specter; for all the spookiness of some of the other stories, this one looms largest. Some have suggested that this letter has autobiographical elements, as it conspicuously marks Hofmannsthal’s transition from the composition of lyric poetry to drama and libretti. Perhaps it is an ode to the impuissance of literature as Hofmannsthal knew it, a cue for the ushering in of a brave, new modernism.
15 - The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon DavisReview:
Natalie Zemon Davis, along with the likes of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Carlo Ginzburg, both of whom she explicitly acknowledges in “The Return of Martin Guerre,” has carved out a relatively new niche in the academic history. Instead of writing about the movers and shakers, the kings or emperors, or large-scale religious change, she writes here specifically focused on a few families in mid-sixteenth century France. The reputations made by the people that exist within the covers were not the result of high birth or diplomatic achievement. The only reason the name “Martin Guerre” has any resonance to our ears is because his story is perhaps the most incredible since that of Odysseus. Except Guerre’s has the virtue of being historical fact. Without any of the historiographic jargon that we may have come cynically to expect, Davis has wonderfully harnessed most of the elements that allow the causal reader to fully appreciate the story of Martin Guerre.
Not long after moving from the Basque village of Hendaye to Artigat with his father Sanxi and his uncle Pierre, Martin Guerre, aged 13, marries a certain Bertrande de Rols. After a period of restlessness and sexual impotence, they conceive a child (also named Sanxi); soon afterwards, he gets into a dispute with his father and runs away, never to return. From this point on, there are intermittent lengthy discussions of property transfer in France at the time, specifically detailing how Basque tradition stipulates that the property moves from Bertrande to Pierre (since Sanxi the elder had already died).
In another world, Arnaud du Tilh (aka “Pansette,” or “The Belly,” for his well-defined paunch), eager to remove himself from the monotony of the seigniory of Sajas, joins Henri II’s army. In one of the weaker and more speculative parts of the book, Davis here guesses that Arnaud and Martin might have both met somewhere while in the service of Henri II (in whose service the real Martin might have lost a leg), traded intimate life stories and history to such an extent that Arnaud could then arrive in Artigat, proclaim himself the long-lost Martin Guerre, and insert himself into lives of Pierre Guerre and Bertrande, who quickly learns of du Tilh’s imposture, but outwardly fervently maintains that he is really Martin Guerre. Pierre, however, decides to form an inquest into Pansette’s identity, suspecting something is out of place.
The inquest turns into a trial where witnesses – Martin’s friends, family, doctors, neighbors – cannot agree on his identity. In fact, Pansette is such a good impersonator that about one-third of them say he is Martin, another third say he isn’t, and the remaining refuse to comment, being too baffled or fearing retribution from a member of the village. He is found guilty, but appeals to an illustrious court in Toulouse, where the author of one of the first accounts of the story, Jean de Coras, sits as a judge. After careful consideration, he overturns the ruling of the lower court, and announces Pansette innocent. At that moment, a man with a wooden leg enters the courtroom claiming to be Martin Guerre. One by one, everyone begins to recognize “the newcomer” (as Pansette calls him), and within a matter of hours Martin, who has been gone for a several years, regains his reputation, family, and friends inside the courtroom. Coras sees the error of his previous judgment and sentences Pansette to, first, an “amende honorable” (a traditional French assignation of culpability) and then death by hanging (a punishment deeply tied to avarice in the medieval imagination).
Davis ends again on a speculative note, suggesting that perhaps Coras found sympathy with Pansette because of their common sympathy for Reformation ideas (Coras was and remained fairly liberal for the time). Given the time period, there were countless accusations slung back and forth of faithlessness and apostasy. However, the book is much too short and this part in particular too underdeveloped to seriously support this idea.
Interesting, too, is what Davis never explicitly takes much time to discuss, but nevertheless lurks beneath the surface: ideas of identity, gender, property acquisition, incipient capitalism, and belonging in sixteenth-century France. So, while a causal reader can enjoy it for its unique historical cache, those whose interest is more academic have a lot to unpack, too. For those interested in enjoying the latter approach, I recommend a reading in tandem with Valentine Groebner’s “Who Are You?: Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe,” which takes the time to fill out some of the undercurrents in Davis’ thought which she only alluded to.
16 - Myth & Christianity: An Inquiry into the Possibility of Religion without Myth by Karl Jaspers and Rudolf BultmannModernity was a troubling thing for those who had to live through it. Pure, objective, unassailable science was quickly supplanting religious ideas, and paring those ideas down to what they were – mere myths perpetrated on us by those who wanted to exert social and cultural control. Or at least this was the conclusion reached by many who, with the advent of a new way of approaching universal truth, now wanted nothing to do with that old-time religion. But not everyone felt the same way. This very short book introduces the thought of Rudolph Bultmann, one of the leading German theologians of the early twentieth century and proponent of “demythologization,” and Karl Jaspers, the well-known German existentialist and philosopher. First, there is a very capable introduction by R. Joseph Hoffmann, followed by an opening statement by Jaspers, a reply by Bultmann, and then a closing reply by Jaspers. Jaspers and Bultmann both being dyed-in-the-wool Heideggerians, it is interesting to read about their intellectual justifications regarding the respective virtues and weaknesses of hermeneutics as applied to religious myth.
As I mentioned earlier, toward the latter part of Bultmann’s career, he started to talk about something called demythologization, in which he attempts to divest religious meaning and intent from the original myths in which they are couched. For Bultmann, the Ascension and the Virgin Birth (just to name two highly representative religious myths) mean something, but the fact that the religious content is ensconced in the language of the miraculous is a serious stumbling block for the modern man whose mind has come to see the miracle as ridiculous and impossible. Therefore, these myths need to be reconfigured – divested – of their Biblical form and given a structure which is makes getting at their meaning and significance possible for someone living in the twentieth century.
Jaspers, however, sees the element of myth as indispensable from the content of religious belief itself. Jaspers claims that “reading” these myths without their mythical structures is impossible. He rejects the idea that any religion can be understood apart from its mythical origins. The topology of the origins themselves, he argues, is essential to our understanding. Religious myths are not there to provide us with a decoding project; their cutting away cannot happen without the simultaneous disappearance of any possibility of a religious message. Myth is, for Jaspers, das Umgreifende (the Great Encompassing) by and through which we can escape the worn dualities of subjectivity and objectivity, and achieve a sort of transcendence.
Jaspers saw Bultmann’s project of demythologization as a sanitizing one, one that failed to understand myth as an essential vehicle for apprehending and describing the transcendent. Jaspers comes close to the one that Northrop Frye constructs in “The Great Code: The Bible and Literature,” in which he suggests that modern attempts to read the Bible are often foiled because we no longer read and write in the mythical; rather, he thinks, following Vico’s tripartite theory of language, that our system of writing has since taken on empirical, positivistic concerns. While Frye thinks that one cannot read the Bible without myth since it is written in myth, Jaspers respects the mythic, and asserts that the religious person must come to terms with it. Jaspers accuses Bultmann of a scientism which sees itself as being responsible for not be accused of foolish mythologies.
I would like to include a word about the construction and editing of the book itself. It has a wonderful introduction by R. Joseph Hoffmann which provides one of the greatest contexts and explanations of the rise of liberal theology in the nineteenth century. However, Jaspers’ first parry in the conversation includes a lot of material from his Existenzphilosophie which is completely unnecessarily for the overall understanding of the text and the content of the argument at hand. This part of the text includes explanation the reader could have done without, like “We cannot think unless something becomes an object for us. To be conscious means to live in that clarity which is made possible by the split between I and the object. But it also means to live within the walls constituted by the split between the I and something known to be an object.” And so on. If this language had been excised, the book would have made its argument in tighter, more cogent terms. Also, of the 88 pages devoted to the back-and-forth of Bultmann and Jaspers, Bultmann is allotted a grand total of 12 pages, which makes me think the editor may have had a slight bias. In any case, the substance of the debate is fascinating, but these weak points to detract from the overall rating. I would recommend a close examination of these ideas for anyone interested in the shapes and trends of liberal theology in the twentieth century, but one can probably find another publication whose editor is less clumsy in communicating them.
17 - Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment by Stephen Kotkin and Jan GrossReview:
In the west, we are often regaled with unquestioned stories of the fall of communism, most often the one in which the triad of Margaret Thatcher, John Paul II, and Reagan collectively conjure the World-Spirit of neoliberalism and capitalism to defeat the Reds. It's an account that speaks to our need for heroism. Stephen Kotkin's account, however, is a revisionist one in that he claims the downfall of the Soviet Union (especially the bloc states in Eastern Europe) was much less exciting than we've been led to believe. It ended, he tells us, not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Kotkin's approach is interesting in that it doesn't focus nearly as much on western intervention or containment strategies, but simply on the inner dynamics of the countries themselves, of their "civil" (that body of extra-governmental institutions including unions, churches, and universities) and "uncivil" societies (the bloated communist states). The core of the argument is that in each of the three states with which is he concerned - East Germany, Romania, and Poland - the leadership was so decadent, so blissfully unaware, and so inept that they didn't need much outside intervention to fall. They brought themselves down without much help.
