Platonism for the Iron Age : An Essay on the Literary Universal [1 ed.] 9781443859608, 9781443858205

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Platonism for the Iron Age

Platonism for the Iron Age: An Essay on the Literary Universal

By

Frederic Will

Platonism for the Iron Age: An Essay on the Literary Universal, by Frederic Will This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Frederic Will All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5820-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5820-5



TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. The Universal in China ............................................................................ 1 2. Emily Dickinson and China..................................................................... 2 3. The Individual and the Universal ............................................................ 4 4. The Universal in Literature...................................................................... 5 5. Aesthetic Universality: A Mini-History .................................................. 6 6. Universality and History.......................................................................... 9 7. Diversity and Commonality................................................................... 10 8. Eighteenth-Century Europe, Greece, the Universal............................... 12 9. Diversity, Stance, Hellenism ................................................................. 14 10. The Self as an Adventurer in Language .............................................. 21 11. Babytalk, Logic, and l’innomable ....................................................... 24 12. The Body of Literature ........................................................................ 31 13. Hentscher-Dompal and Dr. Faustus..................................................... 33 14. Replacing Your Life ............................................................................ 44 15. Scholarship and Poiesis ....................................................................... 45 16. Do We Own Our Own Language?....................................................... 49 17. Universality, Prayer, Depth ................................................................. 51 18. Translation and Depth ......................................................................... 54



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Table of Contents

19. Literature and What We Are ............................................................... 57 20. Literature as Central Art ...................................................................... 59 21. Platonism and the Ideal ....................................................................... 63 22. Universality and the Classical Tradition.............................................. 66 23. Ostention and Oblation ........................................................................ 70 24. Ostention and Literarity ....................................................................... 72 25. Oedipus, the Great Man, and Ideality .................................................. 74 26. Stormed by Poetry ............................................................................... 78 27. The Opus and the Fictive ..................................................................... 81 28. The Universal and the Text ................................................................. 84 29. The Ancient Graveyard Stillness ......................................................... 87 30. Literature and the Moral/Political........................................................ 89 31. Text or Blog? ....................................................................................... 97 32. Rogue Speech .................................................................................... 100 33. Language and Wild Rausch ............................................................... 102 34. Language and Simplicity ................................................................... 105 35. The Demented Killer Within ............................................................. 107 36. Living with Other Cultures ................................................................ 111 37. Greeks, Platonism, Salvation ............................................................. 118 38. The Royal Ontario Museum .............................................................. 126 39. Concrete Universality ........................................................................ 129



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40. Prayer and the Literary Universal ...................................................... 133 41. Interpersonality and Depth ................................................................ 136 42. Language and Transcendence ............................................................ 138 43. Alain, Sentiments, Passions, et Signes............................................... 141 44. Progress in the Arts? .......................................................................... 143 45. Gayatri Spivak and Comparative Literature ...................................... 145 46. Art and the Social Sciences ............................................................... 148 47. Literature and the Rounded Character ............................................... 150 48. Gayatri, is She Right? ........................................................................ 152 49. The Search for Meaning .................................................................... 157 50. Midlife Fictions ................................................................................. 158 51. The Goncourt Par Excellence! ........................................................... 161





1 THE UNIVERSAL IN CHINA

In 2003 I was teaching American literature in Changsha, Hunan Province. It was at the time of the outbreak of the Iraq War. For several weeks we foreigners had felt anxious about the advance toward this military adventure, which seemed unjustified by any danger it posed to our country, and in fact narrowly concentrated on one bad guy and his regime, to the exclusion of many other equally harmful regimes. What we have subsequently learned proves how right we were. The little guy is not without understanding. But that’s not yet my point. For days, as the approach to war came closer, and the conclusion of our class on American poetry came closer, we had been noticing a huge red banner hanging in front of our apartment building. It was inscribed with a message, in yellow-colored characters, proclaiming the evil of the American position on Iraq, and the danger America was presenting to the world in that Middle Eastern country. We foreigners felt vaguely excluded by the sentiments expressed there, which were clearly aimed at “us”, though we also felt in agreement with at least some of those sentiments. This was one of those occasions when a bit of our nationality stuck to us, though most of our consciousness was where the other was, in the thought position that challenged our nationalism. It was not a comfortable position, though it is one that many of us will recognize as part of the cost of belonging to a “nation-state”, and I took that discomfort on as I prepared my last class. In class I had a kind of epiphany which intersected with the reactions invoked by the red banner. The epiphany was rooted in the ground where we long to be one with each other, as fellow humans, but find that longing thwarted. We were concluding with Emily Dickinson. I had been loving the chance to share her insights, while at the same time feeling the distance between my efforts to share and the comments returned to me from the students. I had wanted to be one with my students, across the text of Emily Dickinson. But now I wanted to move the conversation, between me and these students, to a more personal engagement than even Emily Dickinson’s text authorized.



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2 EMILY DICKINSON AND CHINA

We had been reading Emily Dickinson’s words about what it is to be human, to fear death, to see precisely what the slant of the sun is in a garden—wherever that garden is. (The banner fluttered in my mind.) We had been talking, directly if belatedly, about universal human experiences. Didn’t Emily Dickinson take us to those places? Do you think there was a lot, I asked the students, in the way she showed us those places, that you were not able to share with me, or me with you? I didn’t expect a response, and got very little. The students were on the whole glad just to be through with class. But I went on. We Americans in China are aware of being in a culture where the current message is that we are aggressors. I mean in advancing on Iraq. I have seen the banners outside my flat. They made me nervous. They gave me the sense that this place, this location on the globe where I had been for some time, is not mine. I had thought I owned my flat, and the walk leading to it, and the look of the line of tofu shops that subsided into their own damp smoke, every night after midnight, leaving their owners bent with sleep over the charcoal. What has intervened between me and these places and moods? I am not a politician, or am I? Am I just by virtue of my personal history shaped by the mould of my culture? Am I locked inside a condition where the universal is unthinkable? What keeps collectivities of people apart? Is it the details of the ways they dine, or shave, or make up their faces, or present their obeisance to god? I was raised in a certain place and time, as were these students of mine. Now a war was threatening which seemed to pit against each other the world views of two nation-states from which, willy-nilly, these students and I had adopted viewpoints. “Viewpoints” is so shallow a word for the imbrication of the individual with the attitudes of his or her kulturwelt. Those attitudes are as thick on us as are the bacteria and molds that throng our faces when we wake in the morning, and which, in fact, we would be dead without. So sensing and being all that I called on my students to be, as though in fact we were one, despite the barriers inhibiting our oneness, I asked them to think that the poems of Emily



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Dickinson touched universally valid themes that joined us, me and them, in reading those themes, and at a level of oneness which surmounted any possible disharmonies introduced by politics and government. I waxed rhetorical, anxious to make this Iraq friction the occasion for pointing out how deeply literature brings together people who are falsely separated by their differing embeddednesses in time. I know how much mere rhetoric was wrapped into that “falsely”; how unpleasantly likely it was that distance and difference were the very names of our condition. My students finally “appeared to be touched” and to get the point I was fervently trying to work out for myself. But I have every reason to believe that the scum of embeddedness, on every cheek in the room, was far more irremovable than the clichés of the political arena.



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3 THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE UNIVERSAL

What did I think to say through the Emily Dickinson poems foregrounded in the last class in Changsha? There was an historical convergence that day, as I climbed for the last time up the steep cloudy hill past the tofu grills and tea shacks to the main drag of the University. I wanted to complete the class on a note of drama. For a long wet semester I had put forth histrionically on the American poetry I most love— Whitman, Hart Crane, and now Emily Dickinson, whom I thought we had earned. I wanted to conclude with that spare poet who reduces speech to skeletal codes, and life to the point where death can be seen cleanly through it. I wanted to say, through our discussion of such poems as “to see things slant”, that we, my students and I, were understanding each other through understanding the text between us which was a text in which the fundamental nature of human existence was being encoded. I had the impending war in my mind, and the hostility to it both of the culture I was living in and, but in a different register, my own hostility to it. I was made very sensitive, on that day when I aspired to a certain end of class showmanship, to the fact that living in a polity or politics is part of your condition, and that the universal oneness symbolized by certain works of art rubs hard against history. And yet I felt the validity of some “transcending” point I was fumbling to make.



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4 THE UNIVERSAL IN LITERATURE

The form of the universal in which I am interested is the universal revealed in literature. What is the literary universal? Let me make a distinction between two kinds of literary universal. First, you write the universal into your text. That action is often applied to some of the skills writers like Dante, Homer, Goethe display. That is “writing the universal.” That takes genius. Second, though, there is the capacity to formulate and talk about the literary universal—the capacity I associate with thinkers like Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, Johann Winckelmann, or Joshua Reynolds, who saw through the lens of the universal, or who used the universal as a dominant concept for their thinking. They are critics, while the first group are creators. What I learned that day in Changsha probably taught me something about what I think it can mean, in poem or story, for the universal to be touched by either of these two means. If you tell me that Hamlet’s dilemma should be readable or graspable in any culture that wants to stage it, I will agree. Everything about Hamlet is essentially and deeply understandable in any cultural environment, provided a minimum of translation has taken place. Shakespeare’s genius has embedded the universal in his text as Hamlet. Of Dante’s work it has been said, by Grandgent: When we ask ourselves why we are so strangely stirred by the words of a man of whom we know so little, one so remote in date and in thought, we feel that it is because…he knew how to present universal emotions, stripping his experiences of all that is peculiar to time or place…



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5 AESTHETIC UNIVERSALITY: A MINI-HISTORY

The notion of artistic universality has a modern history, and to that history we owe even the terms of the present analysis. As worked out in certain adventures of eighteenth-century aesthetics—Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, Johann Winckelmann, Johann Goethe—the universal is “that which is always and everywhere true.” For Samuel Johnson truth and beauty are universals, transcending time and place. Goethe writes of the universal dignity of the human face, any face, as it emerges into form, and “adopts the stage of the universal.” Pope wants us to let nature be our guide, and doing so to let what is universally valid declare itself. For Winckelmann the truth in art is not a single cultural truth but a symbolical way of pointing to a truth which transcends all cultures. What is beautiful or true to me here in Iowa is going to be beautiful to the man or woman on the street in Calcutta, and vice versa. (Examples from nature are regularly chosen as back-up evidence for the existence of such universal beauty: the beauty of the sunset, of the rose, of the child’s smile, of “beautiful” events that evoke the same pleasure in Japan as in Cedar Rapids.) The ugly or perverse or degraded is never the example of choice for the universal, but why should it not be? That notion of universality has much to do with the question of “generality”, and the “general” condition may seem incompatible with the perverse or degraded. Samuel Johnson’s “character” Imlac, in Rasselas (1759), urges his young pupil-artist to strive for the general in his work, for quod semper, quod ubique; the pupil is not to “number the streaks in the tulip” but to strive for general truth. This notion of “generality” is related to that of universality. The universal is taken to be the individual stripped to its generic simplicity. For an art thinker like Winckelmann the universal is like the purest water drawn from the heart of the well, clear and clean as the water Pindar considered the best thing in the world. Both concepts—universality and generality—became creative phrases for eighteenth-century European thought about the arts.



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This whole bolus of aesthetic perspectives, which to many in our day may seem archaic, was shortly after its time under challenge by eighteenthcentury contemporaries like Montesquieu, in L’Esprit des Lois (1748), who were already beginning to query the nature of the cultural “other”, and thus to complicate the notion of the universal. It is not a question here, of course, of a few names of creative movers, who occurred all together and were on the growth curve of “modernity”, and with it that impulse toward social self-awareness which was later to give birth to the “sciences of society”. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Herder (and at times Goethe himself)—among multitudes of outstanding thinkers—were already in their time launching early social scientific perspectives, wondering whether other cultures saw the world as they saw it, and thus, of course, whether the true, the beautiful, and the good applied equally to all cultures at all times, or were even the universally highest values. This was a kind of querying that was in some cases—take the example of Shaftesbury in the Characteristics—both working the territory of the universal and doggedly worrying it, taking the universal notion as a springboard toward a quest for ultimate value, and at the same time questioning the idea of any universality of taste or meaning. One of the mysteries that defines our own time was unfolding: interest in the other and its relations to us inevitably leads to concern with the essence we have in common with the other, but the very discovery of that commonality is a gateway to discovering the funny little ways the other is not like us—the ways the African eschews the very dining fork on which we Iowans count to save ourselves from too-direct contact with the confection on the plate. For the various eighteenth-century thinkers—the Encyclopedistes, Condorcet, Lessing, Malthus—who were the founders of our soon-to-be social-scientific preoccupations, it was becoming obvious that other cultures belonged to the unity of human thoughts, even that the Classicalbased Western tradition was “historical”, but less obvious that the highest artistic values of one culture would translate into those of another culture. These thinkers were reaching toward a discovery that would be typical of the cultural anthropologist’s find; that the grid of sameness, through which we perceive the other, is the grid through which we are enabled to perceive the oddity, the non-normal of the other. The birth of the social sciences in the nineteenth century signaled what was about to be a widely respected case for “cultural relativism” in such disciplines as anthropology and linguistics. (One might think of the work of Sir James Frazer—The Golden Bough, 1922; or Benjamin Whorff—Language, Mind, and Reality, 1942.) It is a long story to trace and map the inroads of relativism into the idea of the universal, but we will hang on to what we have already established



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here, that there is a kissing kin relation between universalism, the thinking of the literary universal, and the newly refined awareness of how different cultures do their lives differently. It might additionally be argued that the case for universalism, in a new guise, is returning at certain points in twentieth and twenty-first century argument—cf. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1944) or Alistair MacIntyre, After Virtue (1984). But if so, and this is a long story for which I simply suggest a title or two, attempts to rescue universal value reappear now from the dimension of religious/ philosophical thought, rather than from the implicit values of the thinking of a society in action, as was the case with the universalism of the eighteenth century. Some of the great texts that in our time have supported renewed ideas of the universal are the Greek classics, recaptured, for instance, in contemporary educational movements like the Great Books Program. Yet the Greeks of the Classical period, whose greatest work has generated so much thinking about the universal and general, and whose greatest theorists, Plato and Aristotle, are above all concerned with the universal and general, themselves had no aesthetic or literary concept of the universal. In fact, on such matters as universal artistic value the Greeks were entirely silent, even in the limited amount they wrote about the nature and import of the arts. We might say that the Greeks did the universal while the moderns occasionally talked and thought about the universal.



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6 UNIVERSALITY AND HISTORY

On the face of it, interest in universalism today sounds erudite and detached. The opposite is the case. Our topic, the literary universal, is a concept whose very formulation is alive and arouses edginess, and which is made provocative by the current climate of cultural discourse; to draw attention to literary universality suggests in our time almost an engaging trench-level statement. In an age when everything political and cultural is about difference and the other, it will seem offensive to many to regress into the topic of the universal. And the intellectuals? How will they cotton to such talk of the universal? Within the academy, to be sure, attempts to pin down the universal traits in mankind might in one sense seem to be welcomed; after all, those traits mesh with the viewpoint of globalization, which is as much in vogue today as diversity; though globalization, as shibboleth, might well seem to proceed in the opposite direction from diversity. (There is no rigid exclusion between the two terms, but the operative fallouts from them move in opposite directions. If the revered minority is found to be just part of the global whole, it loses its distinct condition; if the global whole is imagined to embrace endless subgroups, the grand unities of the whole are leached away.) But the fact is that the flag of universalism, for all the support it provides to the global perspective within the community of thinkers, lies even there under a deep cloud. It is as though the quod semper, quod ubique perspective implied a politics of the elite, which it certainly need not. And yet that seeming implication has brought a political dimension into the discourse of historical aesthetics. We must attribute this cloud over the universal to a prevailing world cultural view in which the welfare state, attempting to mandate equality of rights, shudders at any suggestions of cultural superiority, and scorns itself for any semblance of prioritizing, thus feeling obligated to prioritize the “dispossessed of the earth” at the expense of the unity of human being. The fact in that within this complex of issues the notion of the universal, “what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed,” finds itself in stormy weather today, and is likely to capsize at any given moment for want of any thorough inspection of its historical roots.



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7 DIVERSITY AND COMMONALITY

What we call “diversity” today, implying at this time the respect for the rights of minorities and marginalized groups, is what we have for a half-century wanted to promote through government “entitlement programs” on the federal level, bringing the support of our government to bear on the entitling of those “history” has left behind. This promotion of under-supported diversity has laudable generosity as one of its roots, and makes its claim, today, to pride of place in the intellectual’s arsenal of perspectives. Diversity, however, has not always been the sought-after goal of our society—nor is it universally sought-after today in other societies. There are different ways to view the diversity issue. Diversity is not the sought-for goal, today, in Nigeria, or Iceland, or China, all of which countries promote a preference for their own indigenous inhabitants—one of 300 pronouncedly separate ethnic groups (Nigeria); a member of the Nordic community of nations (Iceland); the vast Han majority of the population (China). Nor, in fact, was immigration, and the striking diversity it promotes, a priority for the polis of fifth-century Athens, in which being foreign was a strong mark against you; in which being a barbaros, speaking Attic Greek with a funny accent, was an inherent reproach, not the mark of a to-be-valorized outsider. That is to bring up a few examples of laws and public policy on immigration, as it occurs today, a topic of complex contention in a country like the United States, where a long unprotected border to the south has allowed in floods of undocumented aliens, for the most part illegal and in some degree, to some (but far from all) people, an unwanted element in the population. The issue of cultural diversity, and the promotion of it, is hot and active in America today, because our desire to respect the basic human identity of these illegal presences speaks very loudly in many sectors of the population, and lays a claim precisely on respect for the brotherhood of humanity. The diversity issue has become intense in America because the thrust of much legislation and popular feeling is sympathetic to minorities, and sensitive to the disparities of wealth and privilege which have the



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cumulative effect of concentrating national power in the hands of longprioritized cliques or individuals; while at the same time we know that the commitment to the universal human is a strong thread in our humanity. We envisage the global—the global village, the economic community of nations, World Music or World Literature—as at least one omega point of progress among human beings. One goal of such universalism, we suppose, is the erasing of the differences among the local communities that go into composing a world community. And as we know—from our daily experience either of arts from other cultures, of summit meetings joining leaders from different cultures, or even of supremely testing struggles of cultural difference—like the Sharia incursion of Islam in the Magreb into Mali, as it runs into the post-colonial Westernism of Socialist France—our thoughts, feelings, and prejudgments about the other are constantly modifying, so that even in the knowing of the other as brutally other we are knowing the other. Or to pick a more digestible instance, go to Barnes & Noble with me last week. Americanah? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie? Had to pick it up. Never do that, just explore. I’m caught at once, as I follow the self-analysis of brilliant English transcending norms, fussy in elaborate detail over the choice of hair attachments and sarcastic blogs in Princeton and Trenton, skipping over into a Nigerian high life you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours living room dialogue, until I find myself an hour later chucklingly rehearsing the sounds of the once unknown cultural dialogue of Nigerian sophistication; through another which marriage has welded me to I realize how utterly I have learned to speak to myself in a new language. I have met the other and know it, but precisely through knowing the absolute knife of difference that defines it.



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8 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPE, GREECE, THE UNIVERSAL

What about the culture that generated the Western concept of literary universality, the eighteenth century in Europe? What kind of complex of world views were those people coming from, into their notion of the universal? Did they see in the universal that strange affinity to the particular, the locally familiar, which we discussed above? What was their attitude toward diversity? Put yourself back there in 1750—in Leipzig, or Dover, or Nantes. The world is shrinking around you; the great initial voyages of discovery were well in the past, distant corners of the globe were coming into the light, and even notions like travel and tourism were beginning to take their bite out of human ignorance. From where, in this developmental picture of the world two and a half centuries ago, would have come the notion of the global and the universal? And were the notions of the global and the universal twinned? Or only indirectly related to one another? In the Western hemisphere the global was at that time only a form of pronouncement. Who expatiated about the importance of the global, or thought, in that sense, about the unity of all mankind? My story book answer has several chapters in it, all already part of the foregoing discussion, and all pinned to textbook elites. It includes Johnson’s Imlac, urging Rasselas not to number the streaks of the tulip, but to stick with the general, the universal; meaning-themes containing within them the rich content of the particular. Another chapter includes Sir Joshua Reynolds, charging against Blake’s idea of “minute particulars”, with his own notion of idealized portraiture, which goes for the general human features of the portrayed. Another chapter includes Goethe, digging up the traces of the generally valid from the phenomena of clouds, or from evolutionary human behavior—what could go for the type more than the argument of Faust, that symbolically embedded figure in whom the human quest for infinite learning and at the same time tangible here-ness is essentialized? (We begin to track here the intersection point where the concrete



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universal, what we find in Falstaff, borders on the abstractly universal, where Blake and Reynolds actually belong in a hidden dialogue with one another.) My last chapter includes Alexander Pope, looking for “what oft was said but ne’er so well expressed,” as though there were ways waiting there for reality to find its best expression; an expression uploaded from the nature which is the universal mother of us all. I am throwing everything but the kitchen sink into this farrago of eighteenth-century references, mixing the literal shrinking of the globe with the consequent widening of the mind, the beginnings of that paradoxical humane geography which has reached the haunting stage by our day, and may contain in it the one grail, the unity grail, lying before and within the future of humanity. I am tracking in a few sibylline words the interplay between globalism and regionalism. And implying a kinship thread between the global village thought and the thought of the literary or other artistic universal. And what is it again, that unity grail? Put it a different way this time. The human infant grows into the stages of life, and for part of that growing curve an apex is envisaged, a point of maximum operation which precedes the central nervous system slowdown that leads to death. Same with the humanity which spreads over our globe. Infant cultures mature and in that process they learn more about the world outside them, at the same time discovering more about other people and about themselves. The Chinese come into contact with Indian Buddhism through a monumental series of translation efforts, in the first centuries after Christ, and in the course of it Chinese culture is hugely enriched, mutual understanding promoted, petit à petit, between the two huge cultures. The globe grows smaller, the humane purview wider. The contemporary American, emailing his fellow geologist in Sarawak, makes a new whole in the noosphere, while shrinking it, in the course of discovering similar tectonic plates which are at the same time different in ways that can only be seen through their similarity. But—and this but is where the complexity lies—for the contemporary American, the British gent of 1750, or the Athenian in the agora watching The Persians, the move outward into the general unities of the human condition is at the same time an unfolding of the difference among people, the diversity that is only discovered by the unity. We are on the path, today, to discovering new forms of an old paradox, that the more we discover of our common humanity the more we discover of our common difference.



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9 DIVERSITY, STANCE, HELLENISM

This is to keep ourselves within the issue of thinking about the universal, and, in an age obsessed in the West by the notion of diversity, with the issue of the paradoxical relation between diversity and unity, the mutual hunger of one and other with which Plato himself is obsessed in dialogues like Protagoras, and in which, in fact, the Milesian hylozoists were themselves obsessed, say Anaximenes as he saw the diverse permutations of a single substance, air, into snow, ice, and evaporated water. It was the Greeks themselves, in fact, who most transparently grasped the polarity of universality with the local, and so it was the Greeks, once again, who take us back to the other aspect of the universality discussion, that of the creation, as distinct from the analysis, of the universal. We make our roundabout way back to the meaning of the mysterious universality of Classical Greek writing and art. What is it about Greek sculpture (the work of Phidias), Greek architecture (the Parthenon, the Temple of Poseidon at Sunium, the Temples at Paestum), Greek poetry (Archilochos, Sappho, Simonides), Greek epic (Homer), and Greek philosophy (Plato and Aristotle) which seems to set a perspicuous standard for other times and places, which seems to speak for mankind, as was said in an earlier day, while at the same time emerging deeply regional, local, clothed in the dress, rhythms, audiential environment, and sense of precision that bespeak that time and that place? (I beg my way out of an “historical” explanation for this dated aristocratic Hellenist viewpoint, the explanation that the traditions of ancient Greece and Rome, which were in Europe prioritized by the Renaissance and the two following centuries, only in the nineteenth gave way to the adulation of Hellenism, which was in fact a latecomer in the self-definitional aspirations of the “cultured West”.) It is a question of where we start, no? I started with Greece. Parker Peckham, a colleague of my father at the University of Illinois, came to our house when I was thirteen; he and I studied Greek together and I have never felt such lifechanging freedom. This was my Renaissance. You and Juan and Supriva and Ching-hsien will all have had different entry points into the material of



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culture, but what I am arguing, here, is that we all, all, find ourselves back to a common understanding in the end, a human nature for which we may never have time to adopt a single term, but which is the blaue Blume that blossoms inside us. So, shelving for the moment where the point is to go, keep the point clear: that the Hellenic is capable of arguing itself, here, as a creative matrix of universal achievement in artistic symbol. This weighted historiography is different from that by which we disengaged the eighteenth-century concern with the thought of the universal, the produce of a tradition, fundamentally elite Romanized, which derived from the Renaissance and farther back from the typological writing we find in Paradise Lost or Gawain and the Green Knight or Beowulf, in all which texts there is a sense that what is being transmitted is there for semper et ubique. The point just made will shortly fall back to let us look again at the “Greek miracle”. First, though, we need to mark the special sensitivity of the point just made. In the culture wars of our day it is made to seem of supreme importance which point of entry one makes into a discovery of cultures and mankind’s unfolding in them. The priority of the Classical has lost favor, not to mention the whole priority of the West as portal. One can review this sensitivity academically in terms of the development of a “discipline” like Comparative Literature, for which the issue of choosing a starting point has always been central. That choice is implicit in the idea of choosing. To be sure, there are neutral ways of setting up a situation of choice. You can ask a child whether he wants an orange or an apple. You can do so without any preference for the choice he will make. But is your offering voice without valence? From inside himself, however, the child will occupy a point of preference—I tasted this at Gramma’s and boy was it sweet, or wasn’t that a worm I saw in one of those apples at Jim’s?—and will choose from there. The grounders and namers, of the Comparative Literature that has become an academic discipline in the West, were initially not only Westerners, “cultured” inheritors of the “Classical traditions” and European higher history, but were there because of the luck of history in flight from a seething Europe: René Wellek, Renato Poggioli, Jorge Guillén and Roman Ingarden. That Europe was seething in part from the illness of the nationalism which had been born two hundred years earlier in the very Western Europe that was ripping itself apart; it was not surprising that, wedged into a small corner of history by shocking and bitter events, Kristallnacht, Munich, the annexation of the Sudetenland, these culturally sensitized Western Europeans should have sought refuge in the havens of the United States University world, whose open curricular



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environment, coinciding with the strong doctoral study programs inherited after all from Germany itself, by way of Johns Hopkins, assured areas for innovation and scholarship which were no longer available in Europe. (So much has to be not said, in accumulating a background to the social dynamics of any event horizon, in this case the establishment of American Comparative Literature; for example where the American Graduate Study world found itself in Humane Studies, at the time infusions from the European experience were being made available to it.) It was also not accidental that these refugee scholars were living the salience as well as the nightmare of nationalism, as they carried their culture across the ocean; with the result that the first steps of Comparative Literature within the American academy were firmly planted both in the notion of national literatures and in just those Western national literatures, with their Classical origins, from which was to emerge the marked Western-culture emphasis of the study of Comparative Literature. Which brings us by the inevitably foreshortened arc back to the issue of where we stand in the understanding of Comparative Literature study today, and, of course, of how far we have come from the mid-twentieth-century establishments by hyper-cultured men in flight with bizarre accents. We haven’t even started talking about the immense journey already traveled by Comparative Literature, in a half-century of volcanic cultural challenge. (The author teethed on Wellek and Warren’s Theory of Literature, 1949, and is hit in old age by The Death of a Discipline, 2003, by Gayatri Spivak, who used to sit down the corridor from him in the tooth-cutting early days [1965–70] of Comparative Literature at the very University of Iowa where René Wellek taught for seven years upon arrival in the United States in 1949. The measuring of cultural difference, between those two books, will be at least a sub-theme of the present Platonism for the Iron Age book.) No, we’re not legitimately back to the Greek miracle, we’re not back to the generating point of the universal in the arts, but we are isolating a reason why the establishers of the academic discipline of Comparative Literature thought in terms of Western national cultures as the basis for the process of “comparison”. Whether or not they had thought of their ethnocentrism is uncertain, for they were fighting within them the battle of the nationalities we all were then; while they were much less aware, even than we are today, of the richness of the world’s cultures. We will return to that rich and super-current issue of self and other, starting point and object, in literary studies, but it is time first for the housekeeping we had promised ourselves, a look at the creation, rather than the academic search for, the universal, and that is of course the topic



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of the Greek miracle. Did the Greeks of the Classical period find their way to expressing what makes human sense everywhere and at every time? Or is that kind of old-fashioned pre-empirical nostrum one for the history of self-interested nationalism, as retro-fitted by the Renaissance and the nineteenth century onto a pile of hard-to-interpret texts which are still being processed, and at that from an unstably onward-rushing platform, our hurtling momentary perch on history as we write? Friends of the Greek universal claim, allies of Johnson and Pope, are likely to play their strong cards first, as have most versions of the modern Classical tradition: Homer, Oedipus the King, Thucydides are likely to preempt the discussion; and for the good reason, I believe, that these writers were supreme masters of the distance and quality of distance separating themselves from their texts and their audiences. That heavy overworking of “distance” needs justifying, as does the present author’s headlong rush into the language of quality, following say the tradition of Matthew Arnold and Rachel Bespaloff. If we meet the challenge of this quality language, we may approach a formula for the transcending achievement of these writers sprung up on a rocky peninsula in the Eastern Mediterranean, and without immediate influential antecedents—the highly creative humanisms of Babylonia and Egypt, not beyond shouting distance, were hard to incorporate in the present apostolic succession. Homer, Sophocles, Thucydides: all create from a narratival magisterium, from their first lines controlling us: “Menin aeide thea…” putting us in the space of invocation—but what counts, keeping us there until, with Peleiadeou Achilleos, we are on a level with our entire upcoming narrative: My children, latest generation born from Cadmus, why are you sitting here with wreathed sticks in supplication to me, while the city fills with incense, chants, and cries of pain. Children, it would not be appropriate for me to learn of this from any other source, so I have come in person—I, Oedipus, whose fame all men acknowledge…

How much more a master of distance can the teller of tales be? Is the quality of distance, removed in myth space, not designed to take you unresisting into its space? and as for “Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians; he began at the moment that it broke out…”—is there not both total control of the reader and a placing of the narrative promise in a ritual/mythical



