Hildegarde

This was on Arts and Letters Daily this morning–

http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/06/message_to_freshmen_lets_start.html

Be sure to click on the link to the full Bard freshman seminar reading llist.

And remember that Bard was always considered to be a hotbet of faculty leftism when I went to college…

And before bitching about what is or isn’t on the reading list–remember, the purpose of the course is to have students read what they think they ALREADY know, but that they don’t.

While all the rest of this stuff has been going on, I finally finished my afternoon book.  It’s called The Secret Language of the Renaissance:  Decoding the Hidden Symbolism of Italian Art, by Richard Stemp, and it leaves me with a couple of things to say.

The first is that I really hadn’t realized, before this particular book, how much the size and shape of a book matter in the way I read it.  This is an outsized, coffee-table type art book, full of really gorgeous illustrations, and it’s damned near impossible to pick up and read.

To read it, I had to lay it out on the arm of the loveseat and lean over it sideways.  I couldn’t bring it with me to school or to lunch.  It didn’t fit in any of the things I usually bring with me, not even the outsized knitting bag my friend Carol gave me that fits my grade book and folders.  It was also too difficult and too awkward to handle when I was standing in line anywhere.  It wasn’t much better in the car.  I’d prop it up against the steering wheel, and all I had to do was breathe funny to make the horn go off underneath it.

I often wonder if this would be a problem with electronic book formats like Kindle.  They’re smaller than this book, of course, and meant to be portable, but for some reason I feel that they would also be far more fragile.  I can bang a book around without worrying about it, except around water.  I have visions of my caving in the Kindle in my tote bag because I drop a heavy book in there with it, or I end up slamming the bag against a corner as I’m going around it.

Whatever.  I’ll admit to not being really entranced with the idea of electronic books.

The second thing is that I find myself really happy to have found something new to learn about–ack.  That’s not quite right.

Let me try it this way.  Art has an entire technical vocabulary I have encountered only infrequently in my life, and an entire intellectual history I know very little about.  This was a good book for me because it was not so simple as to make the whole project seem vapid and overly simply, but not so technical that I couldn’t understand it with a little work.

And it made me remember that I like doing the work.  I started a small notebook for terms and information after a while, just trying to keep things straight in a single source where I could refer to them when they came up again.  I found out that there were names for things I didn’t know there were names for–pendentives, for instance, which are the triangular sort of insert looking things that  fix a round dome to a square structure.

This is the kind of thing I should have brought away from Introduction to Art History, years ago.  Maybe I wasn’t paying attention.  When I was younger, I tended to think of anything that didn’t have to do with words as being essentially trivial.

It’s been a long time since I’ve actually found something I wanted to understand thoroughly and began the process of doing that.  I’m glad to be back at it.

Maybe it helps that Italian Renaissance art was designed to be “read”–that is, was designed with enough references and allusions to give Yeats a headache.  I posted a link to this picture on Facebook a week or so ago, but I’ll post it again here:

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/carlo-crivelli-the-annunciation-with-saint-emidius

I may have posted it here, too.

I like it because I like it–I like the near photographic quality of it in spite if the fact that it is obvious not photographic.

But I also like it because it fascinates me as a message.  Every image in it, even the little line of articles (the candle, the vase) on the shelf above Mary’s head, has specific meaning that anybody in the Renaissance, even people who were illiterate in the ordinary way, would have been able to decode.

It’s not just the images, either.  Things like the relative placement of the figures, the specific colors and kinds of paint that were used, were all part of conveying a narrative–and narrative was definitely the point of most art in Italy in this period. 

So I’m back to stories, just stories told in pictures.  Think of Crevelli’s Annunciation as   the high art tradition’s version of a comic book…

Or maybe not.

The third thing is a quote from Stemple’s text.  It’s his attempt to explain how Renaissance artists, sculptors and thinkers defined the word “civilization.”

Civilization, he says, is “nature subjected to the organized mind of man.”

If with “nature” you include “human nature,” I think that’s a very nice way of putting it, a way we probably couldn’t put it now, without being subjected to a lot of lectures from environmentalists.

The Renaissance had no sentimental delusions about nature.  It was not an era whem people imagined that “the natural” was “the good.”  It was often an era when “the natural” was equivalent to “the evil.” 

Nature was not only fallen, not only shot through with evil due to the original sin of Adam and Eve, but imperfect.

For years I wondered how people like Thomas Aquinas and Augustine would revere both Aristotle and Plato at the same time.  It seemed like a contradiction.  Aristotle and Plato were poles apart–direct opposites, in fact–when it came to things like politics and the perfectability of human beings.

I should have remembered that different eras have different obsessions.  Renaissance philosophers–and artists and theologians–didn’t pay much attention to the political thought of either philosopher.  They saw in Plato’s concept of this world being but a pallid shadow of the Ideal Forms which exist in eternity a way of explaining the relationship between this world and God’s perfection. 

Like the huddled men staring at the shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave, we, St. Paul said, “see through a glass darkly.”

And, I’ll admit, that was something that had never occurred to me before.  Not bad for a book that was probably not really intended to be read.  If you know what I mean.

Anyway, that thing about civilization being “nature subjected to the organized mind of man” intrigues me, and has landed me once again in front of Lorenzo de Medici.

But I think I’ll worry about it tomorrow.

I never know whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing that I sit down to write the post in the morning and I don’t know where to start.

This morning, however, I’d better start with the most salient point.

I never said that William Henry was a conservative.

What I said was that he took a number of positions–a lot of them, really–that virtually everybody in America these days would assume were conservative positions.

