Alan Jacobs

Reading Daniel Meldelsohn’s new essay on Sappho, I recall an essay of my own from some years ago — a reflection on Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho and her own love poetry — that contrasts a recent neopagan theory of eros with what we read in the Song of Solomon. Here’s an excerpt.

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In Solomon’s Song we are repeatedly warned against the reckless invocation of a power greater than that of mere desire:

I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, do not stir up or awaken love until it is ready! (8:4 etc.)

And why should the daughters of Jerusalem be so circumspect? Because if it is the true Love that is awakened, it will not again sleep; and no floods can wash it away. And—continuing the catechism—why is that? Why will this love not sleep, nor be washed away?

Because it is grounded not in desire, not in eros, not in any “experience,” but in the beloved (a word I have used in this essay with Solomon’s song always in mind): in the bride herself, or the bridegroom himself. Love is the proper and adequate response to the excellence of the beloved. “We will exult and rejoice in you,” say the daughters of Jerusalem to the bride: “rightly do they love you” (1:4) — rightly. When she tells them to find her beloved and tell him that she is “faint with love,” they reply with a question:

What is your beloved more than another beloved, O fairest among women? What is your beloved more than another beloved, that you thus adjure us? (5:9)

And the bride can answer, with more than the simile of a wheel rolling downhill, and with more than a claim for his beauty — though beauty there is, beauty there certainly is: he is “distinguished among ten thousand” (v. 10); “he is altogether desirable” (v. 16a). But above all, “This is my beloved and this is my friend, O daughters of Jerusalem.” Friendship implies a kind of reciprocity — even Foucault acknowledges this idea — alien to the understanding of Eros that Carson derives from Sappho: as we have seen, the great plea to Aphrodite simply assumes that desire will be unequal and asymmetrical. But it is reciprocity in which the bride places her trust; her limitless regard for the bridegroom is matched by his limitless regard for her; and so she can tell the daughters of Jerusalem with perfect assurance, “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine” (6:3).

In a memorable scene from her memoir The Florist’s Daughter, Patricia Hampl describes what it was like, when she was a child, to watch her father arranging flowers:

He emerges from the walk-in cooler with an armload of flowers — tangerine roses and purple lisianthis, streaked cymbidium orchids, brassy gerbera daisies and little white stephanotis, lemon leaf, trailing sprengeri fern, branches of this, stems of that. He tosses the whole business on the big table, and stands in front of what looks like a garbage heap. An empty vase is set in front of him. He appears to ignore it. He just stands there, his pocketknife in his hand, but not moving, and not appearing to be thinking. He doesn’t touch the mess of flowers, doesn’t sort them. He just stares for a long vacant minute. He’s forgotten I’m sitting there.

Then, without warning, he turns into a whirlwind, Without pause, grabbing and cutting, placing and jabbing, he puts all the flowers into the vase, following some inner logic so that — as people always said of his work — it looks as if the flowers had met and agreed to position themselves in the only possible way they should be. He worked faster than anyone else in the shop, without apparent thought or planning. I could distinguish his arrangements — but they weren’t anything as artificial as an “arrangement” — from across the room from the dozens lined up on the delivery table for the truck drivers.

This is the art of arrangement: a discernment of the inner shapes and forms of things, followed by a self-effacement. So too with arrangement in all the arts.

Also universally true: that limited resources bring out the best, or worst, in an arranger. My friend Father Martin Johnson was a set designer in a previous life, and he commented to me once that a spare set was much more expensive to design than a busy one, because when the objects of our attention are few, every one of them has to be precisely right.

I am especially fascinated by musical arrangement, in which simple effects, when created by people who know what they’re doing, have extraordinary power. I could illustrate this point solely by reference to the work of Billy Strayhorn, who did more than almost anyone realizes to make the sound of Duke Ellington’s band, but let me instead take three examples from varied musical traditions.