The establishment of communism promised a better life for everyone, yet it was obvious how much they economically lagged behind the capitalist countries. In an effort to jumpstart technological innovation, they borrowed money from western countries, but soon realized that there was no market for the cheap, shoddy products that they were making. In no time, they were barely even able to make the interest payments on their loans. Debt skyrocketed, and most of the time, the answer was to put austerity measures into place - for people whose lives, they would tell you, were already quite austere already. To aggravate matters, hardliners were completely unreceptive to change. To admit that reform was needed was to admit that the ideological tenets of the state religion were somehow flawed. The extreme myopia and utter denial of the party heads only further catalyzed the downfall of the eastern bloc states.
The one egregious exception to the inefficacy of civil society is the case of Poland's Solidarity movement. Marx's reference to Poland as "indigestible" should have been a clue that it would be an outlier: it had an economy that had many heavily privatized parts (compared to other bloc states), which very well may have made way for union opposition and Solidarity ascendancy. John Paul I's timely death, to be followed by the election of John Paul II, was also fortuitous. Included in the section on East Germany, Kotkin's coverage of the St. Nicholas protests in Leipzig are especially good.
In a little-known piece called "On the Freedom of the Press" written in 1842, Marx said that often "government hears only its own voice ... It knows it hears only its own voice and yet it deceives itself that it hears the people's voice." That, in a phase, is the story of Eastern Europe in the twentieth century, and the story which Kotkin renders so well here.
18 - How Institutions Think by Mary DouglasEver since the time of Descartes, and very probably since the time of the ancient Greeks, we have been deeply enamored with the idea that we – conscious, rational, decision-making beings – control the way that we think and act. While Mary Douglas certainly doesn’t suggest that we are just mindless cogs in a machine, she does offer some interesting insights into how we think about institutions, categories, and rationality that have serious implications for the idea of wholly autonomous human intellectual agency. Douglas, one of the greatest social anthropologists to come out of England in the twentieth century, is known better for her “Purity and Danger,” “Risk and Blame,” and “Implicit Meanings.” “How Institutions Think” is a series of Frank W Abrams Lectures that she delivered at Syracuse University in 1985.
Some scientific ideas enter the world, readily accepted and widely read by an eager scholarly community. Others languish – but not because they are of a lesser quality, and not even because they are incorrect. Ludwig Fleck’s book on the discovery of syphilis titled “The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact” (Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache), was one of the latter. Anticipating a sort of social constructivism, Fleck said that scientific ideas are accepted or rejected into a canon for reasons not because of their inherent worth, but because certain social conditions (Fleck called these “thought-conditions” or “thought collectives”) allow or disallow their admittance. The Denkkollecktiv is a whole matrix of social circumstances, thoughts, and assumptions that envelop the scientific project. If a new idea substantively differs from one some aspect in the Denkkollecktiv, it will be ignored – not consciously by individual scientists, but by the scientific profession as an institution.
This is where Douglas picks up on her anthropological history of the “classificatory enterprise.” How can the phenomenon that Fleck described really happen? What was it about science – or any institution – that shapes social cognition and categories so profoundly? How do these institutions develop, and why? Following Durkheim’s lead, Douglas claims that autonomy (in the sense of radical social individualism and atomization) was in many respects an illusion, and that we are marked by a strong sense of social solidarity through shared “classification, logical operations, and guiding metaphors [that] are given to the individual by society.”
One of Douglas’ implicit arguments is that the difference between sociology (group action) and psychology (action of a single agent) is wrong-headed. Instead, she asserts that for a rule to turn into a legitimate social convention, it needs a parallel cognitive convention to sustain it (46). Social institutions encode information, and then use that information to minimize the entropy, or inherent disorder, in decision-making. The stabilizing principle of institutions – what keeps them from breaking down – is that they “naturalize social classifications.” By naturalizing the social in reason, the institution automatically legitimizes it. After all, one of the first priorities of the institution should be legitimacy, or else it would incur so much doubt that it would eventually be destroyed. Douglas considers the common social analogon of likening the roles of men and women to that of the left and right hand; the logic of complementarity in nature legitimizes the social order, constructing a rationality which seems like it was there before time began. Even the institution of sameness (yes, even sameness – logical similarity – is an institution) is time- and culture-sensitive. Douglas cites the example in Leviticus of the camel, the hare, and the rock badger: they all chew cud, which would lead us to believe that they would all be classified as cud-chewing ungulates. However, since they don’t have cloven hooves, they are excluded. The criterion of difference here, having a cloven hoof, is completely arbitrary – yet it is the sole category that bestows “sameness” on a group of individuals. Douglas makes it clear that categorizations like this are not cool, objective observations into the inner working of nature. They are very telling maps that “model the interactions of the members of the society.”
Institutions do more than order categorical knowledge. They also filter information in such a way that they can be said to remember and forget. Fleck’s book recounts a classic case of institutional forgetting. The failure of a legitimate scientific idea to be accepted into the prevailing canon of knowledge is usually the result of a lack of “formulaic interlocking with normal procedures of validation.” For an idea to gain acceptance, it sometimes has to exploit “the major analogies on which the socio-cognitive system rests.” Evans-Pritchard’s study of the Nuer focuses on institution remembering, according to Douglas, discovering “an explicit demonstration of how institutions direct and control memory” (72). He showed how economic interactions, including weddings and cattle distribution, order the memory of ancestors.
The one thing I was curious about while reading the book was that Douglas never mentioned Berger’s “Social Construction of Reality,” which covers much of the same territory. Of course, not being an anthropologist, Berger has a somewhat different take on matters. “How Instutitions Think” should definitely be read alongside the Berger, and I think the reader will find that they shed light on one another. Highly recommended.
John wrote: "17 - Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment by Stephen Kotkin and Jan GrossReview:
In the west, we are often regaled with unquestioned stories of the fall o..."
Great review. I never thought that our country or any other Western Nation had much to do with the demise of the Soviet Union -- that they would crumble from within. Your review is so clear and detailed, I don't feel I even need to read the book. Sorry Mr. Kotkin.
19 - Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg“Confessions of a Justified Sinner” is exciting because it wears so many hats – it’s a gothic novel, a murder mystery, and perhaps most of all a trenchant critique of Calvinist thought. It consists of three parts: an objective summary of events in the novel, the events as told through the eyes of Robert Wringham, and the retelling of how the author (who also uses the name James Hogg) came across Wringham’s account of the story. True to the early eighteenth century’s Romantic fascination with all things fragmentary, broken, and incomplete, this novel uses the conceit of being a “found document,” in this case the handwritten history of Robert’s experiences.
The beginning of the novel tells of the marriage of a young, conservative termagant named Rabina to George Colwan, an outgoing, fun-loving man who is put off by Rabina’s extreme Calvinism. Their marriage effectively ends in their separation, but not before he impregnates her (probably in an act of rape), after which she gives birth to George. His father raises him well, and he grows up to be an academically gifted, well-adjusted young man. Shortly after the separation, Rabina’s ultra-conservative religious advisor Reverend Wringham moves in with her, and she soon has another child (this time probably by the Reverend) named Robert, who takes Wringham’s name. Robert turns out to be the anti-George: maladjusted, antisocial, vindictive, and hateful. The Reverend convinces Robert that he is justified in the eyes of God - that is, guaranteed to go to Heaven and be forgiven of whatever sins he might happen to commit on Earth. As one of God’s elect, he can do no wrong.
Even though they were raised separately and never allowed to see one another, sometime during early adulthood, Robert starts to stalk George through the city of Edinburgh, generally causing trouble wherever he goes. George also begins to notice that wherever he is, Robert is also very close by, as if he is being shadowed by a doppelganger. Robert’s malevolent antics do everything from strike terror into the heart of George to causing a town-wide fracas. When George is finally murdered in a drunken brawl, his step-mother encounters a prostitute who claims to have seen the incident. She says that Robert did it. Later, Robert admits to the crime in one of the most revealing confessions in all of literature, putting on full display his strange, perverse motives, obsessions and compulsions about the purity of his soul.
The second part of the novel shifts into Robert’s telling of the story, and we learn of the presence of one Gil-Martin, who has goaded and encouraged Robert’s deviance, even doing so in the name of Calvinistic sanctity and justice. Gil-Martin is also a protean shape-shifter who can assume Robert’s form at will, and commits murder while doing so. At first, Robert understands the necessity of these acts because they are in the name of the greatness of God. But eventually Robert’s doubts start to grow as to how holy Gil-Martin’s murders really are. Even the prototypical Calvinist fanatic ends up having a conscience. At the end of the novel, the reader is still left hanging as to Gil-Martin’s identity. Is he real, or merely a figment of Robert’s imagination?