These include

1) opposition to affirmative action

2) the position that affirmative action is a process by which lesser qualified candidates are given preferment over better qualified ones (and therefore is a form of racism)

3) an antipathy for the graduated income tax, under the assumption that such a tax is meant to punish achievement and success

4) an opposition to “victim’s studies” departments in colleges and universities

5) an opposition to “mainstreaming” the mentally handicapped in elementary and high school classrooms

6) an opposition to uncontrolled immigration and an insistance that immigrants learn English, Americanize themselves and assimilate

7) an opposition to conducting business, especially government business, in the US in anything but English

8) the firm belief that Western civilization in general and American civilization in particular is objectively superior to most of the others that now or have ever existed, and especially superior to the cultures of the present-day “third world.”

If I gave you that list of positions and told you nothing else about the person who held them, you would assume that person was a Republican.  So would I. 

And we’d be right.   In today’s political climate–and in the political climate of the early  90s, about which Henry is writing–those would be Republican positions.

What has always bothered me, what continues to bother me, is how it is possible to reconcile such positions with the position that highly educated elites are bad, and that goodness in the political process belongs to “just plain folks.”

In fact, I think that last thing, in the paragraph above, is inherently contradictory to the rest of the list, numbered above.

Of course, the obverse is also inherently contradictory–it makes no sense to champion lowered standards in schools and colleges and the superiority of Guatamalen folk art over Michaelangelo at the same time you’re insisting that the government is better run if it’s run by highly educated elites.

Back in the 30s, the Democrats had both the drive to economic leveling and the folk singers.  It was upper class Republicans who upheld the high art traditon while at the same time opposing the graduated income tax.

The parts of the puzzle do not go together for me. 

In the 60s, as in the 39s, being a progressive Democrat meant dumping all that higher learning, high achieving stuff and going in for folk art.  Being a Conservative–at least a William F. Buckley conservative–meant not only championing capitlism but looking down your nose at rock music and insisting that the high art tradition was the only tradition worthy of being called art.

This situation got turned around in the 80s, and I’m not quite sure how, although I think I know why.

What I am trying to say here is this:  it makes absolutely no sense to me that people who take the positions I outline above would ALSO take the position that all virtue resides in the “folks,” and that “elites” are bad.

The positions outlined above are, as Henry notes, essentially elitist ones.  To say that Western Civilization is superior to others is to say that Western Civilization is better and others are worse.  To say that entry to university should be on “merit only” is to say that some people are better than others and deserve better things–and that this sense of “better” is objective and universally applicable.

Back on the main page of this web site, I’ve got an essay–one of the ones on the menu on the right hand side–called “Why I Don’t Vote Republican.”  It comes in three parts, the last of which is called “The Stupid Thing.”   A number of people who have written that essay have said that it doesn’t make much sense to them.

This is what I was trying to get across here.

First, that the self-conscious apotheosis of “just plain folks” does not fit the rest of the positions that supposedly make up the Republican political philosophy and

Second, that it’s a deal breaker for me when any political party denigrates intelligence, education, and high culture.

And, what’s more, Ayn Rand would agree with me.

In spades.

A week or so ago, Steve Lewis (from the other blog) got confused as to why I would link “small town values” and Sarah Palin, and this is why.

But I still don’t understand how either political party manages to bridge the contraditions.

So, to get back to where I was yesterday–Henry’s book isn’t actually about literature, or even the arts, specifically.  He has something to say about them, but it’s in passing.  His major bone of contention is what we would now call “multicutluralism,” which is an approach to cultural diversity that says that all culturals are equal to all others, that no culture can be called superior to any other.

Part of the problem I’m having trying to think of a way to talk about this is in the fact that the words are all vague or inadequate.  By that, I mean the words to define what it is we’re talking about.

“Culture” is one of those things that’s so broad in its general usage as to be almost useless.  People say “Western culture” when what they mean is “Western Civilization,” but also when what they mean is “the way people in the West live now.”  People talk about the “culture” of the “knitting community.”  They also talk about “the culture of consumption,” meaning a lifestyle thread within the larger “culture” that is distinct and…I don’t know.  Totalizing?

Henry tends to use “culture” almost as a synonym for civilization, but not quite, which makes things difficult to sort out sometimes.

His point, however, is that some cultures are superior to others, and some are inferior to others. 

Outside of diehard ideologues, I don’t think much of anybody would find this a controversial idea.  Even those of us who don’t want to say so, because it would be rude and hurt other people’s feelings, tend to think that a culture that favors FGM, the right of men to beat their wives and the banishment of women from public life is inferior to one that accords women equal economic, political and social rights with men.

For myself, in terms of modern cultures, what always strikes me about the Islamic states now in existence is the extent to which they are unable to maintain themselves in any meaningful way.  Places like Saudi Arabia have lots of money, bought from sales of oil.  And they have modern, well-functioning hospitals, impressive architecture, everything you could want technologically–but by and large the have to hire Europeans, Americans and Australians to build and run these things.

This is not, obviously, some genetic defect on the part of the people of these countries, making them incapable of learning science and technology.  Saudis and Iranians who come here to live often do very well as doctors and engineers.  The people who remain at home, however, seem to either not want, or to be in some way culturally prevented from, scientific and technoloigical achievement.  Or even scientific and technological functioning.

The other thing that strikes me about cultures as they now exist on the planet is the extent to which they can be divided into those that do, and those that do not, contribute to global welfare.

This–like the scientific and technological stuff above–is not necessarily a function of the wealth of the countries or cultures involved.  There are poor states all along the Pacific rim that provide goods and services to the rest of the world at prices cheap enough to bring comfort and entertainment to people who might otherwise not be able to afford it.

More importantly, though, there are cultures that produce technological innovation, medical and other scientific discovery, books and movies and music and other artworks–whose output positively affects the lives of people in hundreds of different ways.

There are others that produce little or nothing of this kind of thing. 

And I would say that the societies who do are superior, at least on that measure, to the ones that don’t.

The worry, of course–the reason why so many people shy away from this kind of judgment–is that if we acknowledge that one culture is better than another, we will also be endorsing the idea that the first culture has the right (or maybe even the obligation) to invade and conquer the second.

After all, wouldn’t it be just for the second culture’s own good?

