Human Nature

 

Two weeks ago I published a little piece about Boethius.  I had been stimulated to do so by the announcement of a forthcoming mini-conference marking the 1500^th anniversary of the poet-philosopher’s death.  That conference, sponsored by our Classics Department, took place toward the end of last week, and I was able to be in attendance, much to my intellectual profit.  It was immensely encouraging in the face of all the chatter about the eclipse of the humanities in our liberal arts institutions.  That the small seminar room in which it was held was uncomfortably full is a very good sign of the robust health of the humanities.  I expected a Times headline: “At Princeton, Standing Room Only for Sixth-Century Neo-Platonist”.

 

Having already offered my widow’s mite on Boethius himself, I shall now attempt to  do the same on the topic of his apparent concept of human nature.  For that is one of the major if mainly implicit subjects of his great best-seller, the Consolation of Philosophy.  Boethius was actually a theologian, though he wrote his Consolation in the guise of a secular philosopher.  The metaphoric structure of the Consolation is founded in the idea that Lady Philosophy is a wise healer/teacher dealing with a very ill patient whose malady stems from his oblivion of his own true nature.  Lady Philosophy begins her diagnostic interrogation by asking Boethius whether he is aware that he is a man (he is so aware).  Having further heard his opinion that he is a man, she asks whether he can define what that is.  His answer: “A mortal rational animal…and nothing more.”  This answer appalls Lady Philosophy because of its materialism.  Where is the soul?  For us the concept of the soul is mainly if not entirely metaphorical: the battle for the soul of the nation, etc.  But in the old psychology soul (anima) was an absolute if immaterial reality, that which was the unique special constituent of the human species, both a feature and a proof of man’s immortality.

 

One of the most consequential medieval popes, Innocent III (d. 1216), wrote a kind of anthropological diptych, one volume extolling the dignity of human nature and a second excoriating its depravity.  It perhaps tells us something that only the second survives.  It is called De miseria humanae conditionis, which even the unLatinated can see looks pretty grim.  Chaucer translated it as Of the Wreched Engendrynge of Mankynde—a coffin-table book, perhaps?  The more positive view has its own rich literature of course, wonderfully delineated in a classic study by a Harvard English Professor, Herschel Baker, The Dignity of Man: Studies in the Persistence of an Idea (1947).  Baker’s book is endlessly fascinating in its presentation of the traditional old European theory of man’s nature as sacramental, that is, having both an outward physical body and an invisible spiritual core.  Anybody interested in our earlier literature, especially Shakespeare, Cervantes, and other such Renaissance giants, will benefit from reading Baker’s book.

 

We often seem to think that the decisive progress toward the “modern” in Western thought is a feature of the Renaissance, but I put my money on the Eighteenth Century.  “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man”—so go the famous lines from Alexander Pope (the neo-classical poet, no relative of any of the several Pope Alexanders).   That was in his “Essay on Man” in the 1730s.  Somewhat later the Scottish philosopher, David Hume, opined that “Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular.”  

 

J. H. Van den Berg

 

            I cannot believe this is true; at least if it is, I have been barking up the wrong tree for many decades, a possibility by no means to be dismissed out of hand.  Of course, brilliant writers have been writing about human nature from the dawn of recorded human history, and as often as not they have been more concerned to show its consistency than its variety. But I am more in tune with the Dutch psychologist Jan Henrik Van den Berg in his very challenging book The Changing Nature of Man (1956).  Part of our difficulty in understanding—understanding, that is, as opposed to confidently misunderstanding them—is our natural tendency to apply the contemporary mental categories that for us are virtually instinctive to situations in the remote past.  But as my own greatest teacher was wont to say, “You cannot play hopscotch before the rules for hopscotch are invented”.  We may safely assume that blood was circulating through the human body before 1628, when that fact was “discovered” by William Harvey.  But that truth is a fairly recent discovery in terms of the long history of world literature.  We cannot expect medieval literary references to the heart, of which there are very many indeed, to reflect the attitudes of modern cardiology.

 

Psycho-history, or “mentalities” as the French like to call it, is a topic nearly infinite, but I want to scratch another half inch of its surface by mentioning the work of Julian Jaynes.  By chance I was personally interacting frequently with Julian beginning about 1970, when he was a research psychologist at Princeton and I was in the early years of my career.   We were both deeply interested in undergraduate life, and in the promise we saw in the idea of the residential college—of the sort that eventually has become universal on our campus.  (The residential college system creates coherent subgroups among an undergraduate body of a size to foster a wide variety of intellectual and cultural activities, such as theater, musical groups, or community action volunteers, at what might be called local scale.)  Julian was the first faculty Master of the Woodrow Wilson Society, later Wilson College, of which I was the first regular faculty director.  The system, consisting of seven separate colleges, is now universal.  Jaynes was officially a researcher attached to the Psychology Department.  We all knew that he was writing some kind of ambitious book, concerning which he was so evasive as to lead us to believe it was a pipe dream rather than a bibliographical reality.  But then in 1976 it suddenly burst upon the literary world: The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976).  For a while it cut a pretty broad swath, and it (unlike Julian himself, alas) is still very much alive.  There is even a Julian Jaynes Society.  I shall not try to tell you what is in it, or to pretend that I even fully understand the argument.  But I can and do use the professorial dodge of recommending that you read it for yourself.  It is in one oblique way a literary study.  He uses the classical Homeric materials to posit a dramatic hypothesis about a profound historical change in the operations of the human mind.

