Alan Jacobs

Represent

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before coffee

A note for those of you who don’t look at my micro.blog: I have deleted my TinyLetter account and moved my newsletter to buttondown.email. If you have already subscribed through TinyLetter, you should also be subscribed to the new one. If you have not subscribed, you may do so here. 

This is a nice — not a great, but a nice — profile of one of my heroes, Donald Knuth, but it does have an odd little moment: 

Dr. Knuth lives in Stanford, and allowed for a Sunday visitor. That he spared an entire day was exceptional — usually his availability is “modulo nap time,” a sacred daily ritual from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. He started early, at Palo Alto’s First Lutheran Church, where he delivered a Sunday school lesson to a standing-room-only crowd. Driving home, he got philosophical about mathematics. 

Hmmm, isn’t that interesting? Knuth is the deepest and most wide-ranging of computer scientists; plus, “many consider Dr. Knuth's work on the TeX computer typesetting system to be the greatest contribution to typography since Gutenberg”; and he’s a Sunday-school teacher? Might it not be worth our time to explore that a little bit? Apparently not. 

But if you, unlike the NYT, wanted to explore these matters, then you might take a look at the book of calligraphy and commentary that Knuth put together called 3:16: Bible Texts Illuminated; or, if you’re really interested, listen to or read his lectures on religion and computer science, Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About. 

first outline of some ideas to be developed later

The long-standard account of literary modernism posits a kind of Heroic Age of High Modernism marked by a series of titanic masterpieces by writers of fiction — Joyce, Proust, Mann — and large bodies of revolutionary poetic work by Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Rilke, and so on. One might add to this the writers of smaller fictions who serve as a kind of bridge linking the poets and the epic chroniclers: Woolf, Kafka, and so on. The goal of these writers, again in the standard account, is to produce what Wallace Stevens called “supreme fictions”: comprehensive accounts of experience by which experience might be grasped. The unnamed singer in Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West” might be seen as the model and aspiration of all the High Modernists.

In this account, the heroic age effectively concludes with the publication of Mann’s The Magic Mountain in 1924, or at the latest with the appearance of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse in 1927. Yes, there are a few stragglers: Yeats’s late poetry, Finnegans Wake, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Endgame, Pound’s endlessly unfinished Cantos — perhaps Eliot’s Four Quartets, though those might better be seen as a repudiation of modernism than a fulfillment of it. But by the late 1920s the torch was being passed to a next generation, a passing that may be said to begin with the (private) publication of Auden’s first small book of poems in 1928, and may be said to end with he death of Samuel Beckett in 1989.

I’d like to argue that even if this standard narrative bears a lot of truth, something else happens that has not been widely noticed: the shifting of the ambitions of High Modernism into genres other than the novel, the epic, the lyric. Here are the last great High Modernist masterpieces and their genres:

• Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941, historical travelogue)
• Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (1946, literary history)
• David Jones, Anathemata (1952, fragmented collage)
• Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1955, memoir)
• Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (1971, literary/art criticism)

I really do think that The Pound Era is the last achievement of High Modernism, and not the least in that company. It’s a really great book. Kenner’s day job as an English professor misleads us: he should be thought of not (or not primarily) in the context of academic literary criticism, but rather as a writer, like the writers he writes about.

The way in which literary history and criticism can extend and develop modernism is suggested by Colin Burrow, in his introduction to a recent reissue of Ernst Robert Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages:

This particular book certainly is a world. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages belongs with Frank Kermode’s Sense of an Ending and Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis as one of the three most inspiring works of literary criticism written in the twentieth century. All three of these works demonstrate a kind of literary criticism that involves looking for the large patterns and histories behind a wide range of texts, and which requires the critic to work across large swathes of time and national boundaries. All three books also combine that breadth of vision with the philologist’s microscopic concern for detail.

As will be clear, I think Burrow ought to add The Pound Era to his list, but I like the list, and I like what he says about the particular kind of greatness those books embody. Those authors’ ambitions, and the skills that underwrite such ambitions, are closely related to those than enabled Ulysses, the Cantos, and the longer poems of Stevens. (The Sense of an Ending, as Kermode freely admits, is Stevens modulated into critical prose.)

But why did High Modernism end in 1971? why have there not been further pursuits of its distinctive ambitions? Kenner himself makes a fascinating suggestion, though it is only a suggestion, in his book The Mechanic Muse: “Technology alters our sense of what the mind does, what are its domains, how characterized and bounded.”

In this book he associates the work of some of the great modernists with particular technologies: Eliot with the telephone and its “disembodied voices,” Pound with the typewriter and its techniques of spacing, Joyce with the print shop (and especially, though not exclusively, that of the newspaper). “There’s a real connection, in short, between literary Modernism and what Richard Cork has called The Second Machine Age: the age, say 1880 to 1930, that saw machines come clanking out of remote drear places (Manchester, Birmingham) to storm the capitals and shape life there.”