I do not, personally, understand why this needs to be so.  Of course, lots of people think it’s necessary to forcibly intervene when they see somebody acting in a way that “isn’t good for him,” but I’ve never had that particular kink. 

And there is nothing intrinsic to acknowleging relative values to different cultures that requires anybody to intervene to “fix” the ones that are less than ideal.

Henry, to be fair, does not suggest that we should do any such thing.

What he does say, in his list of things that make one civlization/culure superior to another, is that a superior civilization keeps its citizens “safe,” in the sense of keeping them from being invaded and taken over by some other civilization.

In other words, that any conquered culture is–by the very fact that it has been conquered–inferior to the culture that conquers it.

And that’s an idea I keep running around a lot.

Henry’s attributes of a superior civilization comprise the following:

1) It “promotes the liberty of its citizens”  That is–it “fends off invaders”  So the issue in contention here is the first one.

2) “provides a comfortable life, relatively free from want, for a plupart of its citizens”   I find the “relatively” here very interesting. 

3) “promotes modern science, medicine and hygiene and otherwise maximizes the health, comfort and longevity of its citizens”

4) “produces permanent artifacts that express esthetic and humanistic principles appreciated by other cultures”  There’s a lot in that one.  The “appreciated by other cultures” thing is a potential can of worms.  But I’ll get there.

5) “provides widespread, rigorous general education and ensures a generally meritocratic admissions system, so that the chief talents of each generation will be fully exploited”

6) “expands, by trade or cultural imperialism or conquest or all of the above, and will find its tenets embraced by the erstwhile captives even when the era of expansion is over”

7) “organizes itself hierarchically, tends toward central authority, and overcomes tribal and regional divisions, all without suppressing the individual opportunity for self-expression and advancement”

It’s an interesting list, and I’ve tried to quote it directly rather than paraphrasing it, so that I’m as accurate as I can be.

But it’s worth thinking about–and the problem with it are even more worth thinking about.

And I may do that tomorrow.

So, Robert thinks I’m going to yell at him–but I’m not.  I’m much more fascinated by the fact that a) we have been defining “deference” differently all this time, and b) we’ve been talking past each other on the subject of the Canon and objective standards for art.

Let me start with deference.

I do, of course, sometimes “defer” to the judgment of other people in particular cases, if by “defer” you mean deciding to go with “if you say so.”

But there is no subject–not cancer treatments, not quantum mechanics, not even the weight a bridge would carry–on which I automatically assume somebody else to be “right” just because they have a credential (or even a lot of experience) that’s supposed to make them an expert.

In my experience, experts are wrong a lot.  If I trust the person, I’ll trust his judgment.  If not–and you’d be amazed at what I’m willing to challenge–I’m going to go research the subject before I allow your “expertise” to rule the day.

To me, “deference” is not a question of whether or not you do or do not accept a person’s judgment in a particular area.  It’s a question of acknowledging that the other person is intrinsically better than you are, AS A PERSON. 

“Oh, yes.  You’re MUCH better than I am.  I should look up to you and follow you.”

That’s deference.

And I give it to nobody, and do not expect it for myself.  And, as I’ve said, I’ve known very few people in my life who have been interested in that kinds of things–and the most obvious example was not an English professor, but a school nurse. 

I think people who want “deference” in that sense are intrinsically bad people–and dangerous people, too.   But although I have known a professor or two with that problem, my acquaintance with them has been overwhelmingly with people in the “helping professions.”  My guess is that there are going to be a few in every profession, but that some professions are more congenial to this kind of personality than others.

On the other hand, I’ve known one of these people in private life.  You can demand this sort of thing of a family as well as of a client, or a colleague.

That said, however, it’s got to be obvious that most of what’s been said here about objective standards for the arts and about the Canon has been to a large extent a matter of assumptions not fitting the context.

For one thing, I would NEVER suggest that ANYBODY should simply accept that X or Y is a great work of are, or that W or F is a bad one, simply on somebody’s say-so.  Hell, if I won’t automatically accept a doctor’s cancer diagnosis on the basis of his say so, I’ve got no idea why I would want to accept Professor X’s decision that Don Quixote is a great novel on the basis of his say so.

A lot of the confusion comes, I think, because, when we get into discussions of this sort of thing on this blog, we are never talking about just one thing.  We keep jumbling things together–objective standards for art, what belongs on the Canon, somebody or the other’s required reading list–that seem to be the same subject, but are not.

On the subject of objective standards for art, the claim of the necessity of absolute relativity is untrue on its face.  At the very least, it’s simple enough to design an interior system–that is, a system where judgments of “good” and “bad” are made by referring to an a-priori set of rules.

We do this all the time in sports.  We say that Serena Williams played “a good game of tennis” or Lebron James played “a good game of basketball,” and this isn’t about the score.  It’s possible for somebody to win playing a bad game and lose playing a good game.  There are rules internal to the game that determine the “goodness” or “badness,” the relative worth of the played game, that people who actually understand the internal system can determine with a great degree of consensus. 

The rules for judging relative worth, then, are arbitrary but perfectly objective.

I was thinking about this yesterday when I was looking through the book on Italian Renaissance art I’ve been talking about.  Renaissance artists and philosophers wrote a lot about the internal rules of the game, so to speak–they developed elaborate rules for painting, for sculpture and for architecture–many of them mathematically based–and applied this to their own practice and to judging the practice of others. 

Art understood in this way would fit Robert’s requirements that he be able to check it, and that the results of such checks be at least reasonably reliable.  There would, of course, be grey areas on the edges and points of contention–but outside pure mathematics, there always are.

Which brings me to my second problem in these discussions:  the insistance of applying ruled and standards to the attempt to define objective criteria for art that would not be applied elsewhere.

I’ve said it before, but it’s worth saying again–the mere fact that there is controversy about X does NOT mean that there is no objective truth about X.  It may just mean that some people are wrong. 

