22 posts tagged “american”

Melville, Herman. "The Piazza," "Benito Cereno," "The Encantadas," "The Bell-Tower." In Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories. New York: Bantam, 1984 (1856).

This Billy Budd edition is rounded out with the entire contents (minus "The Lightning-Rod Man") of the only story collection Melville published in his lifetime. The famous ones are "Bartleby," which was never a huge favorite of mine, and "Benito Cereno," which what do you say about "Benito Cereno," but "The Piazza" is one of the weirdest versions of pastoral I've ever read; the whimsical narrator superimposed on a scene of actual hardship strikes (and strikes hard) that difficult, uneasy note that the early Wordsworth is always trying for. "The Encantadas" is an amazing series of sketches on the Galapagos islands with a lot of quotes from Spenser; Melville allegorizes the Galapagos tortoise with no less ingenuity, though at far less length, than he allegorizes his whale, and then there are these sorts of inimitable moments:

If now you desire the population of Albemarle, I will give you, in round numbers, the statistic, according to the most reliable estimates made upon the spot:

Men..............none
Anteaters......unknown
Man-haters....unknown
Lizards.........500,000
Snakes........500,000
Spiders.....10,000,000
Salamanders....unknown
Devils...........unknown

Making a clean total of.........11,000,000

exclusive of an incomputable host of fiends, anteaters, man-haters, and salamanders.

Rorabaugh, W.J. Berkeley at War: the 1960s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

I had to do a little fact-checking for the fiction. (To clarify: I would not describe this project as being in any way about the 1960s.) It's more reasonably written than that cover picture would lead you to believe, although a lot of the gestures toward scholarly objectivity were interpreted by at least one previous reader as a betrayal of the Cause, prompting large pink marginalia - "Um... no! Asshole!...  a) you're biased and b) you got there after the fact... Fuck you Rorabaugh, you're a bitch!" I assume this person is a careful student of Plato's Phaedrus and likes to pick fights with books because they don't talk back.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature and Essays: First Series. In Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte. New York: Library of America, 1983 (1836, 1841).

Mooxyjoo was right about Nature being the one to check out. Yes sir. Love that prose, even lacking his version of faith. The Essays are awesome when they are about things I find awesome, like Circles. I am not quite as enamored of Heroism, and so lack of faith occasionally becomes a problem.

It is told of Brutus, that when he fell on his sword, after the battle of Philippi, he quoted a line of Euripides,--"O virtue! I have followed thee through life, and I find thee at last but a shade."* I doubt not the hero is slandered by this report. The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness.

Maybe it was juvenile to find myself siding with (possibly apocryphal) Euripides and (historical construction of) Brutus rather than with Emerson? But dear Ralph Waldo, you would not want me to smother the instinctive counsel of my outleaping heart?

----

*I didn't remember this line from Euripides offhand and couldn't find a version of it anywhere - maybe from one of the lost plays, if there's anything at all to the story? These are some other versions of what Brutus said:

"O Virtue, thou art but an empty name!" - Helvetius, De l'esprit
"O Virtue! I sought thee as a substance, but I find thee an empty name!" -Godwin, Caleb Williams
"After taking breath for a little time, he cast his eyes up to heaven, that was all spangled with stars; he repeated a line from Euripides, containing a wish to the Gods, 'that guilt should not pass in this life without punishment.' To this he added another from the same poet: 'O virtue! thou empty name, I have worshipped thee as a real good, but thou art only the slave of fortune.'" -Oliver Goldsmith, The Roman History

The original source for all this seems to be the Roman History of Dio Cassius, composed in Greek circa 200 AD, whose book 47, chapter 49 reads (in one English version):

Brutus, who had reached in flight a steep and lofty spot,
undertook to break through in some way to the camp. In this he was
unsuccessful, and on learning that some of his soldiers had made terms
with the victors he had no further hope, but despairing of safety and
disdaining capture he himself also took refuge in death. He uttered aloud
this sentence of Heracles:

  "Unhappy Virtue, thou wert but a name, while I,
  Deeming thy godhead real, followed thee on,
  Who wert but Fortune's slave."

Then he called one of the bystanders to kill him. 

According to our translator Herbert Baldwin Forster, these lines appear in no extant play. But only one Herakles play by Euripides survives; there might have been more.

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Second ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983 (1961).

His quest is sympathetic, his trajectory engaging; a corrective to Percy Lubbock's dogmatisms about ambiguity and dramatic presentation leads into--not really an attack on modern fiction, but certainly a questioning of its premises. What do we lose with all this ambiguity, with authors refusing to make clear their ethical norms? Is Stephen Dedalus a pompous ass or not? Of course Booth knows that Joyce's answer, if you cornered him, would be a complicated version of "yes and no," but something about that seems unfair; Booth wants the cards on the table. The oddity is his assumption that authors really are holding those kind of cards, akin to the oddity of his insistence that fiction is mediated by language but not made of language--that it is fundamentally made of character, and that the linguistic mode of apprehending character is in the final analysis somehow ancillary.

The preference for human figures over linguistic structures is also evident in the implied authors and implied audiences and undramatized narrators and so on which are such a famous part of this book. As with the special case of the Arranger in Ulysses, such theoretical entities have always struck me as versions of the luminiferous aether, but I did just run across a quote from J.M. Bernstein's Philosophy of the Novel that at least explains the need to postulate them. In criticizing Genette's rather different system, Bernstein says that Genette can't imagine a non-individual subjectivity, and in a weird way that makes sense for Booth too. Given that novelistic narration does contains values that are bound up in the life of the mind, if you have a picture of the mind as self-subsistent and self-enclosed then of course you'll wind up inventing a bunch of rei cogitantes to back up that narration. On the other, if you can accept that our attitudes toward novels can piggyback off our attitudes toward people without actually conjuring up such people, then the whole distressing crowd of specters fades away.

