July 30
Tweeting Art
Whatever you think of the New Critics, an interesting way to frame what was going on in that weird Ebert column I was banging on about last week would be Cleanth Brooks’ claim that
“The poem, if it be a true poem, is a simulacrum of reality…an experience rather than any mere statement about experience or any mere abstraction from experience”
That’s a quote from his chapter on “The Heresy of Paraphrase,” in The Well Wrought Urn in which Brooks puts forward an idea of art as a thing which has to be actively experienced. He’s working to combat the sense that criticism’s job is just to reduce a work of art to its meaning, its essential core, the kind of reading where Heart of Darkness becomes Racism, Moby Dick becomes Obsession, and The Scarlet Letter becomes Puritanical Prudery. Repeat ad infinitum.
I’m switching from poetry to novels, here, for no better reason than its because it’s easier. But I think the point remains: the problem with reducing a massively complex novel to a few words, Brooks might suggest, isn’t simply the scale of complexity that’s being lost, but the experiential structure of both its composition and the active way we render that complexity meaningful. However much there might be a kernel of truth to each of those one-word summaries, they erase something vital about the works they purport to describe, and less because they summarize badly than because they summarize at all, thereby misplacing the thing that’s important about the aesthetic object, which, as Brooks, might say is not what we abstract from or paraphrase a poem, but how we experience it. Here’s how he does say it, in fact:
The essential structure of a poem (as distinguished from the rational or logical structure of the ‘statement’ which we abstract from it) resembles that of architecture or painting: it is a pattern of resolved stresses. Or, to move closer still to poetry by considering the temporal arts, the structure of a poem resembles that of a ballet or musical composition. It is a pattern of resolutions and balances and harmonizations, developed through a temporal scheme.
It’s interesting how close this comes to the definition my friend Dan offered for a sense of video games as Art (though he admitted to being uninterested in actually making that claim). As he quite nicely suggested, we could put video games
“…in roughly the same category as sculptures that are about modifying the space of display and conceptual pieces that expose or distort the ecology of spectatorship. The core artistry in game-design lies in building complex interactions out of relatively simple rules and behaviors, in establishing spaces that carry some kind of genre-specific decorum. When they are a vehicle for narrative, the story itself becomes secondary to the way that it conditions the gameplay.”
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The Anti-Theory Wing of Literary Studies
Nina Paley is the creator of Mimi & Eunice and is unleashing them on the world under a copyleft license.
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July 28
Fans: A New Public for Literary & Cultural Studies
In continuing to think about fan culture I sent a query to Francesca Coppa, a long-time student of fan culture and one of the founders of the Organization for Transformative Works, a non-profit that is all about fan culture, serving it, studying it, and advancing it. In her reply she mentioned several kinds of ongoing fan scholarship and observed:
I think of all of these as “real” research; the question, perhaps, is what sort of umbrella it would have to be gathered under to “count.” But everyone knows that “fans” are a kind of grassroots academy who know more about the things they are fans of than any “TV and media” scholar!
So, I’m thinking that if the literary academy really wants to reach the general public, these folks should be high on the list. But just what would that entail? These people are actively creating their own artistic expressions in words, images, and sound, and are actively pursuing their own research agendas. What does the academy have to offer these people? Can the academy conceive of a relationship that’s more of a partnership than a relationship conceived around more evaluative essays in intelligible prose?
Because I’m thinking that that’s where the deep action is going to be. Not in trying to reconstruct the glory days of Leavis and Trilling and the rest, but in doing something that’s of this 21st century, something that’s new.
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July 27
Dianetics For Higher Ed?
Should The New York Times (NYT) exist? Ha--you’re thinking, “What an unfair question!” Or “You’ve framed the debate in an obviously unfair or careless way."
And right you are. But since I’m a rich and powerful chunk of media capital with a stake in the answer, I don’t care what you think, and I’m free to compound the injury by holding a false “debate” on a question that unfairly asks one side to argue for its existence.
Enter The New York Times and its latest bungled attempt at analyzing higher ed, which just riffs on a piece reported by Robin Wilson for the Chronicle. As if framing a loaded question weren’t enough, they stack the deck, a couple of different ways. In the more obvious manipulation of the lineup, opponents of tenure outnumber proponents 3-2.