Start with Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose choral settings are close to unparalleled. Listen to “Loch Lomond”:

[embed]www.youtube.com/watch

Notice how in the third stanza and chorus he creates tremendous emotional power by the simple tactic of switching the roles of the lead tenor and the chorus: the rich weave of the choir in that verse is succeeded by the keening solo: “You take the high road….” And then in the closing notes the bass sinks down to notes we might expect in Rachmaninoff’s Vespers but that seem almost shockingly tragic in a performance of a Victorian imitation of a folk song.

The tragic element in Radka Toneff’s definitive version of Jimmy Webb’s “The Moon’s a Harsh Mistress” — no one else should ever sing this song — is intensified by Toneff’s death, probably by her own hand, at age twenty-nine. But there is more than enough tragedy in her performance: I don’t know that I’ll ever quite get over the way she sings “The sky’s made of stone” in the last stanza.

[embed]www.youtube.com/watch

Every note, every inflection, of her rendering of the song is masterful — but so too is the piano of Steve Dobrogosz, so spare that he can’t afford to put one foot wrong. And he doesn’t. The vocal and the piano walk the same tightrope, and do it with such apparent effortlessness that you can’t imagine the song being different in any way. It’s “not anything as artificial as an ‘arrangement’” — it’s just heartbreaking.

That’s too dark a note to end on, and anyway it’s time to turn to another genre. Here’s Bill Withers singing “Use Me” (apologies for the dopey video — close your eyes while listening, please):

[embed]www.youtube.com/watch

In addition to Withers’ urgent vocal, we have acoustic guitar, bass, percussion, clavinet — that’s it. (Plus three skillfully-placed handclaps — listen for them.) Spare in a very different way, everything driven by that funky beat and the unforgettable clavinet riff — if you can call a sequence that long (alternately 12 and 15 notes) a riff. I call it a riff, and one of the best I’ve ever heard.

Obviously, this is a very different musical experience than the first two, but it has in common with them that uncanny perfection of limited resources arranged in such a way that you couldn’t add anything without compromising the power of the song. That’s the power of great arrangement, whether of flowers or objects on a stage set or musical instruments and notes: the power to make you think Don’t touch it — please don’t take anything away, and for God’s sake don’t add anything. It’s as if all these things have “agreed to position themselves in the only possible way they should be.”

In fact, Bruni’s breezy anecdotes tend to reinforce the very assumption they ostensibly question: that prestige, power, and wealth are the major goals of education. He’s not asking his readers to examine a cultural obsession with success, so much as assuring them that they can still impress others without attending highly selective undergraduate institutions. Just look at all the people who run huge companies or work at prestigious consulting or law firms, he says. Not all of them went to Ivy League schools! There are “myriad routes to a corner office,” as he puts it. He never seriously considers the possibility that college might shape students into adults who are not interested in a corner office.

— Nick Romeo

Another day, another story about the legal trouble you can expect if you’re a free-range parent. This matters, a lot, and what’s at stake needs to be made clear.

1) The parents here are accused by the state of “child neglect,” but what they are doing is the opposite of neglect — it is thoughtful, intentional training of their children for responsible adulthood. They instructed their children with care; the children practiced responsible freedom before being fully entrusted with it. And then the state intervened before the children could discover the satisfaction of exercising their freedom well.

2) What’s happening here is fundamentally simple: the surveillance state enforcing surveillance as the normative form of care. The state cannot teach its citizens, because it has no idea what to teach; it can only place them under observation. Perfect observation — panopticism — then becomes its telos, which is justifies and universalizes by imposing a responsibility to surveil on the very citizens already being surveilled. The state’s commandment to parents: Do as I do.

3) By enforcing surveillance as the normative form of care, the state effectively erases the significance of all other forms of care. Parents might teach their children nothing of value, no moral standards, no self-discipline, no compassion for others — but as long as those children are incessantly observed, then according to the state’s standards the parents of those children are good parents. And they are good because they are training their children to accept a lifetime of passive acceptance of surveillance. The Marxist theorist Louis Althusser used to speak of the ways that culture can be transformed into an “ideological state apparatus” — that’s what our society wants to do to parenthood.