 

Julian Jaynes reunifying a mind

 

 

 

 

 

Academic Palms

 

            As I have now written about eight hundred weekly posts, I have to forgive myself for forgetting most of them and, no doubt, inadvertently repeating subjects now and then.  Inadvertent but inevitable: I have nowhere near eight hundred ideas.  This week, however, I am fully aware of the repetitive element.  My subject must once again be the achievements of one of our children.  Katherine Fleming has been honored with yet another prestigious award by the Republic of France.  Thus it was that a week ago we found ourselves Ubered up the Turnpike through really beastly traffic to Manhattan.  Our destination was an event at the French consulate on upper Fifth Avenue to attend the award ceremony.

 

            There are all sorts of reasons to continue to admire French civilization, the chief of which is that it is so wonderfully civilized.  But teachers and scholars have a special reason for their appreciation.  At least since the days of Napoleon the French have been leaders in giving public recognition to outstanding men and women renowned in science, humanistic learning, and teaching prowess.  Among the honorific categories of French knighthood are the three grades of the “Ordre des Palmes Académiques,” the “palms” involved belonging to the realm of allegorical botany, sort of like the laurel leaves you see in pictures of Virgil, Dante, and Petrarch.  The three grades are chevalier (knight), officer (officier), and commander (commandeur). None of these awards is cultural chopped liver, but the highest, commander, is of course particularly prestigious, and this was the one with which Katy was being presented on this occasion.

The site of the ceremonial event was the Villa Albertine, a part of French consular properties on Fifth Avenue.  It is the home of a French cultural center and small library.  This historic building is an imposing mansion on the east side of Fifth Avenue just south of the Metropolitan Museum.  It was built by a captain of industry, William Payne Whitney, just at the beginning of the twentieth century.  The house he built is truly baronial, but I don’t hold that against him.  There is an important distinction to be made between barons and robber barons. I insist on a a fairly high level of genuine iniquity in my robber barons, and Mr. Whitney by no means qualified.  He was to be sure of the category of “Patrician, Filthy Rich,” but a number of our great ones of the Gilded Age combined opulence with civic consciousness and philanthropical zeal, and there were several noble Whitneys whose names are remembered for their cultural good works.  (Of course the founder of Whitney Museum of American Art had the maiden name of Vanderbilt.  So it goes, or at least used to go.)

 

            There were perhaps sixty people at the event, only a quarter of whom were blood relatives of the honoree.   Lots of what I think of as New York People.  It was presided over by Mons. Mohamed Bouabdallah, who holds the titles of Cultural Counselor of France in the United States and Director of the Villa Albertine.  If you try hard enough to imagine just how polished and suave somebody holding those ranks is likely to be—that is to say, a public-facing French diplomat housed in a Fifth Avenue mansion--that was Mons. Bouabdallah to a T.  Katy herself is a terrific performer, so that there was a subliminal sense of repartee just beneath the high seriousness of their dialogue.

 

            Though this was my first visit to the Albertine, I had seen Katy “perform” there one other time on video.  A year or so ago in that venue she had a recorded public conversation with Laurence des Cars, the head of the Louvre Museum in Paris.  The Louvre is perhaps the most famous art museum in the world.  The Getty may be the most opulent; so one learned from the conversation between their two directors a lot about the deeper challenges facing the international museum world.  Those challenges cannot be reduced to any single issue, but they all must involve the delicate negotiation between keeping artefacts safe and making them public.  That is the fundamental issue, but it seems to have an endless number of fascinating corollaries. 

 

            Of course our daughter had to make a little acceptance speech—like all of her formal communications elegant, witty, but also at heart substantial.  It was also very kind in its allusions to her parents, to whom she gave probably too much credit in the formation of her international cultural perspectives.  But we loved it; and it is true that her breadth of cultural range, her remarkable abilities in several foreign languages, and the catholicity of her intellectual sympathies do have their origins in part in her experiences in various of our sabbatical stays in England, France and in Italy.  I remember her so well as a very little girl living on a farm on the outskirts of L’Isle-sur-Sorgue in 1968, the year of the great French student rebellion and general strike.  There she was in her little red polka dot dress gobbling escargots and gabbling in peasants’ French.  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive….Sometimes I ponder in my mind the remarkable differences between the lives lived by my grandparents and those being lived by my grandchildren.  One might think that they represent not different generations but different species.  Yet the through-line is family, which remains for many of us the indispensable constellation of social cohesion in a vast galaxy of whirl and change.   

