Precious Life-Blood--or Dead Hand?

George Eliot (æt. 30, 1849/1850) by Louis-François d'Albert Durade

I have been home now for ten days, just about the time needed to reclaim and settle back into long-established patterns and habits. While I was in Paris this last time I particularly missed my morning swim, as the local and supremely convenient pool was for reasons no official could or at least would explain, closed until a “further notice” that never appeared. Finding and using one of many other municipal pools was a theoretical possibility; but I was not willing to pay the necessary price in time, travel, and above all in reconfiguring the whole shape of a workday to accommodate an ancillary desideratum. My father used to call such activity “building the house around the doorknob”—that is, making the greater cause subordinate to the lesser.

But there are doorknobs and doorknobs. I find myself at the earliest beginnings of a large project, a situation at once daunting and exhilarating. It is exhilarating because the fields of relevant inquiry open lush before me like the Great Plains at harvest time. In every direction I look I see the ripe grain practically begging to be gathered. It is daunting because I am far from sure I can pull it off. Yet more vexing is a hesitation yet more fundamental: should I try to pull it off?

Like most humanists of my generation I spend a few hours of every day sitting in a library surrounded by walls of books. I continue to think that the all-encompassing “electronic library” is largely hype, but that may just be another index of my increasing obsolescence. Though I often require the resources of large or specialized institutions, the library in which I most happily work is not surprisingly my own--modest of course, but carefully gathered, winnowed, and sculpted in accord with personal need, taste, and even (can I admit it?) aesthetic preference. Many of the scholarly books that form the physical cocoon in which I work are old, handsome, multi-volume sets of breath-taking erudition. All of them were at some point somebody’s “large project” into which untold hours of solitary work were poured. All of them are the products of a mode of industry known to a tiny guild but wholly foreign to the experience of the vast majority of humankind past and present. Most of them rest undisturbed on my shelves year after year. That actually is the fate of most “large projects.” And quite apart from the question of fate is the question of integrity of motive.

The cabinet of Dr. Faustus (by Rembrandt)

THE SCHOLAR'S STUDY

The bloguiste's lair (by Nikon Coolpix 4100)

Among the noblest statements in Milton’s Areopagitica is this: “A good book is the precious life-blood of the master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose for a life beyond.” That is inspiring, but doubts nag. What about the not quite so good books? What, God forbid, of the really terrible books?

My preliminary ruminations have sent me back to George Eliot's Middlemarch--one of a few special books I try to reread every decade or so. In an essay on Eliot Virginia Woolf famously wrote of Middlemarch as a “magnificent book which with all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. I do not know the precise “imperfections” Woolf had in mind. For me the novel’s hugeness (800 pages), required by the lengthy development of subplots of questionable necessity to the major theme, is a difficulty. And it makes it hard for me to tell you, as I now do tell you, that your life will forever be the poorer without it. For is it ever a novel written for grown-ups! In fact you probably shouldn’t even try before, say, your thirtieth birthday.

The fifth book (i.e., long section) of Middlemarch is entitled “The Dead Hand,” and like so much else in this brilliant novel, the phrase reverberates with complex suggestion. In an earlier book the Rev. Edward Casaubon has learned that a serious cardiac condition, “fatty degeneration of the heart,” could at any moment claim his life, leaving unfinished the great work of scholarship in which he has invested many decades. “The Dead Hand” chronicles the emotional blackmail and manipulation he employs to attempt to wrest from his young wife Dorothea the promise that, should he die, she will continue the work and bring it to completion exactly along the lines he has dictated. The pattern of emotional coercion is paralleled by a legal coercion, for which the technical term is indeed mortmain (“dead hand”). As yet unbeknownst to his wife the jealous and petty-minded Casaubon has added a codicil to his will making the bequest of his substantial legacy to her contingent upon her not marrying in her widowhood the man she will in fact marry. Thus Casaubon seeks to control Dorothea from the grave, even as he has controlled her through the course of her constricted and increasingly unrewarding marriage.

The fifth book is primarily the story of Dorothea’s inner conflict. She is most reluctant to make the promise Casaubon so importunately seeks; for although she is powerfully moved by a sense of marital duty complicated by sentiments of affection and sympathy, she has little confidence in the scholarly project to which her husband has devoted his life. Indeed, she inwardly judges it to lack intellectual integrity. As every graduate student of English knows, Casaubon’s great work, unfinished and probably unfinishable, is called A Key to All Mythologies. This unwritten book, and what it represents, is also in a large and figurative sense a “dead hand”.

