From the Irresolute Desk

Jacob Bryant

 

    My possibly cryptic title invokes a famous piece of nineteenth-century furniture, somewhat reminiscent of a small, beached whale, that adorns the office of the President of the United States in the White House: the "Resolute Desk."  Unfortunately I sit behind an Irresolute Desk.  I am good neither at the making of resolutions nor at the keeping of those made, but since I write this on New Year’s Day, the pressure is on.  So, while I am not resolving actually to do anything except think about something I might do, I intend in this new year to dip a toe of pussy-footing possibility into the shallow end of the kiddies’ pool.  To be a little less oblique, I am thinking about undertaking another book.  I guess I am in the situation of one of our obscure politicians who announces at a sparsely attended news conference that he is establishing an “exploratory committee” to look into his possible prospects as a presidential candidate.  As you read the newspaper squib about this on page seventeen, you are already pretty certain the squib is the last you will hear of it.  So I am appointing myself an exploratory committee of one to consider the wisdom of an eighty-seven year old man undertaking a major writing project still needing significant primary research.  With artful procrastination I probably can take up the whole year with committee meetings.

 

    During the pandemic, to improve the unshining hours, I put in a lot of time on a Duolingo Portuguese language course.  My studies eventually led me—as I have explained before in this blog—to discover a major novelist  whose very name I cannot remember having encountered earlier: José Maria Eça de Queiróz, or Queirós (1845-1900).  Eça was the conduit by which I became usefully sidetracked into the fictional manifestations of developments in biblical criticism and interpretation as reflected in some major European writers, in the century between the birth of George Eliot (b. 1819) and the death of Mikhail Bulgakov (d. 1940).  That is roughly speaking my proposed topic, and it is of course enormous.

 

    How to share with you some sense of what I have in mind?  I might well begin with the most famous novel dealing with my chosen theme, as it is also a strong competitor for the rank of greatest novel in the English language: George Eliot’s Middlemarch, first published in 1871/2 but set in the era of the Reform Bill of 1832.  This is a book with many plots, perhaps too many, but the “through line” is the history of a remarkable woman named Dorothea Brooke, a provincial orphan, and the ward of an uncle whose affable pomposity at times invites our affection and at others our derision.  A major theme of the book is the clash of  older and newer modes of social, political, scientific, and religious thought.  The book begins with Dorothea, not yet twenty, naively accepting a marriage proposal from the Rev. Edward Casaubon, a country parson of considerable means and an erudite amateur scholar.  Casaubon is bogged down in apparently endless research for a vast literary, historical, and theological study called The Key to All Mythologies.  The conclusion of his vast researches (determined long before he has concluded them), will prove that all the great myth systems of the ancient world are but distortions or mangled memories of the true revelations of Moses in the Pentateuch: in other words a “fundamentalist” (as we might now call it) defense of the historicity and inerrancy of the Bible.

 

George Eliot

 

            “George Eliot” is of course the pen name of a woman named Mary Ann Evans who was not merely a Bible reader, having been raised in Evangelical piety that she later abandoned, but a real Bible scholar, the translator of revolutionary works of German theology such as D. F. Strauss’s Life of Jesus (1835/36) and Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841).  Her abandonment of orthodox Christian belief, though it scandalized many of her contemporaries, did nothing to qualify her life-long admiration of the literary qualities of the Authorized English Bible.

 

            There are many dimensions to the literary exposition of the sterility of Dorothea’s relationship with her considerably older husband, who sees in her a subservient research assistant rather than anything approaching an intellectual partner.  But his vast and wacky Key to All Mythologies is itself a major load-bearing pillar of the novel.  It exemplifies  in intellectual terms the “dead hand” with which Casaubon would seek to crush his wife’s spirit and control her even from his grave.  Casaubon’s erudite stultification would renew and expand the enterprise of numerous episodes of intellectual reaction of the eighteenth century.  Specifically, it is clear that his magnum opus  in endless progress  is a fictional  extension, expansion, or imitation of the work of the Cambridge antiquarian  theologian Jacob Bryant (1715-1804) entitled A New System or Analysis of Ancient Mythology (1774–76).  Motivated by the same aims pursued by  Casaubon—to defend supernatural Christianity and biblical inerrancy—Bryant erected one of history’s more amazing piles of learned nonsense.  His method was pseudo-philological, consisting mainly of the etymological reduction to three- or four-letter “roots” of personal and place names found in ancient Near Eastern and classical texts.   These roots he presented  as crucially related to vaguely similar forms to be  found in the Pentateuch.  The relevant part of his lengthy article in the Dictionary of National Biography can be summarized in one sad sentence: “His research is remarkable, but he had no knowledge of oriental languages, and his system of etymology was puerile and misleading."

 

Eliot critics, especially the female ones, are wont to beat up on Casaubon, and Lord knows, he deserves it.  He is prissy, pedantic, emotionally stingy and as we now say “controlling” to an extreme degree.  His treatment of his young wife is one of literature’s more convincing depictions of domestic emotional cruelty.  Graduate students of English literature long ago found in Casaubon and his monstrous Key to All Mythologies the archetypes of pedantic futility that too often haunt their nightmares.

 

            We can all endorse the condescension with which Eliot’s readers have scoffed at the wrong-headedness and futility of his white-elephant scholarly enterprise.   Will Ladislaw (Casaubon’s younger cousin, a spirited modern idealist with modern ideas and a modern temperament, who eventually marries the widowed heroine) does so within the text of Middlemarch itself.  Ladislaw  specifically alludes to Bryant’s works—part of the sluggish pond of the past that in the novel the wave of political Reform promises to refresh--as the emblems of an antiquated intellectual order.  But we can scoff at his biblical studies only in the same way we can  scoff at the adepts of alchemy, who, believe it or not, were still fairly numerous at the dawn of the nineteenth century. There is scant philological difference in English between alchemy and chemistry, save that the latter has shed its Arabic article.  The  project of the alchemists, however, was a fantastic and sterile one in terms of its stated goal to transmute base metal into gold.  Even so, through the centuries of the Renaissance and early modernity the alchemists perfected many of the techniques crucial for the emergence of real chemistry.  I find here an analogy with numerous episodes in intellectual history.  The shining pearl is the oyster’s response to the irritating grain of sand, and that fact makes the sand of interest in itself.  All of this calls for exploration with or without a committee. But is the world really in need of a Key to the Key?

 

 

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?