 

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius

 

 

We have a general idea when the Roman philosopher Boethius was born, but think we know more precisely when and where he died: in or near the Italian city of Pavia, in Lombardy, in the autumn of 524.  There is enough authority behind that date to allow a group of my learned colleagues to have organized a small conference for next week commemorating the 1500^th anniversary of his death.  I am eagerly looking forward to it.  The name of Boethius is no longer universally recognized even by college graduates, and more’s the pity.  His great masterpiece, the Consolation of Philosophy, is, well, a masterpiece, and for more than a millennium among the small number of extra-biblical texts any educated European person was likely to know well.  That is because it deals seriously with very Big Issues such as the freedom of the human will and the essential nature of the human species.

 

            Boethius was a patrician in the Ciceronian tradition, a man who combined extraordinary mental prowess and political capacity.  But he lived in a political atmosphere very different from Cicero’s.  His world was that of the regime of Theodoric the Ostrogoth in an officially Christian Rome where politics and religion were entangled in complicated ways. He got on the wrong side of the king rather as Thomas More many centuries later got on the wrong side of Henry VIII.  He was imprisoned, tortured, and brutally executed.  He was not a churchman, but an active secular functionary who wrote several rather abstruse theological works.  His great Consolation is a classical philosophical dialogue set within a minimal narrative.  The narrator (Boethius) is imprisoned under capital judgment, where he finds no solace from the muses of poetry, in whose company he has long delighted.  Instead, a commanding, epiphanic woman of great authority suddenly appears in his cell, banishes the muses, and diagnoses Boethius’s problem as one of acute lethargy or mental torpor which has sapped him of his moral clarity and stamina.

 

            The woman is Lady Philosophy.  In five beautifully shaped books (chapters) she acts as a philosophical physician dealing with a hard case.  What is Boethius so upset about?  After all, he has only lost his fortune, his social station, his family, his liberty, and is about to lose his life in an ignominious and brutal manner.  That is roughly Lady Philosophy’s take from the get-go, and that of the “character” Boethius’s by the end of her several tutorials.  By implication, it should be the view of the reader as well.

 

            The Consolation of Philosophy is essentially a dialogue of the mind with itself, a form of which there are numerous other examples.  The most obvious proximate model is the book that Augustine called his Soliloquies, or internal conversation, in which an “Augustine” seeks illumination from “Ratio” (female personification of Reason) concerning God and the soul.  Some eminent classicists have been slow—perversely slow, in my view--to admit even the Christian substructure of the Consolation.  But that is a testimony to the secular rigor with which Boethius is dealing in philosophy, not theology—reason, not revelation.  The principal meaning of the word theology at that time was “study in the sacred text,” that is, biblical study or exposition.  The moral education of the narrator “Boethius” is gradual but dramatic.  He begins in a state of moral and psychological despair and also of nearly comic moral obtuseness.  A major theme is that of a sick man slowly being cured not by supernatural revelation but by his ability to reclaim an intellectual and moral clarity present in his human nature.  That is, the pretense is that the propositions posited and “proved” by Lady Philosophy can be arrived at by deductive reasoning and are not dependent upon supernatural revelation.  An eminent scholar has shown that two apparent biblical allusions are there by authorial carelessness, probably having been imported from unrecognized allusive passages in Augustine or elsewhere.  (Boethius’s lifespan was approximately a century after Augustine’s.)  The genius of the Consolation lies not in any extraordinary originality of argument, though the argument is impressive, but in its literary features, its beautiful prose and poetry.  For it is a prosimetrum, that is, a work composed both in prose and verse, with careful artistic relation between the two.  Some of the finest poems of the Silver Age of Latinity are to be found in it.  It is a prototype of later humanism, which habitually uses ancient pagan literary materials for Christian doctrinal purposes.

Dame Fortune with her wheel

 

Quite apart from its moral doctrines, the book’s purely literary influence in the Middle Ages and Renaissance is nearly incalculable. There are only two “characters” in the dialogue—Boethius and Lady Philosophy.  Yet it greatly advanced the popularity of a third.  That is the personification of Fortune.  Fortuna was the Latin name of the goddess of luck, chance—fortuity, in short.  This abstract concept of the random, unpredictable, capricious events of history and indeed of every individual human life became a major literary character on her own.  Though Boethius is instructed that there is no such thing as random chance as popularly understood, malign happenstance is rife in world literature.  When Shakespeare’s Romeo cries out in dismay after killing Tybalt “I am Fortune’s fool” he is bewailing his victimhood before a capricious and indifferent malignity.  Francis Bacon famously opined that “He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to Fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men.”  One small detail in Lady Philosophy’s account of Fortuna—that the goddess has a wheel that in its random rotations can raise those who attach themselves to it to the heights of prosperity (good fortune) or crush them beneath its weight (ill fortune)--had a huge success in later literature, learned and popular alike.  The television give-away program “Wheel of Fortune” has enjoyed an almost mind-boggling longevity of success.  One recent headline: “Wheel of Fortune contestant’s boyfriend proposes on set in middle of filming leaving host Ryan Seacrest nearly in tears.” 