Some of what I read, I read out of a sense of obligation, because I think I need to. I thought this would be one of those books, too. I was surprised to find that it moved at the clip of a modern psychological thriller, while always maintaining its literariness. If you found anything to admire in Walpole’s “The Castle of Otranto” or Lewis’ “The Monk,” I highly recommend this.
20 - Errand Into the Wilderness by Perry MillerPerry Miller’s “Errand Into the Wilderness” more than any other book I’ve read in a long time makes you realize sometimes how little education our educational institutions actually provide. Think of the Puritans. The word conjures up images of earnest, hard-working folk bedecked in golden buckles and ruffles eager to spread their moral superiority to anyone within earshot. We think of their biggest accomplishment as managing to survive disease and pestilence for so long, despite their backward ways. The history we know of the Puritans is a history of events – things they did, their names, their travels. Miller’s fascinating book opens up Puritan history for those interested in intellectual history – a history of ideas, theology, and polity. And what a fascinating world he uncovers.
While the main focus here is Puritanism, Miller does occasionally do a bit of wandering; some of the latter essays explore Emerson and the formation of American nationalist ideology. There are ten essays, all of which are full of the enticing, meaty history of ideas, so I won’t be able to cover all the ground of the book here, though I would like to give a short précis of some of those essays which I thought to be the most impressive.
The book’s title comes from one Samuel Danforth, whose sermon “A Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness” sets the existential, searching tone whose tenor can be found in each one of these essays. In the title essay, Miller notes the dual meaning of the word “errand.” It can mean a task done by an inferior for a superior, or it can refer to the task alone, the very action itself. The first generation of Puritans to set foot on North American soil never thought of themselves as Americans. They were just Englishmen and Englishwomen whose task was to see to it that the “errand” of the Reformation could be enacted on Earth. In other words, they saw themselves very much performing an errand in the first sense. After the English Civil War had failed to turn the heads of the world to their glorious City on a Hill, they were left with a vast wilderness. These essays are how the Puritans fashioned a sense of meaning, and eventually, in time, American identity, out of those very raw ingredients whose presence still make themselves felt in American life – Calvinist theology, a sense of community, and profound intolerance.
“The Marrow of Puritan Divinity” is one of the longest, and best, essays in the collection. It covers the shift from strict fundamentalist Calvinism to covenantal theology that took place sometime within the early part of the seventeenth century. In 1550, strict Calvinism was still acceptable. The Scientific Revolution was still far off, and the abject nature of human beings was still de rigueur. The absolute and capricious power of God could still accept or reject human souls according to His whim. By 1650, however, the unscientific worldview that would allow this kind of God had, in some respects, given away. Theology had better learn to justify the ways of God to man or else risk losing some of its influence. Some of the first important Puritan theologians – including Cotton, Hooker, Shepard, and Bulkley – began to constitute a new school that broke from Calvinism in one important way: the incorporation of covenantal theology. No longer, according to these theologians, did you have to believe in God despite his mercurial nature as you used to. Now when you professed a belief in God, you and He entered into a covenant – he turned into a God who was capable of making and keeping a promise. “He has become a God chained – by His own consent, it is true, but nevertheless a God restricted and circumscribed – a God who can be counted upon, a God who can be lived with. Man can always know where God is and what he intends” (63). In a lot of ways this essay forms the ideological core of the book, since Miller will discuss in the later essays many of the ways in which the covenant was absolutely essential in understanding Puritan civil society, church, and state. In fact, Winthrop’s constitutional ideas were based upon the idea of men coming together and forming an earthly covenant.
In “Nature and the National Ego,” Miller again uses the trope of the wilderness and connects it to Emerson and American identity writ large. He says that, in contrast to Europe’s “Nature” (which is effeminate, inferior, derivative), America has founded itself the original, masculine quintessence of the wilderness. To support this idea, he points out that many Americans intellectuals in the nineteenth century began to worry about the possible effects of industrialization and the encroachment of “civilization,” fearing that its appearance might be proportional to the uniquely American identity that might they might have to cede. He goes so far as to say that “if there be such a thing as an American character, it took shape under the molding influence of the conceptions of Nature and civilization” (210).
Both chronologically and ideologically, these are the two essays that couch the rest of this wonderful collection. I would recommend these essays for anyone in search of an alternate view to the prevailing idea of America as being originally founded on religious tolerance and individualism, or anyone excited by old-fashioned American intellectual history. This is some of the best of its kind.
21 - Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870-1920 by James KloppenbergThere are many books that provide a systematic history of a certain subject (Menand’s “Metaphysical Club,” for example, looks at the birth of philosophical pragmatism in the United States), but it’s much rarer to find a book that starts with a philosophical foundation, and then goes on beyond it and reaches into another field. That is precisely what Kloppenberg does here, focusing on much the same subject that Menand discusses in his book. The project is impressive in its scope: starting with the birth of American pragmatism and European historicism, he argues that many of the great liberal and progressive social reformers of this time period, unimpressed with the various dualisms that had dominated philosophy since the time of Descartes, used pragmatism and the ideals of philosophical liberalism to undergird their social programs and ideas.
During the first third of the book, Kloppenberg details why previous philosophical ideas proved unable to deal with complex social and philosophical problems, and why this dissatisfaction necessitated the birth of pragmatism. He focuses here on six thinkers and their critiques of previous ideas: they are William James, Alfred Fouillee, Wilhelm Dilthey, T. H. Green, Henry Sidgwick, and John Dewey. The general criticism they level against previous philosophical thought was its interaction between subject and object (or, in the language of psychology, stimulus and response), which assumed they could be separated and thought of as different entities. Dewey especially takes this idea to task, calling for experience to be understood as a unified whole, instead of a series of subjects understanding different objects. He said that we need to think of experience as a “reflex circuit instead of an arc,” i.e., not one-way, but something more resembling a simultaneously feedback loop. James, whose early career was just as much involved in psychology as it was in philosophy, elaborated on these points, creating what is in effect a uniquely American epistemology focusing on the wholeness of lived experience instead of abstract, theoretical interactions between the mind and reality.
The Europeans of the group, especially Fouillee and Dilthey, tried to correct for the ahistorical trends that were prevalent in a lot of philosophy. Descartes and Kant had conceived of knowledge has happening in the utterly disconnected brain, unconditioned by culture or society. To even study one person in a specific context is pointless, since, according to Dilthey, “the connection of the individual with humanity is a reality … The starting point lies in my consciousness so far as it contains a coherence of knowledge which is in agreement with other consciousnesses perceived by me – a coherence therefore which extends beyond my own consciousness.” Here, Dilthey gives what is, more or less, a pragmatist theory of truth – one that emphasizes coherence more than correspondence with reality. Disenfranchised by both philosophical idealism and empiricism, these thinkers opted for history as the source of immanent critique and the basis for all foundational judgments.
Kloppenberg then makes the move away from these radicals’ (he’s always calling them “radicals” or “renegades”) critique of epistemology and toward their critique of ethics. Previous systems – and he discusses especially Benthamite utilitarianism – provided a final, lasting system of ethical principles. As Fouillee noted in “The Psychology of Idees-Forces,” while the dualism of pleasure and pain “may constitute the dominant quality of original sensations,” it is hardly the sole content of human consciousness. By failing to differentiate between among experiences, he argues that Bentham’s calculus of happiness ultimately proves inadequate. There was also a growing acknowledgement between public (the commonweal) and private interests (which Kloppenberg terms “prudence,” but might more appropriately be called “self-interest”). Sidgwick, Dilthey, and James especially doubted that tragic collisions between self-interest and the requirements of justice could ever be prevented. All six thought that politics was ultimately reducible to philosophical questions over values, about which there can be no final answers.
While the first half of the book focuses on the history of philosophical tradition and a critique thereof, the second half considers how contemporaries expressed similar ideals, though they sought to locate them in the action of social reform and progressivism. Again, he presents six representative thinkers: Eduard Bernstein, Richard T. Ely, Beatrice Webb, Sidney Webb, Jean Jaures, and Walter Rauschenbusch. Kloppenberg claims that “there is a distinctive continuity between the two groups’ philosophical and political ideas.” The similarity here seems to be mostly in their respective views of history. Only Bernstein spoke of a “critique of socialist reason,” but all of them thought that socialism should let go of its scientific pretense. The pretense to science is just a smug confidence “in the inevitable triumph of the proletariat.” Instead, they argued for a radically empiricist approach to historical understanding, approaching knowledge as a “conscious process of truth testing and its recognition of the historical and qualitative dimensions of understanding.” In the last few chapters, another set of six (yes, a third set!) are considered in the context of mostly European power politics. Those thinkers are Leon Bourgeois, Leonhard T. Hobhouse, Max Weber, Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and John Dewey (again).