Consider these sentences:

Wilson nailed it.

Jones just doesn’t get it.

It’s about ethics in games journalism.

It’s not about politics.

It. And: about. This kind of language is useless — worse than useless, in fact. Substantively, such phrases say nothing more than “I agree” or “I disagree,” but they add a layer of blurry obfuscation. Whole vast complexes of ideas and experiences disappear in the dense fog generated by a two-lettered pronoun. Wilson nailed what? Jones doesn’t get what? Put your brain in gear and figure out what you mean by “it.” Then write or say what you’ve decided you mean. Maybe then you can contribute something more than the mere announcement of what team you’re on.

About just thickens the fog further. What is this “it” that can only be “about” one thing? What does it even mean for an it to be about? All you’re really saying when you employ this locution is, “I would prefer us to debate certain topics that are different than the topics other people want to debate.” Again: vacuous.

So don’t use these locutions, ever. Just remember: It’s about clarity of thought and precision of expression.

Charles Taylor explains many (most?) internet debates — and a great many others from the past two hundred years. If you ever wonder why people on Twitter (serious people, not mere trolls) can get so extreme in their policing of deviations from approved behavior, see “The Perils of Moralism,” in Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays (emphases mine):

Modern liberal society tends toward a kind of “code fetishism,” or nomolatry. It tends to forget the background which makes sense of any code — the variety of goods which rules and norms are meant to realize — as well as the vertical dimension which arises above all these.

We can see this above in relation to contemporary Anglo-Saxon moral philosophy, as well as in the drive to codification in liberal society. But the sources go back deeper in our culture. I want to argue that it was a turn in Latin Christendom which sent us down this road. This was the drive to reform in its various stages and variants — not just the Protestant Reformation, but a series of moves on both sides of the confessional divide. The attempt was always to make people over as more perfect practicing Christians, through articulating codes and inculcating disciplines. Until the Christian life became more and more identified with these codes and disciplines.

In other words, this code-centrism came about as the by-product of an attempt to make over the lives of Christians, and their social order, so as to make them conform thoroughly to the demands of the Gospel. I am talking not of a particular, revolutionary moment, but of a long, ascending series of attempts to establish a Christian order, of which the Reformation is a key phase…. (351)

Code fetishism means that the entire spiritual dimension of human life is captured in a moral code. Kant proposes perhaps the most moving form of this (but perhaps the capture wasn’t complete in his case). His followers today, be they Rawls or Habermas or others again, carry on this reduction (although Habermas seems to have had recent second thoughts).

Modern culture is marked by a series of revolts against this moralism, in both its Christian and non-Christian forms. Think of the great late nineteenth-century reaction in England against evangelical “puritanism” that we associate with names as diverse as Arnold, Wilde, and later Bloomsbury; or think of Ibsen; or of Nietzsche and all those who follow him, including those rebelling against the various disciplines that have helped constitute this modern moralization, such as our contemporary, Michel Foucault.

But these reactions start earlier. The code-centered notion of order and its attendant disciplines begin to generate negative reactions from the eighteenth century on. These form, for instance, the central themes of the Romantic period. Many people found it hard to believe, even preposterous, that the achievement of this code-bound life should exhaust the significance of human existence. It’s almost as though each form of protest were adding its own verse to the famous Peggy Lee song: “Is that all there is?” (353)

Freddie deBoer’s critique of Conor Friedersdorf’s post on European antisemitism is too careless. Freddie:

Friedersdorf spends the requisite amount of time showing Grave Concern about the increasing threat to Europe’s increasingly threatened Jews, who are threatened, at an increasing level. Near the end, he helpfully includes the caveat: “The degree of danger that Jews in Europe actually face is beyond my knowledge.” Or to paraphrase, the phenomenon that is the sole justification for my piece may or may not be occurring, I just don’t know. It’s an excellent little bit of postmodern maneuvering: I’ll take my Muslim-throngs-are-advancing-across-Europe clicks, please, but don’t take my word for any of this.

