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The “Gettysburg” “address”

June 23, 2010 in language and ethics, literature, politics | No comments

“Fourscore and seven years ago, our “fathers”—with half the population excluded from the start—“brought forth”—with the dubious, always questionable assumption of “progress”—itself a value judgment about the meaning of history, which opens up the inherently dubious notion of “history” itself—“a “new” “nation”—a double double scare quote, with the claim of “new” at once instantly erasing the presence of all indigenous peoples and affirming the utterly questionable notion that anything can be qualitatively or authentically “new,” which again calls the very notion of “history” into question—and the word “nation” presupposing a commonality that may be nothing more than a kind of conspiracy of consent, a conglomeration of power meant to enrich the few and marginalize almost everyone else—“conceived”—privileging the idea that anything so questionable as a “nation” could be made up, as if out of nothing—“in “Liberty”—

Well, that’s just too much. We’re going to have to stop right here. We can’t even begin to get into “dedicated to the proposition”—we’ll let that pass—that “all”—“all”? Really? “men”—again—“are “created”—by whom? By what? For what purpose? To what end?—“equal.” Yes. Stop right here.

After the seminar

Greil Marcus, an editor of the New Literary History of America, in a piece called “Scare Quotes are the Enemy”

What Marcus’s parody captures about bien-pensant readings  is their dainty horror at the discovery that people in the past did not think like Us. Which is odd in a generation that rabbits on about the Other.  Texts are produced only to be decontaminated. It wasn’t us, cry the critics, we didn’t silence the Other. It was Them.

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Jobbing English

June 7, 2010 in literature, universities | No comments


Studying English taught us how to write and think better, and to make articulate many of the inchoate impulses and confusions of our post-adolescent minds. We began to see, as we had not before, how such books could shape and refine our thinking. We began to understand why generations of people coming before us had kept them in libraries and bookstores and in classes such as ours. There was, we got to know, a tradition, a historical culture, that had been assembled around these books. Shakespeare had indeed made a difference—to people before us, now to us, and forever to the language of English-speaking people.

Finding pleasure in such reading, and indeed in majoring in English, was a declaration at the time that education was not at all about getting a job or securing one’s future. In comparison with the pre-professional ambitions that dominate the lives of American undergraduates today, the psychological condition of students of the time was defined by self-reflection, innocence, and a casual irresponsibility about what was coming next.

William M. Chace, ‘The Decline of the English Department’ , The American Scholar online

My stress, my experience. All very well for me, because I went on to teach it.  But for all the others, while there’s no evidence that their degrees in English led to blasted lives, the traditional liberal writ had long ceased to run. English Departments at their height – as Chace points out, a height briefly occupied in the middle years of the 20th century -  were preparing students for a world which no longer existed.

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Lolita in Tehran

May 25, 2010 in literature, values | No comments

A belated cheer for Reading Lolita in Tehran. Azar Nafisi’s book combines memoir with an intimate account of reading for survival in the Mullahs’ Iran.  Nafisi is an academic specialising in fiction. She believes passionately in ‘art as a human complication’ (James’s phrase). Complication as we encounter it in the best Western fiction is always intolerable to the orthodox. Some of us have lived through this conflict – in very comfortable circumstances – in respect to the absolutism of the Left, and later of the women’s movement (Ti-Grace Atkinson’s ‘burn all the books’).

Nafisi describes how, in a class discussion of Daisy Miller, one Islamist declares simply:  Daisy is immoral and ought to be killed. In this milieu, ambiguity and irony become heretical, to suspend judgment immoral, to doubt, a crime. Read the rest of this entry »

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Sour American Notes

April 16, 2010 in literature | No comments

Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic brings out the limits of Dickens’s celebrated ‘compassion’. Taking up a suggestion of John Forster,  Dickens’s friend and first biographer, Hitchens  suggests that Dickens responded most powerfully to the kinds of injustice and deprivation he experienced in childhood. When it came to other races and other places, however, he exhibits mean-mindedness and plain brutality.

. . . radicals and reformers in mid-19th-century England were to be defined above all as sympathizers with the American Revolution and with the cause of the Union in the Civil War. Dickens was scornful of the first and hostile to the second. His exiguous chapter on slavery in American Notes was lazily annexed word-for-word from a famous abolitionist pamphlet of the day, and employed chiefly to discredit the whole American idea. But when it came to a fight on the question, he was on balance sympathetic to the Confederate states, which he had never visited, and made remarks about Negroes that might have shocked even the pathologically racist Carlyle. I had not understood, before. . . that the full title, American Notes for General Circulation, was a laborious pun on the supposed bankruptcy of the whole “currency” of the United States.