The second half of the book begins to flirt with something Susan Haack once referred to in a New Criterion article as “vulgar Rortyism.” As I mentioned above, these thinkers criticized Marxist conceptions of history for their scientism, but Kloppenberg almost leads the reader to believe that pragmatism should be in the service of democratic politics. He also manages to turn pragmatism – a relatively well-defined, mostly American, philosophical tradition – into something smacking of mushy relativism. Granted, the author never includes pragmatists like Peirce who emphasize the role of logic and science in any of the 17 people that he examines, this strand of thought seems to get lost – a dubious trait in what seems to be a book about the historical development of pragmatism and Anglo-European historicism.
While I found the intellectual connections in the first part of the book fascinating, Kloppenberg fails when trying to show that those same ideas influenced the second and third groups of six. He just flatly claims that the philosophers influenced the social reformers and progressives, but never connects the threads for the reader, which is a serious fault in a book of intellectual history. And none of this is helped by the fact that Kloppenberg insists on covering the contributions of so many people. In parts, it seems like a rush to list all the contributions and name the important books associated with one of the above. For sheer ambition and breadth, I think this is an interesting book to look into, especially if you’re excited by Kloppenberg’s interdisciplinarity. But for being included on so many graduate-level European and American intellectual history syllabi, I was surprised to find the book has the weaknesses that it does.
22 - The Age of Shakespeare by Frank KermodeI’ve found the Modern Library Chronicles books to be somewhat of a mixed bag, as another reviewer aptly put it. Hans Kung’s “The Catholic Church: A Short History” and Stephen Kotkin’s “Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment,” which I’ve recently also reviewed, were very good, and full of information for people of all backgrounds. Frank Kermode’s “Age of Shakespeare,” however, I found to be written for an audience who has little to no knowledge of late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century English culture and politics. It may be the case that the varying quality can be attributed to the word limits imposed on the authors (all hover around 200 pages excluding ancillary notes or bibliographies). Many good introductory sources require a book anywhere between two and three times this long, especially when times were as complicated as Shakespeare’s were. This could have been a better book had it been on just the history of Elizabethan and Jacobean England itself, but as I want to share below, Kermode chose to make much of the book about Shakespeare’s life and work instead, and I think the book suffers for it.
None of this is to say that Kermode doesn’t manage to distill some really good information in a very small number of pages. The early chapters do a superb job of emphasizing the various changes from Catholicism to Anglicanism (under Henry VIII), back to Catholicism (under Mary I), and then back to Protestantism (under Elizabeth I), and particularly how those changes manifested themselves in many plays of the time, most of which never seemed far-removed from inherently political concerns.
Kermode is honest, admitting that most of what we know of Shakespeare’s early life is purely from speculation. Did he come to London seeking the patronage of Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton? Did the Jesuit (and later, martyr) Edmund Campion discreetly pass Catholic literature on to William and his father John when William was young? The possibilities are interesting to think about, but again are ultimately conjecture. He also traces the incredible rise in the place of the playwright as a subtopic in several of the book’s chapters, from the liminality of the unsavory vagabond during Elizabeth’s reign to the reverence and honor many had gained by the time of the early part of James I’s reign. Some of the best information is the background provided about the Rose, Globe, and Blackfriars theatres - their construction, the various people that were responsible for writing and producing the plays, the kinds of audiences that frequented each theatre, et cetera.
The chapters that suffer the most are the longest, which happen to be the ones which cover Shakespeare’s plays. It seems like Kermode is racing as fast as he possibly can to write at least half a page or so on every play, which he manages to do; he spends a few pages on a couple of them. However, as I mentioned above, none of what he says sticks with the reader. Instead, we get randomly introduced tidbits, interesting though they are. He tells us that in “Titus Andronicus,” Shakespeare carefully interrelates the ideas of humor and social taboo; that the influence of Terence and Plautus is easily discerned in “The Comedy of Errors”; and that Bottom echoes, if not directly copies Saint Paul’s “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man the things which God hath prepared for them that love him” (I Corinthians 2:9) in Midsummer Night’s Dream (IV.i.204-214). There is no rhyme or reason as to why he includes what he does. Many books need not be as long as they are. This one should have been much longer.
The first half of the book is worth the introduction to the England of the time, but I would say the second half can easily be skipped. There are simply too many other good supplements to Shakespeare’s plays out including Mark Van Doren’s “Shakespeare,” Auden’s lectures, Northrop Frye, or if you’re feeling particularly reactionary, Bloom’s “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.”
Great review. Have you read Will In the World? Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare One of my favorites on the subject.
Hi, Sherry. Thanks again for the kind words! I really appreciate your comments and thoughts my reviews.It's in my library, but I haven't read it. In addition to the plays themselves, I have about a dozen or so books on or about Shakespeare, but have only read a few. I've been on a kick reading about him because next week, they're having a "Shakespeare in the Park," and they're putting on "Twelfth Night." They're doing it in the Botanical Gardens, which will be great, provided it's not 100 degrees that night. :)
John wrote: "Hi, Sherry. Thanks again for the kind words! I really appreciate your comments and thoughts my reviews.It's in my library, but I haven't read it. In addition to the plays themselves, I have ..."I highly recommend Will in the World. I think you would appreciate his scholarship. Twelfth Night is one of my favorites. I took a semester off from College and toured as Viola in Twelfth Night all over the state of Ky. I did other shows too, but that is an all time favorite. Enjoy!
23 - Twelfth Night by William ShakespeareI read this in preparation for going to see an upcoming production of this play put on by “Shakespeare in the Park” that’s going to be playing June 1st through the 4th of this year in the Botanical Gardens. Considering the myriad summaries and expositions of this play, I won’t recapitulate those here. What I will do, both for my personal use and for the remote possibility that someone else might find some use in them, is post my own thoughts and notes I took as I read it. Hopefully they’ll serve as an aide memoire if I ever need one.
ACT I: Overall themes: identity (masque?), rejection, and desire. It asks whether or not love is something real, or just another human artifice, much like the music that Count Orsino “feeds” on. Orsino’s switch of affection from Olivia to Viola is a hint that he loves the idea of love more than one of the women themselves. He’s a parody of the hopeless romantic. Viola’s wish to be transformed into a eunuch is indicative of gender liminality – or at least this seems to be a common argument, even though it’s readily known that men played all roles in Elizabethan and Jacobean theater (so I’m a little confused by the single-minded focus that much modern scholarship has put on gender in this play). Perhaps this gender ambiguity is a sort of defense mechanism to deal with the uncertainty inherent with being tossed on an unknown island. There has also been some focus on Orsino’s shift of affection toward Viola (Cesario) from a platonic friendship to a more romantic one. (Could our more modern emotional coldness associated with masculinity be coloring this reading, too?) Feste is obviously one of the cleverest people in the play. “Cucullus non facit monachum” indeed! As a critique of courtly love, this act accomplishes a lot, and Feste comes out being one of the least foolish people on the stage.
ACT II: Malvolio (literally, from the Latin, “ill will”), the only character who takes himself much too seriously, is tricked into the tomfoolery that he himself so deplores, ultimately proving Feste right: it’s not just the role of the fool to entertain folly.
ACT III: Even though, considering Malvolio’s transformation from joy-hating blowhard into romantic lover is a drastic one, that Olivia thinks him mad might be telling. Is there any room here for a sort of Foucauldian discussion of what constitutes “madness and civilization” in Elizabethan England? From the little that I’ve seen of the scholarly literature, I haven’t yet seen any discussions that run along these lines.
Wow! That's great. You make me laugh. I have read this so many times. From my point of view it follows the classic comedy format. The main character has a deeply moral reason to disguise him or herself, and so much comedy is derived from this. Also, Shakespeare had twins. Many say this play is based on his relationship to his children and that his son, Hamnet, drowned and his twin sister was with him when this tragic accident occurred. Viola desperately trying to find her twin whom she fears has drowned resonates with this real life tragedy. About boys playing girls playing boys -- they certainly can carry off that disguise better than wearing gowns as a woman. Might just be practical. As usual I love to hear your thoughts. I hope you enjoyed the performance in the park. Please review it.
I'm afraid it wasn't my favorite, Sherry. They turned it into a beach movie (think Beach Boys and Annette Funicello). Surfboards as backdrops, cheesy 50s and 60s beach music interludes (even when Feste is singing). At least they preserved the original language, but maybe they did that because they felt guilty about doing everything else they did. I'm sure some people would have been able to appreciate it, but I'm kind of a purest. Review: I gave it one out of four beach balls.
24 - Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880-1900 by George CotkinThis volume, the fourth in the Twayne Modern American Thought and Culture series edited by Lewis Perry and Howard Brick, looks at American intellectual history from 1880-1900. Cotkin covers this ground adeptly and even-handedly, from the pervasive influence of Darwinism on practically every area of human endeavor of the time to the ambiguous place of the woman in intellectual life. The book has its weak points, which I will mention at the end.