If you’re interested in looking at some actual facts about the constantly-expressed fear that Europe’s Muslims are creating an atmosphere of stifling anti-Semitism, rather than just read the assertion one more time, you might start here.

If you follow Freddie’s link you’ll see that that it’s to a piece about antisemitism in Britain and only in Britain, whereas Conor’s post is about Europe as a whole. Antisemitism could be a non-issue in Britain and still be a serious Europe-wide problem.

Moreover, Freddie’s simply wrong when he says that Conor merely asserts that antisemitism is rising in Europe. Conor links to this article which in turn links to several studies indicating significant upturn in antisemitic events in various parts of Europe. Conor even links to one of those studies as well. So Conor provides considerably more evidence by which one could assess these questions than Freddie does.

If you follow up those links, you’ll get the impression that antisemitic actions and attitudes vary considerably within Europe. All of the studies are relatively localized — at best national in scope. It is this variability that leads Conor to say “The degree of danger that Jews in Europe actually face is beyond my knowledge.” There’s not enough evidence at this point to make a continent-wide judgment — or if there is then neither Conor nor I know about it.

Antisemititic attitudes and actions are clearly real, and given what happened to Europe’s Jews less than a lifetime ago, it makes sense to be concerned about it — to investigate it further, to gather information, to study the information that has already been gathered. Freddie’s sneering about “Grave Concern” and “Muslim-throngs-are-advancing-across-Europe” is a sophomoric response to genuine suffering. And you know, compassion isn’t a zero-sum game: caring about Europe’s Jews doesn’t prevent us from caring about others who are also hated not for what they’ve done but for what they can’t help being.

Armand Marie Leroi is an evolutionary biologist — and also a scientific imperialist. No, that’s not an insult: it’s his own account of the matter.

Now, to be sure, Leroi says that in the conflict between science and the humanities “Hard words such as ‘imperialism,’ ‘scientism,’ and ‘vaulting ambition’ will be flung about,” because such words belong to “the vocabulary of anti-science.” But in the very same paragraph he claims that the only choices for the humanities are to pursue “a new kulturkampf” that they cannot win — because they are “weakened” by internal conflicts — or to “gratefully accept the peace imposed by science.” The really interesting word there is “imposed”: science is not offering peace, it is imposing it. Looks like for us humanists it’s Hobson’s choice.

And lest we think that that talk of “imposing” was an infelicitous turn of phrase, Leroi immediately extends it: “Under the Pax Scientia criticism will continue, but be tamed.” The imperium of science, or perhaps I should write Science, is today’s successor to that of Rome.

In Virgil’s Aeneid, the hero Aeneas descends into the underworld and meets the ghost of his father, who prophesies to him about the future of Rome. The “arts” of the Romans will be pacisque imponere morem, parcere subiectis, et debellare superbos — as Allen Mandelbaum renders it, “to teach the ways of peace to those you conquer, / to spare defeated peoples, tame the proud.” The language of taming in Leroi’s essay seems scarcely accidental.

So imperialism it is, then. I suppose I am supposed to be thankful that Leroi, in his great magnanimity, allows a barbarian, or perhaps a slave, like me to continue to do my work under the minatory tutelage of Science — especially since the alternative, I guess, is to end up like Spartacus and his fellow rebels. (That anti-Roman kulturkampf wasn’t such a great idea, guys.) After all, to offer any resistance whatsoever to the new imperium is to be “anti-science.”