More importantly: in a debate about the “demise” of tenure,” the debate’s framers don’t include any voices of persons who are living the circumstances they purport to examine: the life of career faculty, full time or part time, with a teaching-intensive load and a nontenurable contract. One participant is on a nontenurable research contract--for a Harvard outfit that does management consulting for higher-ed administration, natch. But that’s like dressing up the testimony of someone who’s always driven a Rolls as the honest voice of straphangers--the near-volunteer faculty on freaking food stamps, like Monica, Andy, and many others.
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July 23
Toward a Fan-Based Research Collaboratory
Cross-posted at New Savanna.
Despite some reservations about fan scholarship—e.g. I’ve seen pointless edit wars at Wikipedia & pros are adept at pointless quarrels as well—I’m seriously thinking about an initiative to see if fans are interested in doing at least some of the descriptive work I call for in the piece on cultural evolution I recently did for the National Humanities Center (cf. this “quasi-festo" for naturalist criticism, and this piece on “Kubla Khan"). I see little prospect that academy-based scholars will under take such work in the near term. The sort of descriptive work I have in mind is not obviously subordinate to an inquiry into the “meaning” of a text. That pretty much means that the work is not unpublisheable on its own; there’s no obvious way to earn professional credit for doing it.
But fans may well be interested in doing such work, but on the texts that interest them. And those texts are only rarely going to be canonical high culture texts. And that’s just fine with me. I’ve done such work on manga and cartoons and would have no problem with doing it on episodes of, e.g. Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Star Trek (any generation).
I’ve recently been doing quite a bit of work on Sita Sings the Blues, an animated film by Nina Paley, which I discuss in the Humanities Center post. As some of you may know, the film is done in four different visual styles. So I’ve made a table with a column for each style and then gone through the film from beginning to end and briefly annotated each segment in the proper column. You can find that table online in a Google docs file here. One of those segments, the Agni Pariksha, is done in a fifth style. I’ve gone through that segment an annotated each “shot” or sequence within it. You can find that here. In prinple each of the some 60+ segments in the film could be described at the level of detail I’ve used in the Agni Pariksha segment.
In fact, one could easily describe a film frame-by-frame. Would that be worthwhile? In some cases, yes, and in some cases no. It depends. There’s really no way of knowing until the work’s been done in at least some cases and we can take a look at it.
It’s clear to me that such descriptive work is a necessary precondition to a deeper knowledge of texts, whether written, filmed, or videotaped. All the cognitive psych and evolutionary psych and neuro-psych in the world is not going to accomplish what can only be accomplished through description. If the pros aren’t going to do the work, then it’s up to the fans. If the fans get into it, then in a decade or two the pros will have no choice but to follow or simply to drop off the edge of the earth.
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July 21
If Andrew Breitbart Edited It
The always excellent Amanda Marcotte has been tweeting movie and book reviews if they were edited by Andrew Breitbart, the right-wing hack who doctored a video to get an innocent woman fired (or merely passed along fraudulently doctored video) for petty political gain, and in the face of whose transparent dishonest our president and the entire mainstream media are, at the moment, quivering helplessly. Some of hers:
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July 20
Debating Tenure, Again
By now, many readers will have seen the story in the Chronicle of Higher Ed about the dramatic decline in the number of tenure track faculty at American colleges and universities. The Valve’s own Marc Bousquet is quoted in the story. There is also a series of columns under the “Room for Debate” rubric at the New York Times, called “What if College Tenure Dies?"
The comments on the Chronicle story expose some of the problems in the way the story is framed. The basic graph shows a decline in the percentage (not number) of tenure track jobs in academia across the board (from 57% in 1975 to 31% in 2007), which then provokes a round of debate amongst pro-tenure (i.e., Cary Nelson) and anti-tenure (i.e., Mark C. Taylor) academics, who are quoted in the article and then expand on their views in the Times. No one disputes that there’s been a surge of adjunct hiring at established universities in recent years, and no one disputes that colleges and universities often try to downplay through reclassification the amount of teaching that is done by graduate students (that said, I think it’s incorrect to include graduate student instructors as “non-tenure track,” since in principle graduate students are on their way to tenure track jobs in the future; the number of courses/students taught by graduate students should be in its own category).