What is it? Casaubon’s proposed Key to All Mythologies is projected as a vast work of scholarship designed to defend and demonstrate the primacy of the Mosaic historiography of the Pentateuch in relation to all other surviving ancient Latin, Greek, and Semitic literary sources. Though we learn only bits and snatches of Casaubon’s method, it is clear that its two principal stress-bearing pillars are what we would today call linguistics and mythography. Casaubon will be concerned to demonstrate according to his linguistic science, and in particular the science of etymology, that all ancient cosmogonies eventually reveal a common source in the Hebrew of the Masoretic text. Here one assumption is that Hebrew was the original language, that spoken by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. In a similar fashion, larger narratives—such as, presumably, the myth of the Golden Age as found in Virgil and Ovid--must be distortions or distant reflexes of Pentateuch history. The purpose of Casaubon’s life work is the defense of the literal inerrancy of the Bible and the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch—a task that for thinking Christians had become most difficult by the 1830s (the time of the novel’s setting) and by 1870 (the time of its completion) impossible.

I spent several hours yesterday in the Rare Book Room of Firestone Library reading one of Casaubon’s intellectual models: Jacob Bryant (1715-1804), an Etonian and Cambridge don, author of an astonishing work entitled A New System, or an Analysis of Ancient Mythology—a huge, ornate Georgian flat tire obviously being reinvented for the early Victorian generation by Eliot’s Mr. Casaubon. In fact there is a dismissive allusion to it in Middlemarch itself (book ii, chapter 22). Will Ladislaw (Casaubon’s poor but brilliant cousin, who in the end marries his widow) alludes to “men like Bryant—men of the last century” whose books are as relevant to contemporary scriptural scholarship as the theories of Paracelsus are to modern chemistry. The article on Bryant in the Dictionary of National Biography is hardly less severe: “His research is remarkable, but he had no knowledge of oriental languages, and his system of etymology was puerile and misleading.”

Still the three fine, fat quarto volumes of his New System, bound in tree calf with its old gold stamping still bright and shining—how beautiful they look upon the shelf! So as I set out on my own next small embalming project, I wonder anxiously. Will it be “precious life-blood … treasured up on purpose for a life beyond” or merely a well preserved dead hand?

The Eighty Percent Solution

Robert Goheen (1919-2008)

“Home,” says Frost, “is the place that when you go there, they have to take you in.” There are other slightly more upbeat definitions, such as that home is where even spitting rain on New Jersey Turnpike in rush hour can seem vaguely comforting in its familiarity. There is nothing vague, however, about the comfort and familiarity attendant upon the reunion of long-married couples; and I sat down with the greatest pleasure to a light supper of soup and salad.

My theory was to hit the ground running—or actually sitting, the posture more appropriate for a library—but I have fallen into the reverie of pleasant distraction. On Saturday I have to give a little after-dinner speech at a celebration marking the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of Wilson College, the first of the undergraduate residential colleges in Princeton University. I haven’t actually prepared the talk, but have enjoyed the leisure of preparing to prepare, so to speak.

In fact Wilson College, like many academic institutions, had several “foundings”. The one with which I was associated came in the fall of 1968, when for the first time a small number of freshmen accepted an invitation to join. The master then (Wilson’s first) was the late psychologist Julian Jaynes, author of the once-famous book entitled The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It was Jaynes who had shepherded the Woodrow Wilson Society through its infancy and its transition in becoming Wilson College.

I became the second master just at the time that the anti-War protests were becoming serious, and from that period—especially the spring of 1970, with the Kent State massacre of early May—come some of the most vivid memories of my career. In this country an institution that is celebrating a semicentennial is usually considered venerable. My fear is that a person who has been associated with it for more than forty of its fifty years might have some claim to the same adjective.

Princeton actually has two alumni who became presidents of the United States. I’ve always thought it a little lame that so many things Princetonian are named after Woodrow Wilson, and so few after James Madison. When after a long interval I became Master of Wilson College for a second time in the 1980s I conspired with my friend and colleague Sean Wilentz to pretend that the Wilson involved was Edmund Wilson of the class of 1916, perhaps the greatest literary critic America has produced; but that never caught on. But if I had the chance to pick my own name today, I would call it Robert Goheen College, and Goheen is the real subject of this post.