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accounting which—and this is where authorial distance might swing over into “universal claim”—we see the promise of temporal and spatial transcendence, a reach to the universal? The self-confident authorial distance, intimated above, tracks into tales which are carried through on a sustained arc of intention: the Iliad flaying us with unremitting scenes of hand-to-hand combat, local cunnings, acts of bravery, leading us toward the gesture of grace, on Achilles’ part, which is all the preceding could have justified; and doing so in a counterpoint of caesura with run-on which is of unequalled energy; Sophocles unfolding, with us, a tale so thrillingly internal to itself, that even its spectacular displays of passion and loss are folded back into its artistry, chorus and actors blending in a growing awareness of despair; Thucydides, in a dry sublime, rubbing our attentions in one after another increasingly heartless example of the Machtpolitik that lies at the heart of intra-political relations, and that leads inevitably to system breakdown. The authorial distance claimed in all these texts is the pre-condition for the carrying power of each text, to a point where it is hard to imagine the text not presentation-worthy for any culture that speaks the human condition. Distance and carry are enabled, in these examples, by some capacity for projection. In Adrian Stokes, Greek Culture and the Ego—for in that book I get intimations of what “projection” in great art means—I get a fleeting sense that the way we try to overcome loss, by reconstituting our bodies in an image, like that which fine art produces, is our path to the creation of literary universality. This would be the path, to put the point in terms of Classical literature, down which Homer, Sophocles, and Thucydides walked, but not Virgil (great though he is in lesser ways), not Seneca (too weak to discipline a strong theme), or Tacitus (too brilliantly of the moment to keep the longest arc going). Is the formula for literary universality then to be found in a quality of self-definition? And if so, why did it take place in Greece when it did? Did it take place in all the expressions of the Greek people in art? And if so, did it take place throughout the productions of fifth-century Classical Greece, through the fourth century? Why did it stop, this miracle of selfdefinition and controlled inner distance? Why did Hellenism have to happen? The explanation surely lies in the quality of Greek self-definition. But the hard work of explaining starts there, with the words. In artistic creation you define yourself in terms of a relation to what you make. One quality of that relation might be distance. This is a phenomenological term, a measurement of felt distance. It is like the distance intérieur Georges Poulet writes about, which is a quality of relationship. By cliché



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agreement, and by intuition out from the points in this text, the Classical distance would be one which is removed but not dehumanized. To some extent this point applies to effective literature of any kind—to literature which deals with emotions, like Fromentin’s Dominique, as well as to literature which deals with the structures of human relation like RobbeGrillet’s Les Gommes. It is not in the emotions of the text but in the emotional working through of the creator that the healing and enwholing process of high art takes place. We can postulate for the Greek classics a maturity of distancing in which the authorial voice clears an exceptionally healthy environment for hearer or reader attention. This is the space in which the great author defines and clarifies himself. It is by traversing this interior space that the reader or listener recovers him/herself. And it is because this movement of self-recovery is a fundamental human gesture that a kind of universal applicability leaves its shadow on the great text. And why did such a capacity for artistic greatness—for we are on our way to the visual arts of Classical Athens as well as the verbal—“take place in Greece when it did”? The political/economic conditions for personal freedom—trade, monetization, the growth of literacy, the stimulus of rivalry, the plastically growing availability of a language both incremental in vocabulary, supple in those all-determining niceties like prepositions and prefixes, and finally the exhilarating sense of establishing the new, in genres, in emotional range, and in philosophical power: all these conditions were present in fifth-century Athens. Discovery begat discovery in an intense historical spiral. A wide formula, to be sure, and one to which high cultural intelligence was essential, and from it the luck to have been christened by the Bible, the Homer text, which was itself on the highest level of literary making. (Contrast, here, the exemplars under which other great literary cultures worked: Vedas; the early Italic texts Virgil later draws on for a mythography of Rome; Sundiata or La Araucana or Os Lusiadas—noble tales of foundation, but tales tied to the local pride of a single tribe; the Song of Songs, or the Confucian Analects—all of them reverberations of the effort to find the control point in an emerging society—rather than designed projections into the open space of naming the whole human condition—as we find it in Homer.) It is no wonder that the myth system of Greek worship remained as fluid and inventive as it did, spawned as it was by Ionian dactyls. Did this Hellenic literary achievement find its way into other arts, as we would expect? The same maturity of demand we meet in Homer, Thucydides or Sophocles enters our response space in the early Attic kouroi, in the Poseidon temple at Sounion or the Parthenon, in the Zeus Temple at Olympia, or in the sculptures of Phidias. Yes. Confronting any



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of these structures means moving into a sharply defined space of concentration. One can adopt this access spirituality from any position, the acid test of the self-enwholing achievement such architects as Ictinos were achieving. (It sets the seal on the discovery, of the carrying demand of this visual achievement, that even the hidden parts of the Greek temple are worked with perfection in mind. The unseen back of the metope is refined to the max. The conscience of such work ends nowhere.) These productions for the eye make a claim in which universality is less difficult to argue for than it is in works of literature. Even when in justice we add back the painted surfaces of these structures and creations which we now know as brilliant marble, we see nothing about cultural difference, even over a long diachronic distance, which would suppress the carrying directness of this work, as it enters new spaces. Did this therapeutic fullness of achievement persist through the Classical period of Greece— which was markedly an Athenian period? If we look on Plato as a creator of art the answer will be yes. Plato both explores what makes beauty transcend the moment, and enacts, in his dialogues, that interplay of ideative subtleties which is itself art in the making. But if we concede this point, and cut Aristotle off from our list of makers of the universal in art, we need to ask ourselves what happened, in Greek culture, to bring an end to this period of literary universality. The answer, to keep to our level of easy generality, will once again take us to political developments—loss of the integrity of the fifth-century polis, with its democratic rumbustiousness —and to the introduction, with the Hellenistic world and the “globalism” of Alexander, of genre visuals—the Boy with the Goose, the Altar of Pergamon—and genre texts—the poems of Theocritus, the dramas of Menander, the mimes of Herondas. Contrary to what might seem logical expectations, the entry of such sentiment sharply reduces the universality of the art works produced. Apparently the universal carves sentiment away from it, and leaves what Johann Winckelmann considered the ideal, the purest water from the center of the spring.



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10 THE SELF AS AN ADVENTURER IN LANGUAGE

I started with an anecdote. I wanted to open out some of the dramas, aspirations, and inevitable frustrations of the drive to connect universally. There were thinkers in the eighteenth century who felt that the clarity of Classical thoughts, their relation to nature and God’s plan, guaranteed intelligibility worldwide for distichs written with Latinate discipline in a corner of English culture. This was a forgivable innocent parochialism, as, someday, will seem to distant ages our own tortured efforts to measure the limits of human understanding and of the global social. Right in the midst of the universal thicket do we stand now, and while ready to formulate a data bank of the world’s Babelian thousands of languages, and inwardly ready to say yes to any culture’s eccentricities, we still think and feel from an historically over-determined I with which we inevitably dress the universal. I am still seeing through American lenses, twentieth-century Midwestern filters on them, and contacts, believe me, layer on layer there, passed on from the Urbana Illinois lens to the eastern Iowa lens, to the marriage number three lens, and you carry the ball from there, right down to the surface of those other balls, the eyeball and the mindball, and the hardball diamond where I played my Illinois heart out. As if to ease itself into the morass of our efforts at historical selflocation, this study in literary universality can hardly move more honestly than into the language it uses to interview the possibility of the universal. (It is as though, in the midst of a prolonged filibuster, the talking head makes an abrupt stop, steps into a separate chamber, and views a documentary video of him- or herself talking for the previous two hours, and wants to know what is that talking face and animated mouth? What kind of an action is it in the midst of, and what has that action to do with something taking place inside it, like a brain? Is not this action detachable from everything else inside or around it? Is not every philosophical question we can ask, about the psychology or aspirations of the human animal, patent to read from those moving lips and palpitating throat?) We have so far looked at—thought about—the existence of the universal, and at creations which intend to incarnate the universal. Both kinds of thought



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were formulated in language attempting to scrutinize uses of language, to palp language claims for the translatability of all languages into mutual intelligibility; and rightly were those claims assumed because the literary universal is nothing except what we might want to say or write about it, and what we might want to say about it is nothing except in terms of what other languages can validate as our thought. (The universal itself, in whatever form it appears, may exist before or outside language, but the point is arid—for only in language can we even formulate the point.) The essential role of language, in making ourselves parts in a world, is taken for granted here. The present text records dramas: some of the adventures of language in substantiating and characterizing the universal. But what credentials back up this effort, and justify our attention to it? We live in a biosphere of verbals, each cropping from the ground we sow it in, and each as easily detracked from its cognitive mission as the a in Derrida’s différance, that portal into the discovery that meaning (as Derrida sees it) exists only as a byproduct of the mutual self-definition of terms and their opposites. Nothing, we know, binds us to spelling or numeration as they are passed down to us. Nothing guarantees us the referential usefulness of our language except its extension over the globe of the human biosphere. Sartre gives us, in La Nausée, the moving example of Roquentin fixated on the roots of a giant tree in his city park. He grows increasingly terrified as the roots, swelling before him in the dusk, push back the language coverings—Roquentin gradually loses control over the word “racine” and starts to babble at it, as though he were having a stroke—and has an intimation of the world that is not made up of language. This kind of intimation is of great rarity—we rely on the testimony of the mystical in us—and by the nature of our condition in language virtually precluded. Our discourse about the universal not only participates in creating the great prison house of language, but is guilty of perpetuating, in language, the particularly extravagant proposal that texts made of language, words, could contribute to appreciating the fundamental oneness, the humanity, of humans around the globe. Humans exist over the drop space on the other side of which is l’innomable, that which, because it exists as what we cannot name, threatens with special indifference those language sallies in which we aspire to name the most lasting format of our presence on the globe, our universality. In Chapter 15 of Time, Accounts, Surplus Meaning (2012) I do my best to characterize that pre-speech zone, while in Chapter 7 of the same book I try to “get inside the mind of the prehistoric artist.” What we are saying there, and here, is that what we are saying, about the place of the concept of literary universality both in thought and in



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creation, is talky-talky human bullshit, whistling in the dark to keep from our attentions the absolute emptiness of piles of words, an emptiness so threatening that to keep it at bay for sixty thousand words is to put time in, well, holding back terror. Wow, what a hyper-dramatic account of this text that is, and how needlessly uncomfortable! Isn’t the prison house of language at the same time a safe house, a shelter against what was threatening Roquentin in the park? Shouldn’t we shut up and enjoy a little peaceful incarceration? This is going to be a long book, full of twists and turns. It is going to take jumps and curves and try to disappear down its own throat like a living magic trick, but underneath it all, ahem ahem, it is going to be sober as a nun in her cubicle. The nature and existence of the universal are not just hat tricks produced by European history, but beacons lighting the path that separates one of us from another. Sooner or later I’m gonna break my Catholicism open like an egg onto the snow-white screen of this text— textura, better, something with grain enough to absorb egg yellow—and I’m gonna try my turn at love, community, sacrifice for the other, and the master’s model, but not quite yet. And yet I’ve raised the flag, no? Put it up there for pot shots? Universality is about something.



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11 BABYTALK, LOGIC, AND L’INNOMABLE

OK. Talk about universality, or writing about the planting of snowpeas, or about establishing a small business, it’s all about the about which is not there. The answer to language is always language. In the present book we have begun by choosing, as our language which is simply part of a chain of language acts, language about literary universality, in other words language whose claim to carry to the ends of the earth, to the farthest sentient ear, place it as claim as far as is imaginable from a capacity to establish itself. The capacity for that self-establishing, of the language of universality, is as likely as we are to involve the inorganic universe in conversation. What I offer here as a conundrum or logical contradiction can as usual be addressed only by incremental attacks, and especially in the present case, for I move here toward language in which challenge to meaning is increasingly savage, and what might seem insanity is on the path to the world, rather than lost in the world. In a recent book, Being Here (2012), I make and watch language “going off the tracks.” First cut the drain from the sludge Water will steep. Tea Wants care before houses. Stride, Please, til weak, fyre Please, dray stalls. Masked words, tech Primacies. A hard grain Stank, road drain. Tenr, sine cosine

It is perhaps at “dray stalls” that the machinery…of obfuscation…begins to creak. The mystery of no mystery signals its presence backstage. We begin to imagine the heady misstep possibility which tracks language usage. Not that “dray stalls” forbids all efforts we might make to assign a



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tie-in to it; but that any I to take charge of “dray stalls” is absent. We are heading into increasing entropy. We still have a self to represent the passage. We have nothing like imagination to drift on. Ineinsbildungskraft, a making into one, is barely present. We are playing ball in the zone where the incrementally non-rational is within our ken. We could here be moving into any number of territories in which to discuss the approach to l’innomable. We could flay out into the speech of the streets of the ear, the disparate that is everyday. We could be listening in on the private languages of a Stefan George. We could be entering the territory of Plato’s Cratylus or Rudolf Carnap’s The Logical Structure of the World. We could be entering the world of speaking in tongues. We could be drifting back into the schematic world view of Plotinus. We could be stepping over into the madness which it is easy to accuse, as being the first available stepping stone away from the this sound after that sound, please sir. In other words, we could be on the brink, here, of many ways of discussing the abjection from that lingua communis by which the universal in language is guaranteed. We will take a little trip into several of these modes of abjection, but not without warning you and me, o reader of the elderly and dim, that we have not forgotten the track, and that we will be making our ways back across labyrinthine terrains to the intersection of literary universality with the daring adventure of language tout court. We will be returning to language of which its authors, with the confidence of St. Thomas, of Logical Positivism, or of Johnson in Rasselas pronounce clearly what is true and offer it to the world and the ages—a proposition as démodé as imaginable, in our time, yet implicit in mathematical theory, in ground rules of scholarly thinking even in the Humanities, and in experimental science. The streets of the ear can sound like this: Steeplechase Vigilance flushes the brawny hare. There’s movement in a thistle. For a tin doctrine He sold x and y quanta. Discount goods. The devil’s in de tails, Though, weary as are details, Couched always in the finer edge. There’s a drain of fabric Fiery and detached as always. Ever is it the tocsin of child



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The Long Poem in the Age of Twitter (2011) is an anthology of such sounds from the street, which of course is a venue on which strains of Dante and the Greeks blend with the notes of dry goods and quantum physics. Our very time, in short, is polysignificant to the core, but at the expense of the rabid layouts of syntax, from whose grip quod semper, quod ubique takes its affirming life. On the street we can watch coherence falling apart like a melon left too long in the sun. However, that disassociating coherence is still a texture, and in many ways a thicker and more persistent web than the everyday language to which we adjust ourselves in endless affirmations that we are well. No more overrated constriction can there be, than the life time of expected responses by which we verify our insecurity as wanderers on the planet. Does the disassociation we start with, the rumor of the street as language, betoken a step toward l’innomable? Or is the disassociation simply a way in which we fall back to a default position, within the permissible range of language games? In Chapter 15 of Time, Accounts, Surplus Meaning (“Directionalities”) I range as widely as I can over the consciousness of a “porch mood”, and disengage several kinds of trapdoors through which the language user, in the manner of Roquentin, can fall. I play over the pre-verbal, in the verbal, and look to take sequence by surprise, and “catch a glimpse.” Is anything comparable under construction in those flights outside the coop taken by the rare language genius who “invents his own language”? Case study: Stefan George. Even in his youth, George showed a remarkable proficiency and aesthetic obsession for language. His earliest poems, written when he was fourteen, already exhibit a sensual and carefully constructed imagery, one which relies not only on visual portrayals but on aural landscapes as well. One critic has remarked that George consistently makes use of a “specially coded language”, as indeed is evidenced by his



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linguistic experiments. As a young boy of 8 or 9, George invented a secret language, intended for use in his imaginary kingdom (or “caliphate”) of Amhara, into which he initiated a few select playmates. This language only survives in incomprehensible fragments. A later development, in fact a new secret language, survives in certain lines of George’s early poetry, such as “Ursprünge”, a reflection on childhood. Finally, an Esperanto-like artificial language, which George called his lingua romana, was used in many of his first compositions; only later did George “translate” these works into German. Doch an dem flusse im schilfpalaste Trieb uns der wollust erhabenster schwall: In einem sange den keiner erfasste Waren wir heischer und herrscher vom All. Süss und befeuernd wie Attikas choros Über die hügel und inseln klang: CO BESOSO PASOJE PTOROS CO ES ON HAMA PASOJE BOAÑ. By the current along the palace of the shelf The longing for a noble swelling drove us: In song that none could understand We were lords and masters of all Sweet and enfyring like an Attic choros Over the hills and islands resounded: CO BESOSO PASOJE PTOROS CO ES ON HAMA PASOJE BOAÑ. (Stefan George: Der siebente Ring. Gesamt-Ausgabe der Werke, Band 6 / 7, Berlin 1931, pp. 126–129.)

Childhood games or a step toward that language inside language, where the sound (“aural landscapes”) becomes the meaning, but in counterpoint with the semantic, which continues to jam the product? If we allow the latter account, we will step toward understanding the attraction of “the other side” of language. The infant learns language in part by “imitating” the sounds he hears, but in part by countering: by inflecting a syllable not emphasized in the adult model—how are you instead of how are you?; playwords like zorg or trngg which delight in anti-meaning. There is in childhood a tussle with language which has to do with the art maker in us. We deal, here, with abjection from lingua communis, the stock ploy of perspicuous meaning which can, like the Catholic mass, be grasped in Fiji, Point Barrow and Riga all with equal ease. Abjection is an inherent falling away from a given condition, and as such is the kind of entropy within



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language we can imagine meant by Rabelais’ claim that there are no natural languages, that all languages are “made up” or “constructed”, and—we add—can thus be délabrées, taken down and apart from within. That kind of inherent entropy in language might seem in play when Wittgenstein discusses “private languages” which are not supported by a language community, the creator of which does not share references with any other language user. Wittgenstein uses that notion, of a private language, to rebut it, and to claim that language is an action socially supported—or is nothing; but in the course of so arguing he will have given room to the thought that a language which comes unhooked from reference exists inside the language we make everyday out of, where reference is casual, slips and slides over designata, and frequently fails to do the work we urgently need of it, like directing the refugee to exactly the right path up ahead, or the emergency med tech to exactly the right drawer where he will find the keys to the jaws of life. The same potential for linguistic disaggregation from within, if there is no social maintenance on hand, can be heard through those lines, of Plato’s Cratylus, which are given to the “conventionalist” Cratylus, for whom names (language in general) have no natural relation to what they designate. Names slip away from their things, if untended. The broad point at stake, here, is most easily tracked in some of the writings of Rudolf Carnap, in The Logical Structure of the World. In the section in question Carnap is fingering the idea of degrees of meaningfulness of a sequence of what we might consider “increasing meaninglessness”. 1. “Jupiter sits in this cloud (but the appearance of the cloud does not indicate his presence, nor is there any other perceptual method through which his presence can be recognized)”; 2 “This rock is sad”; 3 “This triangle is virtuous”; 4 “Berlin horse blue”; 5 “And or of which”; 6 “bu ba bi”; 7 “-)(*-*”.

Carnap takes care to strip the first proposition of any sensible qualities, in order, as he sees it, to make clear that the claim about Jupiter is on the same level of non-reference as the items that follow in the list. (A believer in “the spirit of Jupiter” might otherwise claim that the first proposition was in fact referential—which would break the chain of continuity of the whole list, much of which is at most questionably referential.) He explains this point: If the first sentence of the sequence is to be considered meaningful (even if false) then it would be difficult to introduce, without being arbitrary, a



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criterion which allows us to divide the sequence into meaningful and meaningless expressions.

As it is, consequently, it is possible to divide the “descending” sequence into levels of increasingly meaningless assertion. Is it the semblance of syntax that deteriorates in the sequence? (Only in 4 does the syntax break; and from there on.) Or is it some increasing lack of claim to use-value; increasing abandonment of the pretence that an item’s presence could be put to use in action or purpose? This progressive leaching of truth claim from an anchor clause—it could be quod semper, quod ubique, an assertion from within the viewpoint of literary universality—is not generated by the anchor clause, but illustrates the downshading of the integrity claim of the propositions that follow. The thought that deploys this argument is going to understand the point of Sartre’s depiction of Roquentin in the garden, faced by the “increasingly” non-denominatable roots before him. “Increasingly” may be the word to fight over, between Sartre and Carnap, but the backstories of the two men’s thinking will here intersect. (Let’s borrow the bracket impulse from Carnap, before we skip down the word-path to speaking in tongues, Plotinus, and finally the language deviances we see in the lab settings of the clinical psychologist. Bracketing is a way of asking permission to pause, perhaps to take tea but perhaps to insert, to modify, to chunter, as do professors when they’re low on thought gas. What I am writing here is professor talk, I hope in some sense, but also a blog from the kitchen table of a small town in Iowa where I live, or from Rive Gauche cafes like those in Barnes & Nobles. Everything that wants a voice, in me, wants to acknowledge its personal sound, and its relation to the point of production. It is my language that is exploring the language issue, and whatever entropic down-pull I find within the languages of literary discourse will be only as verifiable as what I can find in myself. Self on the table seems to this “scholar” to be the path to letting examples accumulate to the saturation point, locking in a perception about human potentials for communication.) The instances of George, Cratylus, and Carnap have been just that, instances. Or suggestions? Or analogies? Thinking in the human sciences is not like thinking in the social sciences, where an issue is laid out, its background sketched, research questions proposed, literature on the topic reviewed, method of study presented, data collection carried out and conclusions offered. What do I find when I look at a book of traditional (and fine) literary scholarship, like Bowra’s From Virgil to Milton? I find a launching point in a matured perception—that the great heroic epics of



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the West, from Homer to Milton, all seek for local ways to make a single point, “to proclaim in poetry a new conception of man’s grandeur and nobility.” We easily see, from reading the subsequent chapters of the book, which deal with a half-dozen great epics, that the author’s procedure has been to exemplify his larger point in a variety of instances, and to read the meaning of those instances against one another, incrementally, until a conceptually thickened conclusion/broth has been formed. The element of discovery—unlike that hypothetical advance of the social scientist—is unfolded from within, of course, but basically derives from providing instances in support of an initial perception. It is the hope of the present text to supply instances too, while linking the instances internally to one another. The present text, unlike Bowra’s, is a kind of scholarly blog. And thus it takes up, as though in a conversation with itself, an extraliterary space in which the event of internal language entropy enriches its intelligibility. The moving point, before us, will be that language, like the human who makes it, is a mobile fictum, forever self-defining and thus renegotiating with its objects of knowledge. From within us we must be able to know what the deep root noema of speaking in tongues has to say to us. Even those who suspect the phenomena of glossolalia to be selfinduced hysteria are customarily able to go to the point where they understand the trope of language fissuring. The inheritance in many languages of the single message of the Holy Spirit is such a compelling model of the power of language to specify down from within itself that we cannot but add it to the thought tools by which we can envisage the universal statement or concept in literature, undermined. The same kind of thought experiment is available to us as we reflect on the kinds of aphasia that spring from issues in the brain, but that take their revenge on the power of speech. From within the centers of language making come the inhibitions of language which are, like the tongues spoken at Babel, ready to rehearse their genealogy from within. Whether the species of aphasia are part of the inner entropy of language, like the tongues, or simply perversions of normal language, the final effect of these attacks on function is to expose the fragility of formulations in language, and especially of crystallizations, in language, of thoughts like those of the universal, which are having their long day not only in Platonism and math, but in the recurrent postulations of lasting truth in imaginative literature, ethics, or art.



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12 THE BODY OF LITERATURE

This text is all about accreting insights, putting them into awareness, building from them and into them, and sustaining a unique language house which will never need to be deconstructed because it is exactly what it is, and has no movable parts. The author letting this through his sieving presence wants to know whether what is being done here is related to what is called “scholarship”. Scholarship is usually defined as the act of applying reason and analysis to a growing body of past events, in which there are coherent patterns. Examples: Greek and Roman thinkers turn back onto their own cultural development, at ripe moments in their cultures’ growth—in Alexandria, after the disaggregation of the Classical Greek world, and the onset of cultural self-reflection at the Great Library, Callimachos and Apollonius Rhodius edited and classified the great works of the “Greek past”; in Rome the Pax Romana is already a great age of scholarship, most of it (cf. Varro) devoted to idealizing the Republic and refounding the Empire, as Virgil, that scholar, had done. (It is noteworthy that we only with difficulty think of “ancient cultures” as scholars of their own time and world, and approach even such ambitious literary establishers as Herodotus, as though they were not “serious students” of their times. We isolate scholarship from the main thrust of a culture, whereas “it” is an essential ingredient in the way a society grows.) Or of course there are the grand Western examples of antiquarianism, adventure, tourism, improved record-keeping methods, growth of bureaucracies on the government level, and the university “systems” which by the nineteenth century had crowned the Vater Professor Scholar in unassailable form, and with that paternal guardian of the data of culture came the great compendia of, for instances, Ranke’s The Roman Popes in the Last Four Centuries (1834–36), Migne’s Patrologia Latina (221 vols., 1844–1855), Inscriptiones Graecae (begun in 1825; 49 fascicles to date), or the many collections of the Oxyrhynchus papyri. Scholarship is, not surprisingly, thought of as a way of filling in blanks, completing and documenting records, preparing the next generations for a fuller understanding of their own pasts.



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The problem with this imagery is that the scholar is a real person making real artifacts out of targets which yield only their surfaces in the data they generate. To say that, and to lead toward a justification of the kind of blog scholarship this text is, will no longer strike the reader as daring or subversive, in an age when the positivist model of scholarship is widely seen for what it is, a stage in social recovery, an invaluable testing ground for integrity of analysis, and one of many kinds of effort at social self-recovery—the historical novel, the oral document, the archeological dig (which becomes increasingly articulate as a tool of analysis, as in the recent Writing African History, 2005), or the kind of linguistic contrastive analysis that Jan Vansina has applied to certain language families in the Congo—and yet the present author feels responsibility to himself, to heal the wound of time by justifying the present effort to rename time. And he feels in himself the tension between longing to know and longing to make new, an uncomfortable spur. The present author has been haunted by the notion of the body of literature. That conceptual shape, which has subsequently interwoven him with the notion of the Church as the body of Christ, has played a central role in his concern with Comparative Literature, both as a discipline and as a history, and in his views both of translation and of literary scholarship. His concern with space, as a way of restoring lost time, plays out in that body, and ultimately his working theme here, the literary universal, the realm of abiding truth in literature, is a thought component in his working through of the body of literature. As these concepts will reign throughout the remainder of this text, we can press the pause button briefly, to situate this notion of the literary body in the author’s ongoing conversations with himself.



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13 HENTSCHER-DOMPAL AND DR. FAUSTUS

In three earlier books, Translation Theory and Practice (1991), Singing with Whitman’s Thrush (1993), and Literature as Sheltering the Human (1993), I moved in and out of the notion that literature is a single body, boundless and bounded—like the universe—and that “we” have from within us a craving to consume it. (I commute we into the type of the homo linguisticus, the voracity we are for the limits of our imagination.) When I go back, after years, to the carefree mythographia of those books, I find the essential of my “point” in the tale of Professor Ralph HentscherDompal, “Professor of Comparative Literature at Gummerton University” (Literature as Sheltering the Human, pp. 49–57). Prof. Hentscher-Dompal is a Faustian mockery who stands both for what I desire and what I can learn from. Ralph Hentscher-Dompal, Professor of Comparative Literature at Gummerton University, was considered a maverick. His hours were eccentric, his colleagues thought. Normal activities—like teaching his classes—he did normally. (Handling six to nine weekly contact hours, over the decades; meeting essential committee assignments; bearing up his end of the Mediaeval Studies Program.) After or outside these hours—at least during the day—he would often be found asleep at his desk. (He had no wife and children to keep him bored at home; no boy or girl friends to keep him on his toes at the office.) But the odd part was that he was often at work until late at night—sometimes all through the night—in his huge cluttered office on the top of Tocsin Hall. Campus gossip attributed bizarre activities to those hours spent with the night sky. Rumors aside, however, and because we happen not to need them, we can say entre nous: Professor Hentscher-Dompal was an alchemist, a modern scholar, a Comparatiste, devoted to the most ancient of arts, transmutation! (The truth of his activities came out later, in his private diaries, full as they were of references to the gods, Thoth and Brunetière.) Year after year this Comparatiste labored on an elaborate challenge. First he constructed a critical-historical scheme of the whole



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The body of literature, as this author found it at that time of writing— he was sixty-five—bowed to the issue of time, but little more; there was no changing the mind of a man for whom the temporal was radically the spatial, the whole narrative of the universe was radically the idea of it in God’s mind. He knows, as he rehearses this passage ten years later, that time has some kind of last word—ecce corpus!—but under his knowing is a sense of being comprehended by concept, and concept, as he cannot forget, is where he gets the confidence to imagine a body of literature which coheres, which has the imaginative vitality to assert its meaning against the inroads of the trendy. The issue of translation encourages another zone of deployment, of this notion of the insurgent spatial whole. The author thought that the practices of translation are those by which the entire being of literature finds itself in the process of disclosure. To translate, he held, is to let one text, in language foreign to the translator, speak itself in the translator’s language, and to do so through the medium of a third language. That third language, this author implied—never parsing this thought fully—is the



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language of intelligibility across which the translator enables one text to assume the meaning of the other. The parallels with the Holy Spirit flit in and out of this set of perceptions, just as the body of literature simulates another meaning, the Body of the Church, or of Christ. Are these profitable affiliations, or just accidents of metaphorical proximity? To the extent that there is an omega point Platonism at work in this whole opus, in terms of which a truth to things—like that Hentscher-Dompal aspired to hold in his hands—lies inherent in the very quest through “things”, these metaphorical co-ordinates are brothering discovery agents. Whatever can be comforting about the above turns of thought— comfortable because suggesting alliances with the spirit world, perhaps even with the organized spirit world, and thus with traditions susceptible to the wordplay of salvations—is in the present author made uncertifiable by a from-the-outside opsis which brutally envelops not only the salvific metaphor of the above arguments, but has to render even the balm of the culturally traditional as unstable as a waking dream. The author doesn’t know how to say, that whatever he has gained from being at root a drastic poet, one increasingly, with age, bent back over the meaty emptiness of the whole language-making operation, has increasingly ripped at the fabric of intelligibility he is both sewing (and unsewing) as he advances in the earlier paragraphs of this book. It is not hard for him to try surveying the preceding torsos of argument, in this text, and to view them as nothing but what they propose to become for him now, nothing but language gestures he has shed behind him. The language past he gathers around the present text is in fact much more nearly a war-strewn cityscape—or something unneeded and marmoreal like a marble downtown created by de Chirico— than a field of emotions recollected in tranquility. It is perhaps only the self-rewholing practice, which classical psychiatry tried to abet, that provides underlying confidence in the language that has recklessly left itself behind in this text. And at that, when new language has the nerve to insist on itself, as in the recent Being Here: Sociology as Poetry, SelfConstruction, and Our Time as Language, it is language threatening to gag on itself, so sharply does it enact the being-different-from-any-referent that might tempt it. (Derrida, it seems to this writer, takes off fruitfully from the issue of writing versus speaking, which is already a hands-on way of questioning the written text as “saying something”. The author has simply to wonder whether he is a designated bearer of the imp of nonsense—vide Carnap example—or is simply situated in his own front mirror, grotesquely miming the ascentful promises of homo sapiens.) Language in full dress, the epic poem, the address to a continental congress, the commencement address—god help us!—so painfully rejects