[caption id=“attachment_14663” align=“aligncenter” width=“443”] the last humanist[/caption]

Now, to Leroi’s credit, he understands, at least in a rudimentary way, that the kind of criticism often practiced by humanists differs pretty strongly from what can be revealed by running the numbers: “When Edmund Wilson tells us that Sophocles’s ‘Philoctetes’ is a parable on the association between deformity and genius; or when Arthur Danto says that Mark Rothko’s ‘Untitled (1960)’ is simply about beauty, then we are, it seems, in a realm of understanding where numbers, and the algorithms that produce them, have no dominion.” (Though even here he seems to forget that algorithms don’t emerge ex nihilo but are written by people.)

But Leroi doesn’t seem to grasp that much criticism — and much of the criticism that has mattered the most — isn’t concerned with assigning a one-phrase summary of the “meaning” of an entire work of art, but is rather intensely focused on the details that are too small and too distinctive for algorithmic attention. When Keats writes, “Now more than ever seems it rich to die,” what does “rich” connote? Might it be ironic? (After all, the ironic use of “rich” — “Oh, that’s rich” — goes back to the seventeenth century.) No algorithm can ever tell, because algorithms aggregate, and the question here is about a single unrepeatable instance of a word. Nor can any aggregated information tell us anything about the torn cloth at the elbow of the disciple in Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus, or the bizarre alternations of the madly driven rhythms and ethereal voices in the Confutatis of Mozart’s Requiem.

All this is not to say that “distant reading” isn’t valuable — it is, and I have defended the work of digital humanists who work algorithmically against know-nothing critiques — but rather that it’s not the only kind of humanistic work that’s valuable, and that critics who attend to the specific and unrepeatable are doing, and will continue to do, intellectually serious work.

Maybe they’ll be paid for that work in the future; maybe not. People who care about such things will still continue to attend to it, whether their overlords like it or not. An essay like Leroi’s is written by people who have access to money that humanists can’t dream or, who expect to have access to that money forever, and who think it gives them imperial powers.

In a famous essay George Orwell wrote about the headmaster of his old prep school who would say to charity students like Orwell, “You are living on my bounty!” — that seems to be Leroi’s attitude toward humanists. But sorry, I’m not accepting the terms of peace Leroi would dictate — and I don’t think he can impose them after all. The war between Apollo and Hermes will continue.

And one more thing: that Roman imperium, that Pax Romana? They thought that would last forever too.

I’m always getting ideas for books that are very much worth writing but which I know I’ll never get around to writing because other projects come first. Here’s one — I bequeath it to the world.

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It is perhaps only from this vantage point, in the second decade of the twentieth century, that we can see the ways in which the most lasting contributions of twentieth-century literary criticism are extensions of the great Modernist project. Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism might fruitfully be seen as an embodiment, in criticism’s vocabulary and in accordance with criticism’s procedures, of Joyce’s Ulysses. Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis may be said have a similar relationship to the fiction of Thomas Mann, especially The Magic Mountain and Joseph and his Brothers. George Steiner’s In Bluebeard’s Castle translates the concerns of Beckett’s Endgame into an impassioned critical idiom. Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending might best be understood as a late work of modernist aesthetics, an homage to and extension of the major poems of Wallace Stevens — specifically, Stevens’s idea of the “supreme fiction.” Stepping outside the realm of literary criticism as such, Claude Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques is a Proustian gem, a exceptionally rich and subtle work of narrative art. And Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, with epic scope and its obvious echoes of Pound’s unfinished Cantos, might be seen as the final masterpiece of magisterial Modernism. Each of these works draws on deep scholarship but also commands deep resources of narrative art, metaphorical imaginativeness, structural ingenuity.

I think it would be fascinating and rewarding to explore these great works of criticism as artworks. And such a book would also demonstrate that we academics, who love to think of ourselves as being on the cutting-edge of thought, are typically running about half-a-century behind the novelists and poets.

 

This endlessly elaborating poem
Displays the theory of poetry,
As the life of poetry. A more severe,

More harassing master would extemporize
Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory
Of poetry is the theory of life,

As it is, in the intricate evasions of as,
In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness,
The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands.

— Wallace Stevens, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”