Pippin, Robert B. Henry James and Modern Moral Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Oh hell, he makes a lot of claims that I had been wanting to make, in some version, and he makes them really well.

Although James, like many other late-nineteenth-century writers, understands his historical context as undeniably empty of the large moral frameworks and categories and typologies within which intelligible human engagement and understanding were formerly possible, it is still the case that the way his novels and stories work, come to engage and grip us, would not be explicable were he not to have succeeded in establishing something like the necessity, the practical unavoidability, of the moral categories his narratives call forth. While much of this moral dimension involves the importance of the possibility of one's actions being justifiable to those whom such actions affect (James's frequent word is being "squared"), the criteria of such acceptance or mutual recognition have nothing to do with natural law, the wisdom of tradition, the approval of the community, religious scripture or religious feeling, pure practical reason, the resolution of class conflict, or some benchmark like a phronimos, an experienced man of practical wisdom. In effect, all the major characters are walking a high wire with lots of normative turbulence but without any safety net, dependent wholly on each other and their own talk and negotiations and perceptions for balance. There is plenty of "high modernism" here, in other words, replete with absent gods, and so many other absent minor divinities like mankind, progress, and happiness or prosperity. Yet there is also no metaphysical boredom, no nihilism, no high-culture nostalgia (with America simplistically demonized as kulturlos modernity), none of the "secularized" Christianity of Dickens or George Eliot, not even Conradean stoicism, no symboliste new religions. The young - Milly Theale, Ralph Touchett - die innocently, unjustly, but no one raises any fists to God.... With James we have begun to settle down in the only wilderness left, "inside," but without a sense of teleological, progressive, developmental stages of success or any road map or goal; we have only the endless chatter and irresolution and revisions and re-revision of the later modern urban world. Even so, perhaps just because so, some sort of real tranquility is intimated, some moral tone in the late novels especially, in some way more than resignation, pessimism, or skepticism, is struck.

The specifics are as good as the generalities. Pippin lays out what Edmund Wilson misses in The Turn of the Screw, what Eve Sedgwick misses in "The Beast in the Jungle," what Martha Nussbaum misses in The Golden Bowl. Of course he doesn't answer all the questions he raises - they're big questions - but he's talking in the right terms.

James, Henry. The Awkward Age. New York: Penguin, 1966 (1899).

After some initial casting about, the motor for the plot resolves into an older man's offer of a healthy financial bequest to a younger man on the condition of a certain marriage taking place. The Tragic Muse had a similar situation, but this time around the matter is treated with a great deal more hesitation and indirection; for one thing, a point is made of never mentioning the sum, so that it joins Milly Theale's mysterious illness and Lambert Strether's mysterious manufactured item in the list of Crucial Jamesian Unspeakables. On the level of form, the strategy has something to do with modernist ideas of purity: factoring out the contingent. On the level of plot, it has something to do with complete terror of being conditioned by the material world.

James, Henry. The Other House. New York: NYRB Classics, 1999 (1896).

This is a good way to read a Henry James play without reading a Henry James play. It's his first novel after five years spent in an unsuccessful attempt to conquer the theatre (Oscar Wilde, that unclean beast, had captured the public heart) and is taken from a scenario originally intended as a three-act play. James would pull this adaptation trick more than once, and the results could be pretty awkward, but this one has its merits; after a clunky first act (excuse me, "first book") designed to get the machinery going, the melodrama plays out with brio. The style betrays its origins - mostly dialogue, with interspersed sentences that read like stage directions, stitched together with periodic paragraphs of Jamesian introspection - but somehow it does serve as a forerunner (a "precedent," James calls it in his notebooks) to the late style. I need to do more work to figure out how.
 

Edel, Leon. Henry James: A Life. New York: HarperCollins, 1987.

See here on irresponsible psychologizing biography that turns the work into a code for the life; how many sentences do we need along the lines of "Maisie's confusion is James's own?" That quibble aside, it's a nice long readable & informative ground against which to place the figure of "one's" particular Jamesian interests, if "one" has particular Jamesian interests. The early chapters gave me the uncomfortable prickling feeling that I often get when reading about young writers; the later chapters calmed me with the sense of long life.

Brooks, Peter. Henry James Goes to Paris. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.

This has been getting recent attention in the TLS and elsewhere, so I'll just add that it's the rare book of literary criticism I would happily recommend even to people who aren't writing a dissertation on or otherwise obsessed with its subject. I like Brooks in general, and especially like him on James; there's also lots of fun stuff on French literature (even if one doesn't learn much new about Flaubert, the copious citations from Bouvard et Pécuchet are a delight in themselves). The last page also has an amazing biographical tidbit that I hadn't known about, and which I'd hate to spoil.

James, Henry. The Tragic Music. New York: Library of America, 1989 (1890).

This one gave me a bad dream where I was running around the house screaming about the mediocrity of my own talent; but that's my problem and not the book's. Of all the meditations on art and life I've seen from James - or anyone, really - this is one of the best; it manages to treat the struggle and sacrifice of the vocation without lapsing into self-pity or cheesy Romantic notions of inner torment. The book contains both an aesthete and a working artist, but they aren't the same person; and at the end of the book, having served as a necessary goad, the aesthete vanishes ("like a symbolic personage"), leaving the artist his lot of daily work, not poetry but sober prose.

There are three or four other principal threads in the book, all done just as well - but I'm not such a pedant as to go through them all.