There’s a lot of controversy about the theory of evolution–that doesn’t mean that there’s nothing but opinion and all opinions are equal.  It just means that some people are wrong.  There once was a lot of controversy about the shape of the earth.  That doesn’t mean the roundness of the earth was just a matter of opinion, no more or less connected to reality than the flatness of it.  It just means that some people were wrong.

The fact that there are lots of different opinions about  X doesn’t mean that there is no true, objectively, about X.  It just means that people can and do believe what they want to, for lots of reasons, and often with facts be damned.

We would not declare all of biology to be “just a matter of opinion” because lots of people don’t accept evolution, or even because there are differing views on the nature and existence of the Cambrian explosion among biologists themselves. 
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There’s no reason to declare the arts entirely subjective matters of opinion because people do have different opinions about them.   People have different opinions about everything.

The second thing here is the assumption, never stated by always running around underneath, that English teachers and literary critics are the “experts” on what makes a great work of literature, that art history teachers and art critics are the “experts” on what makes a great work of art.

But this is like saying that philosophers of science are the “experts” on what makes good biology, say, or that architectural critics are the “experts” are what makes a great building.

In most fields, experts are not usually outside critics or chroniclers of the field.  They’re the actual practitioners in it.

The Renaissance had no English teachers, but it did have writers who both produced work (Orlando Furioso, for instance) and judged other work (Dante’s Divinia Comedia, for instance). 

The third problem is that the judgment of what is or is not a great work of art is separate from the judgment of what belongs on a Canon, or what should be required in the classroom.

Neither the Canon nor anybody’s required reading list is compiled as a list of what constitutes great art.  Great art may indeed be on it, but only because great art tends to be influential in a lot of different ways.

The Canon is first and foremost a list of works necessary to understanding the intellectual history of a civilization.  These include literature, philosophy, history, painting, sculpture, music, theoretical works of all kinds, religion–some of these works will be great by internal objective standards and some of them (Mein Kampf, for instace) only necessary to understanding the whole.

As for the Required Reading List–well, that’s another thing altogether.  Required reading lists for high school and college courses are not usually compiled on the basis of what is or is not great literature.

For high school, the issue is teaching certain advanced reading skills.  Sometimes this is done by trying to “expose” students to great literature, but more often it is done by picking things the teachers think the students can ‘relate” to in the hope that they’ll bother to read anything at all. 

And this is as true of the old freshman English course that included “readings” in fiction and poetry as it is of high school courses. 

These days, most Freshman English courses require no reading in poetry or fiction AT ALL–they stick to essays about topical subjects like abortion or gay rights or gun rights or war. 

Once you get beyond Freshman English, a decent English major is looking to make sure students know a long range of works across the centuries–it is, essentially, a study of the works that have lasted as a way to understand the internal workings of imaginative forms in English.

So, yes, I wouldn’t bother to assign Trollope to students in Frenshman English–but I would expect he’d be represented as part of the Nineteenth Century Novel course requirement for majors. 

Even so, however, that would say nothing about whether Trollope wrote great novels. The choice of what novels to include in a Nineteenth Century Novel course is not made on the basis of what works are “great,” but of what works it is necessary to read to understand the history and evolution of the form as it has come down to us.

Henry in his book sides with the “we should teach people about  X because X represents one of the highest human achievements” line–and it’s one that’s interesting enough on several levels.

But it has nothing to do with according anybody deference, in my definition of the world.

I’m actually cold.

There are a lot of books in my house, hundreds of them at least, maybe thousands.  There have also been a lot of books in my life.  In that case, the number is almost certainly many, many thousands over the course of the years.

One of the peculiarities of my life has been the fact that it hasn’t always been possible to hold onto the books from one point of departure to another.  I’ve moved continents a couple of times.  I didn’t pack all the books in boxes and send them around to where I was next.  For a while I kept a lot of them at my parents’ house–but they moved around some themselves, and in the end they were storing things with me.

So books got lost, and it didn’t really bother me a lot.  It seemed natural, and books can be rebought, most of the time, if you really want them.  Sometimes–maybe even more often than not–I found out I didn’t.

The much less frequent, and distinctly odder, phenomenon has been that of the books I just can’t seem to lose, even if I’m trying.  These tend to be books that I remember distinctly for some reason or the other, but not ones that I necessarily liked. 

I usually have no intention of reading them again., and yet there they are, every time I turn around–on top of the TBR stack even though I’ve already read them, on the counter in the kitchen, the first or second or third thing to hand when I’m looking for something else.

One of these books is a short thing called In Defense of Elitism by William A. Henry III.  I suppose there’s something almost funny in the fact that somebod writing a book defending elitism should be “III.” 

Henry was–before his massive heart attack at 44, just before this book was published–a “cultural critic” for Time and other magazines.  He’d also done some fairly serious journalism, notably on civil rights during the civil rights movement, and won two Pulitizers.  One of the Pulitizers was, I think, for a biography of Jackie Gleason.

The book came out in 1994, and it’s been in print ever since.  Which is an interesting thing on several levels.

Let me pass over, for a minute, the fact that Henry is the only person I have ever heard, before I started talking to Robert, who really had a thing about the word “deference.”  And I’m going to get to the deference thing is a minute.

Let me start by saying that the book is not screamingly original.  Most of what Henry has to say–about affirmative action, about “victim’s studies” departments, whatever–has been said a million times before.  It’s just that, these days, sixteen years after the fact, most of the people who say them are also witheringly contemptuous of the high art tradition.

In a way, Henry’s book makes more sense to me than the critiques of much of the contemporary populist right, because I think it hangs together better–it is, in fact, conservatism as I had known it in the pages of National Review in my childhood.  There is something just–confused–about a group of people who both champion the high art tradition and push for gay studies departments at the ivy-covered alma mater, which is what we have now, with the upper middle class liberal-left.

That said, Henry is not, as far as I can tell, a conservative.  He thinks gun rights are only “imagined,” he thinks dislike of homosexuality is mindless bigotry–let’s face it, no conservative organization would have him.  And the Republican Party of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party would vomit him up like bad meat.