But what if the sharp decline in the percentage of tenure track jobs is not due to decisions to eliminate the idea of tenure, so much as the growth of community colleges and the rise of for-profit institutions? The former only rarely have tenure track positions, while the latter never do. As I understand it, very few traditional colleges or universities have actually decided to abandon tenure in recent years. The Chronicle only cites Evergreen State College; Bennington College, not cited in the essay, also abolished tenure in 1994. Does anyone know of other colleges or universities that have gone this route? If that’s it, this is almost certainly a misdirected debate.
Questions by commenter “bmartin” (#12) at the Chronicle fall along the lines of my own objection:
An interesting analysis, but I would like to see the actual numbers not just the percentages. By what amount has the overall higher education enterprise increased since 1975? Is the increasing percentage of non-tenured positions due in part to the increase in for-profit institutions? Has the actual number of tenured positions decreased? I presume the actual report will include the numbers but it would be helpful to include these in the summary.
The actual Department of Education/AAUP report from which the Chronicle derives its numbers hasn’t been publicly released yet; when it is, we’ll be able to get a more exact picture of what exactly is happening vis a vis community colleges and for-profit institutions. Unfortunately, this Chronicle article, extracting one factoid without sufficient “internals,” as Nate Silver might call them, seems to be designed to provoke a contentious debate over “abolishing tenure,” which remains for most universities a non-issue.
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Florence Nightingale, Letters from Egypt
Having cleared at least the semblance of a path through the draft thesis chapters that have taken up the bulk of my time since my summer class wrapped up at the end of June, I’m finally turning my attention back to my summer research project, which is to extend and perhaps even complete the essay on Ahdaf Soueif that I’ve posted about here before. Yes, that’s right, it’s not done yet. It got as far as a conference paper last year, and since then, in between other projects, I’ve been collecting references and sources for it and trying to conceptualize what it is I hope that the final essay will do, or be about and where exactly I might submit it. My basic idea is to fill in more details about In the Eye of the Sun and then develop a comparison between it and The Map of Love--which I’ve just finished re-re-reading. The Map of Love has a more complex form than In the Eye of the Sun, interweaving the story of two 20th-century women (Isabel, an American, and Amal, an Egyptian who turns out to be Isabel’s cousin) with the story of Lady Anna Winterbourne, an Edwardian Englishwoman who travels to--and eventually marries and lives in--Egypt. While my motivating interest is still the intertextual relationship between Soueif’s work and George Eliot’s, The Map of Love clearly has strong ties to other literary sources, particularly accounts of “lady travellers” in Egypt. Lucie Duff Gordon is probably the most famous, but I’ve also signed out of the library a lovely illustrated edition of Florence Nightingale’s Letters from Egypt: A Journey on the Nile 1849-50, which turns out to be quite entertaining. For instance, like me she wages war on biting insects:
I and the gnats have so many ways of outwitting each other. X and Mr B. look as if they had the small-pox; but I, who would sleep in an Indian rubber tub with a tallow candle in my mouth if it were suggested, shut my windows before sundown; and I hear those who are in, furling their wings and uttering little infernal cries of triumph. Then I set my door open, and put a light in the passage, and they think I’m there, and follow; but I’m not,--don’t tell them. Then, when night comes, I take out a large sheet of paper and begin to write, and they believe I’m not thinking of sleep. But I leave off in the middle of a word, run with all my might at the Levinge [an elaborate netted sleeping bag], where I insert myself by so small a hole that you would say a camel could get through the eye of a needle; and then I clap my hands, and sing a little ode in honour of Mercury, the god of theft, because I have stolen myself from the gnats. Meanwhile I hear their whistle of rage and disappointment, and I see their proboscises coming through the curtains, as if they would fly away with the whole concern.
In a more serious vein, she often reflects on what she perceives of “Mahometism.” Carefully fitted up in “Egyptian dress,” including a complete veil, for instance, she is able to step inside a mosque to observe:
That quarter of an hour seemed to reveal to one what it is to be a woman in these countries, where Christ has not been to raise us. God save them, for it is a hopeless life. . . . Still, the mosque struck me with a pleasant feeling; X was struck with its irreverence. Some were at their prayers; but one was making baskets, another was telling Arabian Night stories to a whole group of listeners, sitting round him--others were asleep. I am much more struck with the irreverence of a London church.