Consider this a very tardy tribute to a much-admired mentor and friend. I was away from Princeton in the spring of 2008, when he died; and I could not even attend his memorial service. Bob Goheen was the President of Princeton University from 1957 until 1972. I really came to know him only after he left the presidency, and fully to appreciate his true greatness only in his later years, after his service as Ambassador to India. Goheen was as “old Princeton” as they come. He came out of a Presbyterian clerical family, and had taken both his B.A. and his Ph.D. here. He was an assistant professor of Classics at the time of his election. Everything in his background suggested that he would be a thoughtful guardian of the institution’s dearest traditions. How many could have guessed that he would transform it as he did?

For it was President Goheen who presided over the most monumental institutional changes of the twentieth century—and all of them for the good. These included putting the university irrevocably on its path to a nearly unique financial security, dramatically expanding the faculty and the “physical plant,” and charting an essentially new course for undergraduate life. It was in no easy or simply fashionable way that he came to espouse the innovation (which then seemed so radical) of the admission of women students. And so far as undergraduate residential life is concerned, he is the true father of the Princeton college system.

For a very particular, indeed eccentric reason I was struck by a single sentence in the impressive obituary published by the New York Times: “Dr. Goheen would eventually build or acquire 38 buildings, increasing the university’s indoor square footage by 80 percent.” It was the percentage that struck me, for it brought back to my mind the conversation in which he had recruited me to become the Master of Wilson. He invited me to lunch in the faculty club. I was still an assistant professor, and a one-on-one presidential luncheon in a the public dining room rather went to my head. I proceeded to give the president a little lecture on precisely what needed to be done to reform undergraduate social life. I did so with no small degree of certainty, which he tolerated with a polite patience, considering that he had been pondering the issues involved for several years and I for about two weeks. Then he said something I shall never forget. “You know, John, these are complicated questions, and reasonable people are of different minds about them. I’ve had to adopt a little rule of thumb: don’t ever be more than 80 percent right. It just isn’t seemly.”

When I survey what is passing for “political discourse” in our land these days, I hear an angry cacophony of one-hundred-percenters. No wonder their approval rating is seventeen percent.

Transitional Man

big transition: Camões has gone to his long house

Life is pretty much like essay writing. Once you’re into them, the paragraphs take care of themselves. It’s the transitions that are difficult. As a proposition that may be of dubious validity, but it’s style I am after, not substance. My model was Forrest Gump. I am attempting to develop an aphoristic style for a projected self-help book, and I am just practicing. Actually it is an instance of desperation being the mother of invention. I was just now having a tasty bowl of cereal and an interesting conversation with my delightful granddaughter Sophia when she innocently uttered a terrifying word: “Wednesday,” that is, today. Wednesday meant one thing for her—namely a somewhat relaxed start to the school day—and something quite different to me. What it meant to me was that until that moment it had escaped my attention that it was blog day.

Yet it all comes together nicely, for my even more-than-usual forgetfulness is an emblem of my transitional state. Transitions come in various sizes and colors. I am just about to leave Paris. That this is definitely a gray transition is authenticated by the weather, which has suddenly turned rather grim: cold, dark, wet. They have put the Christmas lights up in some of the public places, but not yet turned them on. There is always a certain amount of dreary schlepping about attendant upon arriving for or leaving after a lengthy stay, and I have a number of drab duties to perform before flying back to Newark next Monday.

Another transition is of a pleasant yellowish pastel hue. On Friday I completed the manuscript of the little book I have been writing, tentatively entitled Luis de Camões: the Poet as Scriptural Exegete. On Monday I sent it off for review by a prospective publisher. On Tuesday I returned to the Gulbenkian Library for a final time to say goodbye to its director, and especially to the two charming librarians whose cheerful expertise has on a daily basis eased my path. Such are the formalities of French professional life that it was only in parting that I learned their names. They both have the Christian name Isabel, like several other important women in my life, the fourteenth-century Plantagenet ancestors and kin of Henry the Navigator.

Until halfway through my bowl of granola this morning I was planning yet another transitional step, and I may get to it yet. I actually contemplated trying to write a page or two on my next project. I always feel better when I am starting something new to get a few words down on paper even if they are not destined to survive until the final product. I am under contract to write a book rather grandly entitled in my proposal The Dark Side of the Enlightenment. Talk about transitions!