What the telephone, the typewriter, and the print shop in the early 20th century have in common, says Kenner, is that they are socially transformative but also transparent — you can watch them and see, at least generally, how they work.

What starts happening in the middle of the century, in the aftermath of Turing’s work on computable numbers and Claude Shannon’s contributions to information theory, is the disembodiment of information, its removal to an impenetrable, unobservable digitally-generated world. And Kenner sees this transformation encoded in the work of Beckett, for whose characters information, or what wants to be information, is increasingly detached from all material contexts, social and technological alike. Thus, says Kenner in an especially brilliant moment, you can take a sentence our of a Beckett novel and readily turn it into computer code, in this case Pascal:

(In candor, Kenner admits that while this is “reasonably idiomatic Pascal, … if you’re fluent in the language you’ll have noticed that it doesn’t give the computer anything to do.” Which perhaps makes it even more Beckettesque.)

At the outset of the book, Kenner notes that

High Modernism did not outlast transparent technology. Beckett, its last master, already carries it into the intangible realm of information theory. And Beckett, it’s become commonplace to say, is a bridge to the so-called Post-Modern. That is: to our present world of enigmatic “text,” or foregrounded codes and redundancies, of microchips through which what moves may be less interesting than the process of moving it elegantly. All of that absorbs, in Silicon Valley and at MIT, intelligence of a rarified order. It’s another subject.

A subject Kenner does not take up in The Mechanic Muse, or indeed elsewhere. But what a prodigious suggestion! One might anticipate an argument going something like this:

In an especially beautiful poem, Richard Wilbur speaks of Creation as a manifold word in which we read ourselves: “What should we be without / The dolphin’s arc, the dove’s return, // These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?” But what if this is true of our technologies as well? What if we require, in order to stimulate deep reflection, technologies that are transparent to us, or at least translucent? It is already widely understood that the opacity of our technological order has socio-political consequences — see, for instance, this reflection by James Bridle on "the wider, networked effects of individual and corporate actions accelerated by opaque, technologically augmented complexity” — but what if it has imaginative consequences as well, that is, what if it depletes imagination altogether? In that case, then what we write produce “may be less interesting” than the code that makes the transmission of our writing possible. In that case the next book for us to read will be Vikram Chandra’s Geek Sublime. 

But Kenner — a man shaped and formed by older tools but preternaturally attentive to newer ones — did not live to make that argument. And I am not inclined to make it myself, in large part because I have been instructed by David Edgerton that old technologies, old technological environments, do not simply go away when new ones arrive. But still, I might hazard a thesis like this: As people grow more fully immersed in opaque technologies, their work becomes progressively less interesting than the work of (a) those whose work remains responsive to transparent technologies and (b) those who created the opaque technologies. 

But the question remains: might it be for people to contract and order their technological environments in such a way that the ambitions of High Modernism might be living ones for them? I’m not sure. But this much I do know: If there are such people, few very, if any, of us know who they are.

CODA: In the very last of the hundreds and hundreds of letters, one thousand eight hundred pages of letters, gathered in this two-volume set, Hugh Kenner types to Guy Davenport: “Are you still non-tech, or have you by any chance an e-mail address by now?”

Current status

In 1878 a man named William Barnes published a book called An Outline of English Speech-Craft. “Speech-craft" is a word Barnes prefers to “grammar” because “grammar” is not an English word but a Greek one. Barnes’ self-chosen quixotic task — as outlined in his Preface Fore-Say — is to describe English speech-craft using only English words. The task is quixotic because linguists and lexicographers and grammarians typically use words borrowed from Latin and (less often) Greek. They speak of prepositions and participles, of the nominative and the subjunctive, of transitive and intransitive. Here are some of Barnes’s alternative terms — I’ll leave it to you to guess what Latinate terms they are meant to replace:

• speech-breathing
• breath-penning
• pitches of suchness
• outreaching
• unoutreaching
• time-taking
• thought-wording
• sundriness

3rd Sunday of Advent, 16th December 2018

Old Testament: Zephaniah 3.14-20

New Testament: Phil.4.4-7

Gospel: Luke 3.7-18

And the crowds asked [John]…’What then should we do?’ [Luke 3]

Today is a day for joy. Its traditional name is ‘Gaudete Sunday’, which you could translate as ‘Rejoice Sunday’. It gets its name from the first line of the New Testament reading: ‘Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say ‘Rejoice!’’ That is Paul’s instruction to the people of Philippi; that is what he enjoins them to do in every waking moment. Rejoice! In the watching and waiting of Advent, today points urgently towards the joy which comes towards us. ‘The Lord is near’. He is close now. Before long he will be with us, in our company; before long we will know, just as we are fully known, face to face with our redeemer and judge, Jesus Christ. Rejoice!