The left wouldn’t have been much in love with him, either, though.  If he hadn’t died before publication, he’d probably have had a rough time of it.  Even as it was, a few self-consciously liberal and left reviewers allowed as how Henry didn’t have the courage of his convictions.  He should have just said that other races and sexes besides heterosexual white European males were genetically inferior to those heterosexual white European males.

This always interests me, as a tactic, because it is a sort of self contradiction.  Why is it that people who claim that all human idenity is socially constructed–that intelligence, artistic talent, and the rest is a matter of nurture and not nature–have such a hard time accepting the actual (and predictable) consequences of differences in nurture?

Most African Americans were slaves until 1865, and then burderend with racist law throughout half the country for another hundred years after that.  They were denied significant education in many places.  Is it really surprising that they have not yet produced an African American Shakespeare?  Is the only possible answer to that that there must be something genetically inferior about African Americans?

Most of sub Saharan Africa is a climate-induced tangle of jungle that the rest of the world found it very difficutl to penetrate, therefore cuting off the societies there from intercourse with the wider world.  The climate also made it difficult to preserve buildings, never mind fragile artefacts like manuscripts.  Is it really surprising that no major civilization (on the scale or Greece or Rome or even the Incas) arose in what is now Zimbabwe?  Is the only possible answer to that that there must be something genetically inferior about African peoples?

For some reason, a significant number of people seem to have a problem understanding that “not yet” isn’t the same thing as “not ever possible.”

But although I find most of Henry’s analysis unexceptionable, there is one thing in the book that absolutely took me aback the first time I read it, and it’s something I never forgot.

That was why, when the book came swimming to the surface again the other day, I sat down and reread it. 

It’s on page 135 of the paperback edition I own. 

It’s where he says–in the context of health care rationing–that some lives are just more worth saving than others.

I’ll get back to this. 

It keeps bugging me, and for more reasons than you might think.

Yesterday, I went crazy, looking all over the web for an image I wanted to post here.  Usually, this is not a problem.  I know it isn’t really true that everything is on the Net, but it sometimes seems like that.

In the end, I found only one image, and it’s from the Powell Books page on the very book I’m sort of half-reading in the afternoons.  The URL turned out to be War and Peace, so I shortened it at tinyurl.com, which gave me this:

http://tinyurl.com/2vq57hx

With any luck, it will work. 

What it is is one of the intarsia panels made for the “studiolo” of one Frederigo da Montefeltro, and it exists in the book as an example of the growth of the use of perspective in painting. 

The trick in this case is this:  Frederigo da Montefeltro had only one eye.  And because he had only one eye, what he saw when he looked at that painting was much different from what we see.  The eyes work differently depending on whether we have the use of one or two of them.

I’ve got absolutely no idea if this is true, and I find the writer’s contention that this painting would look “much more impressive” to da Montefeltro than it does to us completely astonishing.  I find it impressive as hell as it is. 

And I’m a little worried about the image that URL leads to, because on my computer you can’t get the whole image up at one time.  You have to scroll.

But here’s the thing–I think the issue of taste is essentially an issue of perspective. That is, different people have different “tastes” in music, painting, literature, sculpture, food, you name it, because they are in some way situated differently.

I am not now talking about the endless drudging nonsense about “sex race class” that has come to substitute for actually understanding literature in some of our college English departments. 

Or maybe what I mean to say is that the “gender race class” thing is nonense not so much because those things don’t in some way factor in to a person’s enjoyment of (or lack of enjoyment of) the arts, but that the way in which these things are conceived in literary theory doesn’t factor in.

I’m falling all over myself here.

The problem with the “gender race class” thing is not that it wants to know what those things have to do with how people respond to the arts, but that it DOESN’T–what “gender race class” theorists do instead is decide beforehand how those things SHOULD matter in the way people respond to the arts, and then try to come up with rationalizations for why that isn’t the way they actually do.

That’s the point at which we all start to get endless lectures about “false consciousness,'” and the saner among up pack our bags and go home.

The problem, of course, is that “gender race class” matter in ways that are more complicated than a politicized analysis can deal with.  With sex, for instance, it’s almost certainly the case that we’re dealing with some things that are at least partially innate.

I’m not an essentialist, but I don’t have to be one to know that if it is true all behavior is socially constructed, Darwin was wrong.  Some differences in “taste” will just be there, because they are.  My older son was four years old the first time he tried escargot.  He ate the entire late in one go.  Some things, we’re just born with.

I don’t think we can change what we inherit in genetics, but I do think we can channel it–in fact, I know we can channel it.  So lived experience, and habituation, are both going to be factors. 

This would give the “gender race class” people their opening, if they actually knew anything about the lived effects of gender, race and class.  I suppose it would be petty of me to note, here, that if these people had spent some time actually reading and understanding the literature they claim to be expert in, they’d have a better chance of getting this right.

But I saw a beautiful example of not getting it right a few weeks ago on a television show called Countdown with Keith Olbermann. 

A man–I think he was an editor at  The Nation, but I’m not sure–at any rate, a guest on the show, went something like, “How do we explain to these people?  We don’t want to take your money and give it to somebody else.  We want to take the banker’s money and give it to you.”

And the guy was convinced that people couldn’t understand this, because he was sure if they did understand it they’d have to be in favor of it.

Which put me in mind of a Josh Thompson country song called “Way Out Here.” 

Which that guy ought to listen to, but won’t. 

The other thing, though, is that it’s fairly obvious that both the innate and the habituated can be overcome, either deliberately because we try to do it or accidentally.  Frderigo da Montefeltro didn’t start out with only one eye.  He lost one in a “jousting accident.”

And even in cases where it can’t be overcome, it can be channeled. 

If we could bring all these things together and actually examine them, we might come to some conclusions about what makes “taste.” 