The first part of the book is the best and offers some of the clearest insights, though Cotkin never really does get to the heart of the matter in attempting to define what modernism actually is for him. He uses the metaphor of a “tangled bank” – the same one that Darwin used in another context to describe nature. The themes are familiar ones: how our subjects are continually buffeted to and fro between moribund Victorianism and the new, ambiguous, questioning modernism. Cotkin does a superb job of detailing how far-reaching are the ideas of progress, often espoused in the guise of Darwinism. Even the leading liberal religious thinkers of the time – Henry Ward Beecher, Newman Smyth, Octavius Brooks Frothingham – co-opted the idea of progress to create a theology that ministered to the particularly Victorian (not modern) worldview. Former orthodoxy started to become laced with aspects of rationalism, but not necessarily for the scientific pretense it provided; in fact, more often than not, this aspect of religious thought devolved into a calming anodyne for the complacent middle class, an appeal to their fetishization of progress. He covers Pragmatism, that fresh American philosophical tradition, very well, including how its professionalization also led to the development of psychology as its own academic discipline. Even in the realm of psychology the freedom versus determinism debate comes up again, with William Graham Sumner firmly on the side of passively accepting Nature’s laws, while William James suggests there is room for human volition.
In one chapter, Cotkin does a fine job in detailing the perhaps not terribly surprising extent to which racism dominated the fields of academic anthropology and ethnology. Lewis Henry Morgan’s work with the Iroquois and John Wesley Powell’s involvement with the U.S. Geological Survey are also indicative of the search for parallelism, order, and logic that Cotkin has already illustrated. Naïve optimism was not relegated to the middle-class, however. As James C. Wellington of Columbian College said, “There is a limitless vista opened (though not an absolutely unlimited one) for the prospective working of better laws, purer justice, wiser economics, richer science, and higher morality.” By the end of the century, as the influence of Franz Boas grew, anthropology began to slowly slough off its former assumptions and found that “the contextual understanding of culture … was complex and inexact.”
The second half of the book provides information that is just as interesting, but much more derivative. I was introduced to some new names – Frances Benjamin Johnston and Gertrude Kasebier – but the background story has been told much more effectively elsewhere. In the closing chapters, Cotkin touches on the growth of American consumerism, and gives a few quick and insightful sketches of Stephen Crane, Louis Sullivan, Thorstein Veblen, and Edgar Saltus.
For an undergraduate student who is looking for a quick overview of the reigning ideas of the time, this book is perfectly sufficient. The first half is worth reading all the way through for the interesting undercurrents of rationalism and progress Cotkin develops, but the second half should serve mostly as biographical reference material.
John wrote: "I'm afraid it wasn't my favorite, Sherry. They turned it into a beach movie (think Beach Boys and Annette Funicello). Surfboards as backdrops, cheesy 50s and 60s beach music interludes (even when..."That is hilarious! I wouldn't have like it either. I'm a purest too. When I direct Shakespeare, I love it placed in it's own time period. I'm not too keen on deconstruction either.
25 - Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History by Jay Winter“My Peter, I intend to try to be faithful … What does that mean? To love my country in my own way as you loved it in your way. And to make this love work. To look at the young people and be faithful to them. Besides that I shall do my work, the same work, my child, which you were denied. I want to honor God in my work, too, which means I want to be honest, true and sincere … When I try to be like that, dear Peter, I ask you then to be around me, help me, show yourself to me. I know you are there, but I see you only vaguely, as if you were shrouded in mist. Stay with me…” – Kathe Kollwitz (artist), in a letter to her son Peter, who was killed in WWI
This excerpt from a letter by Kathe Kollwitz, whose heartbreaking sculpture and prints encapsulated the loss of an entire generation, also addresses some of the concerns at the heart of Jay Winter’s “Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning,” which explores intellectual territory already trodden by the likes of Paul Fussell in his “The Great War and Modern Memory” and George Mosse in his “Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars” (which I reviewed for this site in January.) Unlike Mosse’s book, which looks at larger national and cultural factors, Winter hones in on how people coped with tragedy on a level unknown until the trench warfare of World War I. In the second half of the book, he looks at different artistic media – film, popular art, novels, and poetry – in an attempt to distill how they dealt differently with the loss, guilt, and trauma that was visited upon them by the War.
We often think that the soldiers who fell in the War as Americans or Europeans, but of course some were from as far away as Australia. Winter argues that this affects the way even the most fundamental ways we relate to the War, especially the way that we mourn. He tells the story of Australian Vera Deakin (daughter of the pre-War Prime Minister Alfred Deakin), who was one of the most active members of the Australian Red Cross and searched endlessly for missing and unidentified soldiers. Families in Western Europe (where Winter spends most of his time in the book) read of their losses within days for the most part, but it sometimes took weeks or even months for those in Australia. Worse yet, some simply heard nothing more than that their loved one was “missing in action,” and many never heard anything at all.
Culturally and aesthetically, we think of World War I as being the cynosure of modernism. However, Winter argues that in order to grieve, Europeans looked backward instead of forward. Spiritualism saw a huge resurgence during the War years. It was just one of the “powerfully conservative effects of the Great War on one aspect of European cultural history.” Instead of a burgeoning modernism, these years were much more dominated by Victorian sentimentalism and traditional religious and spiritual ideas.
The second half of the book turns toward the arts for clearer insight on how grieving occurred, on both personal and national levels. One of the most interesting parts here is Winter’s short history of Images d’Epinal, a tradition of popular, often kitschy, French folk art that was very popular at the time, and often catered to aforementioned Victorian ideals and religious feelings. Again, the focus is on realism and the representationalism of the past, not the avant-garde. Winter ends by jumping all the way to World War II and noting how the grammar of mourning had changed in the wake of the Shoah. To quote Adorno, “It is barbarism to write poetry after Auschwitz.” Not long afterward, we start seeing the rise of even more self-consciously abstract and anti-representational in all different kinds of cultural expression. It would seem that much of the art world at the time agreed with Adorno’s appraisal.
In the end, this book was not merely as good as the Mosse, which struck me as brilliant and well-argued. Nevertheless, Winter’s revisionist cultural history of World War I being a time of aesthetic conservatism and tradition is one worth considering; there is certainly enough evidence to both support and refute it. I plan on reading his “Remembering the War: The Great War Between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century” soon.
Another very interesting review. It reminds of reviews I used to read in the literary section of the New York Times.
26 - Pornografia by Witold GombrowiczWhen reaching the end of a novel, rarely do I have so much to say, and also so little. This was my first experience with Gombrowicz, and it was a bewildering, exciting one. It has elective affinities with Kundera that make it a unique, and not wholly pleasurable, read. About one third of the way through the novel, I wasn’t sure that I would make it the rest of the way. The purely distilled, unrelenting psychological depictions of its characters and occasional absurdism can sometimes make it arduous, but this eventually lets up a bit. I stuck with it, and I’m glad I did. I think I had insisted a bit too much before I even began reading the novel that it would have somehow relate to the War, our relation to it, and how we react to it.
As has already been noted by other reviewers, the title is appropriate, but the novel is not “pornographic” in the sense that we usually use the word. Perhaps that’s why “Seduction” has often been used as a translation in the past. Instead the pornography here is a perversely pathological inspection of its central characters. While the novel is set only in Poland, Gombrowicz actually fled Poland shortly before the outbreak of World War II, thinking that he would wait it out; he would remain there for almost twenty-five years.
The two main characters in the novel, Fryderyk and Witold (again, like Coetzee, Gombrowicz tempts the reader with autobiography by using his name), conspire to get Henia and Karol romantically interested in one another, even though they hardly notice each other, and Henia is already engaged to a young attorney. Witold initially is the one who shows an interest in the young couple, however Fryderyk’s interest soon comes to border on the obsessive, conniving to have Henia’s fiancée catch them in a romantic tryst. Meanwhile, a Polish soldier fighting in the resistance movement heightens the tension of the story as several plots to kill him are eventually hatched within the household.
A fascination with youth apparently imbues much of Gombrowicz’s work (the effort to realize the romantic connection consumes an inordinate amount of time), including 1937’s “Ferdydurke,” which I look forward to reading. He views youth as a kind of purity, physical and perhaps ideological. He says in his play “The Marriage,” “Each person deforms the other person, while being at the same time deformed by them.” I find it interesting and telling how he chose to define the interaction between two people here as a kind of destruction instead of construction. It definitely sums up the bleak undertones of the novel, while also showing what a relentless psychologist Gombrowicz is.
A few words in closing: I have heard that Danuta Borchardt’s translation is the best one, so opt for this one, assuming you cannot read the original Polish. Also, do not approach it with some preconceived notion that it should be a philosophical meditation on war simply because World War II is its setting. I think this was one of the things that vitiated my reading pleasure the most. This novel certainly is not for everyone, but for those that love a thoughtful author – a real writer’s writer – I would recommend this.
27 - The Sheltering Sky by Paul BowlesThis review contains spoilers.