 

It is impossible to think of the great emergent poetries of France, England, or Italy without an awareness of Boethius looming in the background.  Both Jean de Meun in France and Chaucer in England translated the work into their vernaculars as well as using its ideas and themes extensively in their own work.  The prosimetric form of Dante’s New Life (Vita Nuova), not to mention much of that work’s content, are homages to Boethius.  Literary originality in earlier centuries generally began in a generous imitation.  The trick was to find a new and engaging way of expressing generally approved truths: “what oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed,” as Alexander Pope puts it in the eighteenth century.       

 

The only popular work of modern literature I know of that brings Boethius to the attention of general readers is A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole.  This somewhat capricious romp was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1981—its author having committed suicide in 1969.  Though this macabre biographical circumstance suggests to me that his own allegiance to Boethius must have been somewhat  qualified, his book did introduce the Roman philosopher for a brief moment into the chatter of New York literary cocktail parties.  A Confederacy of Dunces is one of those novels, of which there are several in modern publishing history, which was repeatedly rejected by editors or supposed literary experts, before finally being published to acclaim.  The novel’s picaresque hero, one Ignatius J. Reilly, frequently alludes to or quotes the Consolation of Philosophy—not entirely coherently, in my view—along with other evidences of a conflicted Catholic culture, of which there is a strain in Southern letters.  (Toole was an admirer of Carson McCullers.)

 

Habent sua fata libelli.  This phrase, part of a slightly longer and frequently quoted Latin saying, has a rather banal translation—“Books have each their own destiny” or something like that.  It has been the fate or destiny of the Consolation of Philosophy of old Severinus Boethius to fade, after many centuries of intellectual centrality, into the kind of learned oblivion that could make it a prop, an emblem of obscurantist eccentricity, in a comic novel about a Minever Cheevy with a southern accent.  They say that what goes around comes around, but I doubt that there will be a popular Boethian revival in my lifetime.  It is all the more important, therefore, that his name be kept alive and his ideas analyzed and debated in those centers of learning that have the honor and also the responsibility of preserving the best that has been thought and written by our ancestors, however remote.  Those who would understand the present—I say nothing of the future—have as a preliminary obligation to attain some understanding of the past.  That is why I am looking forward to next week’s miniconference.                                   

Urban Renewal

I didn’t really need another signal that I am losing my marbles, but I got a strong one last week.  There arrived in the post a large, beautiful, and obviously quite expensive art book published by Brepols.  This is a distinguished scholarly publishing house in Belgium, once chiefly known for its edition of patristic texts, but in recent decades perhaps more prominent in the field of sumptuous and pricey medieval art historical studies.  The book is entitled Florence and the Idea of Jerusalem, and lavishly illustrated.  There was nothing else in the envelope, though it did have a return address, that of a Medieval Studies Institute at a Big Ten university.  It looked to me as though some sub-subaltern on the staff of their prestigious journal had by mistake sent me this copy in order that I might review it in their learned journal.  I sent them an email with this surmise.  The subaltern’s mildly annoyed response was instantaneous, and it was accompanied by a copy of my own terse but unequivocal agreement to review the book, written a month earlier before the matter took permanent leave of my memory of it.  How to save face?  “Never apologize, never explain,” as Disraeli, Henry James or maybe somebody else is supposed to have said.  Just write the review—which I shall try to do within two weeks.

 