And that might be interesting.  I’m fascinated by the idea that da Montefeltro saw something different in that painting than I do.   And there’s surely a part of me that would like to understand why some things become enormous best sellers–Chicken Soup for the Soul, for instance. 

But I think what really strikes me in all this is this:

When we talk about taste, we’re not talking about the arts we seem to be referencing.

We’re talking about ourselves.

And what the “gender race class” people in English departments have done–aside from nearly destroy the study of literature–is to find an analytical-sounding way to talk about themselves. 

For all the self-righteous blather about “confronting white skin privelege” and “empowring the other,” what modern college English departments have actually done is to install a system whereby they can hold perpetual lemon sessions.

In case you don’t know what a lemon session is–it’s when everybody in a group gets together to tell X what’s wrong with him.

And you’d think that would be awful. 

And it is, when X doesn’t want to hear it, or when it’s sort of thrust at you out of the blue.

But there are lemon sessions in various groups (like sororities, for instance, and consciousness raising groups) and for all the supposed negativity, it’s something a lot of people actively enjoy.  Hell, they’ll pay money to go to seminars where they know that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

Why?

Because, in the end, there’s one really good thing about a lemon session.

It’s all about you.

Never mind, feeling cynical this morning, I suppose.

I’m going to go off and think about harpsichords.

Well.

Okay.  I feel a lot better than I did yesterday.  I’d say I was getting too old to pull all-nighters, or even mostly all-nighters, but the fact is that I never felt anything but awful when I pulled those in college.  It’s the same with exercise.  Exercixe makes you feel great! all those programs yell at you.  Well, I’ll do it, because it’s good for me, but it made me feel like hell even when I was a lot younger than I am now.  I am not, I suppose, a very physical person.

Anyway–Nabokov and the Philistines.  I don’t know whether to capitalize it or not.  But the idea of the Philistine, and the existence of Philistines, and…but we’ll get there.

First, a slight explanation–the book I’m reading is a collection of essays by Nabokov that existed originally as notes for a class on Russian literatre he gave, I think, at Wellesley.  They’re not polished and amended essays as they would be if Nabakov had intended to see them in print in a journal.

That said, these things are remarkable comprehensive–the one on Tolstoy, which must have taken up several classes, is exhaustive–and they are solidly about the literature.  The only word about politics in them are asides having to do with the terrible mess the Soviets, and their social-consciousness forebearers, have made of the Russian novel.

I think my generation was the last to have English courses like this on the college level.  If they still existed, we’d have a lot more English majors, and a lot less discussion of what the point of studying English literature is.
      
That said,  the essay/lecture on Philistines and Philistinism is one of the shortest in the book and one of the least coherent. 

Nabokov starts by giving the following definition, and giving it as the very first sentence:

“A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.”

As a definition of Philistines and Philistinism–okay, he doesn’t capitalize it; for some reason, I always want to, as if I’m talking about one of those groups of people St. Paul wrote epistles to.

Anyway, as a definition,  this is both unusual and a little inadequate.  It’s also highly ahistorical.  Even when he amends that definition a couple of paragraphs later, by saying:

“Philistine implies not only a collection of stock ideas, but also the use of set phrases, cliches, banalities expressed in faded words.  A true philistine has nothing but these trivial ideas of which he entirely consists.”

Even with this, which declares that in order to be a Philistine, one must be entirely made up of nothing but the trivial and the conventional, there seems to me to be a sort of mushy mess that misses the reality of the real world.

For one thing, in common usage, “philistine” implies an attitude to the arts that is not just indifferent, or in bad taste, but aggressively false–admiring paintings, for isntance, only for how much money they’ll bring at auction.

There are a great many people in the world who would satisfy Nabokov’s definition–or almost would–who have no such attitude to the arts.  Some of them just don’t care one way or the other, and hardly notice.  Some of them have really bad taste–an admiration for wide-eyed children painted on velvet, for instance–but do in fact approach the arts as arts, as valuable in and of themselves. 

For another thing, the definitions as rendered by Nabokov assuming the univerality, both temporally and geographically, of a high value placed on the unique and the nonconformist.

But it is not only not true that all cultures value originality and individuality–most Asian cultures have no use for them at all–but it isn’t even true that Western Civilization always valued these things. 

My little side book these last couple of weeks–the one I keep on the love seat to read snatches of after it’s gotten late and I’m too tired to make sense of linear exposition–has been a big coffee table volume on symbols and symbolism in Renaissance  painting.

And it doesn’t take long to realize that the Renaissance had only a tenuous connection to the entire idea of originality and individuality in art.  In many ways, it held to the Medieval idea that such things are actually likely to make art bad.  Good art expresses eternal truths, not passing notions..

What’s more, the Renaissance artist wasn’t an artist as we know him, but an artisan.  He had a studio full of apprentice and assistant painters who would fill in the detail work after the Master had painted the main figures.  Many of the most famous of Reniassance paintings are “by” one artist or another only by convention–the Sistine ceiling, for instance, is the work of Michaelangelo in conception, and his own painting in the main figures, but the rest was done by employees in his studio and nobody thought there was anything strange about that.

Part of the problem is also that Nabokov in this essay throws out definiton after definition, often at odds in one way or the other with the ones he’s thrown out before.  For instance, he says:

“The character I have in mind when I say “smug vulgarian” is, thus, not the part-time philistine, but the total type, the genteel bourgeois, the complete universal product of triteness and mediocrity.”

But–again in common English usage–a vulgarian is not any of this.  He’s the guy who insists on talking about the color and consistency of h is shit at the dinner table. 

Then there’s that word “bourgeois,” which Nabokov uses as–well, let’s just say not as the rest of us do.  For instance:

“Philistinism is international.  An English duke can be as much of a philistine as an American Shriner or a French bureaucrat or a Soviet citizen.   Then mentality of a Lenin or a Stalin or a Hitler in regard to the arts and the sciences was utterly bourgeois.  A laborer or a coal miner can be just as bourgeois as a banker or a housewife or a Hollywood star.”