Early in my career as a medievalist I became aware of and annoyed by a certain historical “narrative,” of nearly ubiquitous credit among the semi-educated, that might be called Gibbon’s Canard. It goes roughly like this. There was once a great Western Civilization in which people walked around in their bathrobes writing epic poems, building Parthenons and Coliseums and civilizing known worlds by imperial domination. That beautiful world came to an end when a cultural disaster (Christianity) and something called the Völkerwanderung (barbarian hordes running hither and thither) joined forces to create the Middle Ages, aka the Dark Ages, a bleak millennium of brutality, disease, ignorance, and superstition. Things began to get a little better eventually when one day Petrarch walked into a cave, found a pile of long-neglected manuscripts, and decided to start a Renaissance. But they only got good again when toward the end of the seventeenth century Newton published the Principia and only really good in the eighteenth century when Jean-Jacques Rousseau arrived on the scene and taught his friends and relations (most of whom in Rousseau’s case were his abandoned bastard children) how to have a New Sensibility.

This new age was called The Enlightenment.

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night,

God said “Let Newton be!”—and all was light.

So wrote the eighteenth-century English poet, Alexander Pope.

This narrative is, shall we say, a little over-simplified. At first I found myself particularly aggrieved by popular uses of the word medieval as a term of disparagement, opprobrium, or contempt. I started making a collection of such usages as found in the popular press, especially the New York Times. My favorite (and I cannot now remember the specific sources) had to do with a man taken hostage by terrorists or kidnappers and kept blindfolded for a protracted period in an underfurnished urban apartment. The only food his captors gave him—ample, but apparently monotonous—was Chinese take-out. This treatment was described as “medieval”. Well, Marco Polo…Some readers may also remember a memorable scene in the film Pulp Fiction in which a really big, mean, black guy prepares to do violence on a really skinny, sicko white guy. The violence is unspecified, but as it required pliers and a blowtorch, it is also probably unpleasant, especially as introduced with the following threat: “I’ma get medieval on your ass.”

But I also started collecting an anthology of Enlightenment weirdness. I soon discovered that just as the witchcraft craze is more typical of the European Renaissance and Enlightenment periods than of its Middle Ages, so also were numerous other “medieval” superstitions, such as alchemy and astrology. If you are really interested in quackery, pseudo-science, and superstition, one of the best places to look is in the nooks and crannies of Enlightenment Paris. I am hoping that The Dark Side, if I can pull it off as a work of light-hearted erudition, might transform Gibbon’s Canard into Peking Duck. I may subtitle it “The Medievalist’s Revenge.” If I can pull it off, you will get to meet some of the following characters:

"Count" Alessandro Cagliostro (here presiding over a Masonic meeting, as imagined by the satirist Gillray) was a weirdo so outrageous that he could exist only in the Enlightenment...

Valentine Greatrakes the Stroker, whose miraculous cures discomfited the Enlightened...

Julie de Krüdener (as painted by Angelica Kauffmann), author of a best-selling sentimental novel, and a do-it-yourself mystic who may have helped a demented Swiss woman to crucify herself...

Home Thoughts from Abroad

American Library in Paris: alleged site of bloguiste's alleged work

My “mystery” retreat was Kandersteg in the Swiss canton of Bern, one of the lovelier places on this lovely earth of ours, and for the opportunity to visit it I shall forever be grateful to my beloved daughter. But just now I’m back and in the trenches at the American Library in Paris again or rather, to switch to a metaphor yet more clichéd, on a two-week forced march toward the completion of a little book on the Sobolos rios of Luis de Camões. My deadline is November 15, when I fly back to America to new opportunities and writing obligations, and especially to a new book project.

Today, however, I am having a little trouble keeping up my martial gait. It is trouble roughly of the sort described in one of John Donne’s most brilliant poems. My mind, which should be pressing eastward toward the romantic Malabar coast with the Portuguese caravels, is pulled remorselessly westward to such unromantic places as the fifteenth congressional district in Ohio, where it appears that a Republican named Steve Stivers has just walloped a Democrat named Mary Jo Kilroy in a contest paradigmatic of the huge tidal wave of Republican victory, or rather, of Democratic defeat. (The two are only accidentally coincident.) Complete results will not be available to me in time for this blog, but the general drift of things has been obvious for weeks to those with eyes to see and ears to hear.

Or has it? We say that seeing is believing, but about half the time it works the other way around. A lot of the time we see or hear what we want or expect to see or hear—or, even worse, what other people tell us we ought to want to see or hear. Surely, all curious minds must construct comparisons, but living abroad virtually forces the comparative perspective upon you. As the American midterms approached, I have inevitably been thinking about them from the perspective of local developments.