It is so pleasant to see a place where any man may go for a moment’s quiet, and there is none to find fault with him, nor make him afraid. Here the homeless finds a home, the weary repose, the busy leisure,--if I could have said where any woman may go for an hour’s rest, to me the feeling would have been perfect,--perfect at least compared with the streets of London and Edinburgh, where there is not a spot on earth a poor woman may call her own to find repose in. The mosque leaves the more religious impression of the two, it is the better place of worship,--not than St. Peter’s, perhaps, but better than St. Paul’s.
I don’t know why it surprised me, from the author of Cassandra, after all, but I was struck by how often her interest and enjoyment in the scenes she observes are undercut, or at least rendered more problematic, by her consciousness of her sex and the complications it brings:
We have had a delightful week at Cairo. I wish we were going to stay longer. It is the riding in the streets, above all, which is so delightful, of which one never wearies; the latticed windows meeting overhead, the pearls of Moorish architecture at every corner, the looking up to the blue sky and golden sunlight from the wells of streets and in the bazaars, the streets entirely roofed in; and as you stand bargaining for a pair of yellow slippers, you see the corner of a street with the spring of an arch covered with Moorish network, and the sunlight pouring through the square holes left in the roof which shuts in the street. . .
In riding home by moonlight, ... there is not a corner which is not a picture; and no picture can give an idea of the colouring. But you don’t enjoy all this for nothing. A Christian female dog has two titles of dishonour here, and she cannot stir out without her ass, her running ass-driver, and at least one gentleman or a dragoman. A la langue this dependence becomes tiresome beyond what a European can conceive. It is not that one minds being spat at (which I have been) for a religion which one loves, but one is so afraid of the gentlemen of one’s party noticing any insult, as an Englishman’s complaint would bring a bastinado upon the poor wretch, which has often ended in death.
Like Soueif’s Lady Anna, she is particularly fascinated and spiritually moved by the desert. “The oftener you are astonished at it, the more like a stranger a mysterious power it seems,” she remarks;
While the earth in our country is rich and variegated with light, and crowded with animation, the sky above contrasts with its deadness. Here, on the other hand, the sky is radiant, the light is living, the golden light which seems to pour not only from the sun, but from all the points of the transparent blue heavens. One looks down, and the ungrateful earth lies there, hopeless and helpless, a dying, withered desert: one almost fancies one hears the Devil laughing as he dares even Almighty power to bring forth bread.
This is what gives one a supernatural, mysterious feeling in Egypt,--the looks naturally turn to the sky when the earth has no beauty that one should desire it, and the heavens have all beauty. The struggle between God and the Devil is perpetually visible before one’s thoughts, for the earth seems the abode of the Devil, the heavens of God; and you do not wonder at the Orientals being the mystical people they have become, nor at the Europeans, where all beauty is of the earth, and the thoughts turn to the earth, becoming a practical, active people.
Here’s an excerpt from Lady Anna’s (fictional) journal:
We rode on, and we stopped only twice. Once when we made camp for the night. The other earlier: when the sun set beyond the Gulf of Suez, making clear to me whence came the name the ‘Red’ Sea, for the setting sun brought out the red and black of the ore in the mountains and the sea reflected it all back. All the reds, and yellows and orange and purple, were in that wonderful landscape, and as it faded and the colours all round us melted more and more into gentleness, I thought there should be some act--some formal recognition of this daily magnificence. Even as the thought formed itself in my mind, we came to a halt as if by agreement. The animals knelt, the men dismounted and turned towards the South-East. One voice was lifted: ‘Allahu Akbar’, and they prayed silently together.
I might think that Soueif is delicately parodying the orientalizing English tendency to translate the Egyptian landscape into something exotically mystical, except that in her scene, Anna too is moved to prayer and to peace--and after all, isn’t there something spiritually uplifting about extraordinary natural beauty? For George Eliot, it’s the landscapes of one’s childhood that carry one towards “religious” peace and truth. What’s interesting in these examples (well, one among many interesting things) is the way an unfamiliar landscape opens up new spiritual ideas or possibilities.