I found this novel underwhelming. The sense of place was wonderful (if a bit romanticized), and in places it read like a sort of travelogue. This was one most interesting parts of it for me. The people seem distant, aloof, and completely cut off from one another. Two of the main characters, Kit and Port, husband and wife, have presumably escaped post-World War II America to explore northern Africa. Tunner, a third wheel, awkwardly tags along, allowing for an additional romantic interest for Kit. The title is highly ironic: Africa has almost nothing to offer these three other than desolation, solitude, and loneliness. The weather is oppressive. It is hardly a wonder why so many people were reminded of Camus’ Algeria in their reviews.
Much of the novel consists of Kit, Port, and Tunner scurrying from one African city to another, in search of what even they probably do not know. Even though Kit loathes Tunner, they end up taking a train ride together to one of the cities during which they romantically bond (rather unrealistically, considering her contempt for him). In fact, romantic (or at least physical) connections, with the possible exception of the one between Port and Kit, were idealized. For example, early on, Port is led to the tent of a prostitute, Marnhia, whose decoy insists that she is not a prostitute. What seems to be a misunderstanding is really a cultural difference. Much like Nature herself, Marnhia is bleak, alluring, and ultimately incomprehensible.
Halfway through the book, Port begins to show some portentous symptoms, including fever and hot and cold spells. Even though he shows no signs of getting any better, Kit has no qualms about leaving him in their hotel room. It will surprise few readers that in this land of exclusion, disconnectedness even from those next to you, and disorientation, Port dies. Just as unbelievable as the trysts between Tunner and Kit and then between Port and Marnhia, as soon as Port dies she leaves the hotel without pausing or grieving. The story of their marriage up to this point had me fairly convinced that they did care for one another, but reading this made me wonder whether Port’s love was fully reciprocated.
Port Moresby, the name of one of the protagonists, is also the name of Papua New Guinea’s capital. I’m not sure whether this could be pure coincidence, but I would be eager to know what anyone else thought of it. Did anyone notice this? It popped right out at me, but I just saw it mentioned in one or two other reviews.
Gore Vidal said that Bowles’ short stories are “emblematic of the helplessness of an over-civilized sensibility when confronted with an alien culture.” Port also makes it clear that he’s a traveller instead of a tourist. Those points are central to the book. The first of these will genuinely frustrate those who think that some sort of genuine connection can be made between people of different cultures, and maybe even those of the same culture. As someone who still holds hope, perhaps naively so, for this kind of communication, I found the characters proportionately unconvincing. Personally, I find myself much more oriented toward E. M. Forster’s exhortation to “Only connect!” It is what informs all of my reading, my curiosity about the world, and my relationships with others. I realize that my choice is purely an aesthetic one, but Bowles’ central message diverged so much from it that I found difficulty making the connection. However, as Forster might be the first to point out, even though I had trouble with its message and characters, this book offered still another opportunity to connect – one which, unfortunately, I’m a worse person for not being able to make.
John wrote: "27 - The Sheltering Sky by Paul BowlesThis review contains spoilers.
I found this novel underwhelming. The sense of place was wonderful (if a bit romanticized), and in places it read like a s..."
Another really good review. I love the Gore Vidal quote. My daughter just returned from Africa where she was in the business of "connection," as an artist. It was a wonderful experience for her. She was there with university groups from Africa and Australia, hers is from NYC. Working with the groups from the villages around Malalaya LeSoto they created theatre pieces. Pretty exciting.
Thanks again, Sherry, I really appreciate it. Your daughter went to Lesotho this summer? From what you said, it sort of sounds like when Susan Sontag went to Sarajevo while it was getting bombed to produce "Waiting for Godot." I hope she had a wonderful time.
She did. She's just come to visit. She learned a lot, especially the difference between a "first world problem," and a "third world problem." So now her mantra is, "that's just a first world problem."
28 - The Death of the Adversary by Hans KeilsonThis may be the most enjoyable experience reading fiction that I have had in the last year – and also one of the most profound and unexpected. My attention was piqued in June when I heard of Keilson’s death at the age of 101; I knew he was considered to be a good author, yet I never read him. Having long had a penchant for the bleak, searching quality of twentieth-century Dutch fiction, particularly Willem Frederik Hermans, Harry Mulisch, and Gerard Reve, I decided to read this.
However stunning Keilson’s novels are – and I hope to communicate that momentarily – he is even better known for other work. For many decades, he worked in child psychology and psychiatry, with an especial focus on children severely traumatized by World War II. His keen insight into human nature, thought processes, and motivation is on par with the world’s greatest novelists, and that is no hyperbole. As if his psychological and psychiatric training were not inducements enough to read his work, the horrors of the War were not pure theory for him. Both of his parents perished in Auschwitz.
The novel’s setting is 1930s Germany. We follow an unnamed narrator in childhood; we get hints of his precociousness and impishness through learning of both his penchant for forging stamps, and also through a sustained theory of the history of struggle that he presents and continuously develops throughout the novel. As a boy, he acquires a lifelong fascination with an adversary who is almost always unnamed, but sometimes goes by simply “B.” Some reviews have been only too eager to guess at the existence of “B,” seeing as how we are in 1930s Germany. However, I personally think Keilson might have a good reason for keeping the adversary anonymous; using one name would collapse the entire structure of the novel into a kind of singularity; keeping the adversary nameless (even though we still may continue to guess, and guess accurately), Keilson keeps the narrative at a level of constant psychological, humanistic portraiture, instead of the story of a single couple locked in interminable battle.
As the novel progresses and the narrator grows into manhood, we learn that he has a friend who is utterly taken with “B” and his ideas; another time, we see him spending an afternoon with a girl that he knows and fancies from his workplace whose friends turn out to be sympathetic to fascism, too. Instead of simplistic moralism, Keilson intelligently and deftly engages with the adversary on a human level, at one point realizing the nihilism inherent in the logic of “I want to kill him just as badly as he wants to kill me.”
Narratively speaking, Keilson’s biggest gift is to mix tone and message in such unique and telling ways. On hearing that a novel is set during World War II, one is almost preconditioned to expect the trials and tribulations of the oppressor against the oppressed and hiding in safe houses; it is assumed that we will root for the good, the just, the persecuted, and that evil, in the end, will be vanquished. Keilson presented us with nothing so sugar-coated. His efforts at characterization drive toward showing the similarities between himself and B, not the vast differences. He is not interested in showing you how morally superior he is (we already know that), but instead wants to show how existentially, a word applied perhaps too liberally to this novel, he and “B” are similarly situated.
Keilson’s search feels so liberating, instead of the moral burden that seem to come with reading so many novels of the Holocaust. As much as I have read Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, I found Keilson to be better than both of them. Unfortunately, he is not well known in the United States, but he should be. I should also add here that Ivo Jarosy’s translation from the German is luminous, especially in its ability to capture dialogue. I would recommend “The Death of the Adversary” for anyone in search of a great novel that, like all great novels, is more eager to share questions than answers.
29 - The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. PaxtonIn “Il Gattopardo,” Guiseppe di Lampedusa said of the Sicilian nobility that, “if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” Robert Paxton asserts that the same can be said for the scholarship of fascism in “The Anatomy of Fascism,” his insightful analysis of the rise, entrenchment, and political development of this body of political movements in twentieth century Europe. Instead of arguing that fascism is “of the left” or “of the right,” Paxton both escapes those narrow confines while at the same time detailing why these categories are woefully inadequate. The book considers fascism’s development chronologically: first, the prerequisites for fascism, then how it “takes root,” how it gains power, and finally how it exercises that power. It should be noted here that the only two regimes Paxton considers in detail are those of Hitler and Mussolini. Others are mentioned in passing, but the deepest, most important lessons are drawn from these two cases.
Throughout most of the nineteenth century, politics was the business of the educated elite; the common man was often disenfranchised from the most important parts of the political process. It wasn’t until “the masses, full of beer and nonsense” (as Carlyle once acerbically noted) were fully integrated that fascism was possible.
Fascism is often associated with often any ideological stances, from anti-capitalism to anti-socialism to (perhaps most commonly) anti-Semitism. Paxton attempts to show that no one fascist regime espoused all of these ideas at the same time. For example, while fascists often did attack bourgeois capitalists for their flabby materialism, once they gained power, they often joined powers with them later in order to build political alliances. In fact, fascist hardliners usually fancied themselves as apolitical, and refused to engage in decadent liberal parliamentarianism. Of course, as history continually tells us, purity is no way to gain political power or legitimacy. It’s simply not enough to don a colored shirt and start beating up foreigners and minorities. Paxton describes how fully realized fascist mobilization took “a comparable crisis, a comparable opening of political space, a comparable skill at alliance building, and comparable cooperation from existing elites.”
Paxton states that, in the long term, all fascists regimes eventually devolve through a period of entropy in which they slough off their purist elements and become something much more resembling authoritarians than fascists. He refers to this as their period of “entropy,” whereby they undergo a kind of political and cultural normalization along the lines of political elites. He claims that the one regime that did not undergo this phase was Hitler’s Germany. The next-to-last chapter considers fascisms (or fascist-like regimes) in other parts of the world, especially Peron’s Argentina.