Autres pays, autres moeurs, as seen by the British "Independent"

“What developments?” you ask? Well during the last month the economic life of the country was severely disrupted by industrial strikes and street demonstrations protesting new laws, certain to be passed by the democratically elected parliament, that in a most gradual manner will eventually raise the national age of retirement from sixty to sixty-two. Property damage was slight, though not negligible; but the disruptions inflicted some billions of euros of damage on an already wobbly national economy. Prominent among the street protesters, as always, were the lycéens or high-school students. Every graduate of Economics 101 realizes that if present trends continue there won’t be any pensions for these kids until they reach the age of a hundred-and-two, let alone sixty-two, but that didn’t stop Ségolène Royal, the Socialist defeated by Sarkozy in the last elections, from urging them into the streets. Whatever is the matter with Kansas seems to be even more the matter with the gilded youth of the seventh arrondissement.

Vox pop plus teeny bop

American politics gets a lot of lousy press here, as it no doubt deserves in most lands. Yet to compare the absurd French histrionics of pseudo-nullification of the “retirement legislation” with the comparative maturity of American popular opposition to “Obamacare” has been most instructive. But of course that is only the way I see things. Joan flew home on Monday. I accompanied her to the airport, where I bought a copy of the November Monde Diplomatique to read on the bus-ride back, and this gave me an opportunity to find out how others see them. Le Monde is the daily opiate of the French lumpen-intelligentsia, from the political point of view a sort of a New York Times on steroids. The Monde Diplomatique is, roughly, its “Month In Review”.

This month, between the French protests in progress and the American elections in prospect, there was a good deal to review. It will not surprise any of my faithful readers that I am in substantial disagreement with what the Monde Diplomatique’s journalists have to say about these topics. The more interesting comparative point concerns who the journalists are. The interpreter of the anti-Sarkozy protests is Serge Halimi, a public intellectual and journalist who has made a successful career out of attacking French journalists and journalism. He has out-FoxNewsed Fox News in the success of his indictment of a “main-stream media” against which he supposedly stands out in brave, bold profile. He thinks that the fourteen-year-olds so passionate in the pre-emptive defense of “retirement rights” are prescient analysts of a politics that offers them only “a future without hope,” and that “street marches and strikes constitute the best means of avoiding such a fate.”

The other two experts—one addressing the European “austerity wave” generally, the other the American elections—are even more interesting. They are both literary theorists! Slavoj Zizek (whose name is spelled in a variety of ways in America) is obviously against austerity, though I don’t quite grasp why. You have undoubtedly heard the joke question: “What is the difference between a Deconstructionist and a Mafia don?” The answer: “The Deconstructionist makes you an offer you can’t understand.” Zizek is not exactly a Deconstructionist, but he regularly achieves a vatic incomprehensibility. The heart of this essay appears to be the following profundity: “…the credits accorded to Athens will in the first place serve to reimburse its debts to French and German banks. European aid to Greece has no other function than to help the private banking sector.” Presumably rescuing Greece from the social disasters of national bankruptcy is not a legitimate “function”.

For the American scene the Monde Diplomatique turns to an American expert: Walter Benn Michaels, an English professor at the University of Illinois. Professor Michaels is a theorist whose most widely read contribution to literary theory is an essay entitled “Against Theory”. This is but one of the paradoxes of an intellectual career marked chiefly by his ability to deny differences that most others can see clearly, and vehemently to detect differences that others cannot see at all. It would be an injustice to say that his essay in the current Monde Diplomatique is simply common-or-garden academic pseudo-radicalism, for it achieves—and maintains over many column inches--a truly rare level of superficiality. Professor Michaels laments the fact The Road to Serfdom by F. A. von Hayek is currently on the best-seller list. The totality of what he has to say about this extraordinary book is that its author was an “ultra-conservative”. Actually, The Road to Serfdom isn’t doing all that well. It is only number 157 on the Amazon chart. But then the whole point of this post is that everything is comparative. The Shape of the Signifier by Professor Walter Benn Michaels is at number 614,848.

Given the nature of our officially sanctioned interpreters, it is perhaps not surprising that the nations of the world understand each other so imperfectly. With this thought I am left to imagine the horror with which some imaginary Parisian intellectual temporarily resident in Keokuk, Iowa, might stumble upon this blog.