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the primal in it, the primal summoned up in Golding’s The Inheritors—or for that matter even the kinds of limits testing this text is, that it leaves us in neutral, with only our own gears to grind. And at that the author of the present, who waltzed on stage with a Chinese anecdote which may in fact support the notion of a linguistic universal, which tests Emily Dickinson against a plain vanilla background, does in fact act out here over an old-fashioned Classicism. He sees why the texts embodied in the Greco-Roman canon strain against the leash of localism, even while grooving on their own exquisite adventures in prosody, local reference, and ambiguity. He has no problem believing that for a millennium and a half the Eastern Mediterranean harvested the thoughts that sprang down the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush from India, the Ancient Near East, and Persia, and that contrived to invent the human intelligence and give wings to the human soul. For harvest I talk, of course, of the single culture that extended from Homer to Saint Augustine, and that we live with every move we make today. Just what the Greeks and Romans had to offer peels off into details. I have already mentioned Adrian Stokes, and I understand him better in the present language setting. Take a look at Homer’s epics. As Bruno Snell pointed out in The Discovery of the Mind, Homer seems to have held back from a wholistic awareness of the human body. The body, and even the body inspirited by the thumos (spirit, chest-soul, center) is hardly a single concept; it seems almost as though the body is head, arms, legs, etc. Oddly enough, though this view would seem inhibiting as far as the grasp of the human person goes, the view Homer builds into his art—ah, is that the rub, that art helps to transform the body-parts body into a person?—is of “characters” of almost unsurpassed trueness to their distinctiveness. Odysseus embodies traits, which we can pull off him like burrs— ingenuity, stubbornness, purposiveness, longing for adventure—but what holds them together is Homer’s grasp at the center, a grasp made, of course, of dactyls and caesurae, phonemes and inflections, which are Homer’s imaginative ensouling. Whether we are doing Odysseus in Polyphemus’ cave, Odysseus on Calypso’s island, Odysseus bantering his lies with Athena, on his return to Ithaca, or Odysseus tight-lipped and killready as he joins the suitors in an archery contest, we are in all cases acting our way around a whole. It is a doing a whole, really, for we can’t “read” Odysseus without taking the Homer ensouling into ourselves. Are we not reading off parts of ourselves into this doing of Odysseus? I think we are, and that in so doing we are entering the quest of literary genius to carry the other with it—a quest which is ultimately a quest to reach a



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universal condition, a condition in which Yoshi and Tomas and Magdalena, verbal readers around the globe, can join me. That is a baby step toward describing what the universal may be in action. Does that step say something about the kind of person required to meet Homer’s ensouling in Odysseus? Do I need to share Odysseus’ “traits” in order to do him as I should? Do Yoshi and Tomas and Magdalena need to share those traits? The answer lies in the “share those traits.” Neither I nor the other doers of Homer need to be ready to trick a Cyclops, take a raft across the Mediterranean, or throw a shot put two hundred yards. But don’t all four of us need—or do we?—to be able to “get the feeling of doing those things”? (“Get the feeling” means, somewhere inside, to have an imaginative sense of what it would be like to be doing those things.) Does that seem a probing account of what is required in the experiencing of Homer’s Odysseus? I think it is a start. We are taking a test probe here of what could be meant by reaching out to a universal condition in the experience of a literary character. Yet our account is still very literary, as though we were substituting our own euphuistic embroidery for the simplicity of Homer. Are we stuck then with saying what may be “right” about the literary pursuit of the universal, but what is loose and wordy? The answer is that we are doing just that, the loose and wordy thing, but that the wordy thing is the only coin available for talking about events in words. And have we then no way to test the firmness or answerability of the pronouncements we make about the literary universal? If there is a test it will be the robustness of the sense, from within the doing the Odyssean universal, that the doing invites repetition, first of all, and, second, that in the repetition more is appreciated than in the first go around, and so on with repeated retakes. A single “character”, then, as a sounding of the universal in literature? What about a plot, the narrative backbone of a literary story, and for Aristotle the myth (muthos) which gives meaning to the whole? What kind of exercise in the universal do the plots of the Iliad and Odyssey carry out? To read those texts today is still to be lived by an imaginative possibility of ourselves, a possibility that makes the tales before us plausible. We needn’t be adventurous nor addicted to travel to live the worlds of Odysseus and Achilles. We only need to be living our humanity verbally, and with finesse and training. And the creative power to establish these paradigms of the universal? In prioritizing Homer, here, do I simply mouth an expectation of my own career-and-buddy background? Do I not still lag far behind justifying a stress on this Father of Ancient Greek poetry, when I could as well have



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pitched my case around the creators of The Courtier, The Heart of the Matter, or Jeeves? The kind of presence “Homer” is to the characters he establishes, and to the events he narrates, is one in which a mature distancing configures the tone. I fumble here with a chestnut, for sure. I have to unpack Winckelmann to retrieve language that opens the present issue for me. Winckelmann writes of Classical dignity, as it shows in sculpture and architecture, as establishing eine edle Einfalt und eine stille Groesse, while he speaks of the pure Classical as like the stillest water which lies at the heart of the well. (The reference zone here is visual art, Roman or Greek in Roman copy, and the thought background intersective with the kind of quod semper, quod ubique thinking we attributed to Samuel Johnson.) Winckelmamn gives me metaphor to characterize the klassische Haltung Homer adopts toward his tale and its characters. It is this Haltung which Adrian Stokes tries to anatomize, in Greek Culture and the Ego, in terms of (and here I reduce psychoanalytical terms to the plain English boildown I can relate to) fundamental ways the human person reaches for a maturity of vision which includes, but has re-enwholed, the multiple losses that go into taking a position within human adulthood. I think, with what I get of Stokes, that losses, what “Homer” did not say, are a crucial element in what he “said”. The adage “even Homer nodded” will remind us that “Homer” very rarely nodded at all, that is, that he brought to his creation the continuous and alert refusal to live with loss, which “his” whole endeavor was. This point will have its bearing on the achievement of Greek literature clear through the fifth century, and deserves trying out for more clarity. One risks, on this issue of loss, the danger of simply highlighting the work of a particular period of human creation, and giving no argument for the uniqueness of that period. Why not move the “loss overcome” criterion over onto some other Western classics, like Phedre, or the Divina Commedia, or Joyce’s Ulysses? How could we claim that the overcoming event was less decisive for “Haltung” in those works than in “Homer’s”? Or even than in a tenth-rate mystery novel, where the whodunnit master demonstrates a huge psychoanalytical up-jump by “letting” his bad guy decide to “spare his upright” dad at great personal risk, and against the money side of things, just so the master of pulp fiction could enact a taste for grace which was gnawing at him? The anatomy of overcoming of loss through art needs to be formulated at a point of generality where what is lost is merged with the maturity of the spirit grappling with the loss. The largest of themes, most firmly rooted in the contest for human wholeness, and those that qualify for the largest audience, will be won away from a



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whole cultural development, and “Homer” was heir to a Volk’s voice and experience; “he” brought to the fore a maturity of achievement which even Dante could not have claimed. Maturity involved enduring the continual overcoming of mere entropy in a large human theme—warfare, honor, home search, reconstruction—through which ran many of the archetypal patterns of the human experience, but those patterns particularized by a creative signature as noteworthy as the uniqueness of individuality of Charles or Mary around the corner. We are launched on the literary universal issue, and have done Homer scholarship enough damage; time for the unrolling carpet, the lyrics, the tragedies, the histories, the philosophies. Tongue-in-cheek though we are, reciting this genre list, it remains inescapably shaping about the Greek literary achievement that it deployed itself in discrete modes of expression. The genres of Greek literature were only of interest to the Greeks themselves as lived, until Aristotle (in the Poetics) brought attention to the issue. (He classified the kinds of literature in terms of object, mode, and vehicle, and came up with results like exclusion of lyric, as not a major form, and with heavy emphasis on the achievement of a tragedy like Oedipus Rex.) At a guess, it seems that the cultural drift along which the Greeks lived their genres followed the profile of social/economic development, and that the peculiarity of this “universal”-seeking literary team has some relation to the “unusual natural vigor” of the Classical Greek expression in literature. The epic was clearly the energy of a culture celebrating and defining its own achievements, and capturing the flow of a language tensely perched between orality and the first highs of written Greek. The lyric speaks from an emerging age of commerce and monetization, of the unevenness of buyer-seller relationships which constitutes a market, and begins to intersect with those new dimensions of spiritual individuality which backbone the works of Archilochos, Sappho, or Solon. When we stand back from the works of those writers, as we have done with Homer, and view them as part of a collective energy wave, we can see thematic motifs—much like the character Odysseus, or the narrative tale of archetypal experiences in the two epics—which characterize their move out from within their new geopolitical world. As we might expect, in a world where there is a developing market, where commercial naval trade is enlarging the contact with peoples from unprescribed locales, and where the means of text distribution are increasing, the authorial core of selfhood reflects a desire to be seen and known, to be part of the new rich octane of cultural development.



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Take a poem each from the three lyric poets before us. Archilochos tells us in two hewn and hefty lines that he is a soldier who earns his Ismaric wine by fighting with his spear; in other words he illustrates, in fine language, the side of him that knows both roughness and good taste. He looks to be welcomed by a congruous hearer, and through that conduit to be a part of the buzz literature is. (Aristotle divides literary genres in part by the differences in their intended audiences.) Archilochos writes/speaks for any individual who wants to hear language extracted from the self in the way he does it. (Of course this ostension of self is not the product of a deliberate choice of action, but of an expressive person standing at the intersection between his changing language world and the growing complexity of the ambience he knows.) Sappho too points at herself. Archilochos called the hearer to become a seer, observing a roughand-ready mercenary leaning on his military gear and swigging Ismaric. Sappho stands or feels at an angle to a scene which comprehends her lover and a male person sitting near her lover. (The effort to directionalize, in language, is tangible here. Look and see, the poem is saying.) The poem is her jealousy of the person sitting near her lover, and the poem’s feelings are her implication of the reader/hearer in her journey through longing. She traps the hearer in a geometry of emotive conditions which by nature overleaps historical or spatial distance. The trick of discovering this, of course, is the trick of being able to translate this complex demand in language as vivid as the demand is. But that is the issue of translation, touched already, and due to concern us later. The lyric demand, burnished in Sappho, makes a claim that brings the personal to flame. A third example of lyric insistence, in which the opposite of the epic claim is at the fore, might be taken from Solon, the sixth-century lawgiver of Athens, a creator with the good sense to praise himself by self-mockery. The present author has for fifty years been rehearsing Ouk ephu Solon bathuphron Oude bouleeis aner (Solon was not wise, nor a man of thought…)

a uniquely but self-cancellingly (and far from “Greek”) ironic assessment of himself. The word-thing, which continues to self-flay, accuses Solon of failing to take advantage of all the political perks—he was the archon of Athens—to which he would have been entitled; in short of being a fool who should have been punished for his naïveté. How more forcefully could the creator frame the hearer inside an “attitude” established by words?



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Epic and lyric, then, were two modes of being your time in language, by which the ancient Greeks played to the world as their stage. Drama was a kind of cross between epic and lyric. You have the unfolding of a narrative, a precursor of the novel. Then on the other hand you have the outplay of emotions in action which configures itself to the “characters” of the drama. A rich hybrid is formed, once more a reading out from its time: for in the world of fifth-century Athens the group tale-telling of the epic has been carved down to sitcom size, for the instant gratification of citizen fascination, while the complex emotive punch of the character under pressure is permitted egress straight into the mike, and can keep a male citizenry enthralled for an afternoon. The universal claim of the Greek drama emerges from that cocktail of social/psychological components. How different the investment of the tragedian from the epic Haltung of Homer or the (pretend unmediated) directness of the lyric poet, a directness ab ovo customized by everything that makes the poet unique, as well as by the purely language Haltung made for the lyric by the tradition of the couplet or the trimeter or the tetrameter which has offered itself to the occasion. The tragedian becomes his feelings through the filter of a performative setting, the historical origins of which were no doubt the performatives of invocation, rustic sacrifice, catharsis—of a raw insistence deeper than the theatrical purging Aristotle tells us about. What is to hand, as the tragedian undertakes his reach out into a meaning his own setting only launches, includes not only the metrical mass and choral discipline formed by religious tradition and art play in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., but mythical tales which need no invention because they are already inventions of a new kind of creator, the dramatist who carries a small polis out to its limits of understanding. When the dramatist becomes this risk, without the protective covering of myth—as in Aeschylus’ play The Persians—we find drama so stripped of event as to serve as a bare monody, a beautiful lament. When, however, we come to the plays in which the muthos has added its huge power to what the dramatist can invent—to the Oresteia, to Oedipus, to the Hippolytos—we place ourselves at the disposal of what is as close to the literary universal as we can advance. The Oresteia, of course, gives us the privilege of envisioning an entire trilogy, as it should be seen. Three days of performances with a satyr play in between. Time for the spectator to live the super-real events that lead from Agamemnon’s return with Cassandra, through Clytemnestra’s revenge, through the haunting of Orestes, to the final exoneration of the patricide, to the formulation of Athens’ first law court, the Areopagus. Hardly possible to imagine intense incarnate action folded more seamlessly into all it can mean! The space dividing narrator and audience in



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epic, and melting narrator and audience in lyric, has become the dense space of time, a field for working through. (Would the closest modern parallel be Wagner’s Ring Cycle, with its similar demands on experiential learning?) What changes in universal claim when myth becomes the language the Greek playwright argues through! The claim to create what can be valued semper et ubique yields perhaps to the claim that any other culture, at any other time, should be able to create, from its own ritual grounds up, a parallel spatio-temporal demand in literature: perhaps out of the Kabuki sand bag, or Indonesian myth, with its transported Hindu backdrop, rich in the kinds of conflict and salvation Aeschylus shares. Aeschylus’ trilogy is a local job, but an ostension too, a reaching out to any making ear that identifies the dramas of haunting and restoration in terms of a violent boiling-up human clash. (Ostentatious work, this, in the deep sense of existing as offering.) Sophocles’ Oedipus ostends by remaining identical to itself. Though this play links thematically to Antigone (before it) and Oedipus at Colonus (after it, thematically), it insists on standing alone, and in fact enacts a panel in a triptych, rather than an on-charging sequence. Aristotle delighted in the self-containment of this play, in which the search for a murderer is found to be a search for the one who is searching. The beautiful, and complexly unrolled, geometry of this situation is such perfection that it ostends by making a space as realized as a black hole. Greatness rushes to it, from the four corners of the globe. Another kind of universal raises its head in many plays of Euripides. To go there is to see how infinitely various are the ways the Greeks found to turn the Classical dramatic moment into a doron eis aei, a gift forever. In the Hippolytos we meet the tragic victim at the crossroads of suffering and Wagnerian exaltation. (There we are again, turning to Wagner, and linking the Liebestod tone to the exquisite power of loss in Greek tragedy.) Wrongly accused by his stepmother of trying to rape her—while in fact she is simply seeking a cover for the rejection Hippolytos has laid on her advances—Hippolytos harnesses his horses and drives out into a wild disaster in the foam of the sea, true to the nature that has given him his beauty of body and soul. Here the Greek turns to a deep theme, laced into Greek mythical thinking as well as into popular phrases: whom the gods love die young. (This phrase runs at an angle against its equal, from the bitter poet, Theognis: count no man happy til you see him dead. The pair of thoughts leads to this: life is rough, let it flourish in its prime, before the dissolution begins. We say today: live long die short, thereby expressing our hope of surpassing the Greek ideal, having it both ways.) If any contemporary author declares the worldwide relevance of Euripides’ point,



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it is Yukio Mishima, in whose Spring Snow the beauty of youthful death is elevated; while Rainer Maria Rilke, in the Duino Elegies, celebrates the half-light of death as it meets beautiful youth. A psychiatric truth takes equally prominent place, in this playing field of reaches toward the quod semper, quod ubique. The ultimately unsuccessful effort of the infant, to overcome the otherness of the other, is such a moment of beautiful tension, in the first and second years, that it opens that meadow of inwardness Wordsworth caught on the fly, in his own attempts in the Prelude to take back the loss maturing imposes.



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14 REPLACING YOUR LIFE

The present book is of blended genre. There is scholarly debris all over the place. But it is embedded in a blog. And that embeddedness is part of what the author discovers to have been his trademark since he began to feel the need to replace his life with writing. He has wanted to “out” his presence to the text in which he was writing about the world that was not himself. But it was not easy to know how to do this, for “testifying”—hey I’m here, I’m the guy who’s doing this—didn’t seem to sit well with the rhetoric of the scholarly action, which every part of this author also admires. The working compromise, hammered out in the inner negotiations that make language out of a person, appealed to itself once more in the present text, and by offering itself the most seductive of hopes, that the trademarking of self here would at the same time play into the opening out of the literary universality issue. We are near the intersection between the private stamping and the discovery from within the world. We are at the notion level where the becoming fully what self one is, is the way to intersect with the limits of humanity, its reach to the intimate identity of selves across the globe and time. We will stipple the following pages with reminders of this stepping forward in a project. That the self being outed, my keyboard tells me, is that obstreperous scapegoat, a poet, will only add to the conflagratory fuel of the argument ahead of us. The final product, which can only seem so from without, not within, will be language in search of a truth large enough to comprehend both its maker and the topics the maker deals with.



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15 SCHOLARSHIP AND POIESIS

The thought spark lying within this conflagration is that the issues of diversity, globalism, and universality tug at our very breath, as we attempt to become position in our time. Your author has the feel of a position, here, which deserves no more standing than his own time. He is superannuated. He has seen the silt of others’ thoughts stream against his seawall. He is a country mile closer than are his grandchildren to the flatlands of Will’s Coffee House, to the sallies of John Dryden, and to the wit world of such as Samuel Johnson. He can still see the spidery nexus of those gentlemen’s thought. (No, you don’t have to be a gentleman to read one.) The networking is this. The Greek tragedians—we have said it— wrote themselves down from themes which abetted their already keen sense of the aporias of the human condition. Maybe it was because of the acceleration of consciousness among the Greeks—the rapidity with which heroic culture shuffled off into a lyric age in which the Eastern Mediterranean caught the fire of monetization, and the firm profiles of trade and the individual sharpened themselves against daily life, and, once more unrolling, the torrents of philosophical speculation emptied into the rich international struggles that made of Salamis and Marathon steps in world culture. Maybe it was all that, that took place in a couple of centuries. Maybe, that is, the acceleration of cultural articulateness, in the fifth century, so sharpened the inner eye of the tragedians, who knew their fast pace and brief moment of sun, that they saw how to project the deep structures of the human condition. (Stokes and Nietzsche compete for recognition here, as heroes of explanation: the one burrowing inside the loss which motivates the Greek genius; the other inside the pride that motivates it.) Whatever the case, the observant Westerner of our fragile moment may want to become the vatic as well as the scientist of the universalizing situation. He or she may feel the pressure outward, and like Hentscher-Dompal try reading the world in orgies of consumption, in some desire to become equal with the world. And if he or she makes this move outward, and does



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so with the transformative intellect tucked inside the reasoning intellect, the result can become an unrecognizably polymorph engine of learning, like the present text, which relies on itself as its own enginery, rather than on a framework, outlines, with which to enter a compact. There, in fact, you have the problem of writing, like the present blend of scholarship with poiesis, which burns its own tracks as it moves, and has no care for the morrow, other than what it is as care. The author likes to suppose, that in making this move toward a wholistic effort, and beyond that, he wishes, toward an order included in an even richer order above it, he opens a circle of fresh discourse, ruins traditional scholarly discourse for a purpose, embeds the Muse in a bit of the asbestos which makes wings heavy. I find the two mal-occluded bites of my own opus increasingly hungry to meet: Mr. Poem, Mr. Scholarship. Am I simply reaching for a Roman triumph that is indefinitely postponed? In a life of trying to say the other I have tended a fairly neat and unobtrusive house, a poem here, an essay there, a sociological excursus here, a translation from a Greek epic there, and though the two modes incorporated one another, I was consistently pleased to put them to bed in their separate rooms. (Though I knew that my level of thinking was pervaded by transformative themes, while my poetry, as in, say, Guatemala or Epics of America or China: A Modern History, was always trying to make a global statement.) The present work, in any case, aspires to be poetry and thought fused in search of the universal. One might think this present ambition a fatal obfuscation of the reach toward knowledge. Could that charge rest on the weight it gives to its notion of “knowledge”? The present author has never supposed that knowing could seize its object like prey, and hold it. He has taken knowledge to be a movement across insights, and at best first cousin to truth, but he has taken knowledge seriously, as a path to construction. (It has never saved him from evil, but it has moved pieces of his understanding from the wrong place to more nearly the place that works.) The knowledge he seeks in the present quest for the universal is a process of indefinite discovery. Does the young man also seek for truth, which is different from knowledge? Of course. The truth he seeks is the universal that guarantees the shifting patterns of knowledge, by grounding them. This is a form of what the author thinks Platonism must be, and, yes, it meshes with the fine textures of the universal. The conundrum of our time, as it rotates through its conditions of relativism, is that it generates a flashing diorama of universals, through which the screen moves the high-velocity eye. Philosophy dispenses with the universal—did not Wittgenstein dismiss the universal in both the Blue



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and the Brown Books?—and yet literary thinking begins again to restore the usefulness of the universal notion. (Cf. Hogan, The Mind and its Stories.) Our time as moral politics aspires for a sense of the oneness of mankind, while at the same time we are impelled to insist on diversity—a shibboleth for the present Western moment, in its quest to satisfy every entitlement need—which fractures oneness. Do the global village and the entitlement culture fatally diverge from one another? It will be important to the thematics of this whole book that in the end we manage to sustain both terms of this equation, the universal and the regional. Let’s take a fresh run at the universal, in this setting, then at the regional. Across the board, in personal experience, in writing and learning, in becoming a moral entity, in dealing with the unfolding perceptions of contemporary sciences and social sciences, we must include the category of the universal in order “simply to move in thought.” Consider the work of scholarship. I have just read Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle, about the intersections of declining Roman culture with robust intrusions of a nascent Christianity which, in Anselm, Augustine, Cassiodorus, and any number of priests, theologians, bishops, and monks, is establishing a new cultural climate in Western Europe. The detail is instructive, the choice of evidentiary passages is compelling, the style combed Oxfordian, author genially sidelined, guiding the discourse humanely, the discourse frame secure and responsibly constructed. The theme is discrete, though its collateral implications are permitted at judicious points to overspill the immediacy of the text. Is there a text inside this text, or a precondition for this text? There is—the counterpoint of decline, cultural entropy, with the radiance of the new. This simple conceptual pattern steers and organizes the whole. The trope of the whole assiduously constructed word text demands of the reader a “rising to a shaped word occasion” which we have to read believing is a globally repeated pattern in reading consciousness, whether we substitute for our own reading that of a Buddhist scholar in Kyoto, reading of the decline of the Nara period, and the immanence to it of revivificatory lateral developments, or a military historian in Argentina reading about the decline, fall, and renaissance of the players involved in the demise of Peronist power. In other words we can see, in the reading and experiencing curve of Brown’s book, an experiential reading profile whose breadth links the reading/learning experience to a universal sensibility. Consider the poetry of Emily Dickinson with which we began, and this author’s sense that through those poems a bridge could be laid which his Chinese students and he could cross to one another. Never mind



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whether that bridge was crossed, nor assume that because the author and his students were environmentally perturbed no crossing took place. (Crossings aren’t to be measured by a ruler.) Shall we say, borrowing a used page of Plato, that the universal was there to make possible the invocation of the universal; in this case, let us say, the condition under which we realize what “parting is all we know of hell” means. Are we to suggest, in saying this, that there is a meaning nucleus that travels within and deeper than the interpretable grammar of Dickinson’s line, and that translation is simply the incarnation of that fiery nucleus? It will be the author’s point, not much later in this blog, that translation is enabled by precisely such a positioning of meaning at the cross point between messages. For the moment, though, we can leave the close bond between translation and the universal, and very briefly widen the range of our examples of establishment of the universal. We have discussed two versions of literary universality—scholarly and poetic. Perhaps the philosophical dimension of universality is the easiest to exemplify. Take the principles of logic or of geometry. They do not even bear translation, but simply are (or do) the universal. (Hence Plato was quick off the mark with mathematics, in exemplifying his theory of ideas.) Lest this point seem too obvious, and to be pushed here with too little evidence, we might reflect on the geometrical instance for what it says about incarnation of the universal. Here’s the scenario question. Not only what is the universal but where is the universal? The answer will be the same in each case. The universal is coeval with the condition of intelligibility. If we were to press this image to another intersection with concepts, we could say that the universal is to the particular as the Holy Ghost is to the other members of the Trinity, the meaning the world is. That extension of thought is metaphor, to be earned (or rejected) by experience, and yet metaphor is not to be scorned as a way of moving around and ahead in thought. This blog’s whole privileging of poiesis, as a vehicle for knowing, shows readiness to work (cautiously) with metaphor.



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16 DO WE OWN OUR OWN LANGUAGE?

The elephant in the room is language. Can’t you see him snuffling around, vacuuming up all the remnant issues, including even literary universality, which is something happening to and in language? When I say that I come before myself as problematic, and intone that thought as though it were a new formulation of the Cartesian cogito, I am saying so from so totally within language that I may say my proposition has been taken away from me before I had time to utter it. It is this sense of always formulating what has already in advance formulated me, that enshrines language as the always prior. No way can I get behind my language. It was there before I am, like God. And if that isn’t the Word as God, what could be? The fine webbing of the problem, in problematic, is completely transparent, and that because of the being-anticipated-by-language quality of my being here. (This condition is laid out on the operating table in my recent text, Being Here: Sociology as Poetry, Self-Construction, and Our Time as Language. The vehicle by which I strive to map the geographies of literary universality is the language that offers itself to me as pilot, there at my shoulder before I write. In a situation so bound by itself, translation happens as a recourse, and in its mercy becomes a place where language can surge forth as unities to self, text blocks that repeat themselves from national speech to national speech. Such grace as this can deceive, for we are allowed to find congener texts, congener thoughts, and the truth of the universal at the price of the gift; such grace was offered under the dispensation of language itself, which never supposed that it was irrevocably releasing its human prey. We may want to say, as a witticism on this binding situation, that death is only running out of anything to say, no longer being subsidized by language. And the bearing of this problematic condition on the character of literary universality? The bearing, of course, is on language itself, but the literary universal represents language deepened and refined to its point of highest clarity. Where we serve ourselves as vehicles of such language as this—the language become Hamlet—we are at the point of greatest



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intersection with our problematic condition as creations of language. Our problematic condition is systematic, not something we can avoid or bypass, for we are products of the language we must use to cope with that servility. When I read, at my end, the literary achievements of Goethe, Dostoevsky, or Walt Whitman I measure myself to the dimensions of my full condition, and am clothed in a humanity. The community of spirits embraces me, to the extent I become—today we might say I “own”—the language I am.



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17 UNIVERSALITY, PRAYER, DEPTH

This next section is a digression. Perhaps, but I hope not, you will quip that this is a digression on a digression. I have only with age come to prayer. And I have had no forum of similar learners with whom to take tea. But I have long sensed that the practice of prayer springs from conditions of linguistic outreach not totally unlike those that activate the literary universal among us. When I reference the literary universal, here, I reference the great works of great people, in literature, as well as the maintenance of that trans-secular community. When I reference the community of spirits, or the master spirit, I make a claim similar to that which I make in reaching to the universal in literature. This is a rough-andready postulate; we will refine it, and do some overdue surveying of the territory we have been working here. As I go to the heart of Hamlet I dialogue…with whom? Is it Shakespeare, and if so, with Shakespeare at what point and place in his life? At the moment he first struck on the idea of the play-within-a-play? Or am I dialoguing with the spirit of Shakespeare? (I see you nodding; get real, man!) To be precise, and consistent with the thought career of this blog, I should say I am dialoguing with an organic structure in language. In an exceptionally forceful sense, then, this other I am dialoguing with will be evanescent, formulating itself here, unraveling itself there to support new understandings of itself, regrouping itself at what the literary call an ending, a “sense of an ending”, but then at just that point evaporating into that new understanding of the whole which makes each stage of the way look different. These are some of the disturbingly transitory components of that literary event, say the encounter with Hamlet, of which we are positing, in saying the work is an exemplar of literary universality, some kind of stability, indeed some kind of ultimate stability. What kind of seemingly evanescent, but actually firm, stability can this be? Will not what we can posit of the object of prayer bear a close relation with the way we are able to characterize the literary universal in Hamlet?



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Well, let’s see. Prayer assumes many forms, from highly personal wishes to firmly codified proposals—again of many kinds, from pure selfgiving to do ut des—but all have in common that they both create/ establish/join an auditor, and draw near to that auditor. This definition is of an act which enables that to which it is directed—it could be god, it could be Ahriman—and which in that sense—to some degree—is unlike the work act of a reader of great texts of literature, who goes to meet Hamlet where it lies and challenges. (“To some degree.” For in an arguable sense the reader of literature enables, even creates the great work he or she “goes to”, simply by “going to it”. Yet the reader hardly prays the text of Hamlet into existence.) Perhaps the analogy of prayer with reading the universal holds up best if we compare the action of the person or group praying with the creator of the great text. Does Shakespeare do anything like praying when he creates Hamlet? Of course we are richly surrounded with empirical accounts of the creative process in literature, and especially since reading Biographia Literaria we are used to thinking of the writer as gathering up and transmuting the experienced world through imagination, our stress falling on the experienced, and implicitly on the given, rather than on the summoned up, world. Yet there is a sense in which Shakespeare creates into a void where before his creation there was nothing; and in which Shakespeare, like the Benedictine on his knees, fervently addresses the possible. Prayer then takes us down a side road, in our query into the literary universal, the lastingly true in the great texts. Let me duck out from behind my anthropological hat, which the university world has taught me to doff at a jaunty and uncontroversial angle, and say that the great prayers of the Church, from the Our Father through the Hail Mary, to the Prayer of Saint Francis for peace, move heavy spiritual material into place, endowing it with form and freshness, and assuring, for what are in their sense requests—da nobis pacem—textual substantialities, language formatives across which we can deploy the most carefully mapped directives of feeling. These substantialities are not literary texts, but share with great texts an unashamed reliability, for infinite repetition and incremental penetration. “What oft was said but ne’er so well expressed.” Which may be our segue back from prayer into the mapping of the literary universal with which we began. Naturally we have let a gallon of imprecisions flow into the waters of our discussion; the aim of this text is to irrigate some of the clumsy landscapes our time in language has left us with. The location of the literary universal is the crux to préciser. Let’s take the department store action team, with which we began. Let’s lingo it



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in the squarest empirical tradition. Here are Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, there’s Homer, here’s me and you talking about them. SJ: Literature is all about getting to the depth of the human, in art; saying what is true today, here and everywhere, true tomorrow. JB: Convincing, to be sure. But where is this depth? Is it in the human being that creates the literature? Is it in the literature itself, the words on the page? Or is it in all the people who applaud the great work, and make up the human community that admires the literary universal? SJ: Let’s ask Homer. He’s the master of this simple but profound theme. H: The literary universal is in my head. But human beings are a single family. What is in my head, my deep self, is just what is in your head, and your head—and he points toward all the heads in the world. I may be creating for bands of non-literate warrior/ landowners, but because I saw the whole human adventure in them I spoke to them all right here in these hexameters which are just a byproduct of my mind. ME: Isn’t that a little like the claim we would want to make about prayer, that it springs from my mind but finds an echo in my fellow humans who are also the supports of prayer? YOU: Okay, pretty close. But there’s no text to the prayer, no literary work that is out there. The prayer is sustained by spirit alone.