(x-posted)
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July 19
Art art Art
Apparently, Roger Ebert recently declared that “Video games can never be art.” After making him “an object of scorn and incredulity for members of the gaming press, not to mention the Great Unpunctuated out there on the boards,” as a friend of mine put it, this categorical statement also provoked an interesting response from “Game innovator Kellee Santiago” which provoked Ebert, in turn to offer a more careful and considered effort to clarify his position:
I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be art. Perhaps it is foolish of me to say “never,” because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.
I find the conversation interesting and thought provoking, though—full disclosure—I’m more or less totally apathetic towards video games themselves; having once been an avid gamer in the days when Starcraft hadn’t yet become the Korean national sport, video games are sort of an addiction I’ve kicked and, all things considered, am as fearful as an ex-smoker of revisiting. I’m also some combination of uninterested in the question and un-persuaded by Ebert’s argument, which is probably telling in its own way. But if these kinds of conversations tend to do more to reveal our own underlying preconceptions and beliefs than actually lead to any effective resolution, then maybe that, in and of itself, is a kind of useful mirror held up to reality. If you’re interested in the actual debate, you should really view Santiago’s video response to Ebert; though I think she’s hampered by adopting his critical orientation, it’s still a nicely put together presentation of the state-of-the-art of game design, which she frames as being still at a “cave-painting” stage of development, full of a potential that has yet to fully blossom. But I’m more interested in the rhetoric Ebert uses to argue with her (in a post, by the way, which has received well over four thousand comments).
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July 17
Garbage In
Bashing the romantic notion of the artist against the computational power of an algorithm and you get, if nothing else, amusing (and likely short-lived) internet memes. You may have heard of the “I write like” thing that a programmer in Montenegro, Dmitry Chestnykh, put together. Basically, you copy and paste some chunks of your or someone else’s prose into a window and it uses code developed for detecting spam to tell you which famous writer you “write like.” I write like Dan Brown, I was delighted to find. For fun, I had it analyze some Nigerian 419 spam emails and discovered that while most write like David Foster Wallace, “MISS STEPHANIE UJU” writes like Shakespeare. It’s received sufficient notoriety in the last few days to spark some media attention and even some backlash (originally, it would tell you which of thirty-seven white male authors and three white female authors you wrote like; apparently the canon has been opened up a bit in response).
Anyway, having randomly also just come across digital artist Jason Huff’s “AutoSummarize” project, however, an experiment presented itself. Huff took “the top 100 most downloaded copyright free books” and used Microsoft Word 2008’s AutoSummarize function to summarize them, in their entirety, into ten sentence versions (“Word has examined the document and picked the sentences most relevant to the main theme”). The result is sort of wonderful. Here, for example, is Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn:
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain
“All right. “All right. “Why, Jim?”
“Blamed if I would, Jim.”
“Jim!”
“Jim!”
“WHAT raft, Jim?”
Jim says:
“Where’s Jim?”
“Why, Jim?”
And I’m satisfied. That makes me happy. But that gave me an idea: plug that in to the “Write like” program and see who it “writes like.” And guess what? It writes like Mark Twain!
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Better Critics Please
On hearing that Shirley Jackson is getting a Library of America volume, Malcolm Jones was suspicious that “the Library of America is running out of writers”:
Continue reading "Better Critics Please"Latest reasons for suspicion: at the end of April, the LOA will publish a slim volume containing John Updike’s famous New Yorker farewell to Ted Williams, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” fleshed out with a little more eulogizing, published when Williams died. There has already been a LOA volume devoted to baseball writing, joining other volumes about American subjects (food, New York, Los Angeles, the legacies of Lincoln and Twain, the environment). You could file all these volumes under the heading, “Cleverly Curating the Franchise.” But somehow the Updike volume seems not just physically thin but insubstantial—too much made of a good thing. And then, in May, here comes an entire volume dedicated to …. Shirley Jackson? A writer mostly famous for one short story, “The Lottery.” Is LOA about to jump the shark?