What?

This takes “bourgeois” and cuts lit loose from any definition it’s ever had before.  It means neither the rich commoners of French history (the American equivalents would be the Rockefellers, say, or the Roosevelts) nor the solid middle class of American history.  It’s apparently a word for an approach to humane learning, as the phrase used to go–or maybe not, it’s hard to tell.

The odd thing, though, is this–I do think I know what Nabokov is talking about.

One of the problems I’ve been having recently is finding a school for my younger son–not so young now–that both teaches what I want taught (Herodotus, Sophocles, Aristotle, Pliny, etc, etc, etc) and yet is neither run by nor filled with what I’ve come to think of as “those people.”

That “those people” are by and large the people I grew up with, and the people I’ve worked with, for most of my life–well, that’s the kind of thing I moved out of Fairfield County to avoid, and then I failed.

But I did finally come up with what it was that bothered me.  And that is that this is a group of people who cares passionately for the Humanities, for the Great Tradition, for classical education–but as an accessory, like houses built before the Revolutionary War and that little wince of pain when they’re forced to drink ordinary table wine.

In a way, the Great Tradition is for those people what cowboy hats and Southern accents are for country music singers–a badge of identity which it is unnecessary to examine or even to understand.

Those people will quote Shakespeare to you, or Sappho, or Plato–and have absolutely no idea what it is it means. 

My sixteen year old son, reading through an introductory text on the history of philosophy, came to me and announced with absolute glee, “I”ve got it–Bill Clinton is a Sophist.  It all depends on what the meaning of is is.”

Those people will never make that connection, because they don’t bother to actually hear or understand what they’re reading, or seeing, or hearing.   They have season tickets to the ballet, season tickets to the opera, they fill up the front seats at every chamber music concert–but they don’t actually hear music. 

At one point, Nabokov says, of the Philistine:

“He does not much care for pictures, but for the sake of prestige he may hang in his parlor reproductions of Van Gogh’s or Whistler’s respective mothers, although secretly preferring Norman Rockwell.”

But this is wrong.

Those people don’t secretly prefer Norman Rockwell.  They don’t secretly prefer anybody.  If they did, they’d have some relationship with painting. 

Instead, they don’t actually see painting at all.  They are drawn to that kind of painting that works as their badge of identity.  Otherwise than that, paintings have no meaning for them. They can’t even see a painting when it’s right in front of them.  That’s why museums of contemporary art can exhibit dead sharks in urine and draw crowds of paying customers. 

Any half-drunk frat boy at an Aquapaloozza concert, any Biloxi trailer park mama who owns every record Kenny Chesney has ever put out, knows more about music than those people do–because they can hear the music, and do hear it.  Those people attend concerts, which is not the same thing.

I have no idea how people get to be like this.  For me, most of the arts are compelling on their own, so that I have to pay attention to them.  But if you find an art compelling, the chances are that you will not have easily categorizable “taste.”  If you’re really hearing the music you’ll find you like classical and jazz and rock and country and bluegrass and opera and…  If you’re really seeing the painting, you’ll find yourself drawn to Vermeer and Michaelangelo and Hopper and Byzantine icons and….   If you’re really understanding what you read, you’ll like Sophocles and Shakespeare and Stephen King and Ann Radcliffe and Jane Austen and the Hitchhiker’s guides and…

I think, maybe, what Nabokov was talking about was those people, and that he had a problem expressing it because the categories for talking about that phenomenon were hemmed in by the conventions of the Forties and the Fifties, conventions that made it impossible for him to conceive of the real difference between people being not that one likes Vermeer and the other likes Rockwell, but that one like Vermeer AND Rockwell and the other doesn’t see the painting at all, but chooses on the basis of what will make him feel like he belongs to the “right” set of people. 

And with any luck, that made sense.

So. 

Last night, the entire state was under a severe thunderstorm watch except us.  Which sounds good, until you realize that the facilities for all our utilities are someplace else, in another county which was getting the storms.  Lots of them.

The result was that our power kept going on and off.  This messed with the air conditioning, and in this house air conditioning isn’t about temperature any near as much as it is about allergies.

This didn’t bother me, because, quite frankly, I was asleep.  Greg, however, kept getting up every time the air conditioning went off, and finally he decided to call the electric company to see what was happening.

Now, there’s nothing particulary wrong with this.  The electric company has an automated line just for people who are angsting out over outages.  And Greg called that. 

The problem was, he called from his phone, and not mine. That meant the system didn’t recognize the number–it has mine, after all, not his–and started asking him a series of questions.  This is a voice operated system, not a touch tone one, so, of course, it would ask questions, Greg would answer, and the system would not be able to make out what he said.

So, eventually, it shunted him off to a real person–which, at three and four in the morning, is going to be somebody who is only there for dire emergencies like downed wires across roads or people who have been electricuted or electrical fires.

And he then proceeded to talk to this person in as loud a voice as possible for minute after minute on end–waking up the rest of us in the process.

Meaning that I’m a mess here.  I haven’t had any sleep (one thing and another, I didn’t get to sleep until midnight last night), I can’t see straight, and I’m worse than usual at catching the typos.

Which means I’m not going to get to th is definition of “philistine” today either.

I did think, though, that I’d try to respond to the thing about Dostoyevski, and maybe a little about poor Constance  Garnett.

I know that Nabokov thought Dostoyevski had forced and unnatural dialog and cartoon characters–but Dostoyevski’s books do not read that way to me.

Even when I first read them (and I read them at around the age of ten or so, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamozov), they felt entirely real.  When I got older, they felt not just realistic and true to life, but a virtual field guide to real people in the real world, especially in the real world of American academia in the late Sixties and early Seventies.

Dostoyevski is one of the great chroniclers of self-styled revolutionaries and the tourists at their revolutions.  Any one of his political characters would be perfectly at home in any sociology department in any second-tier university from New Jersey to Oregon.. 