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18 TRANSLATION AND DEPTH

We have touched the issue of translation, but it raises its head again, in connection with prayer and the literary universal. In fact the issue of translation infiltrates any discussion, like the present one, of the made-outof-language quality of human being. Language is like the currency we exist as, and our monetization, as bankers of our language deposit, makes us part of the constantly onflowing commerce of interchanging linguistic elements. What else are we ourselves, then, than translations, continual transactions off against one another? Viewed against this backdrop, the literary universal is a kind of gold standard in the transactions of language. Who doesn’t remember the infinite monkey theorem involving the monkey writing the collected works of Shakespeare? If he pushes the typewriter keys long enough he will eventually type the combination of words that compose Shakespeare’s plays. It stands to reason! From that perspective the supreme achievements of literature, its deepest and most lasting achievements, can be thought of in two different ways: either as products of genius or as products of “accident”. (In fact the universe itself can be thought of that double way, as Blaise Pascal and Jacques Monod argue.) Translation, then, can be viewed as a kind of transaction, in the coin of language, by which units of language are privileged to reduplicate themselves. When the units of language are “the life blood of a master spirit,” as Milton puts it, then the chances of random reduplication are cut back to a minimum. How better to explain the constant dissatisfaction we feel with any translation, which is at best a shot in the dark? Even if the translation is that of genius intersecting with genius—Virgil translating Homer or Pound translating Provençal poetry—we have to feel that the intersection of text with translation can never be complete, even though the translation can on occasion be “better” than the original. Among the many translation-related issues evoked by the universality problem, and by our references to chance translation—the infinite monkey theorem—the central aporia circles around the meaning of depth. Is the great work “untranslatable”, if it is, because it exceeds in “depth” what the



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translation is able to muster? Is the great and true in literature, that eighteenth-century ideal, the “deepest” literature? Has “depth” in the arts essentially to do with aesthetic criteria, or is art-depth more generally congruent with depth of thought? We have given some attention, above, to the Classic age of Greek literature—from Homer through the philosophers. In claiming that the literary universal is uniquely generated by those classics, do we mean that the authors in question were “deep” in the sense that we might say of our favorite philosopher, Hegel or Wittgenstein or Plotinus, that they are “deep”? To say that Oedipus is deep seems to mean this, that with each reexperience of it, we appear to find more meanings properly created from within it. Perhaps the first time we see or read this play we feel the horror of self-inculpation, the pain of the process of unfolding this awareness, and some kind of catharsis—relief and release of feelings—at the terrible conclusion. On subsequent readings—or performance viewing, especially such rich dressings of the choral, prosodic, and sartorial as the Athenian viewer would have consumed—we find ourselves steadily more involved with the fate of the protagonist. What does this mean, “more involved with the fate of the protagonist”? Do I care about Oedipus as I see this play? Or do I care about myself, and borrow personal dread from the experience of the character in the play? Aristotle said that what moves us in this tragedy is the experience of a man of great stature who passes from good to wretched fortune. Would that be a comprehensive formula that covers both the fear I have for myself and the fear I have for Oedipus? For me, Aristotle’s perception is strong. It is not Oedipus the character, or me the character, that I tremble with, but the Oedipus/me/you character, as it deploys out into a ritualized action of fall. And is depth, in this instance, an action? We had supposed depth was a condition, a state of being. Can an action be a condition? If so, is the depth anything we can locate, or simply “something” we can profile? If we turn to Homer or the lyric poems of Classical Greece we may find fresh angles of access to this issue of literary depth. In so doing we will be returning to those psychoanalytic, Stokesian notions we tried on before; distance, interior control, overcoming of loss; notions with which Stokes thought it possible to move closer to the secret of the Classical genius. Was Stokes helping us to find our way back to the depth of Homer, or to the depth of the Phidian sculpture, with its terrifying simplicity? He was rightly by-passing talk of depth, and going for the condition of Classical greatness in art, its way of being there which was such that to rehearse the reading of Homer or the Parthenon was to do the meaning of



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Homer more aware of its implications with each reading or seeing. He was inviting us to review depth as experience. Were the implications he was inviting us to see revelations into ourselves, as experiencers? Or into the works of Greek art themselves? There Stokes leaves us where we were before, equally interior both to ourselves and to the other in its beauty. Translation, to return, will then have to occur as a pursuit of the selfenriching art object into layers where we and that other are increasingly one. We have introduced translation into this matter of the literary universal because we take translation to be the paradigmatic act enabling the oneness of greatness among literature’s highest achievements. The literary universal seems to be at stake in the powerful mutual identifying of a great text with its match or matches. As such the literary universal made incarnate is simply the success of twinning stasis, a kind of Platonic rest stop, in that restless swarming of languages among one another—I speak this, you speak that, we all speak a little of this and that—in which genius self-identified is a trade-off for all the world’s failings, but constant striving for translatability remains one of the raisons d’être of human presence, of that continual upreaching Plotinus sees as our longing for salvation. As the present author put this striving in Translation Theory and Practice (1993), the only proof of untranslatability would have to be amassed by working and thinking through sets of translations, by translating. But nothing in that thinking could prove the ultimate impotence of that thinking and working. The dilemma would be like the effort to establish unintelligibility. I can go up to it—to the undecodable hieroglyph, the Easter Island giant—with unintelligibility, but I cannot know it except as the intelligible. I cannot know that I cannot know Cambodian or quantum physics, except in terms of what I am able to know of them.



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19 LITERATURE AND WHAT WE ARE

Alfred North Whitehead writes that “it is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression.” We have been privileging the literary universal, taking wings from the patrician observations of eighteenth-century gentlemen, for whom the Classics were expressions of curried, historically grounded, literary works variously considered morally uplifting, artistically scrupulous, discursively complex, all to a degree that nowhere else could a socially exigent culture cut its learning teeth. The sentence above from Whitehead, however, scrubs us with the bracing Plotinian sense that the Classical is itself a body of aspiring vestiges, historically shaky—think of the vagaries of text histories, ontologically fragile—think of the palimpsest of rereads that establishes the reality of a text, and that those vestiges are themselves but fine points on the clumsy socially expressive welter of ordinary texts that make up the literature of a time, and that are en masse, as Whitehead says, the clearest expression of their time. In our own time, an age not only of instant media reproduction, but of painless self-publishing, it requires no imagination to envisage the upgroaning struggle of recycled words to mount to forms more dignified than they. It is as though the human mulch as a whole steams with the warm humus of language, tendril waving to tendril, ambition to ambition. Thus the literary universal, which we have been presenting as the culminating linguistic-social event, is simply primus inter pares, among the language events that our globe is. Why should there not be a hierarchy among the takings-place as language which human beings are, with its summit where the testimony to the human condition has been most fully articulated, as it has in Sophocles? Why should we not welcome the current cultural flow that has brought a staggering rise in literary selfexpression—from the pulp fiction narratives of teenage Japanese novelists, strutting their novels on Blackberries, through the chatroom creative workshops on the Internet, to the epic/sardonic work of a young Ibo like Adichie, who burns up the local of American pop culture in a white-hot



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language that makes us see lived America as Whistler made Londoners see their fog? The case for the “great work”, in this sociological perspective, is far from popular, and tends to lose the race to relativism, in the culture we support today. Whitehead’s own suggestion, in fact, is quite in line with common sense: the literary text is an expression of the “concrete outlook” of humanity. What is concrete about the outlook of the literary work? It includes the daily, in detail and in attitude, at a point where we feel we are being replicated. Literature reassures us, I hear Whitehead saying, that we are just what we are, and that we can be read off the faces of our own social behavior. This benign account of what literary work does is misleading. Doesn’t it spring from the same bread-and-butter conception of human nature, which we misleadingly charm ourselves with, in thinking of our culture as materialistic? (The phrase is dated, of course, and had its heyday in the culture-interpretation world that surrounded a text like The Two Cultures—C. P. Snow, 1959—for which the “scientific/physicialist” worldview was irreconcilably contrasted to the “spiritual” view of the arts and humanities. With the advent of Internet culture the centralities of energy and information clearly undermined the Gassendi-like materialism of history, while at the same time replacing it with a mock-spirituality for which we pay the appropriate price; we flounder trying to rediscover our inner definition, as makers of the anti-body which Plato laid on the table for us.) So far from materialistic is man in society that he/she works and dies for the ideal, even in the process of perfecting the body, the cult object of our time, and the mover of mass economic forces.



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20 LITERATURE AS CENTRAL ART

The one-liner from Whitehead references literature, not the arts in general, as it expresses the outlook of a time. Our discussion so far has shared Whitehead’s assumption, in that we have inquired for a literary universality in which litterae, letters, appear to establish the genre in question. We have all along been working the letters side of the arts and letters division, and in so doing have followed the thematic of language, which has been placed at the center of our definition of the human. Were we all along using the word “language” metaphorically, and intending “any form of symbolic meaning” that people can use for communication— from song to painting to architecture? Or did we mean verbal language specifically, whether written or simply voiced? The primacy of language, among our vehicles of expression and communication, has long seemed evident to the present writer, who risked that view in an essay in the Antioch Review, “Literature and the Other Arts.” The piece opens: Literature is the central art—axis, core, and guide to the other arts. Language—the central human act—empowers literature thus. There is no literary vaunting in this proposition—which is simply a note on truth; nor need we take centrality as the last word for the arts. Literature is not “the greatest” but only “the central” art.

A few paragraphs later, the author attempts to explain what he means by “central art”: Language is the substance of literature, and the first energy diastole of mere man become human. William Golding’s The Inheritors dramatizes the powers accruing to earliest homo sapiens, when he adds language to his arsenal of orientations; and Suzanne Langer, in Philosophy in a New Key, wrote of naming as “the vastest generative act to have taken place in human evolution.” These testimonies are a millionfold confirmed by whatever archeological digs we undertake within ourselves. Our digging tool of course is language, as is the material we unearth….our first levels of consciousness are built of the things we named, and felt-named “at



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The author still turns to literature as the central art, and still to the literary universal as the gold standard in achievement, when it comes to evaluating the role of the arts as a whole in establishing our highest standards for achievement. But time has passed since he wrote the above (1983), and this blog seems calling for a fresh statement of the matter. He should begin by shading the argument for the centrality of the greatness of literature, and by strengthening his claim for literature, in the present setting. This author took wing at the end of the third decade of the twentieth century, in an academic family working out of the American Midwest. His Dad was a prof of Romance Languages, and his Mom a bilingual (French/ English) housewife and mother, with an avidity for reading. (Every evening, by eight, she headed upstairs with a Modern Library hardback— soft-covered books had been on the market since the early nineteenth century, “railway softbacks”, but only with the development of the Penguin series in 1935 did the pocket book explode on the market— usually a volume of Chekhov or de Maupassant or Austen. On many afternoons young Freddy would walk into the house after school, sit down, and read to his Mom while she ironed; in those sunny oases of time, while the Warsaw Ghetto was being scourged and Dresden fire-bombed, he would read from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India or D. H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia. Habits of deep literary formation were establishing themselves, in the brain, in the innervations, in the properties of the imagination. The first move in rethinking the prioritization of the literary universal lies in the mere recall of these temps jamais perdus. A basic prejudice for the literary was building in a youngish person for whom the imagination in language was serving to provide all the room needed to feel at home in the world. There was a great deal the author would need to learn, about the place of literature among the other arts, in general and in the times he was about to own. Each American who did the second half of the twentieth will have a private history of the place of reading in culture. My own was clearly skewed to the book-lined study, the apostolic succession to that (in the West) Hellenistic librarian drift—it was pronounced in Callimachus and Apollonios Rhodios, back-to-back librarians at Alexandria, professionals of the book unlike those Greeks who preceded them, and for whom orality penetrated deeply into book culture. Meanwhile my own younger children—those born after 1980—were before I noticed defining their values by pop culture music, and leaving in the dust the gentle folk whom I hummed on the way to work, the Beatles, not to mention those vestigial



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bars from the Hit Parade that had imprinted me with sentimentality and Weltschmerz—“toss in a couple of moonbeams,” “give me one dozen roses.” Before I had recovered from doing the dishes and “fooling around,” which was also my historical marker, I was trying to orient inside the worlds of Tupac Shakur, urban rap, hard rock, and soon digital i-plays serving up this material with a selection of thousands of noisy ephemera. One tone wave after another—hip hop, R&B, heavy metal—invaded the sensibility space of younger contemporaries, until, with the warm embrace of technological genius, the sound of music had become the cry of expression of a society for which it had become easy to think the best of yourself. The classical music on which I had been raised—meaning from Guillaume de Machaut to Vivaldi to Schoenberg—was of no avail in a consumer society where music was the food of sexuality. The visual arts had to pose the same ruthless challenge to the primacy of the word. There was on the one hand film, then video, which were increasingly drawn apart from the finesse of older strategies—remember Claire’s Knee?—and toward the replacement of emotion with terror— remember Vertigo? (The nouvelle television, of course—Doc Martin, Breaking Bad, Mad Men—promises who knows what, in the direction of coming equal with ourselves. One can now dream!) Once visual objects began replacing visualization as conceptual statements—Oldenburg, Rauschenberg—it was clear that the visual longed to compete with the verbal. It is to be hoped that this parlor game effort at indicating the downturn of literary centrality, an effort which the author could further have pathetized by reference to his own career as an erstwhile prof of ancient languages, ha ha, whose commoditization by the industrial of medical etymologies has proven ignominiously lethal, that this parlor game effort will have convincingly characterized the spiritual landscape in which the literary landscape would in our time be required to stress its ancient values. Seriously, though, what is there about Hamlet, or Oedipus, or the Iliad that relevantly sustains its claim of “universality” over against not only other works of literature, the Times best sellers—which this week (7/31/13) are, strikingly enough, all about either murder in the streets or sexual deviance—but over against the powers of contemporary visual or musical art, or, even more strenuous, the new in urban architecture? For Samuel Johnson truth was a hallmark of the universal, because the universal embodied the general. In diverse ways contemporaries of this brilliant commentator supported the same perspective. The general was believed to be the locus of the true. Is this a convincing association? And



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can we explain senses in which contemporary literature—or art or music— do not “go for the general and true”? On the face of it, this demand for proof is vague and promises nothing but empty assertions on both sides, the ancients and the moderns.



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21 PLATONISM AND THE IDEAL

For Plato the idea was the principle of intelligibility supporting the particular. The idea of cat underlay the notions of this particular (yellow and brown, and on and on into the more nearly unique) cat as distinct from that tabby (with the injured right front paw and a location in a corner of a house on 74 Burnham Drive, Paducah, Kentucky). The particular may seem gobbled up by the general, in this case, but the fact is that the particular and general—as I see it—are mutually constitutive, and have no existence without one another. Plato, and anyone starting down this path, will need to deal with the raft of objections that have, historically, left half of the Western world curled up with Aristotle. They will have to deal with the query: is there a back-up idea for a man eating breakfast at McDonald’s? If there is, it would seem to have to include the idea behind breakfast and the idea behind eat and the idea behind….and what is the idea behind a derivative postulate like McDonald’s, which so many specific concepts—man, restaurant, food—converge to support, but in which the nexus of those ideas is substantiated by an action notion, eating, which seems not to have conceptual support. The glory of Platonism is that it provides a sensible account of the way meaning intersects with our understanding of the world, but the intersection accounted for here occurs only where things, objects, meet their meaning, and not where actions—or, shall we add, relations such as prepositions or infinitives—meet their meaning. To make Platonism maximally explanatory involves retaining the global-meaning hypothesis straight across the sphere of language, which finds itself openly privileged as the locus of meaning “in the first place”. Is that a burden too great even for the language-prioritizing thesis of this book blog? The problems alluded to, in justifying the margins of this initial Platonic perception, are sufficiently great that, as we said, half of the thinking world decided to curl up with Aristotle, and sign onto a conception of meaning which derived from the ongoing interactions of form and content in historical time, and thus set the stage for a notion of meaning as created in time. With that comment we touch on the second



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part of what we called the “raft of criticisms” Platonism falls prey to. It fits difficultly with the observed state of affairs, that meaning disengages itself through time. This is the unavoidable reading of the text of a life, which inevitably—though with avalanches of set-backs—discovers the way the world is made while making it. And it is this second “problem with Platonism” that suggests the tuning we want to make, in our own present argument, to the notion of the literary universal, which serves as a repository of both the true and the general. That argument is going to have to rest on a Platonic foundation—for so we maintain this whole book’s assumption, that meaning pervades human action, and in fact acts us, that assumption that has underlain our discussion of lived language. (The assumption that the book Being Here turned around.) We are Platonists “living in the material world.” But we are going to think out the consequences of this blog under the sign of a Platonism of which language itself is the ideas, and in which historical motion-sensitivity is directively inscribed. To speak of the senses in which the true, the universal and the general can conspire to make the literary universal will be to return fresh eyed to Imlac’s injunction not “to measure the streaks of the tulip.” What was he talking about? What can we say today, to what he was talking about? We can take the modified Platonism we just formulated, and go with it to major artistic creations—let’s line up Hamlet, Oedipus, Beethoven’s Razumovsky Quartets or a Mozart sonata, a Braque still life or Phidian athlete—and ask what each of these acknowledged creations embodies, that makes us reach for its greatness, establish ourselves more deeply within it with each encounter, and leave it instructed about the efforts of less-perfected art structures. We will have to posit, for each of these achievements, an adequacy to what it contracts to make of itself, that is performance from within that is congruent with what the work challenges itself to achieve. That adequacy is coformative to the implicit idea supporting the work, an adequacy to the ideal. And what has this quasiPlatonic norm to do with the linguistic support system we invoked above, as the foundation of meaning? As a configuration of meanings the texture of the art work assures itself under the sign of a single meaning, its unity and wholeness, and has under that sign the generality Imlac values, transcendence of the laboring condition of meaning. The literary masterpiece may be said to excel the masterpieces of the other arts, in the regard before us, for its perspicuity. (At last we have said it, and what a mouthful; we have tracked a position with a bloody line, and stood up for the literary.) The word bears the idea in it with a clarity the stroked brush, the sequencer of constructed notes, the daring arch, and the bronze cast



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cannot support. It may be true that humming sequenced into the first distinct speech, that music, thus, lies entwined with the primal joys of our ancestral being here, that the lofting of material substances is the maximal sheltering move for early man, but yet nothing in these constructive moves compares, for comprehensiveness and complexity, yes, say perspicuity again, with the masterpiece in language. That this perspicuous condition is the generality and resonance Imlac admires we can only prove to ourselves in the continual reinvention of ourselves in the greatest works of literature.



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22 UNIVERSALITY AND THE CLASSICAL TRADITION

The author has made a compact with himself. If blog this text thing is, in part Wissenschaft, in part autobiography, in part speculation, so be it, and yet if so let this thing as nearly as possible resemble its own ideal contract with itself. The present thing is inscribed inside a broad frame— homo sentiens, mundus objectivatus, textus commentarii; the brew so confected that its very aroma is that of the scribendarius who stands in for the whole, who proves to be under creation as he creates. Testifying to his own obliteration the auctor reviews himself, his guise, as a friend and reviewer wrote, maker of “less an oeuvre than a library.” He picked up late on the idea of Modernism. Joyce and Mann and Proust had made themselves intimates, but where they were taking him it took his student and friend Robert Steiner to show him: they were taking him to a world copious and absorbing enough to free him—to this day still to free him, into what will do as an artificial paradise, while he invites an actual paradise to translate itself into them. The world to which those ambitious aesthetes aspired, as they took the art-impulse to godlike playgrounds, was one the author dreamed of forming for himself, but proceeded toward in the multiple dance steps of the autistic, limning in a design here, and a cross-stitch there, and fired to a sheen by the mere proliferation of books, small books big books, mosaics of a statement he believed formative enough to drive the whole engine through the pearly gates. He is still in that unstable exaltation, expects to wince his way out life’s back door into a brightly lit room filled with examples of his opus. In any case this opus was his version of what he came to take Modernism to be. It was a way of saving yourself by your own bootstraps. The literary universal comes in here. The author’s argument with time convinced him that by establishing the full portrait of his faits accomplis he would be girding himself round with a shelter place of documents. (We all live by ideals—or die fast without them—and those ideals can rarely stand up untarnished to a rational inspection, but then who is to say that a



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“rational inspection” is the last word in assessing human efforts?) As he learned more about the literary universal, the great vision of Imlac, he came to recognize in himself the desire for a verbal treasure house, in which to outspread the boundaryless single text implicit in the more than sixty discrete books he has written. (Though he despairs of knowing that single text, he wishes another would know it for him. He wishes that in such an act he might be freed of what adolescence holds him to the privileging of the book, as though he were an eighth-century monk in his scriptorium at Beuron, arduously copying a master text, and sighing to see cured leather binding fitted tightly to the five pounds of parchment sheets onto which he has empted fifty inkpots. Must he not, before proceeding, free himself of that see-me disposition which a career of self-manifesting in the universities has made too at hand? Would not that freeing enable him to fashion with new comfort an opus—ah, there’s that word—with the profile of the literary universal?) The author has snarfed many a term in his personal quest for a label— labels guide him—with which to signpost the Shangri-la (another label) in which to repose his “achievement”, but also in which to step jauntily onto a new ontological plane, snatching new life from old. That Christian transcendence will be the latest (and strongest) peg in his structure of escape hatches, need not be hidden, but must be kept quiescent throughout most of the present tale. If there is anything persuasive about the present text it must come as nearly as possible from the interior of the text, which, by writing, the present author can lay some claim to being originary. The opus forming the body of the present writer is in fact shaggy and intrinsically just a nisus, what the world as this person is in it would accept as a sterterous gatherum of propositions. The ideal contract I have made with myself has to lie somewhere inside this lacework of selfrepresentations. Many things the world is as dictum lie shaped, frayed, abandoned inside the opus the world writes through this guy. (Sure I hate to say me, and bend pretzel-shaped with the desire to write you into the account in such a way that I will not have to castrate myself in order to level the longing ego for the attention it deserves.) It is as though expressiveness (poems, destiny in secular action, the three novels), will to control, that is to map (cultural histories), accessibility to channeling (translations, starting with the epic voice of Palamas; oral interviews of labor), confession (Portrait of John; Song Broken Song), and philosophy by the seat of the pants (Time, Accounts, Surplus Meaning) were conditions of consciousness establishing the maker me.



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To move the omnium gatherum of “books” from here, this shelf over here, okay?, to that non-place place where the literary universal is to have been in the act of doing this from all time, from the first transformative crib impulse, to fart forth the relief of the “system” into a cleaner space, to the canvas of self-representation the person’s oeuvre makes of him or her, that is to move expression into global statement: the literary universal envisaged by Imlac, the streaks in the tulip stripped back from the purity of truth, the clear water of Winckelmann’s well left before us in translucent cups, the perfection in art that Schiller sees incorporated in the Greek representation of death on stone, the alles vergaengliche ist nur ein Gleichnis of Goethe rendered into the perfection of stillness and validity. And is this kind of salvation through art not then bound by the rules of value, as strictly as the work of the écrivain imberbe is judged by the salon of connaisseurs? Sure, we are in a democracy, and value what we learned from John Dewey about art as experience, out there and available to each of us, but at what point enters the truth and universality value that renders the oblate opus a prayer of entering the condition of literary universality? The obligation of greatness lies within the making of the materials each of us who care direct toward the absolute. Perhaps we should speak here of a condition of absolution, rather than of the absolute, and of oblation, quite boldly, as the maneuver by which any of us makers confer our souls’ blessing on the work put there. We run a shaggy line of thought here, but not because the implications of reaching for the universal are shaggy, for indeed they are part of the crisp and clear-cut sursum corda that Plotinus, in his ascensional epistrophes, delighted to provide an ontic frame for. We are not playing the small ball game of Modernism, nor the world series of Greek tragedy or Homer, who so nearly were the universal we ostend toward, but the life-and-death ball game in which we strive to convert the aesthetic into the ethical. A good deal is said there, which is relevant here and to which we will return. The author’s first published thought book was Intelligible Beauty in Aesthetic Thought (1958). In an early effort to publish that book in German, an expatriate German scholar in America was recruited for the translation, but eventually faltered and resigned because the title didn’t make sense to him, nor did it adapt itself to any German he could create. I think the difficulty was a language one only because it was a thought one first. The literary universal, to take an aesthetic ideal, has seemed to us a repository for the true, in fact to be nothing but the true, seen through a different facet. We have talked about a kind of Platonism under which to interpret the being-true character of that ideal, is a being true which the constitutive power of language guarantees. We have to characterize that



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Platonism so that it incorporates temporality, is a stable meaning-giving dimension of human reality, but also, at the same time a dimension forever being twinned and sustained by our creaturely temporality. All that in defense of the richly being true of the universal. But does the path we track lead us then to a beauty (ideal beauty) which is at the same time intelligible? Is being true, in the present case, the same thing as being intelligible? To be intelligible the true needs to be lived temporally, put into relationships within human experience, and yet the true that Platonism characteristically postulates is distinctive precisely for its immobility, an immobility we have just attempted to see borne by the human in time. In carrying the true over into the intelligible we walk the same lightfoot path that was dared by just those heroes of “intelligible beauty”—Goethe, Winckelmann, Schiller, and a bit later Wordsworth— with whom the author began his search for the heart of that godless goddrenched period—1740–1830—in which we began putting before ourselves both the thrilling challenge of reinventing a meaning-saturated world out of the wreckage of old economic, political, and moral institutions, the wreckage of an older traditional society, with its basically operative worldview assumptions, class difference structures, and static solutions to age-old inequities of power and wealth, and, on the other hand, the slow diffusion of informations—about the natural and physical world, the practice of health maintenance, the fundamental human aspirations for a voice in governance, the right of a society to rethink its economic system, and, embedded in those multiple exchanges, a diffuse sense that the world of the arts is a real world, tied in to willed acts in a social environment, multiply dependent on the socioeconomic setting of the artist, and in that way clearly an environment nurturing the intelligible, in which the meaning of the art work, even if it be anti-meaning, is there to be parsed—in short, after this long sentence, in which the art work can long for that ideal and simple truth Imlac praised, while living that truth, under the sign of a dynamic Platonism, which guarantees intelligibility to art works, to the literary universal, which individual ostension evokes into reality.



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23 OSTENTION AND OBLATION

The argument making its way through this blog will, I hope, be taking on its own insinuations of meaning. We have been amassing a vocabulary of postures, by which to simulate many broad points about meaning, the universal, the literary, the ostended. The author takes no pleasure in calling this kind of movement through language a blog, would almost settle for a blob, but feels unjustified to call the work he is letting become him here philosophy, poetry, Wissenschaft, and much prefers to think of this as a report from his opus, a series of gossip columns about the human condition. Why does the vocabulary culture has given him to work with not authorize this gossip column to claim to be philosophy? People who do philosophy—and who else would establish these ground rules?—tell him that philosophy needs to rely on firm definitions and a sense of purpose, as though to philosophize was to try to solve a problem. He knows that he defines as he goes along, but lets new components of the defining infiltrate his concepts as he proceeds—that is, as in the case of the meaning of the literary universal, he lets the meaning enrich itself by generating a collateral meaning like the intelligible, or a collateral concept like the good. He describes this as an enrichment, while it could, he understands, be taken as impoverishment from a perspective in which the maintenance of non-accretive definitions could be demanded, as a certificate of the trade. He knows that this insistence on the purposiveness of the stable definition—which is of course a legitimate claim against his kind of Platonism, and which therefore he has to take seriously—is part of a gravitas commonly treasured by those philosophers who feel that they are “going somewhere” in their trade, and that philosophy is part of the human quest for scholarship—like researching in the realm of history, or of psychology, of even of the history of the history of psychology. The path toward calling this work philosophy is effectively blocked, then, by all except those who, like Gabriel Marcel in his Being and Having, write diaries which intersect with the major themes of philosophy. And poetry too is cut off from the self-definition of this gossip columnist? The poet makes no claim to enhance human understanding or knowledge,



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and therefore will hardly complain that this blog lacks the drive of Wissenschaft. But the poet will loudly complain—just listen to Milton or Kazantzakis—at the reckless way the mundus cognitabilis is dispersed in the course of this randonnée intellectuelle. There is no total transfiguration of world things through imagination. World things remain here like lumps of coal, intentionally. Here we have Breaking Bad, there Stefan George, here speaking in tongues, there Schiller, here Plotinus, here HentscherDompal, there Rilke and Dryden, here Imlac, there Rauschenberg, as though a farrago of links to the empirical world were scattered within the musculature of a language attempting to remain true to its own contract, that is sure, but battening on imagination only to insist the more on “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” as Marianne Moore put it. Not even a prose poem is this thing here becoming keystroke by keystroke. Which leaves Wissenschaft. We got rid of philosophy and poetry, but have we gotten rid of the effort to build the structures of human knowledge, to converge with that compendious effort at self-recovery, which takes us back to the scholars of yore? Are we working the pathway of Gaius Solinus or Isidore of Seville? Of Pauly-Wissowa? Here again an easy no, for the present text is hardly made up of building blocks—in the sense that might be claimed for advances in nuclear genetics or the history of ancient map-making, in which cases it is of paramount interest to add and transmit either new data or old data reunderstood, and to work with pride in the building of the “edifice of knowledge.” (To be sure, no worker in such transtemporal enterprises ignores an argument like Kuhn’s, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, that knowledge edifice building is a baroque undertaking, with many dead ends and aleatory spurts generated by knowledge worker clusters, who press their understandings into dominant positions: the edifice is one in which now this now that architectural style gains the ascendancy.) The present text, however, is one in which no edifice is envisaged, even distantly, into which to become a contribution, and in which the control of a guiding architecture is apparent. That is why the notion of blog seems to this writer most comfortably to enfold what he is doing.



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24 OSTENTION AND LITERARITY

The present author ruefully reviews his self-characterization, as a blog writer. Had he not better, before submitting to some snide dismissal, settle for a term like autobiography, as a descriptor for his “work”, and rescue at least the honor of being (by now) an author of at least four “autobiographies”? Why must he adopt the pretence of “one who simply becomes language speaking him,” and who “flies below the radar of assigned writing types?” Is this a false modesty on which he pins hopes of being recognized as in fact more interesting than he is? Has he not, after all, stumbled on a way of being himself which subverts even the smirks of those who comment to him “be yourself, man!”?And has he not, in dedicating what language happens to him, to a universal literarity, which requires the most of him in discipline, knowledge, address to the human condition, has he not set before himself an ideal, to reach toward which, regardless of the kind in which he reaches, is already to have been made an agent in the moral as well as the aesthetic drama of life? To pose this question, he finds, is to tread where he feels alone with his condition, as sure as Bertrand Russell or Don Draper (in Mad Men) that we are born alone and die alone and that’s it. Language streams define the youngster, culture offers him or her a material to digest, he or she works it over, with imagination if that has been included in his/her package, and makes an oblation of the whole, “raises it carefully” into an ideal zone. The word oblation—also the term for the work of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate—sluices this labile discussion around into waters in which aesthetic and theological vessels inevitably cross-ship together. It will be pertinent to hover a moment over this issue of what is possibly an event of ships passing in the night, and to make sure that our concern with oblation has not become a concern with ostension, with letting examples—say of the universality of the religious proposal— crowd up against the aesthetics of literary universality. If ostension wants a hearing, here, it will have to take its turn. And if a bridge between oblation and ostension makes room for itself in language, what surer footstep can be taken than over the water by means of the word dedication,



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which has its gnarled roots in the double soils of art—think of the Archaic Greek dedicatory statuette—and religious faith, the dedication—as of the foundations of the church building in Catholicism or Anglicanism.