It’s obvious from the non-fiction that Dickens was no kind of systematic thinker. He lived with moral muddles, contradictions and deep-rooted prejudice. That’s there in the work as well (no Flaubertian defences here) and especially in the way his denouements so often depend on the figure of the benign capitalist – the Brothers Cheeryble descending on a machine.  His novels are full of vividly-created characters and types from the growing lower-middle class. This was new. But as I read him, Dickens had no interest in people getting above themselves. American Notes is full of condescension.

Is he then a radical novelist at all? Perhaps so . . .

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Dickens: American Notes

March 28, 2010 in literature | No comments

As to daily news, there is no dearth of that commodity.  This
passenger is reported to have lost fourteen pounds at Vingt-et-un
in the saloon yesterday; and that passenger drinks his bottle of
champagne every day, and how he does it (being only a clerk),
nobody knows.  The head engineer has distinctly said that there
never was such times – meaning weather – and four good hands are
ill, and have given in, dead beat.  Several berths are full of
water, and all the cabins are leaky.  The ship’s cook, secretly
swigging damaged whiskey, has been found drunk; and has been played
upon by the fire-engine until quite sober.  All the stewards have
fallen down-stairs at various dinner-times, and go about with
plasters in various places.  The baker is ill, and so is the
pastry-cook.  A new man, horribly indisposed, has been required to
fill the place of the latter officer; and has been propped and
jammed up with empty casks in a little house upon deck, and
commanded to roll out pie-crust, which he protests (being highly
bilious) it is death to him to look at.  News!  A dozen murders on
shore would lack the interest of these slight incidents at sea.

Dickens, making a rough passage to America in 1842. The propped-up pastry cook I’m sure was so, almost as if they were expecting the writer whose books are full of such stretchers. I’m enjoying American Notes partly for these bits, for the sudden flash of that wild imagination.

But mostly, Dickens here is the journalist and Victorian ‘improver’, and too well informed about how much at home needed improving to patronise the New World.  In Boston, he diligently tours prisons, asylums and orphanages. In an institution for the blind he comes across Laura Bridgman, blind, deaf and dumb, who was taught to read and write by the extraordinary Dr Robert Howe.  She was, says Wikipedia,’ the first deaf-blind American child to gain a significant education in the English language’. Dickens gives us Howe’s own touching description of their work.

It’s not all blue-book, however. When he goes to hear a famous preacher address a congregation of sailors the novelist wakes up and begins to take notes.

‘Who are these – who are they – who are these fellows? where do
they come from?  Where are they going to? – Come from!  What’s the
answer?’ – leaning out of the pulpit, and pointing downward with
his right hand:  ‘From below!’ – starting back again, and looking
at the sailors before him:  ‘From below, my brethren.  From under
the hatches of sin, battened down above you by the evil one.
That’s where you came from!’ – a walk up and down the pulpit:  ‘and
where are you going’ – stopping abruptly:  ‘where are you going?
Aloft!’ – very softly, and pointing upward:  ‘Aloft!’ – louder:
‘aloft!’ – louder still:  ‘That’s where you are going – with a fair
wind, – all taut and trim, steering direct for Heaven in its glory,
where there are no storms or foul weather, and where the wicked
cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.’

Did he take notes? Perhaps the years of Hansard reporting refined an already wonderful memory. Writing does that.

The book is not short of time’s ironies:

In all the public establishments of America, the utmost courtesy
prevails.  Most of our Departments are susceptible of considerable
improvement in this respect, but the Custom-house above all others
would do well to take example from the United States.

So far I’m enjoying this a lot more than the last book-length account I read by a visitor to the US. This was Bernard-Henri Lévy’s American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville. I read it as it came out in The Atlantic with disbelief (that someone had paid big money for this crap) and envy (of the expense account). It was fatal to the book even to think about Toqueville, let alone to re-open Democracy in America. Garrison Keillor’s review in the NYT seemed to me dead-on, substance as well as tone – the patroniser patronised into the ground. But intellectuals in America lined up to piss on Keillor. Their burden was that the NYT had given this Important Book to a middlebrow writer.  The newly-Americanised Christopher Hitchens called him ‘a vulgar jerk’.  OK. My book on America will be called The US: 400 Years of the Cultural Cringe.

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Two glosses on Howard Jacobson

February 7, 2010 in literature | No comments

Howard Jacobson, in his Independent column a while back

It is a universal law that people give a bad account of themselves when they speak. They cannot find the words for what they truly feel. At a loss, they say what someone else has said, or what they think they should say, and end up parodying what is in their hearts.

Hence the need for literature.

As with what they speak, so with what they hear. Which is why you will find so many intelligent people prepared to listen to and read material that is beneath them. It is as though aesthetically and linguistically we lag behind our own natures. Thus we see adults who have thought long and felt deeply squandering themselves on Harry Potter.

Hence the need to teach literature.

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