Is their language sometimes forced and stilted?  Yup, and it’s worse now than it was in Dostoyevski’s time.  At least Doestoyevski didn’t have to put up with lectures about how the hegemonic heteronormative discourse represses the transgressive hermeneutic of the developing world.

Or, you know, something.

It’s Tolstoy’s characters that seem to me to be cartoonish, deliberate constructs rather than organically grown, overdone, overwrought, and artificial.

And, like I said, that could be the translations I’ve read.  The first of those were by Constance Garnett–and would have been; in the Fifties, that was what Americans had–and Nabokov definitely does hate Garnett.  And since he speaks Russian and I don’t, I could hardly argue with his evaluation of her talents.

But I wonder if something else is going on here.  I wonder if some of this has to do with time.

I wonder if there are some writers who feel silly and false to their contemporaries because they are writing about things that are not present to most of those contemporaries–about things and people far enough removed from the everyday and ordinary for the time to feel unbelievable.

And if, time having gone on, we reach a point at which those out of the ordinary people become a larger part of society, so that representations of them in literature no longer feel wrong or artificial–because the real-life counterparts are all around us, and the characters ring true.

I feel like I’m wrapping myself up in verbiage here.  

But I think the point is this–one of the reasons why Dostoyevski’s characters don’t feel false or cartoonish to me is that I know their real life counterparts.  I know these people in droves.  And Dostoyevski had a very good ear for what they’re like, for the way they think and the way they behave and the way they speak.

Or, at least, he does in the translations I’ve read.

I wonder if it’s possible that writers can write well and naturally, but be in the wrong place at the wrong time for the narratives they’re presenting–so that they get written off as less than first rate until the culture changes and the things they’re writing about become part of the everyday experience of everyday people.

At which point, they begin to look like prophets. 

I’ve actually got one major Dostoyevski novel I haven’t read yet.  I picked it up in hardcover for less than what most paperbacks cost because it was one of the Barnes and Noble editions.

It’s The Idiot, in the Constance Garnett translation.

It also weighs a ton and scares me, so it may be a while before I get around to it.

I’m going to go see if I can put enough tea in me to fake being awake.

Hi.

This isn’t really the post that was meant to follow yesterday’s post.  I’m having one of those days when I have to do thirty gazillion things right away, so I wasn’t going to post at all.

But some interesting things came up in the comments, and I thought I’d cover them, more or less.

My actual interest in all this is in the idea of the “philistine,” which begins with Nabokov’s short essay/speech on it in the book I’m reading, but that’s going to take a little time.  I’ll get there tomorrow, or over the weekend.

In passing, however–

1) Mab is absolutely right about what Nabokov SAID was his understanding of Humbert Humbert.  And I’m one of those people who thinks that we should take what an artist says he means and what he says he’s trying to do with seriousness.  After all, he’s the one most likely to know.

The problem, however, is that he’s not always right, and not always on to himself about his own deepest motives.   I think it was Byron who said that Milton “was of the Devil’s party, and didn’t know it.”  Milton certainly did not think he was promoting the Devil’s faction, but Lucifer remains the only truly vivid character in Paradise Lost.

In the end, we can only take the text in front of us.  It is what it is, and somewhere there will come a time when we no longer have access to what the author thought he was doing.

And Lolita is, taken as it exists in front of us, a brilliant but highly skewed novel.

Second, Mab is also right about what Nabokov SAID were the reasons for his preference for Tolstoy over Dostoyevski.

Here, I’ve got two problems.

The first is that the essay/set of lecture notes on Dostoyevski in the book I’m reading is absolutely lunatic.  With every other writer Nabokov deals with–Tolstoy, yes, but also Chekov, Gogol, Pushkin and Gorki–he presents an evenhanded analysis.  With Dostoyevski, he spends page after page after page calling the man names, declaring all the novels sentimental dreck that shouldn’t ever be called literature, trashing Dostoyevski for everything from his epilepsy to his preferred form of Christianity–and then he gets Crime and Punishment wrong. 

The whole thing is a disply of visceral emotion, not a literary evaluation.  And I’d say it probably means that there was more going on with Nabokov and Dostoyevski than he comes out and admits to.

The second thing here is the idea that Tolstoy’s characters are “more realistic” than Dostoyevski’s.

All I can say is–not to me.  Tolstoy seems to me to be “realistic” only in the sense that the old noir hard boiled writers were–that is, he presents people as inherently and unredeemably and nearly automatically corrupt.

I know a lot of people think that this is more “realistic” than writing about characters who are good and decent–but it always seems to me to be just the mirror image of sappy sweet Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm kinds of things.

This definitely collides, for me, with the way Tolstoy portrays women–not only in the nearly constant theme of female adultery, but in his near obsession with the pains of childbirth.

And it doesn’t help any that I know, from what I’ve seen of his ideas of religion, that Tolstoy opposed the introduction of anesthetics in childbirth as somehow “inauthentic,” or something.

“The Kreutzer Sonata” is a brilliant short story whose underlying sense of the nature of human beings is as foul as a garbage dump.  I don’t find it realistic.  I find it disturbing.

But.

And it’s a big but.

Like most Americans, I have read the Russians only in translation.  I don’t read Russian.  I probably never will.

And that brings up the possibility that Tolstoy and Dostoyevski as I experience them are not what they would be in I could read them in Russian.

Translation can have an enormous effect on the experience of reading any writer, even if the translation in question is a good, solid and accurate one.  I think it explains why the French have always considered Edgar Allan Poe a genius while English and American readers winced at the overblown style.  It is always possible that, in French translation, the stylistic oddnesses have been corrected.

There’s an essay on translation at the end of this Nabokov book I’m reading.  I’ve been interested in getting to it.

But I do have to say that this whole thing may be nothing but the result of the differences in the texts that we’ve all read, as I assume that Mab, like Nabokov, can read Russian novels in Russian.

And now to do forty pointless things that I have to do if my life isn’t going to come apart.