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25 OEDIPUS, THE GREAT MAN, AND IDEALITY

Our topic is literary universality. Universality sought out in shaped language, inscribed inside the truth, created by the genius of the arts—the Greek tragedians we started with—but addressed through the ages by the hearers, readers, or watchers of the embedded universal of the great play, poem, or novel. What is the difference between this kind of supernal creation and the delight in it as a finished product? Does the audience of Oedipus need to be, or in fact is, inside the making pathway of the original author? If not—and of course the proposition seems to demand far more in capacity than any audience can provide—can we specify just what is necessary, to constitute a de facto reading experience of the greats? Is there any cut-off point at which a reading or viewing becomes a “real reading”, an identifying with the creator’s mind, and before which the reader must be said to be dealing with him or herself, rather than with the great work? The answer, of course, will squirm out of our hands, however we try to grasp it. We all know some of the extremes. One can be a linguistically talented reader of Sophocles, and parse out Oedipus “correctly”, without, as we would say, penetrating the human tragedy and mystery which infuse the work. One can fail to see and feel what Sophocles is driving at. At the other extreme one can be a fantastic empathetic reader of Oedipus, can be a reader who knows in his/her heart what is implied by raging against a killer who is oneself. What did Benedetto Croce mean, when in his Aesthetic he insisted that to read the great work effectively we must exactly replicate the creative process that was in Dante’s or Shakespeare’s mind? Did he mean that we need both to have the scholarly skills to penetrate the grammars of the great text, and that at the same time we need to have the greatness of heart needed to embrace the point of Lear or the Commedia? Do we want to say that the best reader is somewhere between these two extremes, linguistically competent, perhaps only in translation, and at the same time able not only to read between the lines but to read there with a sense of the difference of that “between the lines” in his/her time from that same “between the lines” in Sophocles’ time?



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The answer to this question is less interesting than the implications of the dilemma posed by the question. However we answer the question, about reading the greats and the literary universal that infuses them, we are left with the residual likelihood that we will agree to our status as fallen, and as below the level required by Croce. Is that because none of us mere mortals are sufficiently gifted to fathom the work of the greatest masters? Or is it because the greats embed in themselves a condition which puts them out of range for the faculties we humans are given? Was Goethe not speaking to this condition of the ideal work, the literary universal, when he wrote that “Idee und Erfahrung werden in der Mitte nie zusammentreffen; zu vereinigen sind sie nur durch Kunst und Tat.” The Idee, that keystone of ideal beauty which was of constant reference in eighteenth-century aesthetics, does not yield its meaning to Erfahrung, experience, which is the level on which I negotiate toward the work of excellence. Let’s say I read Homer with a knowledge of Homeric Greek and of many of his “references”. I’m a Hellenist. Each time I read the Odyssey I get closer to understanding the blend of bravura with imagination which marks the imagined hero with that named material world partially restored for us in our time by Finlay’s World of Odysseus. Yet I travel through Erfahrung, experience and learning but not the whole aesthetic grasp which, once again, Croce helps us see as the trademark of the genius maker. Winckelmann puts the impotence of our striving in terms of religion, his religion of art. Die hoechste Schoenheit ist in Gott, and der Begriff der menschlichen Schoenheit wird vollkommen, je gemaesser und uebereinstimmender derselbe mit dem hoechsten Wesen kann gedacht werden….

To reach the ideal we are called upon to reach to God himself, but in fact even as we reach for menschliche Schoenheit we have lost our goal, die hoechste Schoenheit. In terms of the dilemma posed to us in discussing Croce, these Germans of another era resorted to an aesthetic language which puts the ideal—can we not just say the universal?—in its essence out of reach to you and me. The almost religious cult of the great artistic creators is under construction here, and will have more than enough progeny, in the following century which brings to birth art pour art, Modernism, the Bloomsbury Circle, Stefan George and his friends. Literary universality may have reached, from its eighteenth-century platform, to heights not for a minute imagined, when in a Hunan University classroom I urged students to see literary values as superintending the values of the day. But there was indeed a bridge



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between the two profiles of literary universality. A diffuse—but not invalidated—penumbra of idealism, both philosophical/religious and bourgeois/sentimental—hovered over the diverse discourses of the universal. The universal and the ideal were kindred concepts differently tweaked by the critical forcefields of modern European thinking. Behind both the universal concept and the ideal concept lay versions of Platonism. Erwin Panofsky, in Idee, long ago opened our eyes to the ways Platonism infused Renaissance Humanist painting and art theory, and from that matrix of “idea thinking” and of “ideal thinking”—the two currents of thought flow side by side, emerging, say, from the mideighteenth century with sculptors like Canova and painters like Sir Joshua Reynolds, and flowing into the beau idéal of, say, Victor Cousin—from that matrix surging into the neoclassical move—Monticello, the madeleine, the paintings of David. The idea has a fervent prodigy in these movements. Does it transport a whiff of what we find in Plato himself? It transports the presumption that for the given world to be perfused with meaning there must a principle of intelligibility “behind” or “within” it. (Embedded in Plato’s term idea itself was compacted the lesson of the relation of the ideal to the real; the verb eido means to see, the perfect tense of the verb eido, oida, means I have seen or, by extension, I know; ergo the notion of knowing is tightly linked to a pre-epistemic action of seeing; knowledge lies at the terminus of seeing, or the knowable, the idea filled, lies within the seen. The ideal, the idea-filled, is what the real is pregnant with.) The literary universal is closely allied to the “ideal” as Joshua Reynolds leads us toward seeing: His (the artist’s) eye being enabled to distinguish the accidental deficiencies, excrescences, and deformities of things, from their general figures, he makes out an abstract idea of their forms more perfect than any one original; and what may seem a paradox, he learns to design naturally by drawing his figures unlike to any one object. This idea of the perfect state of nature, which the artist calls the Ideal Beauty, is the great principle, by which works of genius are conducted.

The reader will be able to think briskly from this formulation of Reynolds to Samuel Johnson’s: “The business of the poet,” said Imlac, “is to examine, not the individual but the species, to remark general properties and large appearances. He does not number the streaks of the tulip.”



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The chain of viewpoints is subtle, between the thinking of ideal beauty and the thinking of the general, but there is an unmistakable kinship which has as its framing environment the neoclassical longing for the abstract in the arts, that is for the purities of a climate of disciplined meaning. Can we link this affiliation more deeply, into a need of the time? Were the literary universal and the beau idéal complementary responses to the incoherence lurking within the democratized and industrialized cultural environments, which a hardly respectable interval separated from them?



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26 STORMED BY POETRY

On a brisk Fall day on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, in nineteen and forty-five, my mother and I drove into the upscale beach compound of her sister and Uncle Bill, the radical Republican of the family, a man ready to kill President Roosevelt for his spendthrift indifference to the stockbroker values my uncle made his living from. That statement is the backstory to where I’m going about art and beauty. But like many backstories, it may in the end take a luminous turn back into the foreground. I was a young seventeen—books had taken away the fighting instinct, asthma and narcissism had reinforced each other in my stethos, and I was ready for love…or poetry. That in fact it was both I may secretly have guessed. That first night, in a bedroom rinsed with ocean breeze—tonic to a cornball Midwestern youngster who was all fields and sense—I woke up to moonlight on the floor and curtains, and was startled by the beauty of the scene. Outside the window I saw the velvet stirrings of Chesapeake Bay, inside I felt the shock and awe of hormones. I did not know that Augustine Aurelius, facing a bay of the Mediterranean at Carthage, had picked out a text, on a divine whim from Romans 13, which guided his life into “paths of righteousness”. But I later related, to that shaping event, the impulse I inexplicably felt, to rummage a little in Cousin Billy’s bookshelf—for it was his room that had been lent to me. Where the hunting fingers went I had no idea, but something felt good about the cover of Oscar Williams’ Anthology of American Poetry, and it replaced everything in the room but my eyes or brain. I fixed inside there for hours, and have ever since been aware of a debt. I sat there reading for hours, at a rusty Victorian lamp, in the corner of the room where the sea breeze came through in puffs. If I were to say what I was reading it would miss the point, but it would open the issues. I was browsing, feeding, on culled lyric poetry from Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, E. E. Cummings, Robinson Jeffers, and Carl Sandburg. Bits and pieces, pages turning; names I had never heard before. The feeling was of opening into a spiritual condition where a world-discovering conversation



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was in progress into which I was being invited, and in which I felt I belonged. The invitations were in language so designed to be interior, to a teenager like me who was all nisus, that I was won into a sense that I was creating the work as I went along. (I was in territory we evoked earlier, discussing what kind of participation is required of the reader of great texts, to meet the true claims of reading, to substantiate the proposal, which Saint Augustine formulated, that to be meaningful reading must be personally transformative. I was meeting that obligation as instinctually as I would at any time in my life.) What I was creating, along with these language spirits, was fresh ways to say and hear about the character of the world that was just then in place to unpackage me—a world where beauty and desire were often coordinated, where death and beauty seemed placeholders displaying the human condition, where the way things felt, here and now, in no way refused the descriptors language was providing for them. The end result of the night was a new sense, that I held inside as I exhaustedly watched the Bay take a face of early morning sun, that the total richness of the world I was living into—eros, fear, infinite curiosity—knew how to speak my name, and would do so as long as I could hear its voice. We started with literary universality, and I intend to stick with that theme, though we have moved out into the Platonic more generally, the aesthetic even more generally, and now into something like the personal genesis of the aesthetic, a step seemingly further away from the issues of literary universality. Are those issues—which postulate a condition of general humanity, and an access to it through the literary imagination— issues from which we can move to the genesis of the aesthetic in the individual, without sacrificing all that is positional and sharp about the notion of the literary universal? We specifically do not want to meander into the autobiographical, unless it yields a firm line of argument trackable to just the points Johnson, Reynolds, and Winckelmann made for us. What was going on in the young man at the lamp by the window in Maryland? Language was going on in him, positioning itself this way that way, language dreaming him with his own feelings, saying those feelings in his place, indeed creating those feelings for him. Those feelings were not the insights latent in the great texts, those meeting points of the essence of the human with sustained ways of revealing it, but they were freeings of the full human, in a young person just starting down the path of replacing his body with the things the world could say about it. What had that “freeing” to do with the path toward the literary universal? To start to readdress that point is to stop a minute again, on the issue of language. It seems to this author, doubtless because language is voicing



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him, that being human is becoming clearer about the way to open your own humanity to being named. Your own humanity? I can start to define this humanity only by miming some of the things I do to become myself. I gesture in thought, feeling, hope, despair; I act out the repertoire of personal horizons which seems to anticipate me. That is my playbook. But there is a stage manager prompting my directions. To each of us the stage manager finds a different way to introduce himself, and a different name by which to introduce himself. (We don’t like soul anymore? We don’t feel good about personality—unless we can tweak it with behavioral components? The manager will manage, whatever we call him/her.) The manager of the chorus of my gestures will search from within me for languages appropriate to the world-discovering nisus I am. Am I not myself literature, made by this wordscape of gestures that establishes ever more companionable forms by which to be known? Am I not, as I establish these forms, being at the same time the ever more consequentially human dimension they promise? And isn’t the forma formarum I aspire to be nexted to akin to the reservoir of absolute human forms the literary universal condenses?



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27 THE OPUS AND THE FICTIVE

Autobiography—no. Whatever curiosity the world might have about the events of this guy’s life has been swallowed up in the language which, truly, has replaced him. The replacement is as a whole his oblation, though it cuts across genres and themes and exceeds his grasp to the degree that he knows he is the last person who would “understand” what he is doing/has done. (Is that not, for all the cognitive bravura owing to the cogito, so generally true as to be one kind of definer for the human being? Inside ourselves by nature, doing by naturalization, we are at no point in life more expert than others in giving an account of us, for even, or especially, as pain we are deprived from a platform from which to see ourselves “making sense”.) The oblation I bring to the table is as jumbled as a bag of groceries, lugged across the room to the site of the universal. Will it fit in that site? Will a novel settle there, or a poem, or a report on banana plantations in Mexico or a translation of a Greek epic poet or a small verse play? What, to begin answering, would help to break down the generic walls? Can a poem and a discussion of temporality and an essay about Mauritania converge on a single shared presence? Uncomfortable though the question seems, an answer to it seems required, if one is to begin to assess the pathway toward a body of works. Anyone’s oblative effort in language artifacts will ask first of itself, what the homogeneity it works around is. Within ourselves we are the last ones capable of answering this question for ourselves, but when we come to Goethe or Lao Tzu we are, in love feeling we are, the first ones able to comprehend the individual’s “life work” as a totality. And what will be the standard by which that opus will be judged worthy, or unworthy, to aggregate out as an expression of the literary universal? This is the question of value, which has a tricky relation to the “literary universality” issue, itself, on the surface, a description of a kind of state of being rather than a state of value greatness, though of course the notion of “high value” is implicit in notions like The Greats (reading the greats at Oxford) or the Great Books Program (designed by Mortimer



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Adler and others at the University of Chicago). The trick is to sort out whether aesthetic value is implicit in the attribution of universality. Are the books we have enlisted in this book, as exemplars of literary universality, of surpassing literary value? Hamlet, the Odyssey, Whitman, Dickinson, Racine? (The list gets shaggy; one forgets who was there before, and inside, perhaps, a Gertrude Steinian no more masterpieces cry rises up from inside, and yet even that step in the direction of “relativism” begins to make one nervous. True, there is not going to be a cut-off point where the list of great books runs out and the list of poor books sets in, and yet our own practice, in writing and judging what we can create, assures us that there is a better and a worse in the writing project, and that if there is a better it makes sense only in terms of a best, even if we move with caution toward assigning that high mark.) I lean to thinking that aesthetic value is what makes the universal value of the great books. But what then about the “universal value” of many books that hardly aspire to incarnate the human condition, but which many judges—each of us will have his/her own list— value highly as “art”? (My list would include Herondas’ Mimes, Catullus’ Lesbia poems, Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror, Bernanos’ Monsieur Ouine, even a vast tableau of humanity and nature, like Kazantzakis’ Odyssey.) Would those texts be examples of sites where literary universality and artistic greatness diverged? Would Johnson’s own Rasselas, to look inward toward our whole discussion here, be an example of a work that expounded the universal outside itself—because it lacks the “art” for it? The address to the universal human condition is itself a condition of art, which at its most realized level is artistic because it is noble. This of course is a Classical perspective, which Aristotle worked through in terms of tragic drama. Great tragic drama deals, he wrote in The Poetics, with the destiny of great men from great families; and in particular with great and powerful men whose fall from the heights strikes the spectator with awe and inspiration. Does the inspiration afforded by the downfall of Oedipus surpass that afforded by the downfall of Willie Loman in The Death of a Salesman, because of the difference in social position of the two characters? (Or does the inspirational difference between the two plays, if there is one, derive in part from the loftiness of Oedipus, and the lowness of Willie?) This question may need to be translated, in order to strike with any plausibility on the contemporary ear, to which an appeal to class nobility in literature seems out of place. If we replace noble families with dignified and powerful individuals, and low-born folk with yielding individuals with reduced (if fascinating) character, and if we are willing to start substituting non-literary genres for



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literary ones, an important qualification—okay, we’re talking replacing Gary Cooper in High Noon or the obdurately proud Erlend in Kristin Lavransdottir, the powerful (if brutal) Artemio Cruz of Fuentes’s novel, or Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe with—on the distaff side—Graham Greene’s Mr. Tench or Malcolm Lowry’s Consul—if we are willing to make those reflective moves we can come within shouting distance of Aristotle’s point, that to be powerfully moved we need to be deeply invited inside the profiles of figures of significance. (These examples were picked with some anxiety, in the search for less-than-good heroes who would not at the same time be scoundrels, and thus would engage enough empathy to draw us in.) Arguably these examples are shaky and need qualification, for difficult is the translation of Aristotle’s poetic into our culture, and yet we may still come out of the comparison finding the art of Undset and Fuentes or Chandler the more significant for the life dimensions of the personnages in whom they invest their narrative skill. This is in fact as far as we can entitle ourselves to go, at this point, into the argument that moral worth is a component in the kind of imaginatively narrativized figura that supports literary universality. Even what we are entitled to say about the complex relation of the literary universal to goodness within the narrativized characters leaves out the narrative as a thing in itself, a thing which would itself, odd as that seems, need to be morally good in order to support the moral-aesthetic value of the whole. The challenge of laying out a general theory of the goodness-beauty relation in the literary universal is this: not that we need doubt the plausibility of this relation, but that to explain briefly how it works, then more briefly how it plays into a kind of Platonic category—of whatever form—is as hard to achieve as any demonstration from felt life situation to encompassing theory.



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28 THE UNIVERSAL AND THE TEXT

And so the farrago of products I export to my literary universality file will be of enhanced value as they deeply illustrate the generic quality of life, the human condition—which might be our translation today of the condition of literary universality, and the truth of my overall package, as we feel tougher and more self-protected saying, will imprint itself the more firmly the more I reach out with what I am to that place of offering. The present author has let his ornamental wind chimes ring to a wide palette of tones or genres, and, over a long writing life, to a wide range of developmental stages, and knows that neither he, from inside, nor another, from outside, would be a master of characterizing that blend of tones and stages. Fortunately he, this author, does not call on his god for a résumé, but only for the life force to be at the birthing point of the life that is given him. From that point, however, he would derive personal union if he could feel himself working inside traditions he himself had established for himself. (Careful use of “the author”. This book thing is the most steadfast effort possible, to a pale narcissist, in the quest to address other people—as himself if necessary, to be sure, but as their selves, and to make what sense he can of himself through knowing the way others do and make life.) Alert to channels of verbal procreations, genres, already argued into existence by the practice of millennia, the author attempts to be heard as a maker of this and that literary genus; lyric both original (from the epigram to the epic) and channeling another voice (translation); fiction, the long narrative cut by imagination out of the paste of daily life; drama, a high-verse closet play; travel writing, the move of a journalist of the interior, through real places looking like Potemkin villages; philosophy, gnarls of disciplined speculation on the relations of art to beauty to truth, a continuous discourse on the “nature of history”, and on the working-self history enables; labor auscultation (interviews), in the banana plantation, the dairy, in the cab with the over-the-road trucker; criticism, the winnowing and evaluating of others’ imaginative oblations; autobiography, tricking the experienced world into language patterns that resemble the feeling of being inside this person who was as soon as it seems he is simply was. It



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will have been one of this author’s self-indulgent protections, that the tones of a multigeneric opus cohere, in the end, as a single voice, as do the different components of a choir. And why does this “author” take pleasure in the self-descriptor of opus maker, and in the barrier challenge of creating a literarily universal statement? And has that barrier challenge in any way been met? We deal here with questions which will be motif setters for the rest of this book, to the extent we let them become as difficult as they want to be made. The author takes pleasure in the self-image of opus maker for good reasons and bad. The bad reasons are part of cultural history and part of his own history—which houses him for explanatory purposes, while refusing him a seat to sit down in. The image of the Modernist author— Yeats, Pound, Joyce, Mann—had its way with him. The purview of art as a self-sufficient zone of pure representation was too luscious for a teenager infected with the cult of art pour art, and no sense of its birth in him. No creature of the Rive Gauche, he was nonetheless an adept of small perfections, the kind that Pater, in recommending the morality of “burning always with a hard gemlike flame,” found in the work of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola or Luca della Robbia; and from valuing those perfections a taste for the self-enclosed wholeness of the “great art work” fastened on him. (For a while he was entranced by the literal formula of Archibald MacLeish, for whom “a poem should be palpable and mute / as a globed fruit,” and in that passage from adolescence to young Harvardian outlier, a passage in which he endured the demented Rausch of The Bridge, or Of Time and the River, and in which he raised the stakes on the addling texts of late teenhood, Anna Kavan’s The House of Sleep or Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, in that passage he found the dispositions that would later, in a work like Intelligible Beauty in Aesthetic Thought, assume passing formality in the incorporation of the aesthetic into the Aesthetic, the palette of names and words with whom we people those literary universal mavens—Johnson, Winckelmann, Goethe—of whom we spoke above.) The achievement of the Modernist author will have appeared the apex of restoring the troubled world to its forms: the troubled world of puberty, say, long preceding those adventures in the senses the arts were to foreground in a twenty-year-old, and as such, in The Magic Mountain, to make for this youngster a summer’s worth of identity. To say that the passion for the opus, that rose from this stew of longings and finesses, was part of the bad reasons for such passion is not to say that a privileged grounding in the finer musics is inherently bad, but that in a postFromentin Dominique or in a Gidean Alissa the quest for the aesthetic demasks what we have to see as a threat of weakness. It is a matter of what



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this author has to read, as hid other, his personal history of bad behavior, that on the far side of the growing image of the artistic opus lay the wreckage of multiple human bonds which even posthumous love may prove inadequate to repair. But the good reasons for which the author chases the opus image? We open ourselves at places that lie on the fracture of personality. From childhood on we lean here or there—we incline to garden, and can’t keep our fingers out of the soil, we find the same fingers quite differently active around the frets of a violin—which charms us into a career, we thrill at our homemade lemonade stand, to which the nice guy across the street becomes a buoying patron, not forgotten when we are making another kill at Charles Schwab, or finally, yes, we may find ourselves at eight on a couch in Honolulu, looking down onto the whole Pacific, and playing griot to our grandmother, whose fascination for our tales of Islandia-like otherness worlds will not go forgotten when, at the age of eighty, we are hacking corrosive epics like The World of John Holmes out of the linguistic brainstem life has grown from us. The good reason for empowering the opus you know wants forth from you is teleological, that you are allowing out from within you, and aspiring to form, the global expression you are capable of. When the case is language, and the opus to be the fruit of that person-defining capacity, the onluring Siren is the establishment of a unified “achievement”, in the verbal, which will effectively replace you. To formulate thus the path toward the formation of opus is to compress in a line the life-rich and time-consuming pastorate of a whole vision.



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29 THE ANCIENT GRAVEYARD STILLNESS

To make a universal literary statement out of a word opus so established is to cross a barrier, as we said above. That barrier is the downdrag of embeddedness we all invest in our temporality, that time cost from which we free ourselves into the form with which we trade identity. Is the opus-making we are currently accounting for unfolding from inside itself the dimensions of literary universality? The literary universal, as we have been tracking it, is of a strict and essential humanity, the general portrait of the tulip, the blood-kin to the kind of Platonic presence we tracked earlier in discussion. And has that barrier challenge in any way been met? By anyone, ever? By the present author? By each of us in our highest aspirations? By the fumbling efforts of the temporal creature to make a haven for him- or herself out of the arthritis and brambles of everyday life? The answer is of course no, and yet that no, which familiarly haunts any discussion of the ideal, especially in an age wised up, but not really wise, to the facts on the ground, that no is won too easily and without enough care for precise formulation. The formulation in question needs meshing with the kind of Platonic ideal account we proffered earlier. The opus we may wish to erect is constructed under the sign of the ideal, but not of an immobile ideal— what we may call the textbook Platonic idea, the frozen idea of a chair in terms of which the chair acquires meaning—rather of an ideal existing as we exist, temporally, but shadowing and standing for our actions; in that dynamic sense a “Platonic idea” guaranteeing the secular throe. Does the literary universal belong among the concepts this account of the ideal/idea embraces? The literary universal, as our eighteenth-century thinkers saw it, was part of that superior dimension in the world to be named, which reflected the human being at its essential and noble—remember how roundly Shakespeare was put down, in that century’s criticism, for his excessive detail, or, positively, how exalted Goethe felt as he contemplated the evolutionary process by which the expressive human figure emerges shorn of the excresenses of less-conscious nature, or Schiller felt, observing on ancient Hellenic gravemarkers the essential



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quiet and dignity of the human. The opus one might aspire to make in language could not succeed by failing the claim interior to the human presence, to discipline, clarify, and share itself.



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30 LITERATURE AND THE MORAL/POLITICAL

The frank proximity of the above perspectives, to reflective systems central to human form zones like the political, the religious, or the moral, is evident, and the flowing argument before us could not convincingly stand on its own, anymore than a house of which one-third was firmly founded but the rest ignored could serve as a lasting dwelling. Yet to step over the zonal line, from these territories of aesthetic and, perhaps, moral (but only as it emerges from the aesthetic), is daunting to this author long comfortable with taking even his religious, and by all means his moral, impulses from the wide precinct of beauty as form and sensuous intelligibility. (That first text of “scholarship”, Intelligible Beauty in Aesthetic Thought—1958—was already a provocative hint that this chap would be taking even his “knowledge” base from the sense world.) The reader can be assured, from this moment on, that in making a few crosszonal raids, in what directly follows, there will be no harassing lectures or proselytic nudges. To start with, the aesthetic is above all to wish to please. The moral/ethical will need a major undressing, before the author can read it into the foregoing discussions. As the raw material of opus, life as sense, is us before we think “us”, so that us we come to think is an us who from the first belch is with others. Author comes into being hewing with his senses gradually more formative settlements for expression, rewards self with incremental success at designating, and needing, effectively. But author as infant cannot carry through this territorial appropriation without the feeders, the teasers, the cooers. The cosmos, whose borders are the room, muscles outward arm-in-arm with friends. A house of beauty may take fleeting form around the already-panting parts of the world, but in the very sense of the house, of the opus as not yet named, of the receptacle of the full humanity you can bring to the table, you are the others whom you have been permitting to construct you. That of course is not the start of delineating the moral life, but certainly of the social life, so inwardly coformative is the social with the sense life, so dependent is the shaper of ever-more-responsive forms on the other people he/she has incorporated in his very condition as shaper. .



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The social life is from the beginning intimately of the aesthetic life; and long past the beginning, all the way to the end, the social, that realm of other bodies in expressive action, naming us as we name them, dressing up and dressing down for us, facilitating this, placing strictures on that, is so much the way we are that, extrapolating, we have inwardly to suppose a global setting in which all human beings depend first on us to give them the capacity even to depend on them. (The backstory to the theory of literary universality, which posits traces of a fundamental humanity, lies in just such a presumed setting. Nothing we learn about our common genetic heritage, by the way, makes it hard to consent to at least the outlines of human universality.) If we concede some plausibility to this rapprochement of the aesthetic with the social, have we made any inroads into the common perception that the aesthetic and the moral stand at a firm arm’s length from one another, so distantly in fact that from Plato’s time to ours, whether mocking the Liberace-like antics of Ion, tracking Gérard de Nerval and his lobster through the streets of Paris, or deploring the antics of Pussy Riot, we assume that the artist and his/her aesthetic make for poor social citizens and even worse morality—though an equally reprobate figure, like Tupac Shakur, drives through his art into a manifestly savage engagement with social values. The construction of an opus, the quest within it to establish themes of literary universality, the persistent nobility of affirming the coherence of the human: none of these efforts appear congruent with social behavior, which goes beyond being with and of others into moral care for others, the criterion of the moral/ethical life. “Appears congruent”? Seems a selfprojecting platform from which the moral and the aesthetic acquire a mutual genesis. The present observation squares with the author’s sense of his own opus construction, which has coursed through the book of genres, traveled generations, and mimed the sentiments of the good in fictions— the fictions of the persistent male who comes through in the end—his own opus construction which has left him no whit “morally better”, which has indeed proliferated the deceptive talent of miming the good, and which figures less toward the nutrition of his moral sense, than he might call forth from himself in helping a friend get to the eye doctor after a bad fall. Is this author, then, to think that his quest to strip back the streaks of the tulip, to go for the representation of the essentially human, to find that in humanity which is like the pure water drawn from the center of the well, as Winckelmann puts it, has nothing to do with bettering him as a person? Tempting as it is to say nothing, in response, and congruent though that nothing sounds to the author’s personal track record of infidelities and local darknesses of spirit, there is reason to fine-tune. The reading of the



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greats, the construction of a world representation with its own faith-filled willingness to replace the body with the spirit, these are not to be dismissed as moral exemplars, simply because the enacter of them shrinks even often from what he expects of himself. Yet when we come to the empathy of character, by which we might think ourselves enrichable by taking formed opera into our care, we find that the catch of compelling word-figures is huge. We might at first pursue this experiment by falling back on those characters whose feinfuehlig traits promise practice in discovering the sensible in the literary experience; think of Hesse’s Siddartha, Pater’s Marius, Fromentin’s Dominique, the youngster of Mishima’s Spring Snow, or Tonio Krueger. (What an abundance there is of these subtle paragons of awareness, in our age whose cult of the object turns many a moral figure inward, indeed, in our moment, turns men into women with an unexpected frequency.) These sensibles seem to the author to under-meet the challenges of living the person over the frontier from the aesthetic to the moral, and yet perhaps “meeting the challenges” is a misguiding formulation: perhaps what we are looking for, as we read the sensibles, is practice in feeling the full brunt of the social world we live; accustoming our ranges of sensibility as To Kill a Mockingbird opened us from inside to the actual feel of racial indignity. Atticus Finch, incidentally, is a proper segue into the zone of the sensitive who is at the same time a figure of dignity and winning influence—a kind of literary version of Gary Cooper in High Noon. It is fitting, and à propos, to turn to literary examples in an initial quest for the crossover temper. After all, the fictive imagined opens out central humanity to us—the point of this book—and though what we find in our fictions is not prescriptive, it is initiatory and freeing. It might nevertheless seem, though, that in our initial preoccupation with character templates, we are taking the easiest kind of crossover passage, from the literary into the real moral world of the finer emotions. Faced with this critique the author of the present quest for the moral might prefer to add, to his milder instances, figures like Zorba the Greek, or le preux Roland or Hector, or even a beat up like Mr. Tench in The Power and the Glory, in the game of paradigms, in short through examples of the robust or the down-at-heel to train a broader sense of the social whole than do the imberbes, or altogether to explode the parlor game before us by crossing the frontier on freight trains of the thematic, like the powerful of the dramas of Philoktetean rage, or the wintry strength of character that backbones The Njalasaga or Kristin Lavransdottir. Were he to do that he would be allying himself with templates of narrative, as distinct from character profiles, and why not, for in the search to make literature itself,



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pure like the purest water in the well, any morally rich crossing point out of the aesthetic is welcome. For the author, the examples closest to home promise most, in the clarification of what can be meant by the aesthetic experience as practice. (From a totally different angle John Dewey, in Art as Experience, gives weight to the present usage of practice. The discussion before us dwells on practice as the more active partner to experience.) The author must think that his trilogy of novels, The Male’s Midlife Rite of Passage: Three Imagined Lives, is practice in himself, and as such deserves a place in this crowded anthology of examples. Though we have argued, at an earlier stage of this blog, that the self is unintelligible to the self, there is no question but that the self knows how to do the self, and how learning accrues from innervations. The author remarks, in an internal comment on the fiction The Poppy Web, that “the kind of work within culture, that the artist thus carries through, is an effort within art. Art is in turn an action within society…” If art is social action, then the doing of art, whether making or remaking art as experiencer of it, is clearly practice in being social. In the case of the trilogy before us, three surrogates of the author, “three midlife males”, request our attention to them as they poise in their passivity on the thresholds of calamity. (Midlife figures abroad, they are, respectively, swept up into a hostage-taking, captured by drug runners, or suddenly stripped of all the identity that was embedded in a just-stolen computer; three figures thrown on their own, out of the blue, into the space where persistence, clear-sightedness, and patience are required; and in which the author and the “reader” are joined in a working-through of existential pressure and endurance.) The tracking through of the destinies of these three historically trapped individuals is for the author practice in thinking through scenarios of his own life, or inventing null hypotheses so that he can imagine what starting fresh means. Is practice of this kind, which we are abstracting as one possible usevalue of making fictions, also aiding one’s readers/hearers to practice their lives, or is it simply inviting them to practice the author’s life for what they can take home from it? With this question we return to the issue of the literary universal, and of the striving underlying it, to produce models of the essential human. (We intend to impute that motive to the world of opus-makers, for whom the making of a body of work in language is lifedefining, while in fact the author is simply working out a schema of what he can understand of creative processes capacious enough to include the arts of language—as well as of sculpture or architecture or music, for which totally different discussions, of the fundamental human, would need