            But the book’s apparent subject matter—the way certain cities have either in reality or in spiritual imagination been “founded” in earlier ones—set me to thinking.  Especially important was the word “idea”.  During the recent elections I was constantly hearing from pundits that America was not a country but an idea. How, or in what sense might this be true?  On every day of my young life in school I had pledged my allegiance through the surrogacy of a piece of red, white, and blue cloth, to a republic, which was I suppose a kind of idea, but I didn’t think of it that way then.  To choose Jerusalem as the model of Christian urbanization was hardly an original gesture.  For of course the “new” or “spiritual” Jerusalem are ancient and widespread conceits both in antique Judaism and early Christianity.  And they straddle both sacred and profane realms.  Why are the words Tsar and Kaiser variants of Caeser?  That sort of thing: the “new Rome”.    I live in the American state of New Jersey, which seems at first glance quite unlike the Isle of Jersey in the English (and why isn’t it the French?) Channel?  How about our northern neighbor, both city and state, of New York?  Not a whole lot of similarity to old York there.  To get there from here you have to pass through New Brunswick, home to our state university.  New Mexico is sort of plausible from the geological point of view, but New Hampshire?  And how about New Paltz, N. Y.?  A place called “the Palatinate” sounds pretty fancy, but have you ever driven through New Paltz, N.Y.?  It turns out that “Paltz” approaches the way Huguenot exiles pronounced the word in the seventeenth century.  Among my much-thumbed reference books is Webster’s Geographical Dictionary (1949) in which there are upwards of twenty pages crammed with short entries of various News, and that does not even touch upon the German Neus, the French Neufs, and so on.  How many Newcastles, Castelnovos, Chateauneufs, Neudorfs, etc., are there in Europe?  People apparently long to live in the New Something-or-Other.  In Chaucer’s day the town fathers of London came up with a ceremonial name for their expanding metropolis: Troinovant, or New Troy.  Of course the original “new Troy” was Rome itself.  And if you are at all familiar with Augustine’s City of God, you must know that the great imperial city—with its teeming population, architectural grandeur, and moral cesspools was itself a type, simulacrum, or foreshadowing both of great Zion and great Babylon.  But it surely must have required a large amount of chutzpah—to use the technical term in medieval Italian—for the civic custodians of Savonarola’s bonfire of the vanities to call itself Jerusalem.  And you can have linguistic renewal in more than one language.  Nova Scotia is a plausible geographical clone, I suppose, but New Caledonia (Nouvelle-Calédonie) in the southwest Pacific?

 

 

            Certain cities have enjoyed allegorical rebirths after their utter destruction.  One thinks particularly of the major North African city-state of Carthage.  Carthage made the big mistake of getting on the wrong side of mighty Rome in the second half of the third century before Christ.  The famous conflict between the two city states—which can be regarded as a single long-running war or a series of discrete conflicts--is one of the great events of ancient history, the Punic wars.  One of the Carthaginian generals, Hannibal, was a storied military genius who took a “cavalry” of elephants (elephantry?) across the Mediterranean and over the Alps to attack Rome from the north.  The annoying initial successes of the Carthaginians caused the Roman historian, statesman, and all-purpose old grump Cato the Elder to utter the single sentence most likely to be remembered by those alumni of Latin 101 who remember nothing else: Delenda est Carthago, “Carthage must be destroyed!”)  He wasn’t kidding either.  The place was utterly obliterated.  According to modern historical myth the site was then “plowed to salt,” so that not even a plant or blade of grass could sprout upon its former site.  The salting never really happened, for it wasn’t really necessary.  When the Romans wiped you out, you were well and truly wiped out.  Nonetheless there are at least a dozen Carthages in America today, and several more important ones elsewhere, especially the one on the Caribbean coast of Columbia (Cartagena).  The gazetteers  of both North and South Americas are replete with names cribbed from classical historians.

 

            And why is Zealand a place in New Brunswick (the Canadian province, not the New Jersey city), and what is new about New Zealand?  Then there all those great places that undergo name revisions on account on of regime change: the Constantinoples and the Saint Petersburgs….but that large subject would demand an essay of its own.

 

 

 

Democratic Doldrums

 

 

            This is the last thing I intend to write about the aftermath of our American presidential election for a while, but so far, so good.  I am referring here to the public reaction to its outcome.  The outcome has left millions disappointed, hundreds of thousands deeply distressed, and probably some tens of thousands in something approaching actual medical trauma.  I speak literally.  On Sunday our parish priest, speaking carefully but with obvious sincerity, spoke of the pastoral imperative of negotiating profound distress among communities united by a common faith yet divided by strongly held political disagreements.  The infliction of psychic pain on such a large swath of our national population is no laughing matter, yet so far as I know there has not been any significant civil disturbance of the sort I was anticipating.  ( I had been anticipating that Vice-President Harris was going to win the election, and that indeed some of her opponent’s most extreme partisans might well misbehave.)

 

            Let me be clear, as the losing contender in the recent election repeatedly said by way of preface to some opacity or other.  I need to make clear my sincere belief that the world would be ever so much better a place if everybody thought exactly as I do.  It is inexplicable to me that any sensible person might not think that way already.  But it turns out that there actually are these other people who do not share my views.  Lots of them.  Who knew?

 

            I read that among the “losers” of the election we must include the “legacy” press.  I must come clear and admit that I don’t actually know just exactly what the “legacy press" is, either from the point of view of legators or legatees, but I deduce that in practical terms it means the New York Times, the Washington Post, and perhaps the Los Angeles Times. While one might have thought that a hotly contested national presidential election would provide sufficient external or objective matter for any journal to try to deal with, the latter two of these papers made themselves the story by deciding not to publish an official institutional endorsement of either of the candidates from our two major political parties.