All of this is meant as a series of lessons which should enable us to, in the end, limn some of the fascism’s defining characteristics. His final analysis concludes that most successful fascisms have several common characteristics. Some of them include a “sense of overwhelming crisis,” “the primacy of the group … and the subordination of the individual to it,” “dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualism liberalism,” “the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason,” and “beauty of violence and the efficacy of the will.” While these aspects might not provide us with the fullest picture of fascism, it seems to provide a good baseline for scholarship, both past and future.
For a while, I have been reading “around fascism,” especially William Johnston’s “The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848-1938.” I found Paxton’s book really valuable in providing the material to connect some really important dots as far as setting the political tone for the possibility of fascism. Also, one of the most wonderful resources in the book is the thirty-page, topically organized bibliographical essay. There is enough material in there to keep anyone interested in the subject reading for quite a while.
This review is very enlightening to my current reading of "The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo. At the root of this story is a fanatical swedish fascism. I was unaware of the extent of this in Sweden.
It seemed to be the political movement du jour in Europe during the first half of the century, Sherry, though it can be traced back a little further. I was unaware of how prevalent it was, too. I'm glad it dovetailed with something you were reading! Chalk it up to synergy. :)
30 - The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick by Peter HandkeThis review contains spoilers.
In this novel, “The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick,” Peter Handke puts on full display the self-conscious experimentation for which he has become so well-known over the last four decades. This is Handke’s third novel (originally published in Germany in 1970), and his first to be translated into English in 1972. Because of its length – only 130 pages – I would suggest this as a good starting place for those who think they might be interested in the voice of Handke’s early fiction.
While the plot is perhaps not the most important aspect of the book, a précis is appropriate. Bloch, a construction worker, is laid off in the first sentence of the book. In a kind of heightened euphoria, Bloch checks into a hotel with only a suitcase, occasionally leaving to visit the cinema. He notices a young woman there, and spends the night with her. For some reason, or perhaps for no reason at all, Bloch murders her in her apartment. Emotion, motive, and fury are all completely excised from the tone of the novel, even in relation to this act. The reader never learns if Bloch is exhilarated or ashamed or scared of being caught. Shortly afterwards, he leaves for a small town on the Austrian border where still more events occur that should faze him, but they never seem to. The last few pages shed light on the meaning of the title is a way that is simply too good to divulge here.
Handke uses some brilliant social critique, especially on the subjects of consumerism and the meaningless of small talk shared with strangers. At one point, he is sitting in a café with two young women. “We buy all our dressed ready-made,” one tells him. “We do each other’s hair.” “In the summer it’s usually getting light by the time we finally get home.” “I prefer the slow dances.” “On the trip home we don’t joke around as much anymore, then we forget about talking.” Handke deftly communicates the crushing smallness of people. Another time, Bloch compulsively asks what everything is worth, including the furniture in his hotel room, as if fascinated and compelled by the idea that money could be the sole metric of worth. To borrow the argot of Tonnies, a sense of decadence – the fall from a traditional Gemeinschaft to a post-industrial Gesellschaft suffuses the novel, wherein old ways of communicating, emoting, and going about our day-to-day lives have been radically reconfigured. While I don’t read German, I have the feeling that the translator, Michael Roloff, had a big part in achieving these effects, too.
The most engaging part of the novel, at least for me, was its experimental style. Of course, depending on personal preferences, some might find it the most frustrating. Handke writes in flat, declarative, staccato sentences, which has the odd effect of spreading Bloch’s emotional numbness to even the reader. The novel focuses in on language to show its strengths, but also its glaring flaws. You get the feeling that Handke has quarried the words for his novella over a period of months or years, never with the naïve assumption that they could ever be ready-made tools for our passive use. In doing so, he issues forth a thoroughly invigorating critique of language and language use. It was akin to reading Wittgenstein, had he written fiction.
All in all, it was not a wholly unpleasurable experience, even if it was more experimental than most fiction that I do read. However, I appreciated this novel more than I enjoyed it. Handke certainly does bring a lot to the table as far as questioning what fiction does, how it’s performed, and what it can do for us. If you like your fiction to delve into these questions, you might find this highly enjoyable. If not, and you haven’t read anything by him, you may want to read this anyway: it’s short, and Handke has often been called one of the greatest living writers in the German language.
John wrote: "It seemed to be the political movement du jour in Europe during the first half of the century, Sherry, though it can be traced back a little further. I was unaware of how prevalent it was, too. I..." And now this recent event in Norway. I wonder how connected that is.
It's not. Breivik was just a renegade psychopath who fancied himself as one of the few saviors of "white, Christian, European culture." It's no more a sign of fascism than, say, the Unibomber or Timothy McVeigh were. He really had no pretensions, as far as we know, of setting up a unified political movement that would compete with other allied Norwegian political parties. That he aligned himself with the Knights Templar instead of any "real" political organization is what clued me into realizing that, even if he did want to organize his cause into something larger, he was far too sociopathic to realize his intentions.
31 - The Sources of Modern Architecture and Design by Nikolaus PevsnerEven though the Nikolaus Pevsner’s name launched an entire series of books on modern design and architecture, one would hardly be able to guess it from reading this volume alone, which was written by Pevsner himself and originally published in 1968.
Aside from the illustrations, most of which are in black and white, there are not many good things to be said about this book. Pevsner’s approach covers architecture, furniture, jewelry, and the decorative arts from around the mid-nineteenth century and ends with the very beginning of the Bauhaus, with an interesting section on the Art Nouveau. Beginners will find Pevsner’s approach especially unhelpful, as he does not provide an overarching approach to any of the periods that he covers: instead of starting with some of the broad themes of, say, Art Nouveau, he jumps right into some of the pieces that he wants to discuss. In addition to this, Pevsner’s choices of artists and designers seem arbitrary. Much of the text is simply written description of things that are readily obvious by looking at the illustrations. He does, however, provide some biographical information of the people he discusses which goes some way in contextualizing the information he has to offer.
I would recommend against this book in general, particularly for someone who is looking for a general, thematic approach to the periods covered.
32 - Strait is the Gate by Andre GideAs with most all of Gide’s best novels, this one concerns the anxiety and yearning at the heart of human experience. A very young Jerome Palissier regularly spends holidays at the house of his aunt and uncle’s estate in Fongueusemare in rural Normandy. One day, he happens upon his cousin Alissa, who is distraught at her aloof, hypochondriacal mother. Both desperate to rescue her and drawn by a genuine affection, Jerome takes it upon himself to sweep in and rescue her like a good, Christian knight errant. The subtle imagery of Jerome as a kind of salvific hero is only a foreshadowing of the religious unease that drives this novel forward toward its foreordained conclusion. As Jerome portentously declares, quoting Baudelaire, “Bientot nous plongerons dons les froides tenebres.”
Jerome and Alissa spend irenic summers together reciting poetry, reading from books to one another in their splendid garden, and enjoying music. The appropriateness of Jerome’s name jumps out at you when he mentions another of their mutual literary interests: “We had procured the Gospels in the Vulgate and knew long passages of them by heart.” (It was Saint Jerome who made the first Latin translation of the Bible.) Jerome wishes to become engaged before moving off to the Ecole Normale, but Alissa refuses. He is understandably upset by her rejection, but is only more spurred on by his ecstatic vision (again, that religious imagery) of eventually marrying her. Eventually, we learn that Alissa has sacrificed Jerome so that her sister, Juliette, will be able to get married first, yet even after Juliette gets married - to a boorish, business-minded vintner - Alissa continues to push him away.
He visits her at Fongueusemare while finishing both his schooling and a military stint, but every time he mentions wanting to marry her, she rejects him and requests that he leave soon, that she cannot bear his presence. Eventually, she tells him that her love of God surpasses her love for him, even though she has always passionately loved Jerome. During their last meeting together, Alissa has grown thin and pale, presumably because of her anchorite-like existence; she has also removed the books of poetry and novels she and Jerome used to read together, and replaced them with works of cheap, vulgar piety. Even while there is room here to doubt Alissa’s love for Jerome, a chapter that includes her personal journals makes it perfectly clear that she loved Jerome just as much as he loved her, if not more so. Jerome has a final meeting with Juliette while she is enceinte with her fifth child by the vintner. Seeing him calls to mind both her sister’s Christ-like sacrifice and makes her reflect on her own uneventful, bourgeois life. As Flaubert said: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”
For maximum effect, as noted above, read this right next to Gide’s “The Immoralist” for a most effective couple of case studies. Considering the year of publication (1909) and the ideas considered – repression, sexuality, sublimation – it should be noted that Gide almost certainly had Freud in mind when he was writing this, though it yields wonderful insights into human psychology even without a Freudian reading.