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to be initiated. Does what works for me, as a working-through of the universal as embedded in an opus, work for everybody in the same way? It would be delirious to insist on this position, perhaps even if we subtract the “in the same way” from the contention, and yet the author is in no hurry to soften the edges of the universal. He is looking, as was Rasselas, for those conditions of lasting value which make the greats great, and the experience of the greats in some ways not only great but incumbent on every cogent reader of the greats. That said, we may add to our edginess a larger-scale question pertinent to the present issue, of the social or moral potential of the making and experience of opera, and of sinking the teeth into the universal. We may have opened some ground, just above, on which to further an eventual discussion of the socialization value of high literature. But getting better at working through one’s social existence is still far from improving one’s moral condition. Take the author’s three fictions, referenced above. The most elemental kind of moral dilemma can be extracted at many points in those three fictions, all of which are about “choices and decisions under extreme duress.” Adventure in Algiers opens with a crossroads drama in which the protagonist collides with a masked hostage-taker and the woman he is taking hostage, finds himself trussed up and tossed into the back of the hostage-takers’ Jeep, and hustled high-speed off into the desert. He and the woman barely get to know one another, remain simple pained covictims, but at a certain point, much later in the tale, the protagonist is faced with a chance to escape, leaving the woman behind. His dilemma could not be more pointed. What he does doesn’t matter; what matters, in this dissection of the event, is whether the author has built into a text a set of internalized guidelines by which he himself would be training a moral sense which would aid him in solving the problem internal to the text. A text is of course a playbook, even a cartoon of issues meaningful to its creator, and yet if we are to attribute to literary fictions any good-faith presence that justifies them we will not doubt that the author here establishes the conditions of moral decision, as distinct from the simple outlines of how to interact in society. In the end, fruitful conclusions about the moral dimensions of literary—or other—art works will need sensitizing to all the multiple shadings of irony, frivolity, purely aesthetic structural compulsion, which make up the literary palette, and prevent us ever from aspiring to extract the moral out of a high literary text. The moral in the literary, as F. R. Leavis argued in The Great Tradition, is earned through the unique skills of the art in question—novel, epic poem, lyric, drama—and is of course a factor of aesthetic value, for when we speak, throughout these lines, of the



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opus which aspires to high literary dignity, we are speaking of works which do not simply respond to the essence of the human condition, but which do so under the condition of art. What Leavis asserts finding in the great tradition of the English novel—Lawrence, Eliot, Austen—is moral experience identical to artistic achievement on the most elevated level. What the author tries to illustrate, by an obvious reference to moral dilemma in one of his fictions, is in principle precisely what Leavis is arguing, about the moral quality of the great tradition in English fiction. The foregoing notes on the moral implications of work in the great tradition of the greats—to speak here of literature, for literature is where the deepest stamp of the human experience is deposited—are mere notes, and need the reins, for we have uttered terms like religious and political in at least introducing the outreach realms of the opus in letters. We have profiled a case for the moral relevance of the major work of letters, and since that work—Hamlet, or The Mill on the Floss or Whitman’s Song of Myself—is the creation of a living person, to be worked through by other humans in a collaborative effort, and to the honor of the finest deposit of the human freed of excrescences, we have to agree that the creator will, in cases of such high achievement, live what the moral means to him/her directly into the language. Since the moral is a factor of the mere presence to others, social co-presence as language, and since the moral is itself the realm of decision in language, it seems germane to ask whether great experience in language has any meaning for the “political” presence or awareness of the maker or consumer of those greats. The political is the realm in which we are engaged as we emerge from the confusions of youth into responsibility for our own social order. The experience of the greats will have been a proving ground for the sense of the essence of the human, and thus a priceless, if expensive, field for the construction of statesmen. (In the West, the concubinage of the greats— Oxford and Cambridge versions; extensive reading in Latin Classics, which had acquired an identification with what we have been viewing as the essentially human, the essence of the tulip, though that identification can easily be unpackaged into its explanations in tradition, text history, and one-on-one instruction—with the “political elite” generated a parliamentary discussion and action rule which, beefed up by the world’s premier navy and a noblesse oblige perspective, guaranteed a fourhundred-year British Empire which it took two World Wars to castrate. That will have been a lab experiment in the living out of one sense of the aesthetic of Rasselas, with the Latin Classics as the select field of demonstration.) As we live a particular literary greats tradition into the



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political, as did the British, we foreshorten the meaning of the opus/ literary universal experience, which is being tested in this book as a living and far more than historically national experience zone. We are looking at the live-out of the major literary tradition in the individual’s life transformative transactions with literature. We are standing close to the individual both as maker and finder of the human essence, in literature, and inviting full appropriation of the greats in the widest and most global sense available. Is there a religious dimension implicit in the discovery of the essential humanity through literary greatness? (It will be evident that we are transitioning among different terms—implicit in, embedded in, collateral to—to describe the richness of effects accruing within the experience of the greats—the shorthand term we are increasingly allowing to take the place of the great opera, the revelatorily deep texts, the constructs that let the essentially human shine through. Imlac insists that poets should not number the streaks of the tulip in their poetry, Winckelmann argues for an art which drinks from the deepest and most tasteless water in the well—the kind of water Pindar considered “best”, “pure”, while Joshua Reynolds, whom Blake hated for it, stressed the representation of the essential profile of the portrayed—whether or not we think he achieved that. Are these injunctions, which indeed target the kinds of art creation this book is about, at all versions of religious discourse? Is in fact the opus-making procedure “religious” in the sense of creating a new world, and saying “it is good, behold it”? (Or is that procedure deceptive, in pretending to create a new world, while creating a contemptible and vain simulacrum of a new world?) To the degree that work of and with the greats can be going for the heart of the human experience, and can convey benefits in social savvy, moral consciousness (at least that), and in the very broadest sense a readiness to take a place inside the deliberations of the polis, we may venture to say that the caring stance toward our created condition, a base of awe, and some readiness to take others on as true persons—that these broad hallmarks of the religious perspective are congruent with the worlds of the literary universal. If one thinks that the disclosures of the human essence, which accrue from the opus-making effort, are at least intimations of the way the universe is, one may incline to promote the greats and the making which embeds them and us in it as veridical testimonies to what is. This is of course an age bred in Missouri, and more like than not to rebel against the kind of Johnsonian equivalents proposed here—to take the grumpy though still gentlemanly paths taken by such oldies as Bertrand Russell, Jacques Monod, and Joseph Wood Krutch, when they gave high color to the view that man (and woman) are futureless excrescences on the



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surface of evolutionary time. If that is where the reader is coming from then the drift of this entire document will be objectionable, and subject only to the rebuttal of doing it, doing it. Doing the work of the eighteenthcentury gentleman in a quiet corner of an Iowa farm town is after all not so preposterous as it might seem!



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31 TEXT OR BLOG?

We waver among “document”, “text”, “book”, “blog”, in an effort to characterize what we are doing here, though Milton wrote that “a great book is the life blood of a master spirit,” thinking wholly congenial to whatever the present screed is, and we should probably boldly seize the word “book” and run with it. Why the hesitation?’ We don’t need reminding that the book itself has undergone dramatic redefinitions in “our time”. (That “our time”, in the author’s case, goes back to pre-paperback days, in which even the ages of parchment and vellum pulsed as archaic memories.) Ten years later, mid-forties, the book-making giants stepped forth in paper—of course flaneurs by the Seine had been well ahead of that curve for a century, strolling while reading in the afternoon sun, or feeling their ways through the dusty corners of the bouquinistes. The paperback revolution strode hand-in-hand through the mid-century with a Marshall McLuhan who was giving us a cultural history in which to frame the powers of the book. He was first of all reminding us that the nature of the book profiles itself against the curve of its particular culture. For the Greeks the book served an ancillary function in communication, the oral governing in social life, literary production, even in the functions of government, through the year 400 B.C. With the Romans the book—papyrus or vellum, scrolled or paper sized—the written, the documented all become more robust and determinant; bookstores, no less, lined the streets of Rome. With the gradual disappearance of that social setting, and the introduction of a Mediaeval reading appetite for holy texts generally consumed only by the institutionally elite, the idea of a wide palette of or market for books shrank. From the Renaissance on the book came to the front of social discourse and opinion formation, until by the Early Modern period the book was socially accepted as the currency of significant discourse and scientific advancement. Gutenberg’s invention of movable type had not only spread but greatly diversified the kinds of writing that made its way into the reading public, and the hard-backed book, with its wood-pulp pages, the book we



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oldies presumed was the heaven-ordained form of the liber, was where we hid our deepest secrets and learned our most enchanting lessons. Little did we know that the same Marshall McLuhan was around the corner with Understanding Media and The Gutenberg Galaxy, to highlight for us the awareness that, with television, our cognizing sensibilities were being widened, and the book-reading experience, in which we had thought our passions for amusement, thought, and reflection could be sated, was en route to a rough nudge from popular entertainment which sat right down with us in the living room. What McLuhan was opening us to was much more enlarging, even thermodynamic, than we realized until the Internet experience took us by the throat, both widening the definition of the idea of the book and significantly recasting its influence and availability. The covers fell off, and there, squirming in the broad light of day, lay the encoded aerial message in its union suit of black and white symbols. No wonder, then, that we dither over what to call this text. Book will certainly be clear, and for normal terminology it would be an affectation to pretend that the present word issue is more than a matter of taste and context. Yet the author has a more far-reaching problem that applies to all the available terms, and that has been aired more or less directly throughout the foregoing. He can explain it more studiously now than before. He has written many books. (He loves to count the number of them, and to say that number in select company, as though the saying of that number was anything but one more page in the total. He has to think that his personal insecurity has seriously warped his ability to grasp what he has and what he has not done and thus, far more importantly this “book” dreams of saying, has warped his natural ability to see others as they are.) But what are those books? He can try out definitions. They are what physics could describe them as, a series of paper-and-spine objects aligned on a shelf in his bookcase. (That initial attempt to physicalize the response will of course abut at once on a problem which doesn’t seem to have a quantitative solution. Are the author’s books, in this physical sense, all the copies of all the books he has written? Or just one complete set of the copies of those books? Questions posed by physics might, at just this point, give way to questions posed by philosophy.) The author may decide that his books—your books, their books—are not in any important sense physical objects, but are physical objects which can become vehicles of intelligible communication—when converted into the reading act. By establishing that definition, the author would be opening the door to new questions. What is the meaning of the communication that takes place when the symbols in one of those books are read? (Read? What an



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infinitude of bio-cognitive processes have to transpire, to place that “read” in the sentence.) Is the meaning in the symbols? Is it in the mind and eye of the reader? Is it in a meeting of the two? Here again the question, which is being posed on an irreproachably empirical level, is demanding attention on a philosophical level—the level of inquiry into whether meaning requires a “material substrate”, or whether it is in some sense embedded in the way things present themselves, in the human cognitive universe. It is evident that the question of terminology—what to call this (or any) “book”—covers the far deeper issue of what this (or any) “book” is. René Wellek, in The Theory of Literature, addresses that question without resolving it, by leading us to puzzle over whether the text has any “physical” existence or location. To this author, the discussion in “The Analysis of the Literary Work of Art,” Chapter XII, remains crisply useful. Wellek refuses either to accept the physical or the ideal interpretation of the existence of the work of art: The work of art, then, appears as an object of knowledge sui generis which has a special ontological status. It is neither real (like a statue), nor mental (like the experience of light or pain) nor ideal (like a triangle). It is a system of norms, of ideal concepts which are intersubjective. They must be assumed to exist in collective ideology, changing with it, accessible only through individual mental experiences based on the sound-structure of its sentences.

For the author, this characterization of the literary work of art can lay the ground for a feasible account of how the literary universal plays out in our experience. The intersection of innumerable readings, which construct the life of the literary work of art, carries itself out under the sign of a persistently engaged central meaning of the text, that meaning within which will develop—in the case of the great text—that reservoir of profound humanity that underlies the literary universal.



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32 ROGUE SPEECH

In a recent book, Being Here—mentioned and discussed above—the author has suggested areas of “personal engagement”, with topics such as the above ontology of the work of art, which could in a trice force a recalibration of what is here an at least partly academic inquiry, into the cultural, and then again into the current significance of the idea of literary universality. In Being Here, which is a poetics of language in your face, the author steps into that meaning-challenging role we touched on above, in inviting into our discussion topics like degraded language (in Carnap’s example), George’s private language, or language making its way through brain damage. The overt intention of those digressions was to purge from the main theme of this book the nobility of the literary universal, any suggestions that human dignity was a ready-to-hand driver in human experience, or that “man in the image of God” was more than a questtheme projected hermeneutically into the empyrean of hopes. (The author hopes never to have claimed more, for the language with which he tries to supplement eighteenth-century dignity thought, than that the historically lodged Christian thematic, to which he is a troubled heir, provides through the Catholic Church an organized and compelling directorate for search.) The degradability of language was a foremost pressure from within Being Here: Gluegh speech, a rogue Entering on the left. Did u not?...a field? N’a road thru the Neolithic? Feelial n’ the shroggs. N’shuerit. Struggl. A risieri frondizi. Tup, mut! He grtopns. N’the furious. The way blisters. Tup a flowr! Megd.



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A hornous. He treils. By the seint. A ponntlod.

Here the degradation is not progressive, for the semantic level is even from start to finish. Nor is the degradation ever complete, for in the text are embedded nouns, hints of nouns, hints of times—Megd; Megiddo. The degradation is a field of insecurity lying across the overall exhortation, bluntedly inserted into the three questions in the first stanza, and as such a cautionary self-exposure of the not quod semper, quod ubique retrofitted to language on the go. …there is a meaning to the process generated here, and it lies in the flanges of pre-conceptual significance that flare out on all sides of the present text. I guess you might say that from early on in my thinking life I’ve been drawn to the edge where the concept is just barely being elicited from the matted texture of daily experience. Dawns of all sorts have fascinated me. Just the creeping forth of half-light. Stevens’ fascinations, with the ways the poem should almost be intelligible, are flagship statements for me, leading to a place where the heart of the human experience pulsates.

Reluctant to hear more from this I, the author now feels trapped by having permitted, into the field of discussion of the literary universal, into the bright light of his Classical moment, the vegetable self ever-obtruding through the gardens of concept, and in this case of fidelity to the great tradition in history. (He takes what he is risking to say to be supported by what we increasingly know about the labyrinths of spindly neurons which proliferate into the code-carrying hippocampus on its way to perception and concept; for he has in fact turned on his GPS to target a couple of areas of devastating vulnerability, in which he has himself eaten the human condition raw, and tasted the bitter at the passing away of the notional.) He will have one word with us on Rausch, another on teenage Goetterdaemmerung and a third on his masturbation history. Autobiography will none of this be, but simply a resort to one of those texts we know, the body, and from whose career we extract some of the lessons we learn in being-here linguistics, the pre-song to the song of the literary universal. Oh inner conservative, be steady, for from the same body you now mine for self-understanding will emerge the rediscovery of what is always and everywhere the same.



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33 LANGUAGE AND WILD RAUSCH

What is masturbation to expression? Isn’t it the furious disclosure of the power of our being here, and of the existential intensity demanding formulation inside you? Had you not been dormant before that exquisite release of powers you did not know you had? Nothing that has happened to you until this time has been both so insistent on voicing itself or so insistent on the vulnerability you have to the powers inside you. And this discovery, has it a bearing on the work in spirit you will require, one day to care sufficiently both for value, form, and the essential human that you will try out a blog-form book on the literary universal? The explosion the self becomes is its undying cry for order; if mastered, it will find its way into concepts of high form—Platonic control systems such as the water disciplined down to the tastelessly superb taste at the center of the well. The nuclear explosion of the self, in masturbation, is like that wild margin of the self which the Ancient Greeks rode—as Nietzsche read them—to a unique exaltation of such drum-tight dramatic form as we see in Oedipus, where death and blood are the foregates to the purity of resolution. The author will be able to share two more biopsies of teenage discovery, thus adding to the global literature on that ecstatic decade of self-quest, the teenage years, in which especially the young of the “developed” societies most recklessly test their limits. (Well past those teenage years, and even in the valley of the shadow of death, authors will challenge the very language they require in order to challenge that language, will bring forth from demonic cauldrons that “N’shuerit. Struggl” which revels in mocking the breath they breathe, and continue to breathe it. We are made of the knowledge of how deeply we must discredit ourselves in order to posit.) The second passage gathers around the wanton insanity of first love, which for the author meant a marathon of self-pity into the depths of a fragile ego—a two-year trip into hell on the good ship Dominique (Fromentin the captain) with shipmates like Amiel, whose outcry of faithloss still rings in the author’s ears—and, again calling in Nietzsche’s counsel, a marathon into the face of the inexplicable, that the developing



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human congenially refuses the comforts of common sense, burrows helplessly within to the places where life most hurts, and mortality most frigidly rebuts what should be joy in the discovery of the other with which to fill the explosive need masturbation flagged. Pubertal Weltschmerz poured from the Midwest Werther, in love with death, in love with love, a breast away from salvation and yet hopelessly dear to the furies. How much of that distorted passion, he wonders, nestles formatively in the astronomy of the present discourse, in which he projects tulips of universality on which the blundering foibles of acne never put in an appearance. The author knows, in his bones, that the Liebestod mode in which infinite longing played off against a sexual furor which would never have addressed that longing, left him in a turmoil of insecurity to which any literary (or other aesthetic) universal would have been a welcome riposte. Language-made from the start—whining out not elegiac couplets, like Ovid, but, from a to him fabled month of bedrest in Honolulu, his eyes coasting endlessly across Waikiki Harbor, a considerable mini-oral epic, layered tales of sea sprites and monsters, and children trying them out— the author discovered his world by inventing another and more real world, in which a voluble house of language laid the foundation for that vertigo of eros which in his teen years picked away at the security locks of sanity. The period of Rausch, to crown these experiments in disorder, ce dérèglement complet de tous les sens, as the author would at the time have put it, though a self-induced bad trip might prove out as our day’s rough assessment of the lad’s experience, the period of Rausch was of course latent in the tumult of erotic Weltschmerz, in which love, longing, and loss seemed absolutely intertwined, and came to the fore as poets like Rimbaud and Djuna Barnes and Hart Crane took him under their control, and, especially in The Bridge, gave him deadly glimpses of the darkness of the city. Scully Square the Sirenic draws on his pallid forehead, rides in and out of a Boston nightworld doubtless lethal but to him at that point only its booky sheen. What that sense of Rausch defined out as was indeed the author’s petit bourgeois version of the abhorrence of death in which, in tandem with wire-tight prosody and choral, with unique discipline of opsis and drama, Nietzsche saw the joyful materials of tragedy. Crane’s hectic art, reading itself off against the author’s nightly subway return over Back Bay, empty rattling cars and the glitz of rain slashing the dirty windows, chopping the Bay into a mince of barges, that art became for a time the inner melody of a Harvardian as lost as any Eugene Gant. And literature, as always, was the book in which he was reading out his zigzag commedia.



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It seems to the author, as he gives wind to the sails of these instances, that in those wild but outwardly quiet years he was setting the table for a vision of the eighteenth century and some of its niceties, those barbed sweetnesses that he was later to discover in the reading of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and from which, as he made a class out of all this decades later at a University in Buffalo, he was to realize a kind of homecoming. These years of Rausch, however, were not to play out their fullest measure in the events that profile a life, even in those events at the point where—as yes, it had to be—the thrashing inward self came into conflict with the norms of society itself, and the guardians of social science intervened to say, to the young Harvardian, enough, society has its tolerance level. Of cabbages and kings of that sort, my dears, the author prefers not to speak here, rustication having its own tales, and yet the reader might just hang on, for the fretting this side of the greats has a trump card yet to play. The author is unsure how to characterize the rebellion of language within language, which storms through Being Here, and yet he knows that throughout that small book he puts his naked face into a fire hotter than the sociometric fire-runs he has just examined, yet ultimately of the same matter, combustible with kin firewood. His aging process cures over the unsureness of the human condition, as it does itself to him. As he takes on himself the disbelief of being here, of operating, he seems to live the imagination of the non-operating, say of language, as of limbs. That track of delusion implacably establishes its other pole, the quod semper, quod ubique.



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34 LANGUAGE AND SIMPLICITY

Havens in the storm are required, for mortals crossing the rough if often charming seas of life, which is why art, faith, fidelity force us to honor them. We may live in an age where sex and violence, as we say, try to convince us they are our markers, an age in which the economics of raw self-interest has ploughed many of its profits into vulgar “media”, little of which brings the human person to the level of dignity, discipline, and thought it deserves. The homes of the literary universal—whether we set them up as the eighteenth century did, in what they revered as the finest works of the ancient Greeks and Romans, whether we set them up, as the Greats planners of Oxbridge or the Chicago Great Books Movement did, in the “great classic texts” of the Western canon, or whether, as in the very contemporary World Literature movement, we set them up everywhere, greatness speaks and the human heartbeat is effectively named—these homes are where we reside in the value which, though perhaps a lesser trough of wisdom than the heavens themselves, is for many as close as they get to the peace God promises us. It is perhaps then not surprising that an investment so munificent as that we make in this literary real estate should at the same time heighten our anxiety—the anxiety we feel when first love is too good to be true, the “boss” hints at a raise make us wonder if they are only hints, or the neurosurgeon’s awaited opinion makes us tremble between the hope of life and the despair of you-know-what—and in heightening that anxiety consign us to bouts of aphasia of the sort Being Here amplifies into a new language. None of those anxieties are surprising, nor is the aphasic response to them, particularly in the kind of postmodern cultural climate we have spent a century preparing for ourselves, and which is a strong thematic in Being Here. It is the hallmark of that climate, that its thinkers use Descartes’ cogito to blow objects out of the water, to leave the subject loose in its universe with nothing better to do than reflect on itself, while rescue operations like Kant’s try to save whatever remnants there are of the world you can put your hands on. Postmodernism, therefore, will ring the bell of terror in the night, buy up our mortgages on the Golden Estates



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we have managed to build and buy, and leave us on the primeval slope where Golden’s first Inheritors began making their ways up the slippery sedge. At least they struggled upward through things. It is the author’s dream to be sufficiently sterterous, that from his mouth comes the whole chunky infrastructure of compiling. He still reclaims the feel, inside, of the chunkiness of word construction in an old poem: Now I begin to make bread. I decide to decide to begin with the gerbes. Straight, tan, gerbes threading them off putting them in baskets. I want bread. It is long since I have eaten. Once I had a friend. We sat at table. He would take the food up in his hands. I remember that ceremony. I want to repeat it. You kneel quietly cupping a flame. We mash the soft kernels. Make a paste with water. Place the whole in a rock’s hollow. Near it to the flame. Tomorrow we will eat it. It will have to do.



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35 THE DEMENTED KILLER WITHIN

To reestablish the literary universal, and the value realm that surrounds it, is to do it yourself, of course, and not to lean milkily on the shoulder of an indifferent society. You get there on your own these days! You read your Greek and Latin, if that works for you, you read Milton— which is probably harder yet—or you study Symbolic Logic, which will really jack you up over the customary cruising level, where value and stricture and passion reside. If you are very crumbly clay, like the author, you are best advised to grow older, think about it, and permit what is to write you or make you or sell you from the open market, just as you are. Where I am, on that trajectory, is language which seems to me to have become part of my time trying to lay its essence on the table. I can still feel myself being constructed by this nisus in language, which is also one’s time, en route to a name for the world. This one starts: Have we not prepared Make that a refrain carved into the os maximum of brain The charge for failure rises in drought years And there is a rectangular corner in every Gunshop where hunter gatherers barter For their lost weapons.

The time speaks it, though there is a “we” here for warmth. The “we” is part of the pack which, line five, carries out the survival of the fittest. Even the brain is bony. The teller of tales morphs in and out of the ruined figure of John Holmes, the grad student who blew up the world. There is an order in things he strove to say. There is an order in the motor, parts of flowers Say to others we’re parts of a whole, And very good dinners taste one another.



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We climb with the demented killer inside us to a point where the world figures out what it wants to say. We have come to a wall in the imagination. It was there before we imagined. It was gone before we imagined But then when we had forgotten it was once more before us. It was a wall made of all we cannot do and all we did not too. And on the road ahead of us lorries going northward And on the road behind us pursuing G men, Themselves I suppose hungry for a little of the activity. Yes we were northward to the wall of the imagination. Where we would find deep in some crevasse Released by the melting of the icecap The shredded face of Mr. Holmes cut this Way and that in the morass of visibilia.

To strive to depict the tragic common fate of man in our time is to be included in the making of the horror; not, though my friend urges this, to eschew any identification with the Beast, so as not to honor him with a name. John Holmes’ fetus could be mine or yours it is soft and egg like like a jelly fish same extra planetary eyes same paper thin bones same chalky toes same broad flat nose thing same little ditsy pecker…

Sure, the little dichter’s effort to be where the heart of the human is, in the literary universal dreamed by everyone in our time for whom being the expression of the human condition is given as grail: Have you a killer inside? I have been where nothing like death was imagined Life was a way of walking carelessly, And time spilled like custom-made rivers Down the sides of my body. Today I have others to measure, And by them to read terrible temporal teeth marks, And yet when I go inside to where it is as always



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I am as always And know what Emily Dickinson meant About notices delayed Past the time you died to them.

Is there not, in the space opened by “imagination”, a reckless genesis in us all, is there not in that space room to say for ourselves what single human condition it is that wills us to be part of it? There is always the tradition. The tradition is where we are genetically one, And belong to what we were as carbon. I beg you to belong with me to the tradition With me to take the mass of the elements Into my shoulders where the strength of a Belonger is tucked away. I beg you in a thousand languages to let The tradition take over at the roots of our hearts And make us one among the animals.

Doing the literary universal for yourself, to the limits of your mean ability, is above all trying to come out equal with yourself—ecce homo!— as part of the testimony we can leave to our life passage. If the author records himself for exemplum, may he be forgiven for choosing the material most familiar, down home and inside, and may he be forgiven for reaching into his pocket more widely? (May he even before that, though, widen the bore of the present turn of discussion? He wishes it clear that the individual quest for a construction of the literary universal is also a common quest, by no means, in our day, the priority of an elite trained into distinguished skills—like the Johnson amused that women can learn Greek, an amazement like the tricks of a trained dog—but a line of making perfection open to any human animal who has the discipline, power of imagination, and self-transformational talent to build his/her own literary universal, opus, monumentum aere perennius. Which is to say, at the same time, that—perish the thought—litterae humaniores may not be the only keys to the kingdom, nor in fact need any action in symbolic form, as distinct from direct action like charity, be those keys, but that the sole prerequisite for establishing a zone of universal presence from within yourself should be the requirement to take what you are and offer it, as an oblation, to the place of the forms, take that Platonism as you find it, shaped and sorted as we left it earlier in this text. May he, in thus widening the bore of this literary universal discussion, at least report back to duty on the ethical question also raised earlier, in connection with whether practice



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in knowing the literary universal was also practice in ethical action. Inconclusive as was the final response to that suggestion, the suggestion remains operative, in those aesthetic-ethical cross-border transactions we must have to imagine refining in a subsequent language.)



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36 LIVING WITH OTHER CULTURES

It will have been the author’s discovery, that channeling others’ lives is opus construction. Translation, travel writing, interviewing of labor, editing: these makings passive of the observer are passages through which the broadly human can enter and construct the self that in turn constructs them. Shall we call this testimonial literature? The author views translation as the ultimate act of identifying with another person in that person’s practice of stopping the wind, writing against it with care as the keystroke vanishes from the hand. (The operative image here is of a global network of artificers shaping their own fates and passing on, one to another, the records of their constructive effort, translations of them.) Moments of entering this world language texture remain with the author as markers in hewing new breath. It is a motel in Iowa City, mid-sixties, and from a prized Olivetti the infused language servant gives form daily to a hundred more lines of those two epics by Kostes Palamas, by which he learned more of his own language, and some of the mentalities of a reputedly mousy Registrar of the University of Athens in the beginning of the twentieth. The King’s Flute and The Twelve Words of the Gypsy, dating from the early twentieth, were learned and highly imaginative recreations of Byzantine epic by a creator both nostalgic and innovative—a fine poet of his own time, straddling the then-delicate line between demotic and katharevousa. It was the practice of the author to let himself go arduously, for a couple of hours a day, into the soufflé of Palamas plus American demotic plus American classicist, with results which critics were quick to find either fresh or reckless, but which the author marked down as excursions. If at the center of the literary universal is the establishment of essential humanity, and the excision of irrelevant excrescences, then the author may at least partially consider this effort on track. To be at the heart of Palamas’ epics is to touch issues—pride, mortality and fear, obsessions of power—which are never far from what being a human is, though in the present case they are rendered baroque, doubtless clouded by every shadow of artifice which the greats wipe away from the brow of tragic humanity.



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Shift scenes. We are a couple of years later, in the same Iowa City which made a home for Palamas, and brought the author into the living texture of world literatures. It is a rainy fall night and the author is leading his translation workshop in a series of literary games. His students are writers from around the world; Chile, Turkey, and Taiwan played hard that night. A poem in one of the non-English languages of the room is circulated, in the original and in literal English translation. Then the dozen writers in the class write or talk out their translations of the poem, tweaking here, reinventing there, parodying here, taking off from there. The lability of the translation process lives through the group. May we not say that we are translated in the process? As the author took on and added to the humanity of Palamas’ construction, so he moves out and around Firuzan Beardsley’s translations of Orhan Veli, in a ballet of justifyings which promote putting it as and tweaking it as not the code Firuzan had extracted from a lifetime’s crescent sense of what the contrary is about. Emigration From his window that looked to the roofs He could see the harbour, And the church bells Would constantly ring all day long. The noise of the passing trains Once in a while, and at night, Could be heard at his bed. He also had started to love The girl in the next apartment. But still, he left this city And went to another.

We are not claiming more than we deserve, from such an experience. We are not drinking the purest water from the well, where its tastelessness is proof of its essential value—and a marker, as it were, of that “purity” the universal lives as. We are not even putting ourselves inside a whole recreated testimony to basic values of the human adventure, as we are doing by letting our English line become that of Palamas. We are practicing placing ourselves at the intersection point between languages, the point where each language is what it is because of what other languages let it be—monetarizing their postulates by being what they are. If there is to be a literary universal it will need to be established in the single currency of language itself.