…In uniform, black-jacketed editions, the works of Melville, Twain, Wharton, Faulkner and dozens of other Rushmore-sized American authors have marched onto our bookshelves…In the last couple of years, as John Cheever, John Ashbery and Raymond Carver got their own volumes, it became clear that the LOA wasn’t going to wait any longer for time’s verdict. It was almost like the production schedule was dictating the editorial decisions. Hurry up, we’ve got to have some more great writers for the fall list! But the inclusion of those authors never raised critical eyebrows (perhaps they should’ve—taken a good look at all of Cheever lately? Not pretty). Nor did the more interesting editorial choices of the past few years—Nathaniel West, Powell. But Shirley Jackson? Not a bad writer, but her inclusion seems so random, haphazard. Why Jackson before Jean Stafford, or Peter Taylor, Wallace Stegner, or why not simply more of James M. Cain than The Postman Always Rings Twice?
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July 14
The United States of Alabama
Only way to please me
turn around and leave
and walk away
--Alabama Getaway, lyrics by Robert Hunter
Many who learn that the University of Alabama-Birmingham (UAB) amputated a $650,000 state appropriation, not to mention a flow of grant money, just to rid itself of a labor center (and Glenn Feldman, the accomplished historian who directed it) will focus on regional differences. One early commenter to Peter Schmidt’s report for the Chronicle blamed “Dixie” culture, saying that this is what happens to someone who “bucks the system in that part of the country. The more the South changes, the more it remain the same."
As a veteran of the Southern-gothic, All-The-Kings-Men style politics of one right-to-work state university with close administrator connections to UAB, I guess my first impulse was at least similar: I can still remember the liberation I felt when I left my tenured position at the scandal-ridden University of Louisville (UL), where concerned faculty were run out of town for questioning the wall-to-wall administrative solidarity that protected a dean embezzling his federal grants, a scheme of extreme work-study that has turned thousands of students into the serfs of UPS, and claims of “research-1” status for a campus with a six-year graduation rate hovering around 30 percent.
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July 12
Romantic Love, Conversation, Biology, and Culture
Note: This post grew out of reflection on an earlier post on bundling.
Cross-posted at New Savanna.
When I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins I took a course in Medieval literature and was thoroughly gobsmacked when I learned that romantic love had been invented in 12th century France. Until then I’d believed it to be a human universal – one and only, forever and ever, that was just how it was, no? Well, not quite.
What arose in Medieval Europe is something called Courtly Love, a set of conventions used by high-born men in wooing their lovers. And these lovers were not their wives, nor wives to be. For aristocratic marriage had little to do with personal preference; it was politics. Powerful families would forge alliances by arranging marriages among their young.
In time, over the course of centuries, so the story went, romantic love was transformed from an aristocratic game into a set of conventions used to define the necessary, or at least the ideal, precondition for any marriage. This set of conventions was in place, at least among the middle class, by the time Jane Austen wrote her novels in the early 19th Century. Those conventions have remained more or less in place up to the present, though they’ve become a bit tattered in the last decade or three as a soaring divorce rate has made it abundantly clear that true love does not last forever. That, of course, is not exactly news – why, for example, did Flaubert write Madame Bovary? – but the myth is so attractive that it dies hard.
That was the state of things during my undergraduate years – which coincided with the emergence of feminist activism in the late 1960s. Whatever their personal experience, everyone gave lip service to one and only forever and ever and believed that it was human nature. In that context, then, the revelations of the learned scholars shook my world.
Counter-Revolution
Learned scholars, however, do not constitute a single tribe. Their tribes are many, and often contentious. Even as the literati were blissfully proclaiming the recent and Western origin of romantic love, other scholars set out to prove them wrong. In 1992, for example, W. R. Jankowiak and E. F. Fischer published “A cross-cultural perspective on romantic love” (Ethnology 31: 149-155). They defined romantic love as “any intense attraction that involves the idealization of the other, within an erotic context, with the expectation of enduring for some time into the future” and they contrasted this with “the companionship phase of love . . . which is characterized by the growth of a more peaceful, comfortable, and fulfilling relationship.” They examined ethnographic data on 166 societies from around the world and discovered romantic love in 88.5 percent of them, suggesting “that romantic love constitutes a human universal, or at the least a near-universal.”