 

            A person who has loomed large in our political thinking for the past several months is a man named Robert Hubbell, who was brought to our attention by one of our old friends with whom we joined, along with another couple of close friends, in a monthly “Dinner for Six”, the main extra-gastronomic purpose of which was to review the political news, which consisted mainly in our exhaustive exploration of the latest enormities of Donald J. Trump.  Robert Hubbell is (I think) a retired lawyer living in the Los Angeles area.  He is energetic, industrious, highly intelligent.  He is a strong writer and a persuasive speaker, the indefatigable producer of his own political newsletter.  Mr. Hubbell issues a near daily political memorandum (the “Hubbell Report”), which is available on the Internet.  He is a strong supporter of the Democratic party, “up and down the ballot” as he often says.  He has particular expertise in legal matters.

 

            I presume Mr. Hubbell, in his clearly expressed unhappiness with the results of the election, probably represents, in unusually articulate form, the attitudes of many others.  In one recent post he spent a certain amount of time adjudicating the linguistic distinction between the nouns resistance and opposition.  Which of the two is the right one to describe the proper stance that must now be adopted by right thinking people with regard to President Trump and his policies?  He is inclined to the former, and why not?  But in my opinion Mr. Hubbell has somewhat lost the plot.  He is insistent that the election was a very close thing.  I won’t enter a dispute as to what it takes to be a blowout.  But Trump won by a margin of eighty-six electoral votes and several million individual votes.  Harris won perhaps five states that don’t have seacoasts.  (Remember the term “coastal elites”?)  She lost every so-called “battleground” state.   Both campaigns spent an unconscionable amount of money in the pursuit of victory, but the “war chest” of the loser—more than a billion dollars—was truly obscene.  Thus she was essentially creamed by an out-spent, foul-mouthed, mendacious, and often incoherent convicted felon vociferously opposed by nearly all the elite cultural arbiters of the nation.  How, one might ask, could this happen? And one might well answer that the fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars but in ourselves, otherwise known as the demos, the people, who exercise their awkward rule by the awkward system called democracy (rule by the demos.).  

Presidential Election

 

What follows is not an essay, more like a plea or exhortation.  I began writing this on Tuesday morning shortly after returning from the poling place, a firehouse about a mile from our house, to which our neighborhood was assigned.  The few people likely to be reading blog essays this morning are well aware that yesterday was Election Day in the United States and aware as well that I generally put my post up fairy early on a Wednesday morning.  As I write, of course, the absolutely final results are not yet known, but it is certain that Donald Trump has won the election and won it big.   While I cannot say that I shall be entirely indifferent as to what the final certified results will be, this brief post is not concerned with them.  Anybody who has been “following” the election campaign closely—and it has nearly obsessed me—will be aware that it has been conducted with an intensity bordering on desperation, and that prominent supporters of both the major candidates have predicted a nearly existential cataclysm should their preferred candidate lose.  Yet it was always certain that one of them must lose.  The clear logic of the situation is that many millions of voters—probably nearly half of all voters—will emerge from the experience disappointed,  and not a few of them angry.  Many are likely to be suspicious and dubious of the validity of an outcome they have been nursed by months of extreme rhetoric to regard to be so undesirable as to be unthinkable.

 

Whatever the result, however, it is an evidence not of the death of democracy but of its practice.  One of Churchill’s more famous remarks, uttered a couple of years after the end of the Second World War, is this: “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…”  Our own American democracy is undoubtedly being tested.  What the current electoral campaign has revealed to me—though I have nowhere seen this as a prominent item of discussion in the press—is the inadequacy of our two-party system in its current evolution.  If the only purpose of your organization is to achieve power, you are likely to employ all legal means in its pursuit and to stretch the meaning of the word “legal” to its breaking point.  Fortunately, a genuine democratic system, truly engaged in a principled fashion, allows constant refocus and recalculation.  By this I mean it is possible to achieve a just and effective government, possible but not of course guaranteed.  When a lady asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of a government he and his co-conspirators had come up with, he is reported to have replied: A republic, madam, if you can keep it.  Let us by all means keep it.

What About Us Grils?

                                                                    Jane Eyre

 

 

The essays in this blog not infrequently deal with books that I have found interesting, and not a few of them are novels.  This one was stimulated by one that I have not read, but clearly need to read soon.  I refer to the novel James, by Percival Everett.  James is of that genre of novels that belong at once to the categories of fiction and of literary criticism or literary history, for they are fictional works that in some imaginative manner interact with earlier works of fiction.  The “background” book in this instance is Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), a picaresque romp of high moral seriousness largely about the friendship of a young white lad (Huck) and an older black man (Jim).  A friend of Joan’s, who is reading James in a book club, asked me a couple of linguistic questions arising from her reading of it.  And as you have probably observed during the current political campaign, what you do when you don’t know the answer to a question is to obfuscate by answering a different one.