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The point at hand was at one time, for the author, simply the outstanding model for the possibility of translation—a model which provided a lingua communis among different languages. He now sees the point at hand signaling dimensions, of intelligibility in language, which point to more substantive additions, to the high calling of imaginative language, than are demanded by the services of a supportive substrate. The interpenetration of languages, while only as uplifting as the quality of their messages, is a generative intersection in which the largest aspirations of language as a single endeavor are put on display. The highest achievements, of language as greatness of the imagination, will be only as towering as the structures raised at the intersection among languages. It is to be observed, as we move this discussion of projections toward the place of verbal rest, that we move here through discourse which is part exhortation, part remembrance of the absolute, part stricture. We have been with the greats, with the Greeks, with Emily Dickinson, with Whitman, with Shakespeare, and it is not to be thought to the author’s mockery, that he should seem confused about his own jockey-sized stature in this company. This discourse, this whole tissue of blown-away-in-thewind phonemes which the author presently inscribes onto a fragile backlighted desktop, is the kind of exhortation we give ourselves through self-education, through the discovery of what our outstretched thoughts, pulsing to their limits, are unable to say. (It is not that the thoughts of the greats are difficult for me, for they are frequently not, but that the being there to perform those thoughts is unimaginable to me.) What kind of exhortation is this discourse? It was a wise scholar who told me what to respond, when asked how to explain the difference between good or great books and bad or lousy books. Respond, he said, that we observe no one reverting from being a reader of good books to being a reader of bad, but many taking the opposite path. The exhortation in the present discourse is in line with W. K. Wimsatt’s thought about value in literature. How is this discourse of the literary universal part remembrance of the absolute? We have characterized the zone in which the literary universal exercises its reign as a “place” where the Platonic absolute has room to enspirit itself. To speak of these moves toward literary universality on the back of the translator as remembrances of the absolute brings to me the thinking of Wordsworth about the marks of innocence that claim fatherhood for the child. (Samuel Johnson saw the child as little more than a necessary impediment on the path toward the universal of Rasselas. Nor does Plato resort to children for his examples or his wisdom; and yet, though the youngest of his team may be Meno, Plato clearly sees the Forms as part of our inborn awareness equipment, a gift from intelligibility to the infant.)



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The thinking of the Prelude at least colludes with the idea that installing the universal involves rediscovering ways to relate “what was ne’er so well expressed” to what is of ultimate value to express. As we move translation into this wide meaning of itself, in which, say, the greats of translation once felt they had the holy spirit at their backs, we may think of the high calling of the translating process as a stricture, in which responsibility, self-transcendence, and learning are put to tests sufficient at best to ennoble. The author adds travel writing and labor interviews to the register of self-translational efforts to which he feels himself to have been committed. The two enterprises clearly share with translation the ideal of making the other operative within them, and, in an image, working with the world to bring birth from its rich womb. To excel in travel writing, translation, or interviews of homo laborans, you have to be where the other is, yourself included in the other’s definition, and make of your mating a testimony. The same old streaks of the tulip problem confronts the travel writer and the labor interviewer; the stricture is going to the heart of what is there, leaving the excrescences, and, if you want to surmount the low bar of your time, demanding that you and the other not only be mutually worthy but able to see what needed to be, and did not yet get, said by the matter at hand. The author remembers what it was, in older days when he was equivalent to what he read or observed or learned on the shop floor, and when the judgment passed by the thing itself reached with his language to a point where better was excluded by nothing more than human weakness. He remembers birthing Big Rig Souls in the Walcott Truck Plaza, Three North American Agricultural Communities in the banana plantations of southern Chiapas, letting Mauritania discover him in Atar in 1993; bridging as well as he could the desire of place and person to be their own lasting exemplar. He knows that the quality of achievement, in such selftranslational operations, is hard to measure by the same aesthetic standards—pure, realized, human—he could hope applied to his fiction and poetry. However, if the notion of the aesthetic is widened, and the literary universal given normative powers, then the criterion of beauty, degrees of which are hard to measure, can be replaced by the more robust criteria of artistic human content. (When we think of the greats, after all, we think foremost of their maturity of perception, their sense of the large human condition, and also the unexpected technical privileges by which a new language, in them, becomes a new way we are to ourselves; in all which, be noted again sine ira et studio, the arts of letters are the deepest



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resources of our humane treasure.) The evaluative markers will scrutinize the following description (1957) of the Marktplatz in Tuebingen: It is a lopsided, but four-sided, cobble-stoned area, surrounded by fifteenth-century houses. Most of those houses are wide and tall; three or four rectangular stories, often with eccentric attics and balconies attached. All the houses are bulky and asymmetrical. No two of them are at all similar, and yet they are somehow all alike. The house colors vary, from pale green to chocolate brown, passing through stages of yellow and tan. The facades of these houses are striped and crisscrossed with dark, outward showing beams. These are Fachwerkhaueser, a chief ingredient in Tuebingen’s visual character.

The human content is narrow, the attention to pictorial is foremost; a frame for the human is set. A seven-hour train ride from Macchu Picchu, Cusco, the former capital of the Inca Empire, lies brilliantly against the mountains, palpably ancient and stylish to the detail. The city is seeded with Inca cobble stone streets, walls carved into a bedrock that grounds no longer present Inca monumental structures. We can look at the intricacies of masonry. There is at Macchu Picchu itself, a massive granite wall block containing thirtytwo separate angles, each perfectly beveled, and fitting into its neighbors. Cusco is full of small marvels of this order. You come out of an ornate baroque church, of the sixteenth century, to find yourself walking along a foundation wall constructed in the fifteenth century by the Incas. The culture of the Sun underlies the Culture of the Son. It is no wonder that the Spaniards under Pizarro saw the radiance of salvation in the gold leaf they tore in basketfuls straight off the walls of the Inca temples.

Now it is 2010 and the language leads the party of perceptions into engagements not yet underwritten fifty years earlier. There is a difference in narrator presence in these two passages. There is a narrator in the first passage, but he is a silent presence, the camera before we knew how much more the camera is than a recording lens. The second passage invites the reader along to observe “the intricacies of masonry” at Cusco. You are treated to small marvels, and told about it. You are invited into the minds of Pizarro’s men, and asked whether you accept that they were in effect seeing salvation in the gold. In other words the second passage invites you much farther into discussion and participation than the first one does. You see the eyes of observation do not “participate” in the way the “eyes” of reading and the hearing of reading do. This difference is illustrated in the way the two passages work with you. What difference we are detecting, here, could not be more than a preface to calculating the human robustness



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of the two texts’ literary presence, but it is an instance of the kind of criterion that could aid in determining whether something like the literary universal was on its way to being won. We track the literary universal from within the zone of the arts, especially of literature, yet there is no doubt that, when literature goes from us out to the place where it is awaited, its hue will be a stirring human sobriety which we will be glad to accept as an inheritance from the intelligibility in things. It is in autobiography that the narrator in each of us most evidently, and most fallibly, aspires to download the self into quod semper, et ubique. We all aspire to the essential memory of a life that is about to abandon us. It is no special province of the greats to milestone our fears of obliteration. The present author, indeed, so mistakes the special witness of literature, to the pathos of the individual life, that he supposes his repeated efforts to give his life a name will have helped to smelt old steel into a strongbox of remembrance. Will he be left with a distilling epitaph, like Yeats? Will everything but his autobiographies be of choice to represent what left him behind as its image? Later in the spring John followed that kiss from London to Budapest. Helene was everywhere for him, in history and the hopping sparrow. (To Marsha—an indignity I’ve not yet named—John let on nothing, while his natural domestic inversion hardened.) Helene was all energy. She seemed to compact her history inside her—her body was eloquent, even ruinous, with Russian bootheel prints—and to pour it seething over him. With her John found part of the globe boiling fresh, hanging itself out in great hunks of color. Everything cut loose. They traveled to Debreczen, to see the Hungarian Wild West, with its scarlet flowers and ponies—the bone-clean land of mystery and of bleached Gyula Illyes implements. They went south to Pec, where they climbed a minaret so thin it fitted them like a sheath, sky only faintly visible through the darning needle summit. Budapest they saturated with curiosity and French kissing, slumming, taking tea and cigars over Zigeunermusik, fucking on the restored battlements, finally settling into Helene’s mommy’s house, where they constructed an Odyssean strongbed for themselves over which then and on later visits they rubbed generation like paste.

Self-portrayal as gossip page in action. Literary universal? Come to terms with the implication of the phrase, as we have abandoned it to the present text, in the company of Platonic ideals, opera embedding a robust human essentiality, the word dropping like dewfall over the terrain of human experience. Has the morality of the ages, not to mention its wisdom, not a commanding claim over the tolerances of the literary universal? Is the



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above not an obscenity against any claim on the human essence? A passage is a passage. There could be redemption in the entirety of the text. God grant there is. And yet a point wants making, short of that theos ex machina. In the domain of what is constructed to last, in language, no appearance is determinant. The author thinks of The Red Badge of Courage, a text his secret librarians would promote to the greats, for its capacity to embed homo sapiens as fear and cowardice. A hero of cowardice, a hero of power. So what’s the difference? The point is fine, and central. The essential human, Stoff of the literary universal, takes the human as it comes, gives it the self-expressive power required of lasting human traits, and works the aptitudes of language into full capacity to represent us.



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37 GREEKS, PLATONISM, SALVATION

Lest this discussion seem to be playing fast and loose with the notion of the literary universal, and to have converted the concept into a discovery device rather than a severe restatement of the reigning importance of aesthetic purity, as a marker for human development, we need to slant our discussion back toward the origins of the torrent of perspectives that flow into this book. The author has back-extrapolated into two cultural periods, those of Classical Athens and of eighteenth-century Europe, and made them touchdown points for reading our present and himself in it. It would be more than unworthy of the humble author of Time, Accounts, Surplus Meaning to read innocently the work involved in postulating privileged (or for that matter deprivileged, scorned) time zones in culture, from which the future, one’s present, can be read. That kind of mapping abstracts from, and distorts, the texture of culture life as it is lived. (Check your own coordinates this morning—time of day or night, social/political embedding, mood, location in thought—and see to what abuse a lifetime of those stigmata would need to be submitted, before they could be wrapped in the semblance of a plausible narrative. Then multiply to the x power to get the character profile of your culture this morning. Then imagine, just imagine, the kind of history of your moment that would have to be written or sung that would recognizably correspond to where and what you are now. Even if that “recognizably correspond to” be given the complex interpretation it demands, it is hard to imagine it less misleading (or insightful) than, say, historical epic poetry like Manas or the Iliad, which preserve ancient memories in a prism made of sharply cut glass. In other words the author’s prioritizing of two historical springboards, for the development of an argument about intersections of literature with what-is, is selective historical mind-mapping, and while it may reflect a desire for truth it is more likely to combine that motive with an act of identity-formation and self-exhortation. It is the author’s intention to counter-think that mapproclivity, in an upcoming book with this same publisher, on the lived character of progress in human cultural history, but as we always work



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with the coat we can afford the present argument congratulates itself on the quality of the cultural touchdown points it has adopted, and surges from its limitations to configure a world-understanding substantive enough to empower discoveries, if not always truths. Were the Greeks and the Europeans of the periods in question—and now those abstractions have been demasked for what they are—for deeplying reasons disposed to the literary universal, and the collateral world views implied by that concept? We have followed Stokes’ account of the Gesamtkunstwerk which is fifth-century-B.C. Athens, as it expresses itself in every manner—sculpture, architecture, ceramics, lyric, drama, epic— and underlined his analysis of the self-positioning of the Classical ego, firmly qualified to see the other as the other, maturely rooted, and at peace with the intersection of the tragic and the beautiful, the basic insight of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. The Hellenic minds behind that achievement were not characteristically analytical or experimental, but rather concerned with form projection. To what did they owe the inclination to move toward the projection of “universal” forms, as we would need to express it, in referring to their artistic achievement as a whole? Can it be simply that the Greeks from Homer to Plato lived in a culture in which the wonder and intensity of human life coincided with the means—political, artistic, economic—to express that wonder? Could the literary—and political and generally artistic—capacities have coincided, so as to establish—in the works of Sophocles, Phidias, Ictinos, Pericles, Pindar—models for asserting both the essential brilliance and at the same time the tragic inwardness of the human condition? Whatever our formula of explanation, we concede that the Greeks themselves did not seek such a formula but were content to provide models to be understood. Plato and Aristotle would soon be available for an analytical retrospective onto the Classical achievement. Generation by generation, footprint by footprint, the two thousand plus years dividing Pericles from Kings George II and III marked the calendar with seeming repetitiveness that only in macro-retrospect looks like a quilt of change. Those generational micro-meshings, tribe, clan, family teaching, giving, sacrificing, battering one another into new sensates, that stormy torrent of self-awareness by which the timeline of an endangered species both enriched and imperiled itself, had by the seventeenth century of our era brought secular insight and invention, creative insight, and its own version of the character of Greco-Roman culture to the point where certain thinker/writers found ways to subscribe to a very post-Platonic Platonism of the ideal, of a quasi-immortal zone of essentialized human condition, in which the forms created by art could be



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thought to distill the essence of the human experience, and to hold it up as in a monstrance to represent what the human most deeply is. This eighteenth-century Platonism, briefly surveyed above, and the theme of the author’s Intelligible Beauty in Aesthetic Thought (1957), has been invoked here as the ground level for a literary/artistic idealism congruent with our time. Our time in the macro sense; hardly the our time of the Westernized global aesthetic of our moment, which backs statesponsored chaos in the arts, and holds both a frank and an antic mirror up to our time, in which we wash our faces and brush our teeth. The author takes Winckelmann, Goethe, Johnson, Reynolds to be stealing a page from what they understood to be the meaning of the Greco-Roman experience, which by their time was no longer the fervent first text-taste that fascinated the Renaissance, but was the diverse neoclassical understanding of an age seeped in educational system classics, art tradition neoclassicism, and a thrilling high-culture environment promoted by the then-dramatic rediscoveries of both the landscape of the Greek and Roman peoples, and, through archeology, the verifiable, on the bone, reality of ancient peoples. (Books like Rehm’s Goettertrauer und Goetterstile and Butler’s The Tyranny of Greece over Germany document some of the stages of this recovery of the ancient world which in fact lays the foundation for the self-awareness of the moderns, as inheritors of the Classical.) The eighteenth century was a privileged moment for value formation, poised as it was between the harvest of the classical Christian past and the explosive new world of democratization and scientific inquiry. It is of historical logic that the perceptual springboard toward a grasp of the greats in the arts and culture broadly, should have lodged itself in this Age of Enlightenment. To choose your historical springboards, agreed, is to move from prejudice into an edifice. The edifice under construction in this text is radically and at every moment a construction, and bears in its voicing of that condition the mark of having been held in existence by the very breathing you have to trust. Breathing and heartbeat are the two bodily functions, they say, of which you should not be aware; they are at their best just as they are. As you age you know you are statistically more likely to die, at any given moment, than you were as a teenager, yet you live the same old tension between nerve and despair, and the same prod to take the condition by the neck. Given to him in that spirit, the present labyrinth of formulations, ideas as action, continually shows the author the pertinence of the high artistic passions, the fabulous musée imaginaire in which each of us can display the masterpieces of his/her own central humanity. It remains to consider whether an edifice of art will ultimately do as a carte



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d’entrée into the condition of the divine. It finally remains to walk head-on into the poor man’s theology incumbent on the Modernist trying out the ultimate ranges of his aesthetic. It’s going to be tempting to discuss heaven. An anecdote will do this time, too. An old friend, a theologian properly speaking, asks me whether I think a life full of opus-making will get me through the pearly gates. What am I going to say on my behalf? That I was a good man? If so, that would take some explaining. I would have to say that an opus in which a life was transformed into an artifice of itself, and in which that artifice was made up of an essential humanity, a tribute to the true image of the human, would be an opus in which my goodness could enshrine itself for the Almighty to admire. That would be an awesome mouthful. Would I be plodding ahead in the furrow ploughed by the nineteenth-century figures such as Yeats, Pound, Mann, or Joyce—who really built temples to the temple of art—or would I, by trying to use my aesthetic credentials, the profile of an opus of which we have seen snapshots throughout this book, to enter the kingdom, simply be showing myself off as a small-time conman, trying to get double credit for a single act? Well, a sort of anecdote: I hand my vita to the guy at the gate. Fifty books? Lots of articles about the arts. Lots of poems. A bit heterogeneous but ardent, evidence of the requisite monomania. I feel pretty embarrassed. Didn’t do much. Was nice when called on, except at those many times in life when the pressure was on and the fires of desire were stoking. He looks me over. Scrutinizes me. Enjoy it down there he mutters, gently shutting the gate.

That’s the anecdote. So what have I been trying to understand, do, create in the life biopsied here? What is the opus, what is the literary universal, what is the modified Platonic realm in which the universal has its place? Who was the guy at the gate? Now we get real. It is 2000 and whatever. We are in America writing this account of what it is and can be to live a life of literary/philosophical opus-making. We are writing that account as if it describes event horizons doable right now, in 2000 and x. We are making an account of an account which might be given right now to justify one’s life. (Milton’s “and



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present my true account” nails the meaning of the second kind of account.) We are talking about what we are able to say, at any given moment in historical time, and in doing so we are reassembling our earlier discussion about the fragility of language, whose strict usage norms threaten forever to derail the orthodox train of expected sounds, and thus to expose the normal speaker to the degraded joys that George once invented for himself. As is so often true, what we can say at a given time is typically the most sensitive criterion for determining what is potential and fastrunning in one’s time. Can we translate the complex idealism of the foregoing, for even the cognoscenti of our time? Let alone for the ordinary language-user finding himself in our time? The answer is essentially no, and yet if that is so we face the central dilemma of how to live a world perspective which is not where history has currently deposited our language. First, though, why the no? Then how to proceed into the face of that no? Why the no? On the face of it, we can talk any worldview into any time. Language, as we have seen in the foregoing, is locally coercive—I can only vocalize tribe speech when I am in the mode it listens to, but I can work against the grains of thought and formulation—to a degree. Literature offers examples, as does daily life. To the max. No instinct rises more naturally to the surface, in a constitutional democracy, than the rejection of fine language. The author’s father, though a subtle academic, used to tease him for employing twenty-five-cent words—you see how long ago this was—when he could have used pocket change. My deacon, faced with introducing catechetical Sunday to the congregation, has to apologize for his clumsiness with this term, which he, a former cop, would not have been used to before, more accustomed, as he was, to language like “come out with your hands up.” My son, old enough himself to be on the cusp of outdated, mocks my efforts to describe (to him over the phone) problems I am having entering contact information on my cell phone. The constraints of the language of the day/streets are intimations of the constraints imposed by the worldview of the day. If we speak of contemporary America we might think of political correctness as a term which has gradually acquired an almost entirely negative connotation, though it has passed through many valorisations, from an initially neutral usage to an appropriative nuance among Soviet Communists who unreservedly favored the following of a party line, to the movement, formulated on the journalistic front and by books such as D’Souza’s Illiberal Education (1991), which lashed out wholesale against the sanitizing of the descriptors of race, gender, and economic class. We have to imagine that at each stage of usage the term politically correct



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gained in coercive force, finally carrying, in its heavy sardonic mature phase—which begins already to fade—implications of a unified political/ cultural stance, to buck which, to indulge fully, say, in the languages of entitlement, was to make a noticeable and binding counter-statement. The language constraint exercised by politically correct thinking is tangled because it operates by indirection, undercutting certain geopolitical formulations which the media busy themselves either favoring or dissing in pervasive night-and-day fashion. In a similar gnarled manner the cultural/philosophical climate of a time infiltrates the thought usages of the time. To see this difficult point clearly involves discarding the notion that the idea climate of a culture and time has a prima facie visible profile, which can be read off the surface of the milieu. (Our electronically driven obsession for polls, our public quickness to label positions through the media, and, in academia, our pleasure in simplified labeling of positions and attitudes: all these cultural inclinations make for a climate in which most of us, consumers as we are of the ready-made in viewpoint, become ourselves ramified victims of thought constraint. It is the build-up of a culture of victims, in this sense, that cumulative drift forms into small mountains of dominant attitude, and, as put in the philosophical community, reigning conceptual standpoints.) To enter such a waiting thicket of not only idées recues, but innervations recues, is to risk speaking loudly in a foreign language in an already-crowded room full of busily conversing people. The broadly aesthetic humanism forwarded in the present text, and its tinges both of Schillerian-like ethics, an ethic based on respect for the dignity of the human form, for eine stille Groesse und eine edle Einfalt, and a Catholicism which, in its care for historical tradition as a preserver of the core meaning of the faith, throws its hat into the human ring, celebrating what of life buoys it, has come down on the side of the permanently and validly human, and therefore floats on an assumption that it, this antique perspective, will find friends and allies today. The blog form this text has made of the reigning argument will be the invitation to read needed to attract the ear of the moment. And why, to drop the mask of over-cured speech for a moment, should not the moment be an aperture into the wisdoms of an earlier day? There is no reason why the present should not be such an aperture; there are several reasons why it should be. We are at an open moment, ready to learn from the past. Nationstates, to speak generally, are collectors of cultural memory, for those memories are their true—if often fictionalized—cartes d’identité. We Yanks have our Constitution, which has its own parentage in the thinking



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of British philosophers earlier in the eighteenth century, who were themselves nourished by a tradition of constitutional democracy which had its proximate roots in the much-studied protocols of the Roman Republic. What may have seemed and been a radical departure in social liberty was an interpretation of the lived past. Historians are busy writing and rewriting us, but doing so with the impulse to bounce us off against our pasts, instructively. Cultural enterprises from within the national condition find us not only chary of terms like progress or the future—what has happened to futurology?—but friendly to careful writing, careful painting and singing, careful public thinking where care means what it always does, attention to form and detail, with in turn a watchful eye for how it was done in the past. The author’s store of exemplary cultural enterprises is of mediocre breadth, and simply reflects one guy’s summer playlist, doubtless a list to be superseded by next summer’s swallows—once again Charles Olson’s Mayan Letters; Peter Brown on early Christianity and the struggle with the Roman Empire; Peter Heather, Empires and Barbarians; Marilynne Robinson’s Absences of Mind. Active reassessments of the past thrive on university campuses, as, in creative conferences, do topics from the philosophy of history, which honor the past by querying the ways it can be known. Robert Frost may have outdone us all by turning first, every morning, to the Times obits, but in that he simply heralded in our collective, and creative, cult of the dead: our growing care for the genitori—whether in a China where attention to parents is now mandated by law, or in an industrialized West where the explosion of elderly has forced us to view that 40 percent of the population, along with whatever wisdom they transport, with a creative eye. To all of which, of course, may be added the drumbeat of military/religious piety, with which on the national level—quite differently from our deep constitutional affiliations —we reiterate our attention to the memorialized dead who served us as flesh-and-blood pledges of having been here and vanished. It is true that we hum to ourselves off-tune, that the Internet will open radical new vistas. We dream (a little) about the new harmonies that a racially mixed globe will establish among homines sapientes. We project (still despondently) an era of faster, more convenient, and more affordable transportation on land. (Waveringly, we think of China as reaching toward new democratic vistas on an enormous scale.) We see improvement in infant survival, cancer treatment, educational horizons online—like the explosively developing trends in programs like Coursera or The Humanities University. In the end, though, these futuristic thematics have in the twenty-first century—with its reckless international squabbles, its



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glowering potential for self-destruction, its degradation of the environment, and its moral chaos—ushered in a climate which promises little for the betterment of the human condition, or the security of the species on the planet. A hunger for the wisdom of the past is tangible on every street corner—not least when the gunburst of drug battles is most audible. The author reads the intensity of that leaning backward from a First Nations painting (1973) by Norval Morisseau—and what optic from our time can better lean backward than the first peoples—which depicts against a steely chrome background a family of Inuits making the original crossing of the Bering Strait, stark and abstract, born up by two supporting tortoises, marking with their courage the dominant power of the past.



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38 THE ROYAL ONTARIO MUSEUM

This essay on literary universality is no paean to the past, nor is it an unqualified lecture on the achievements of a cultural past we now find difficult to restore. The spot-check eighteenth century floated here has been a specialist skim of a specialist topic. One thinks of a recent visit to the European domestic interiors section of the Royal Ontario Museum. There they are, the upper-class drawing rooms, living rooms, ladies’ boudoirs of the successive period styles of Renaissance through nineteenth-century European interiors. You can see where people like Goethe and Samuel Johnson and Joshua Reynolds placed their asses. Because the sound system is subtle in the ROM, you can hear, as from the walls of the mid-eighteenth-century sitting room, the constantly recycled undertone of a Bach partita. That’s the world of Wilhelm Meister! Someone paid for that world, and it wasn’t Johann Sebastian Bach or Immanuel Kant. It was the truly little guy, who was almost the whole population. Yet, oh well, perhaps even that someone, if he was not an ordure sweeper or a tubercular crofter or a lower-class Bob Cratchit, even that someone may with luck have had the sight and smell of the countryside and the quiet breath of family easiness to savor. Prior to the industrial! Prior to the deification of techne, which to the Greeks had seemed a lowering of our state, and to us has become a raising of our condition to the point where our humanity is in jeopardy. So we balance back and forth. We know we have lost something important! We know we have taken a few steps forward. In view of this balance of values one leans to the springboard notion that is backboning this essay. We have been at pains to suggest the fragility of the human presence, and of the historical markers we leave behind us. We have waxed philosophical on the nature of the past, while allowing the past room to be viewed as a creation of mind. It is against this floating opera of flashbacks that one wants to give philosophical firmness to the notion of the past as a springboard for thinking. Perhaps, in view of what we know of genetics, of the curse of inherited conflicts—Muslim and Christian fighting for well over a millennium—and of the ruthless record



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of nature, as a catastrophic buddy to settled life, perhaps in light of all this it seems frivolous to address the past as a launching pad for thought experiments. Yet our effort in hypothesizing—there we use the word—the literary universal may in fact be useful in the way that working back to the present from Das Kapital or from the Summa or from John Dewey’s Art and Experience, or from Rorty’s pragmatism are useful; useful as ways of trying out the experienced if evanescent present as a form of itself. To experiment in thought, on the past, is not to deprive the past of its weight, or to take lightly the telemere-shortening weight of the past on our own shoulders. It is to open onto ourselves as presences a space for movement and fresh understanding, the kind of space we discover when, in aging, we find nature again, perhaps in the simplest but oddly lost format, a wren perched on a clothesline, a dytiscid beetle in a rain pool, a scaldingly hot sex-chase between two chipmunks. And yet, even granted a bland perception like the above, about making it new, we will need to ask where we should choose our discovery launching pad in the past—with choices as wide as Karl Marx and St Thomas or even the Buddha addressing us. What criteria are there for choices as life-decisive as this? Choices like these face the maturing intellectual, whose propensity is to conceptualize the positions he/she is in the instructive course of development. None of us, though, lives exempt from the necessity of a valence in developmental direction, even though that valence be the least articulate possible choice of the choice to choose a breakfast cereal. The human presence exists as historically weighted. On every level of decision our choices will unroll against a backstory—family innervations, functions of one’s physical embeddedneses, enculturated anxieties, lusts and ambitions—which colors our moves to hollow out a life the size and shape of our presence. When it comes to one’s conceptual choices, especially to those of what we might call the intellectual concept consumer, the cry of affinity drives the searcher, who, as though on the long and fraught search for the right mate, stops here then there, in palping for a period, person, set of perspectives, if not with which to identify then from which to move out through conflict, feints, creation of new working rooms. No mate acquisition, in the above game of launchings, has proven stable for the present author, who while launching the literary universal on a series of historical springboards, was answering to an accumulation of imperatives which lay at the routine intersection of chance and opportunism. To mine that intersection is to find tectonic plates slipping away from one on every side, and the abyss of personal genetic, open all the way inward to the Pleistocene, a faintly visible scroll across a windy Gondwanaland. Remarkably, we take our casual decisions and live them



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with a tenacity powerfully undergirded by the very aleatory move of our conceiving them. The acte gratuit of standing into time is brother to the staunchest of affirmations. Which we say, here, in the interest of full human disclosure, and not to desubstantialize the Platonic assertions we earlier waved, as we reclined in the comfort of a drawing room perfumed with Bach partitas.



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39 CONCRETE UNIVERSALITY

The autobiographical carpet always unrolls itself when the philosophical is honestly deployed. Thinking through what we are is a travel guide to what we “think”. And for all the adoption of a universal for literature and the arts, for all the undertaking of a sketch of a doctrine of meaning, according to which the individual acquires its meaning only against the confirming stability of “ideas”, a mobile Platonism as the author fashions it, the given that meaning structure rests on is on one level the observed-through-transparency that in a truce the bombardment of the present briefly permits sight of. The parting of the phenomena, that gives a wisp of ah-ha to the rich second, is a constant miracle of formative enabling, which comes with the territory of being-here, and by contrast with which constructs like brain and consciousness are school tales, little lectures we offer one another. That constant miracle of formative enabling is both endlessly deep and as substanceless as the present, and is wherever invoked a being present with all other humanity, for all have been there in the world your rich moment traced. And over and over again. The global, of which we are enamored, is under constant construction, like the world itself in God’s eyes. This being so, however, and each of us included at all moments in the establishment of the global, the author wonders why, in the thematic of our own time in the “West”, we are aware equally of both the global and of the local, and within the local especially of the diverse, that which marks out the special and different character not only of this or that race, gender, or economic class participant, but equally of this or that individual, down to the point where unique differences assume omega point importance, down to the point where genetic identifiers become our only precise descriptor for the being in front of us. (When we Westerners agitate for the rights of the individual we stop our recessual definition of individuality at a point like the juridical I, the John or Jean standing before you, sir, with a protective coat of law. Our concern with that individual, accordingly, is not the result of love or even care, but of a legal definition with its according properties.) The shibboleths of individual rights, and



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above them of minority or disabilitive or disadvantaged rights, are strong banners waving in the same air that buoys the flagships of the global village in its oneness. Does that oppositio not raise new questions for the issue of the literary universal? Are we not made to think, by the complex of shibboleths fighting it out on our social front, that the literary universal too needs fine surgery to separate it judiciously from the claims of the literarily individual, the latest expression of a Russian Formalist Shklovskian estrangement? An earlier escapade of this text found the author discovering lyric poetry on a charmed night on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. He read poems by Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and Hart Crane. He felt in the presence of wonderfully other sensibilities, on whose lines he entered moods and perceptions he had never imagined, savored rare blends of sound and sense, and thrilled to see language prance in self-discipline (Dickinson) then let itself explode (Hart Crane) and at the same time, or so it seemed, take him with it. How can he rethink this still-exuberant experience against the perplexities of the universal-individual dichotomy? Was he encountering the universal human at the center of the other selves whose word shapes were coming across to him as poems? Or was he encountering word collocations which were unique, and which had their power from that uniqueness? The author, longing to spring for the universal in the mix, steps back, admitting the dilemma. W. K. Wimsatt, in “The Structure of the Concrete Universal in Literature,” seems to propose a way of living the knottiness of this dilemma. (Behind him lies both the décor of ordinary logic and the shadow of a Hegel who built all on the foundation of meaning in the still unfully articulate individuum. All was becoming meaning, in Hegel’s system of unfolding Geist, in contrast to an All which was a reflection of meaning in Plato.) Wimsatt’s instance of discussion was the character of Falstaff, a rounded character, as E. M. Forster less philosophically put it, and one in whom the extremes of distinctiveness, the uniqueness of trademark, was precisely the source of the sense that we were in touch with the quintessence of humanity. Was something like this “mystery” in play when I was opening into poems on that night of discovery in Maryland? The author wants to say yes, thus rapidly reclaiming the ground of universality, without sacrificing the manifest evidence for the unique, thus individual, traits of works of art that last. And yet the victory looks cheap, if left here. The eighteenth-century proponents of the literary universal rarely pressed their evidence into the details of literature, but were content to reflect the age-ripe wisdom of Aristotle, for whom the poetic, the creative,



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was more philosophical than the historical, because the poetic denotes what might be, and not just what was. Imlac, accordingly, advised his pupil Rasselas to work toward the unbound center of the painting, where meaning and beauty were not held back by their detailed components, where the streaks of the tulip could be dismissed, that the simple beauty of the flower might be on display. When Winckelmann sought the essential beauty of ancient statuary he was looking for “eine edle Einfalt und eine stille Groesse,” the dignity of central beauty. (One sees that quality, no?, in looking at the work of Praxiteles or Phidias—even though they are largely meeting us in rather lifeless Roman copies?) Goethe talks to Eckermann about a Chinese novel he has been reading. What strikes him is how directly intelligible the book is to him—as though the accidentals fell away in the readings—and the human “essence” of the novel was what was left. In these postulations of the literary universal, however, the eighteenth-century aestheticians were avoiding such hard-to-formulate issues as how “le poème qui se fait de mots,” as Gautier put it, is able to prioritize its essence over its details, its words. (You see, a marble sculpture, or a thematic novel or a painting of a flower, is not as manifestly accreted from its parts as is a poem which, to repeat, is made up of discrete words.) Would these great figures of eighteenth-century thought, to whom we might add a born wordsmith poet, like Alexander Pope, have been able to raise the banner of the literary universal over some great poem, like the Homer of whom most of these gentlemen thought nature the equivalent? Of course they would, and regularly did, pick Homer as literature’s chief repository of the essentially human in language, but did they do so by parsing the language structure that constructed the Iliad? The answer is clearly that they did not—nor did they intend to—show how Homer got to his greatness mot par mot. Could anyone do that? Does the great work of language art construct itself mot par mot? Does the great painting, for that matter, get constructed brush stroke by brush stroke? The Parthenon—marble chunks one at a time? The universal—literary or of some other art—is constructed both piecemeal and transtemporally, and at the same time. Le poème se fait de mots, true, but in the poem that carries the totality of the human, its own universal power, the incremental is the voice of the essential. Soul and body are given simultaneous expression. This mystery—in the Gabriel Marcel sense of mystery, “nothing more than a problem which invades the very being of the inquirer and exposes its precarious condition”—is totally everyday, goes far to describing our actual presence here, and yet lies so prior to our unveiling it that the construction of the literary universal occludes us even as we reach out to it. Nothing will “explain”, but this



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kind of conceptualization will configure, the rich and seamless blend of ideal with concrete in the realized literary universal, in Falstaff the character, in Shakespeare’s or Donne’s sonnets, in Oedipus the King, or in Chartres Cathedral.