Oh, but hang on a moment, you’re thinking. Isn’t today the day we get some preaching about hell? Don’t duck out of it; we hardly ever get any preaching about hell these days, and we were quite curious about what you felt able to say. Is it real; is it not real? Is anyone bound for it, or are we all redeemed whatever we do, think, feel or say? Have we any time or place for hell in our polite, restrained and studiedly incurious Church of England? And what has hell to do with rejoicing?

When I was a very small child, I was walking with my mother by the sea, and I asked her whether hell was real. It was a cold, grey day: we were on a pier somewhere, sharing a paper cone full of tiny shrimps, which tasted surprising; delicious. She paused a long time, and then said, cautiously, ‘Some people say that the hells we experience happen before we die’. She didn’t say anything else. But I thought about that for a long time, I am still thinking about it half a century later, because… it turned things upside down, somehow, if this world was the world with the real horrors in it; and the world to come – whatever else it might contain - was to be a place mercifully free of man’s inhumanity to man.

Put aside the pictures in your mind of the medieval place of punishment; the strange, toothy stick-insect torturers of Hieronymus Bosch, the half-comic prancing devils with their pitchforks, and the patient, agonised, mutilated bodies of the lost. These are human nightmares: they imagine the ways in which God might be cruel in a peculiarly human way. It is true that the ingenuity and passion we expend upon hurting each other participate in the nature of hell. Each time we see another person as less than fully human – a thing to be used or discarded – we draw nearer to its gates. Yet it is not true that ‘hell is other people’. Hell is where we are when other people vanish from our affections, hell is not a hot place but the place where love grows cold; hell comes near when we lose our capacity for sympathetic imagination; when we look around the world we are in and see nothing but endless reflections of our own hungry, lonely selves.

Last week Canon Johnson, pondering the nature of God’s judgement, talked about the experience of being brought up into the light, the place where the secrets of all hearts are revealed. I want to think about that. About what it might be if every part of you were discovered, shone upon: the secrets, the forgotten things, shames and struggles and failed attempts at goodness; resentments and hatreds and griefs; pride and contempt; cruelties of thought, hidden actions, furtive transgressions; and those stark moments of self-knowledge which are too hard to bear and have to be shoved under a muffling cushion of distractions, busy-ness, business, discontent, wandering, or sleepiness. There it sits, this jumble of half-remembered nastiness and misery, telling you at intervals: no one knows how unpleasant you really are; no one’s love could survive what you know of yourself; trust nobody.

But in the steady, bright gaze of this light, the whole lot comes out, tumbling out any old how, tawdry and battered and small. And you are still loved.

And you look at it, and it’s a painful kind of relief, sharp and searing, like grief or the way it feels to sob and sob and let it all go, the way it feels to stop maintaining it all day after day after day, and you think, ‘What now?’’

‘What then shall we do?’

Because you’ve been carrying hell, and it was a dreadful thing, and now it’s all over the floor.

And this is when the Lord does something unbearable. He hands it back to you. He gives you a choice.

He says, ‘What shall I do?

‘I won’t take it away if you want to keep it. It can go as soon and as fast as you choose, washed away in the deep waters of baptism, dissolved by innocent blood, broken like a dying body. But if you are attached to it, if you can’t find it in yourself to give it away, it’s still yours. This is judgement; that you have to be ready to give yourself away, even the bits you clung to as being absolutely your own, the nasty bits you didn’t ever have to or want to share. Mercy is on the other side of your pride, your self-respect, your contempt, your greed, your familiarity with your own sins, those sins which know you better than anyone in the whole waking world. Are you ready to give yourself away like that?’

And you say, ‘What do you mean by giving myself away?’

And he says, ‘By being ready to be as small as everyone else. As small as the person you despise most, the person you think barely is a person. By learning to love in places where you have so far barely managed even to take notice. By giving up being afraid that people will find you out. By looking outwards, and discovering what you are being asked to give by discovering what someone else might need.’

And at that point, you really can choose. God never rushes anyone. You can keep your hell, and bolt yourself into it; but the bolts are on the inside. Right up to the last moment of choice, conscious or unconscious, the Lord is near, the one who turns the shadow of death into the morning, his hands ready to take the bundle of nastiness from you and leave you light and clear, winged, transparent, emptied; yet still held and filled, solid and real, rejoicing and strong.

Freedom is always at your right hand, every day. Rejoice! The Lord is near. He is coming, he is close. He will make your heart free. The choice is yours. It is always yours. If what you want is hell, you will not be denied it. After all, you made it yourself. But the light is always waiting beside you, just in case you are ready to turn, and to be rescued, and to consent not just to know, but to be fully known.

Amen.