When reading a novel, sometimes the most difficult obstacle to being able to truly and fully appreciate it is the historical change that has taken place between the time in which it was written and when you read it. Judging from some of the reviews I have seen, that seems to be the case with this novel, too. In both this and “The Immoralist,” Gide looks at the tension, confusion, and repression that can often come about when romantic love is pitted against, and forced to compete with, love for the divine. Since this novel was published, this antagonism has almost completely died, which may lead some readers to accuse Alissa of being frigid. Once we are able to bridge that historical gap, however, and realize that Alissa did not see her torment as self-imposed but rather something that was required of her, this novel proves itself to be a superior meditation on both romantic passion and, what was once thought to be its opposite, sacrifice.
33 - The Austrian Mind: An Intellectual and Social History, 1848-1938 by William M. JohnstonJohnston makes a concerted effort to leave absolutely no stone unturned. He begins with a brief adumbration of the history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, emphasizing its frivolity, decadence, and rampant materialism, especially among the nobility. The kind of bureaucracy that we associate with the writings of Karl Kraus and Kafka were only too real for Austrians, a mixture of both uniformity and indolence, or as Johnston says, “absolutism mitigated by Schlamperei.” He includes sections on both university life and military culture, apart from which Austrian social life would have been unrecognizable. Both religion and anticlericalism were fundamental, too.
The amount of information and number of names in this book can be exhausting, and this coming from someone who reads books on graduate-level syllabi for fun. It was so tiring, that after reaching the 300 page mark, I had to set it down for a week to find the energy to finish it. None of this is to say that I did not enjoy the book; I did, and I learned a great deal from it. But it does suffer from a surfeit of ambition. Because of the sheer number of names and ideas mentioned, it might in fact serve many people better as a reference work, rather than a book that you sit down and read from cover to cover.
There are a number of minor cavils I have with the book. 1) Hungarian intellectuals get about fifty pages at the very end, and the only major figures discussed are Georg Lukacs and Karl Mannheim. 2) Johnston continually refers to people by the geographic region from which they come and their religion, often starting sentences with, for example, “this Silesian Jew” or “that Viennese Lutheran,” even when these identities have no relevance to his discussion of their ideas. 3) He refers to several figures as “Marcionists,” but only explains how they are Marcionists once he is more than halfway through the book. 4) While his designation of many of these seminal figures as “therapeutic nihilists” is at times convincing, Johnston uses the phrase to pigeonhole some ideas into narrow categories at the cost of investigating their true complexity. 5) Lastly, as I have hinted at before, the book reads as more of a compendium of ideas and names than a book which presents a thesis, argues against or for it with evidence, and presents a conclusion. 6) Lastly, there is no mistake about the focus here: it is almost wholly intellectual history. The words “and social” could easily have been dropped from the title of the book, and would have given a fairer impression of what was presented between its covers.
None of this should discourage anyone with a real sense of gusto for this type of history. The real meat of the book is in its utterly exhaustive attempt to mention and account for every aspect of Viennese intellectual history. These are just a few of the areas that he covers: economic theory, psychology, legal theory, social theory, the history of “Austro-Marxism,” music and music criticism, the visual arts, the writing of history and historiography, art and art history, philosophy (and not just generally – the philosophy of science, mathematics, logic, and the Vienna Circle), religion and theology, the social trends in Bohemian Reform Catholicism, and the birth of what can properly be called “geopolitics.”
The book’s coverage of most familiar figures – Freud, Kafka, and Strauss, to name a few – is perfectly adequate. However, it should really be most prized from rescuing dozens of names from the brink of obscurity. Of the more than seventy figures covered, I would imagine that more than half are probably not familiar to most of the English-speaking world.
It has proven especially edifying for me in respect to some of the literature I have read on fascism. While certainly not a major theme, one can definitely perceive varying types of extremism forming before your very eyes as you read about some of the social and political theory of the time, especially in the sections on Othmar Spann and the increasingly popular anti-Semitism of the time. If you read German fluently, the book’s notes and bibliography combined run to almost one hundred pages, which should provide a good place to start, even considering the book’s age (it was originally published in 1972). I would recommend this book to anyone who was interested in the time period, but reading it through might not be for everyone.
34 - The Duchess of Malfi by John WebsterThis review contains spoilers.
That John Webster’s birth records were quite probably destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666 is a fitting biographical fact in light of reading “The Duchess of Malfi.” It perfectly highlights the senseless destruction, both physical and spiritual, that permeates this play. The duplicity, violence, and familial division rival anything that you can find in Shakespeare. While the poetry itself doesn’t quite reach the Shakespearean firmament in its baroque floridity, the language is wonderful, and just as full of double entendre and puns as the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays are.
The action is relatively straightforward. The Duchess of Malfi, whose overbearing brothers Ferdinand and the Cardinal insist that she never re-marry for fear that they might have to share her wealth with someone else, disobeys them and asks Antonio, one of her stewards, to marry her. Several years pass, during which the Duchess has two children by Antonio, while the brothers remain ignorant of the marriage, but they eventually find out. In an attempt to escape Ferdinand’s wrath, Antonio flees to Ancona. Bosola, the Cardinal’s goon, chases them in hot pursuit. The Duchess, her two younger sons, and her female servant are all killed on Bosola’s instruction. Bosola, long upset by the Cardinal’s venality, decides to revenge the Duchess and her children. The Cardinal, after murdering his mistress to keep her quiet, plans to kill Bosola, too, but instead kills Antonio who has since returned to Malfi. Just to drive home the idea of complete and utter wanton cruelty, the Cardinal, Ferdinand, and Bosola all die in a final melee. Just when you think all hope is lost, the Duchess’ oldest son appears on stage in the final scene to take charge of a court that has destroyed itself because of its singular bloodlust. However, Webster leaves little room for the reader to imagine matters getting any better.
While Bosola seems like he might be the least interesting character because he has the least qualms with murder, he shows some interesting moments of moral ambiguity and even clarity, which makes his development interesting to watch. Needless to say, by the end, you’re left feeling rent in two by the treachery, deceit, and duplicity of it all. The Duchess’ son does not provide the necessary Aristotelian catharsis, and instead of a court being wholly purged of bad seeds, you feel that that he will end up a young victim in further machinations, another courtly pawn.
While others seem to not have appreciated the introduction and editorial notes, I rather enjoyed them and thought they shed some light on the production, composition, and historical background (yes, this is based on historical events – can you imagine?) As the footnotes are located at the bottom of the page, you don’t have to flip back and forth between pages - one of my bête noirs when it comes to Penguin Classics editions. All in all, I look forward to reading more New Mermaids in the future, and I especially appreciate their effort at trying to revive Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.
Review:
From Mishima’s “The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea” to Kafka to “Winesburg, Ohio,” the themes of alienation and exile have pervaded world literature in the twentieth century so much as to almost become a cliché. The various political disintegrations in Europe of the 1980s and 1990s gave need to another wave of this type of literature, and is whence Dubravka Ugresic’s wonderful novel “The Ministry of Pain” comes. Reading it, I was reminded a lot of Kundera’s novels from the same time period, though Ugresic takes herself less seriously and is a much more successful ironist. While renovating an apartment she is taking in, the main character pops in a random video, and it just happens to be the film version of “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”
The novel follows Tanja Lucic after the breakup of the former Yugoslavia from Zagreb to Amsterdam to take up a position teaching language, mostly to students who (like her) have left Yugoslavia and are now living in Amsterdam waiting for their papers. Living near the red light district, the name of the novel derives from the store where many of Tanja’s students make ends meet constructing sex toys and other leather goods for sex-play. With a highly unorthodox approach to teaching, Tanja chooses to probe her students’ “Yugonostalgia” – memories of family, language, belonging, friends, and anything else that struck them as important about a place that, technically speaking, no longer exists. Tanja figures that her students’ experiences can provide an anodyne for the traumatic displacements their lives have been forced to take on. When an anonymous student reports her for not being academically rigorous enough, she is forced to engage in another teaching style (exiled from her old one?), leaving both her students and herself completely bewildered. But her teaching is really only one of the many parallel stories and musings that go on, taking the novel away from traditional, linear storytelling. Much of the novel takes place through interior monologue where she delivers poignant, sad, and sometimes witty remarks about the brokenness of language, modern culture, her thoughts about her students’ writing, and even one of their suicides.
Unlike in times past when the enlightened citizen-philosopher was offered in literature as the non plus ultra in relation to the modern state, Ugresic suggests that it is the exile whose fragmentation, psychic and geographic, provides new ground for understanding the self through literature. As she puts it in “Thank You for Not Reading,” “The exile, like it or not, tests the basic concepts around which everyone's life revolves: concepts of home, homeland, family, love, friendship, profession, personal biography. Having completed the long and arduous journey of battling with the bureaucracy of the country where he has ended up, having finally acquired papers, the exile forgets the secret knowledge he has acquired on his journey, in the name of life which must go on.” After all, exile is just another form of homecoming.