 

So I was set to thinking about a certain kind of book that messes with literary history while contributing to it.    I do not have in mind here that kind of novel in which the animation of the fictional plot depends upon an obvious contradiction of generally accepted historical fact.  These are sometimes called “alternative historical”, though I prefer the simpler “counter factual”.  Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Tower (1962), an imaginative orgy of the counter factual, depicts a world in which Japan and Germany, having won World War II, now administer a partitioned and occupied United States.  The underground opposition to the Fascists is led by a single heroic figure in Wyoming!  Who knew?  The genre of novel I have in mind—and to which (I take it) Percival Everett’s James belongs—I would regard not as counter-factional, but as counter-fictional.

 

A fairly well-known work from my own field of special interest in our earlier literature is John Gardner’s Grendel (1971).  The oldest great poem in English that most people have ever heard of is the Anglo-Saxon heroic epic poem Beowulf, dating in its sole surviving manuscript probably from about the year 1000, though likely to be of earlier composition.  Beowulf is the name of its Scandinavian hero, who battles against ferocious monsters.  In the earlier part of the poem, Beowulf as a young man takes on a terrible pair of monsters—Grendel and Grendel’s otherwise unnamed mother—who are attacking Heorot, a fabled mead-hall of the aging Danish King Hrothgar.  (In case you are wondering what a mead-hall is, it’s a place where heroic Scandinavian warriors sit around drinking mead, duh…Of course the precise recipe for ancient mead itself, a potent potion based in the fermentation of honey, is not known).  In similar fashion, the exact nature of the monstrosity incarnate in Grendel and his mother is not precisely clear, but it is formidable, terrifying, lethal, and anthropophagic (in more common parlance, cannibal).

 

Sometimes novelistic interplay can become complicated, or perhaps even puzzlingly complex. The more widely known the base or target novel, the richer the complexity is likely to be.  One of the early Victorian novels that anyone who reads novels at all is likely to know is Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). There is a reason for Jane Eyre’s perennial popularity.  It is a really great novel, and its title character an enduring model of feminine pluck.  Jane has it all—meaning, in this instance, everything required of a stock heroine of Victorian fiction.  As a governess, Jane finds herself in the creepy moorland mansion of a dark, brooding, handsome, and super-sexy guy called Mr. Rochester, a man of mysterious sorrows.  Strange noises—of the “Did I really hear something?” type—occasionally float down from the off-limits attic.  Spoiler alert!  There is indeed, unbeknownst to Jane, someone in the attic-- a madwoman!  The madwoman in the attic is Mrs. Rochester, née Bertha Mason.  She had to be put in the attic by Mr. Rochester on account of her violent mental aberrations, which are both literally and figuratively incendiary and apparently render her unsuited to what might be called normal social interactions.  And as her continuing existence might seem an insuperable impediment to the much-to-be desired hooking up of Mr. Rochester and Jane Eyre, you can be pretty certain that her potential longevity will have to be dealt with.  Read the book to learn how it all turned out.

 

The novel Jane Eyre is of course told from Jane’s point of view.  But feminist literary critics have encouraged a broader perspective, such as that which might be imagined to have animated the incarcerated Mrs. Rochester herself.  One of the more important books of literary criticism dealing with the Victorian novel remains The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar.  Though outside my own special field of expertise, I became very familiar with this book.  By a stroke of fate, and my good luck, I was the chairman of the Princeton English Department at the time we were trying (successfully, I am glad to say) to poach Sandra Gilbert from the University of California.  So I naturally had to read her most famous book.  She was a splendid scholar, colleague, and friend during the five or so years we overlapped.

 

The device of telling a well-known story from a new perspective or oblique angle forces you (the reader) to reconsider what is usually a widely shared, nearly default moral perspective, often in a surprising fashion.  I first came to appreciate this literary phenomenon in unusual and certainly unsalubrious circumstances on account of something scrawled on the wall of a dirty public toilet stall.  I am of a generation so antique as to have learned their filthy language and sexual misinformation from furtive lavatory graffiti rather than from widely viewed family TV shows.  Scrawled on the wall of one particularly well inscribed public convenience, I found one day, among many other things, the following strange graffito, the product of dyslexia rather than of depravity, a benediction actually.   God bless little grils!  Beneath this, in bold majuscules, was the query DONT YOU MEAN GIRLS [?] without the punctuation mark the syntax required.  But it was the third and final sentence in what would today be called this thread that was truly brilliant.  It plaintively asked, What about us grils?  The ingenious conceit of John Gardner’s Grendel is to ask the question “What about us monsters?” in a way that makes a reader sympathetic to monsters.  The genius of Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea is to give a compelling explanation of how a mulatta beauty queen from the Lesser Antilles came to be locked up in the attic of a creepy castle in the British boondocks.  It sort of makes you think twice about what it might mean to be a Victorian heroine.  Remembering the grils almost always enriches the tale told and the reader’s appreciation of the manner of its telling.