More recently Jonathan Gottschall and Marcus Nordland, published Romantic Love: A Literary Universal? (Philosophy and Literature 30: 450-470, 2006). They conducted a cross-cultural study of folktales from 79 cultures and at least one reference to romantic love in 55 of those collections and multiple references in 39 collections. They assert that their study “offers staunch support to the existing evidence that romantic love is a statistical cultural universal. It would also seem to increase the probability that romantic love may be an absolute cultural universal offers staunch support to the existing evidence that romantic love is a statistical cultural universal.” “Statistical universal” is a term of art meaning that something is in a lot of places, but not everywhere, yet. It seems clear that if Gottschall and Nordland were to place a bet, they bet that further research would find that romantic love is a true cultural universal, present in every culture for which we have reliable records.
Still more recently, just yesterday in the time-scale of academic publishing, Brian Boyd has asserted, with the calm assurance of senior scholar in command of wide learning, that “cross-cultural, neurological, and cross-species studies have demonstrated the workings of romantic love across societies and even species” (The Origin of Stories, Harvard 2009, p. 341). To this, Michael Bérubé has replied, with the calm assurance of senior scholar in command of wide learning, but learning leavened with a dash of school-boy wit:
This just won’t wash. Other species might court and mate for life, but they do not engage in romantic love in the sense that humanists employ the term, save perhaps for the cartoon skunk Pepé Le Pew. “Romantic love” does not mean “mammals doing it like mammals”; it refers to the conventions of courtly love, which were indeed invented in the European middle ages and cannot be found in ancient literatures or cultures. Those conventions are culturally and historically specific variations on our underlying (and polymorphous) biological imperatives, just as the institution of the Bridezilla and the $25,000 wedding is specific to our own addled time and place.
What’s going on here? Who’s right?
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July 06
The Country and the City: The U.S. Case--The Machine in the Garden
In my first post on Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City, I wrote that “at least for U.S. literature, there have been attempts to write literary histories of depictions of the city and there have been attempts to write literary histories of depictions of the country, but there is no single study which actively attempts to fuse those together and read them as not only the same history but the result of a single process or regime (capitalism), which is what Williams does.”
A commenter here pointed out that Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden is “the book that comes closest, I think, to the kind of AmLit history you want to do.” That probably is true, but it doesn’t actually come that close for a number of reasons which I find demonstrate pretty well some of the basic reasons why there still hasn’t been a study of American literary history which does what Williams did and why it would still be quite difficult to write such a one. I didn’t initially plan on spending so much time on The Machine and the Garden in trying to puzzle out why I feel this is so, but that comment led me back to a closer look at the book, and I’ve found the comparison rewarding. Marx’s book is rightly renowned, even if, like most myth and symbol criticism from the 1950s and 1960s, it has worn a little shabbily. Most of my comments on it will be in a critical vein, but my point in doing so is not to question its worth on its own terms but to suggest the continued necessity of some other terms in which to think about the literary histories of the country and of the city in the U.S.
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July 05
Seven Pillars of Wisdom, beginning at the end
The subtitle of T.E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom is “A Triumph,” and yet he frames the story in such elegiac terms; it is a story, he writes, of “what we felt, what we hoped, what we tried” and you can feel the teleology of tragic failure even before he makes it explicitly clear that “Damascus” was where the train went off the rails, where the light of “Arab freedom” failed. This dissonance has to be the point of it, I suspect, because there is simply too much brilliant, glorious erudition here, too much incredible prose to let the subtitle be simply a bitter irony. This book is titanic, operatic; if anything (I find myself shocked to suggest), David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia is the paler, less ambitious copy. This is not the story of the light that failed; this feels like a story of success in failure.
I’m just getting into this as a reading project—and feel free to join me—so I’m still talking in terms of feelings, a sense of how the book works that I’m trying to pin down without trying to prove yet. But if you’ve seen David Lean’s movie—and if you haven’t, what’s the matter with you?—you probably know what he’s talking about, the triumph that wasn’t: having won the war against the Ottomans, Lawrence‘s Arabs fall apart when they have to create order out of the victory, and can‘t. This ending is present from the very beginning; as he puts it in the introduction,
“…when we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep: and was pitiably weak against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.”
It’s not quite clear to me yet whether this is an Arab youth or not, if the problem is, in his mind, a basic insufficiency of the Arabs themselves as a people. It’s true that when he sets down the historical backdrop for the Arab Revolt, he tells the story of the middle ages as opening with Muslim conquests but closing with a Turkish bureaucratic consolidation made possible by some particular insufficiencies of “the Semitic mind”:
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