Madwoman in attic

 

Election Jitters

 

Though loathe to enter the overcrowded field of political commentary, of which there is no scarcity from others more sapient than I, election day is approaching with insistence, and I fear I am in any event running short of amusing or even light-hearted subjects.  So I had best face up to my fears.  These fears are not entirely or perhaps even primarily concerned with the identity of the winner of the presidential race. With two weeks to go, the race seems extraordinarily close, and the eventuality of an outcome of impressive decisiveness seems remote.  Remote, but of course much to be desired, for the simple truth is that the less contestable the results are perceived to be, the less threatening the contestation.

         There is in my opinion not a lot of room in which to debate one’s voting choice.  In saying this, however, I am obliged to acknowledge that many fellow citizens whose vote will differ from mine doubtless feel the same.  There is, however, a great deal more room for more realism and honesty in facing our dilemma than is being displayed in most of the news stories.  Of the very few commentaries I have seen that seem to me offensively accurate is that of Lee Siegel.  “Not in recent memory has the country been offered a choice between, in Harris, a vapid mediocrity, and in Trump, an unbalanced malignity. And not in recent memory have the running mates of the two presidential candidates been clearly more qualified than the latter — though barely so — to sit in the White House.”  It is my opinion that mediocrity ought to be able to trump malignity any day.  But this truth cannot redeem the disservice of our current party system or transform pigs’ ears into silk purses.

         There seems to be no such thing as impartial or non-partisan news these days, but our son Luke put me on to something reasonably close, a web program called “Two Way” directed by the political journalist Mark Halperin.  The “two way” part refers to our two-party set-up.  The Sphinx-like Halperin, who convincingly never shows the slightest hint of his own political preferences, is joined by highly knowledgeable representatives of our two major parties, both of them partisans but also honest brokers, and an audience of some dozens of “ordinary” voters.  The only slightly light-hearted stated goals of the conversations are “peace, love, and understanding”—and these standards are in the main observed—at least the first and, to a less extent,  the third are.  There are frequent invited interventions from professionally credentialled Democratic and Republican partisan experts.

         In many recent presidential elections the distribution of the popular vote has been relatively even in its totality and reasonably constant in its geographical distribution.  Due to the peculiarities of the system of election not by absolute majority in the popular vote but rather by majority in the block distribution of the individual states’ electoral vote, it has several times happened in recent elections that the winner was not the overall winner of the popular vote.  A popular vote within a state with a ratio of, say, twenty to one, is thus no more powerful that a vote of the same total number but distributed in a ratio of eleven to ten.  Many of the architects of the Constitution were fearful of what they called “the tyranny of the majority.”  Madison and Hamilton dealt at some length with this anticipated problem, as have several other classical political theorists.  This aspect of the American system, which some foreign observers find to be somewhere between puzzling and shocking, reflects the strong sense of what in my youth in the South were called “states’ rights”, a concept that though it survived even our Civil War has given much ground to the superlative powers of the federal government during my own lifetime.  Thomas Jefferson, the chief among the geniuses who wrote our constitution, was of the opinion that it was in a sense a provisional document that would be renewed, reexamined, and refreshed by regular and timely reviews by constitutional conventions.  Instead, it has become a verbal idol.

         It is very difficult to find anything like balanced or objective political news.  Neither the national print press or the radio and television stations make much genuine effort at “objectivity.”  Many don’t even try.  And perhaps there really is no such thing as “just the news” when so many in the news business are genuinely convinced that we face “existential” and apocalyptic threats unique in our history.  There are actually times when being a medievalist has psychic rewards in the present.  Logically, after all, “things can have never been so bad” only once, and the odds that that once is right now must be statistically remote.  Lincoln—I believe he was discussing agricultural problems—told the anecdote of a mythical wise king who asked his mythical wise advisors for a bit of advice: he wanted his wisest philosophers to provide for him a sentence that would always apply to any situation, and always be relevant and never stale but always true.  The gem of universally applicable wisdom provided was the following: And this, too, shall pass away.

         Such advice is important to take to heart.  Somebody is going to win the election, and the chances that it will be Mr. Trump are far from negligible.  Halperin speaks in contexts other than those of his “Two Way” program, and in one such conversation he has expressed his opinion that should Trump win, despite the ostentatious revelations over a long period of time of a bullying , name-calling vulgarity, a nearly bottomless mendacity, and the nearly uniform hostility of the nation’s social, cultural, journalistic and educational elites—that is to say if he is democratically chosen by an electorate which cannot possibly be blind to his flaws—the results will trigger a national mental health crisis.  Among the heaviest burdens of big-D’d Democracy is the social obligation of putting up with the choices of small-d’d democrats.  We shall do well to be spiritually prepared, knowing that whatever the outcome, this too shall pass away.