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40 PRAYER AND THE LITERARY UNIVERSAL

We have discussed prayer and the mobile Platonic, thus palping a geography in which the transtemporal of spirit will have room to move, and now, without yet having brought A and Z together, we have brought ourselves to a place from which to place in that same transtemporal the master achievements of art. There is no wonder that, right or wrong in this accompanying thought architecture, the present argument leads to a point where those master achievements of art acquire an unmistakeable ethical dimension, and give us a fresh perspective onto the relation between art and the good. To join the literary concrete with the literary universal is to step both mot par mot and twinned to essence from the start into words like these: My life closed twice before its close; It yet remains to see If immortality unveil A third event to me. So huge, so hopeless to conceive, As those that twice befell. Parting is all we know of heaven And all we need of hell.

The poem has far to travel in few words. We are many distant places in the following of this voice: in the memory of some of life’s bitter, in the expectation of going beyond—immortality—in the imagination of the imaginable, the déchirement de l’être that takes place on the far side of the death which has dismembered then raised us. At no point in this poem are we in the whole until we finish, and the battle of hell with heaven has had its say, and that especially at the beginning of the poem; though from the first line we have closed over the severity of the losses we lock inside ourselves. We have already been forbidden to take lightly the frolic of trimeters and tetrameters, while by the time we reach “hopeless” we know how far we are from the likelihood of taking a pleasure in the third event. The powerful accumulated message of the whole, where its “universality”



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lies but where it can only account for itself by paradox, is that parting, the supreme gateway to loss, wills both to save us and to damn us. So inward is this formulation that we cannot better its grasp of the center of the human condition, but so incremental and integrated is the statement that we cannot at any point in knowing the poem claim an exemption from its entire argument. It is art’s path to walk us into this sweet ethic, in which we muddle around in the entire meaning of our humanity. Is that entire meaning up for condensing in formulae, as we (roughly) tried to show in dealing with Emily’s short sidewinder? Is the humanly universal a set of meanings? If we were to say yes, and to pursue the identification of universal characteristics—pile up the adjectives for fragility, hopelessness, tragedy, hopefulness, love of beauty—that have from yore played into one kind of Humanism or another, the Humanism of the Greeks who just did their humanism, of Erasmus who wanted to get back to the litterae humaniores of the Classics, the Humanism of Paul Elmer Moore or Irving Babbitt, which reached to the Classics for support in the belief that man is fundamentally worthy—if we were to compile those adjectives we would still be left with no standard of aesthetic value by which to differentiate a benign fondness for the human from a penetrating ostension of what is at the heart of the human, that piece of art by which Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson or Horace address us as representatives of what it is to be alive. That aesthetic standard, which upon coming into being tracks over as the ethical summum, is available in act though not to be prescribed. The approbation of the ages will, in the long run, be the judgment rod for the achievement. Will not this unabashed cloud cluster absolutist thinking, when knotted into the inexpressibly not quite conceptual—Wallace Stevens takes us constantly to the waters of poetry which does not quite mean— prove out as kin to Christianity’s perfected incarnation? What is the wafer on which the universe rests, if not the perfect intersection of the concrete with the ultimately human as love? The author goes rhetorical, raises hackles, assumes much too much tolerance in his reader. The overlap in this analogy is narrow, while the uses of analogical thinking are themselves disputable. An art work created by one of us, laying out our essential nature before us, rising in beauty and delight above the crowd of sputtering expressions we settle for, establishing a more or less durable canon of value, this art creation is far from the existential presence of a physical symbol, endowed with its founding mastership by the finest to have passed our route, and offered back to God from us whom God made and the Christ entered. The point of overlap is in the condensation, in a



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figure as diverse as the wafer and Hamlet, of a full presence which explodes from the concrete—as in the concrete particular of Hegel. Even to risk this narrow analogy is to assume, which the author does, that the words of Hamlet are not the soul of Hamlet, but artifices of eternity to which we reach through reading or seeing Hamlet. That eternity is the Platonic origin and completion of the work itself, Shakespeare’s contribution to the richness of the world he costs.



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41 INTERPERSONALITY AND DEPTH

To have cared to meet his students in the empyrean, as the author did on a certain day in Changsha, in itself betokens a need, in our species, which nothing discussed to this point will have begun to characterize. At what depth and level we need one another is an issue fathomable only in the doing, in the needing. A text about needing is already not a needing, unless perhaps the text exists both as about what is and as what it is at the same time. That is, if the text furnishes its own needing while being about needing, then the implication of language in action is again fortified. The needing of one another, as we put it in language, is thus the needing of one another itself, which fits with the conative character of language, its presence as the satisfaction of a lack, and the expectation of a plenum. Our very interpresence, as humans, is voiced in the language which is the condition in which we make whatever is the day, whatever is the night. And when it comes to making language as an artifice of eternity for one another, creating literary art as the literary universal, we are in the language by which we doing this become the literary universal as well as accounting for it. Is this a way of saying that in language we are ab ovo being with one another, needing one another as the reverse side of our address, as the we whose postulation of us is the condition of our reaching to it? To postulate the literary universal is to be establishing it while naming it. The author has to feel that his predecessor, in this kind of language idealism, has been Josiah Royce, the absolutist of the spirit, for whom what we can think in some sense is. The in some sense is the killer. Recognizing the conative character of language, and the depth to which our interpersonality is immersed in language, we need to see that the fruition of our interpersonal discourse is the omega text in which we pool our presence to each other, and become the themes that unite us. Great literature is those uniting themes in which, by occasional good fortune, we find geniuses prepared to name our essential nature. Great visual or musical art is no less the repository of themes of greatness, though



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literature, language being the material of our existence, is stuck with priority as medium. Is artifice, then, to be minimized, in this account of how the great, the universal in art is established? We have been there before, in and out, and in considering the contribution of each word, each note, each sculptural gesture, in the establishing of the universal art work. It is worth being clear, again, that while we do include the text of the great, every unit of it, in the great itself, we leave room for a cut-off point, a minimum, below which the fragmentary component is not part of the shaping. The leniency we accord in biology, to the cellular prehistory as it plays out in even the minimum formative of life, is inappropriate when it comes to great art, in which, although to be sure the individual phoneme resounds in a Shakespeare sonnet, that contribution has to be bracketed, for purposes of poem analysis. What does not need bracketing is the formative of words— just as the smartphone, activated, requires at least an initial letter or sound grouping before encoding the intended whole. Artifice, though, is for sure decisive in making room for the deposit of faith which the literary universal is. Can we measure the grandeur of a Shakespeare sonnet from the first words of it? One wants to laugh. “When I consider…” Could be the start of an admonitory lecture, in which Dad reminds Son of the ways he has not lived up to expectations. So how much more do I need to cut in, before the magic begins to resonate? Absurd as is the query—it echoes the dilemma of Zeno’s paradox of the tortoise—it nonetheless stabs. Where does the literary universal, the point where the human essence gasps, set in? The answer must lie in the incorporation of the whole literary proposition, Emily Dickinson’s whole poem’s essential point, in a meaning ensouling it. We speak of the soul of the person as infusing that person from conception. We may have to speak of the meaning of the literary universal work as infusing it from….not the start, but from within the whole, from a presence which pre-includes the incremental development of the poem or drama or sculpture.



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42 LANGUAGE AND TRANSCENDENCE

A blogbook assumes a little liberty to play. Has the author played too much? Though he is one who has asked for the meaning of “keep it real”, he is nonetheless crowded into the classic bag of skin, equipped with the runof-the-mill disabilities, bruised and lumpy from seasons in the awkwardly fitting straightjacket of the world, and no psychopompos when it comes to the next chapter in the book, the last. His resume is of the simplest. Life is short and hard to explain. One is born desiring, flits from desire to desire, adopts life-shaping attitudes toward the rules governing desire, conforms to the social whole, explores ways of learning or selffeeding or sharing with the new generation, gets old, compensates for it by dreaming, builds a temple of words, 401Ks, plans for electrical vehicles, sleeps, and doesn’t wake up. Bizarro! What was it about? The permanent is all that is lacking. The impermanence of being here, the massive sadness in things that pervades The Tale of the Heike or Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, those testimonies to the wearing down of the world drive in history. So one turns to the sphere of the permanent as antidote? One chickens? We have devoted attention to the deep self-construction we are as language. Language to some extent makes and represents us, and we live in terms of what we can name and describe and long for in language. Would turning to the permanent as antidote involve more than remodeling our language, giving priority in it to the kind of account this whole text is being? Would that turning involve such simple but life-modifying changes as countering life-formulations like those in the previous paragraph? What is language, anyway? Is it not just a taking stance in being, a conative movement toward others, a field of self-definition, a power we have? Can we not, if we listen to ourselves closely writing the foregoing paragraph, can we not hear rhetorical choice, poetic prose, echoes of others—Joseph Wood Krutch, Montaigne, Boris Vian—in short tones archived from reading others’ turns and twists of their language moments? (If we give ourselves the right kind of silence, think of our language as a gradual emergence from that silence, and finger it into existence, phoneme by phoneme—as Palamas fingers the dawn into existence at the outset of The



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King’s Flute; kai etane tou nou mou e prote karauge; and it was the first dawn from my mind—then we will not think it extravagant to propose other formatives in language, like the updated Platonism of the current text, or, let it be said on a preliminary level, like the positivism of Comte or Carnap, or like the humanistic nihilism of Heidegger or Sartre, or like the language analysis of Ryle and Austen. It is not, of course, that we are free to say anything we want, and indeed sorting out why that is true is part of what we need to argue, once we establish that the modish (but compelling) lingo of the previous paragraph is optional. (Such lingo speaks to a pre-formulation and invites, long in advance of itself, the response that a permanence will need creating, to counterbalance our pitiful fragility.) We have been erecting a scaffold of perspectives, in this text, which aspires to support another kind of name for things than that of the paragraph we are trying to undermine. Can we provide a criterion for choosing among moves in world construction through language? What about saying that we can, in our language (and “thought”, which is in large part action in language) commit ourselves toward interpretive structures which seem to bear our weight, readdress us to ourselves with fresh and path-opening invitations to know ourselves in our world? (I blush to note how easily I can re-translate the prose of our whipping-boy paragraph in a direction which faces toward the Forms, and their entourage of implications, toward the Vitruvian figure of the human in its central nobility.) I have previously discussed the role of language in the attentiondirecting that became a reality in the development of experimental science: It is not that water as the contemporary scientist employs the term is more like water than is water as the theologian or poet uses it. Strictly and literally all nouns are equally unlike what they name, are radically metaphors. But the scientists’ proper nouns are both ikons in themselves and a reaching toward what they name, the noun of scientific discourse above all looking out and doing so with an intention to point, to draw attention outward from itself.

We are reviewing the possibility, now, of directing our language toward a transcendent sphere in which we are ourselves reflected, a sphere which is the meaning we deeply are, mirrored and deepened before us through art. (It is as though we worked with energy spheres, in our language, and have at our disposal powers: to address our condition as formulaically degraded, as capable of proposing new and reinforcing old Vitruvian figures of itself, as….and the list of targets for energy could be widened…as part of sociological documentation, as part of self-sacrificial



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givingness. And so on. We speak here of the Platonic/Vitruvian art move, and of a tournure d’attention by which we risk ourselves as a profound investment of ourselves. The literary universal will be a direction of attention supported from within energies of self-valuing, and will, as the good capitalist says, be its own reward.



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43 ALAIN, SENTIMENTS, PASSIONS, ET SIGNES

A flip move in the unsure. A metaphysic this text is not. A defense, rooted in first principles, deducing from them an arguable account of the way the world given us is, this text is not. A personal essay, shlurping up life themes, sign pointing with those themes, moving over many facets of the interplay of art with the good, the stable with the unstable, the humane with the godly, this is, er, sort of, maybe what this book is. Not quite ready to yield that much ground. Not quite as easy as I would like to be, about the personal essay bit. Maybe Alain’s Sentiments, Passions, et Signes remains the model. He tackled everything, from his own voice. One wants to be all one’s life is. Mine is flawed, cracked at foundational points so compromised that other structures, in the surrounding human space, have been weakened. Other people. One feels bad at that. There is no retrieving the source of the wound, and retroreeling personal history like an old cartoon. So suck it up! And a suck-up this text is, and a more daring, because more contemporaneously global, text the successor will be. The author says this to enhearten himself, to look ahead, and to create the audience he is. He feels the absolute helium bursting in his lines, and books for that trip to Mars from which all of us will have the best view of the cooling and shrinking of the sun. Meanwhile there is meanwhile. There is always meanwhile. The literary universal is going to be cooked in the kitchen of meanwhile, if anywhere. Grand though our mobile Platonism may be, we can’t get that far from the pre-intelligible minima whose prior to us presence locks us into the state of the not quite or not yet. That not quite or not yet which is what we are because we are, is us about to be, and from that priority to ourselves to the transcendent account we give of ourselves in the creation and adoration of the literary universal is, well…is perhaps the heartbeat of the whole created world. It is as though that created world is forever about to say its name, yet forever about not yet being able to utter the first syllable of its name. From this side of the immense web of coded communications that spread like a second universe over the globe, and from among which



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supreme meaning oases coagulate, we are all babes in the crib. Our mouths work with saliva, our eyes blink without focus, our vegetable systems slowly churn…labor it is…It was Novalis who wrote aus schmerzen wird die neue Welt geboren, and the best code name for the effort to formulate from out of the crib will be birth pangs. In the laboring process must lie the germs of that expressive need which will find itself into the greatest ranges of art. We grow from crib to sagacity, but are at every new stage, and at every instant of every stage, just starting to…to “talk”. Labor then is double, the existential labor in which we inescapably are, and the stufenweis labor, labor seen from the outside, the “five ages of man,” by which we can be recorded in the accounting system of human history. Same personage, two views. Our challenge: to read the maieutic by which the literary universal emerges from this bolus of labor pains. On this side of history is the not yet. The author was there before writing this sentence. He is now there before writing that he was there before writing this sentence. Is there not, in this dynamic by which we succeed ourselves from within, with a difference always, is there not the endless self-mirroring from which, in our restless longing for identity, we designate ourselves selves? The author had reason, long ago, to concentrate on Leonardo da Vinci’s statement that “the mirror, above / all—the mirror is our teacher.” Was the author wise enough to realize the meaning here, that we are forever being born from ourselves in new images? We exist as transition, as being born forth? And was not the mirror itself the history on which the five stages of man are written, the eyes of the historian? So that our labor on this side is forever being written out on the face of time? And is not the literary universal, then, the complete expression of our humanity, outed from within the internal dialectic, onto the screen of global accounting? We mirror ourselves back, as quickly as we reassume the gesture of being not yet what we are to be, and that mirroring back constitutes the life of each and all of us. The genius of creation, who makes the literary universal out of this onflowing process, is simply one of us, a processual too, who has the power to testify to the total human condition of all of us.



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44 PROGRESS IN THE ARTS?

Is there progress in the arts of such testifying? Or is the cliché correct, that while there is progress in “science” there is not progress in “the arts”? I am going to suggest, and follow the suggestion into the sister book which will follow this one, that what progress there is in the arts is into the past. There is no aesthetic progress into the future, because artistic expression is always about the mirrored self, the self in its role of about to be, and thus the creating self is always part of the already created, the mirrored, the mirrored both of the individual maker and of the cultural tradition, in fact of the whole humane tradition the individual creates from. It is that condition of retrospection, with which he/she stands on the brink of creating, that gives the nod to the Anciens in the still-raging debate between the Anciens and the Modernes. The pressure to recover is strong in the artist who establishes the Forms in work. Milton’s present is Homer and Virgil, Ariosto’s present, in Orlando Furioso, is La Chanson de Roland, Picasso’s present, as he works on Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, is archaic West African masquerade and masks. The trick of the generation of the sciences, in early modern Europe—and hardly elsewhere on our globe—is this: the mirroring condition, by which mind addresses its possibilities of understanding the world around it, is shattered by the experimental method, which is a transitory restructuring of experience, in which events, components of experiment, are cut off from the making self and made to disclose their independent meanings—those long viewed as the “objective data of scientific discovery,” though the last century has experienced a continual refinement in the description of that “objectivity”. Enabling this mirror-shattering insurgency, there are of course political and economic conditions, which made of early modern Europe a locus of unusual freedom of inquiry, as well as of creativity to be again the past in art, which in a capsule is the whole dynamic of the Renaissance. The literary universal, then, is in finding quod semper, quod ubique, also finding the mirrored origins of even our prehistorical traces. Note, please, that the author speaks of origins and even of traces, origins of those kinds of prehistorical aesthetic conditions we find at Les Eyzies or



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Lascaux. The mirror we hold up to ourselves becomes more nearly a Palomar than we might have expected. In the author’s “Can we get inside the prehistoric sensibility?” he makes his own discovery of a valuable academic literature on the archeology of the prehistoric mind. (Georges Bataille, in La Naissance de l’art, had opened the discussion by his intuitive argument for the primacy of an aesthetic motive in the prehistoric cave painter. Steven Mithen, in The Prehistory of the Mind, brings empirical studies as close as possible to issues like the birth of language in musical humming. William Golding, in The Inheritors, gives us a world inside the mind of Neanderthalers, and though he suggests that such a world lacks the self-consciousness to exist in a history, that world is touchingly aware, if afraid, when homo sapiens appears on the horizon.) The literary universal exposes the human essence, thrilling as it always is to us, back to its roots. Nor is it to be thought that the mirror of selfhood, in which we see our human past reflected, stops with the traces of what we call the prehistoric. We remember Sandor Ferenczi, whose Thalassa, A Theory of Genitality (1924) reports on tracing individual traumas back to the origin in the womb, and (hence thalassa, sea in Greek) eventually to our origin in the ocean. This speculative material evoked both derision and, for a while, sufficient respect that it dominated the Budapest School of Psychoanalysis, and grounded Ferenczi’s appointment as the first university professor of Psychoanalysis. The probability is, of course, that in our makeup from chemistry brewed in the ocean we carry traces of the Big Bang fallout. Much as we strut independently over the globe, intoxicated with our new levels of symbol manipulation and social engineering, we sense inside that our souls are made of carbon.



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45 GAYATRI SPIVAK AND COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

The sciences of society complement aesthetic expression and scientific inquiry, to form a triad of human enquiry energies. Of these three energies, science and social science have been the latest on the field, emerging with the development of Western European culture in the Renaissance. The posture we view as scientific took position by the time of Galileo and Kepler, while the social sciences waited a couple of centuries, for the cognitive fallout from European exploration and travel, and the self-awareness of urban social life, before finding, in thinkers like Montesquieu or de Tocqueville, ways of talking about other ways of being in the world. (Ways, this author hurries to say, which seemed globally other, although in fact we now realize, and argue from in places like this text, those ways are not too other to take form around universal aesthetic presences.) The social sciences, in their effort to bridge between experimental science and the creation of pure value, the literary universal, are paths within the social mirrored, refusing themselves the freeing power of any creation by the greats, warming themselves at the comforting fire of their own reflection, and on the whole masturbatorily returning onto themselves the image society gives them of themselves. What the social sciences discover is not what was not there before, but what was there and not yet disclosed. What the greatness in art discovers is what was not there in the first place, the text of Hamlet or Oedipus, although it restores our primevally embedded origin. Let’s sort out this temporal placing of the literary work, and consign the social sciences, for our purposes, to the bridge they have just given us, back into the mystery of the literary universal. The literary universal throws a brilliant artefactual light onto the depths of the human experience. Is it not paradoxical, then, to claim that the “great” in art “discovers what was not there in the first place”? The explanatory detail lies in the “what was not there in the first place,” and in the mystery, Gabriel Marcel’s sense of the human drama, which appears to



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be an unfolding of a cultural/genetic program, the origins of which were the omega significance of the whole, but which needed unfolding to manifest themselves. (The author begs pardon for compacting, with argument but without evidence, what amounts to a determinist view of God’s creation, but what could soon be seen to be supple enough to include in it the mandate to include the change which confirms inevitability. He hopes the rewards of the present overcoming of paradox will serve as an initial down payment on the value of this layered determinist theory of human development.) It is a manifestation of what was and is our deepest nature, in a freeing act of self-recognition, that we salute in the joy of experiencing the literary universal. We come, therefore, to the freedom which is the quiet and decisive descriptor for the place established by the literary universal. The social scientific, even the scientific, address to our world setting is confined by its wedding to a material. This is most evident in disciplines like sociology or psychology, which challenge themselves, at their most exigent, with ever more fine-tuned accounts of the way we humans are and organize, but which, even in forecasting, keep us tied to nothing more than ingenious probabilities. The sciences, by shifting the gaze of the mirror, as we said above, and by withholding judgment from the experimental games they stage, attend on a realm of freedom, which is essentially the not yet known, rather than the liberating. The distinction is essential, and gives us a new vocabulary for addressing the achievement that the great work of art carries out for us. The purity of the universal, free of excrescences—and deeply commented on in their time by Kant and Schopenhauer—is simply its freedom, the lack of internal obstacles to itself. We might think this condition clearest in the case of music, as Schopenhauer did, and yet we have chosen the literary universal as our reigning example, and that for a reason. The reason has been front and center throughout this book, and rests on the issue of language. Language has figured here as the definer for the human condition, the base in working from which we define ourselves. If we are to be given a freedom, in the aesthetic dimension, it will be at its most congruent to us in the arts of language. We have not tried to specify an art and we have been loose in the texts mentioned for samples—ranging from the lyric to the epic, passing through drama. Is there a significance to the forms freedom adopts as it plays out into these literary genres? The literary greats have appeared before us in haphazard guise, wearing faces as divergent as Homer, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson. We have by and large been concerned with literature as a zone of freedom, stability, and now mirroring of the human in its essence. But is the



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universal as it mirrors itself along generic lines simply formatting itself differently, or is that formatting—the “form” that makes Homer epic and Dickinson lyric—important to the universality established in the work? The question sits uncomfortably with the kinds of broad-stroke worldview profiles in play so far. Part of the discomfort derives from the historicity we are about to have to recognize; literary universality persuades us to discover and treasure it. One would, on the one hand, like to think that the literary universal exists outside temporality, for if that universality mirrors human conditions back to our ultimate roots, if it displays essence without excrescence, as Winckelmann puts it, literary historicity should not affect it. But in fact we know that literary genres take turns reigning over the expressive possibilities of every age. The epic, drama, and the lyric all have their days, though rarely are those days exclusive—and the right kind of genius will find its way, any time any place, through to the statement that gives back a pure liberation from his/her own life. The fact remains, however, that the valence of genre is noticeable in the way the literary universal unpackages itself. We have some unpaid debts to reality, and should address them now, by putting the literary universal out to dry in hard talk.



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46 ART AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

We have nudged close to this talk in discussing the concrete universal, for we were there involved with a sense in which the artistic particular, of whatever size or shape, can transform itself into the substance of the universal. (We moved into the glassy waters of transubstantiation, in making this point.) Are we still prepared to have our cake and eat it too, in that particular fashion? And as for the cake, have we in fact subjected the concrete universal issue to even the minimum of hard testing? Have we turned to instances? Falstaff pleases Wimsatt, as an instance of a character so perfectly human, and so perfectly particular that he thereby becomes a universal image of the human. But is “image” the word? Would Sinnbild or template or exemplum fit better? Is this vocabulary uncertainty evidence of fuzzy thinking, thinking that is fuzzy in a self-degrading way, not a “suitably loose kind of conceptualizing”? In other words, have we specified a kind of resultant condition for the concrete universal that would help us see why Falstaff, rather than, say, The Wife of Bath or Thorpe Athenly (in Of Human Bondage) meets the conditions of the literary universal? (Or would it matter if indeed these other characters did meet those conditions? Would the class of “characters who meet the literary universal conditions” be ad libidem extendible?) The foregoing challenges, to the formulation of a literary universal condition, are only a sample of the artillery that can be massed against the concept of the literary universal! There is the issue of what kind of literary element can pass into the new transubstantiated condition. Characters? Plots? Metrical tournures de phrases? Sonnets? It will not invalidate the basic argument of this blog/text, if we have to agree, to all the above assaults, that while they are valid and expose many rough edges of the literary universal concept, that concept is large enough to hold its half-clarities together, and useful enough to justify the sloppy talking that critical discourse in the Humanities—and for that matter the sciences, as we know from the now almost venerable tradition of fuzzy thinking or of what logic now calls multivalent thinking—has from the beginning of time accepted as part of its way of being.



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It is, to finish with pay off debts to reality, exactly the sloppiness (or fuzziness, or multivalence) of humanistic thinking which has given us humane expressiveness in the first place. That is, we could continue assembling evidence of ways in which the literary universal is hard to define: what marks it off from adjacent notions, like the abundantly overused tributes to the deeply human or the masterwork based on a lifetime of observation; we could try distinguishing just what makes Virgil of universal interest while Statius is not, Mann’s Magic Mountain of universal interest while Manas is not, but in the end we would be wasting time, for the literary universal self-identifies among other texts—as Michelangelo’s David self-identifies among its neighbors in Florence’s Accademia Gallery. The same point holds for other subtleties of subversion by which the literary universal concept can be threatened. The range of attacks is ample, from Gertrude Stein’s in What are Masterpieces?, in which she characteristically argues for words is words—though in a fashion so crafty we wish that she too could take her skills to a truly masterful level—to the argument that the presence of the literary universal in diverse genres proves that the universal is not universal but an extrapolation from multiple single texts which, the argument in our time would go, all share in the universal, if indeed the term is in that case worth using. (Of course the contemporary consensus is clearly hostile to the universality notion, not least because, though we live in an age when the global is being regularly promoted, we in the West have committed to a notion of diversity which shares in Stein’s viewpoint, that literature is a democracy of words.) The present text has been a panegyric to the literary universal, but has taken many winding turns in its efforts to milk the sweetness from a set of perceptions first shared to the author by some eighteenth-century men of letters and art.



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47 LITERATURE AND THE ROUNDED CHARACTER

The author seems close to his starting point, the Changsha dilemma. Was universal literary value sufficient to bring together adults from different cultures divided by geopolitical tension? The case in question was of course prejudicial to a literary universal world solution. Here was a teacher, there a student; here an outsider worried about it, there an insider: serious dyssemetry divided the two camps. But are any conditions imaginable, in which the universal values of the texts before us might have brought us together? (Can the world community, involved adults, come together over solutions to problems of threat, such as the spread of chemical weapons? Such as ongoing social/political genocide? Sometimes. While not decisions involving literary values, those threat issues provoke decisions concerning the wide range of universal values.) Is it simply that literature is literature, and that our time has come to a point of value breakdown, in the face of an historical tsunami of relativisms, particularisms, and, where private lifestyle is affordable, diversities to fit every palate? In short, the author sees that his entire text has brought him squarely back into the kinds of debate the culture wars in his own country have highlighted. (Where those wars are now he has no idea, nor is he is a specialist in the edge of contemporary culture, but a person on the street with a voice and an interest in what his culture is and what he is in it; Walt Whitman’s simplest American.) It has seemed to this guy that the literary wars, in his small corner of world discourse, have shrunk timidly into policy questions, with the appointed umpires making certain assumptions about entitlement, voice, and the place of literature in society which sharply limit the energy of argument, and which—these assumptions— ultimately undermine (sometimes healthily) the absolutist pretentions of their proponents. Thanks to his own career slant, and to the accidents of university life—five years on the same corridor with a fostering angel—the author comes late in life to see how clearly (and on what a forward reaching level) his former colleague, Gayatri Spivak, carries the banners of the new



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world perspective in literary studies. Fellow profs of Comparative Literature, the two of them taught coincidentally at the University of Iowa in the second half of the sixties. The author became aware, at that time, that Gayatri was translating a large book by Derrida, Grammatologie. In rare moments he looked into this text, and went so far as to read an early work of Derrida, La Voix et le Phenomene. From that point on Gayatri went her directions, wonderfully feminist plus, building Derrida, I believe, into ways of thinking that open new pathways for humanistic thinking. Among the pathways, I discern in several of her works, especially in her harddriving book The Death of a Discipline (2003), kinds of deconstructive thought destined to obliterate the traditionalist architecture courted in the present book. This was a challenge for rethought, and one which troubled the author, who had supposed that, without realizing it, he was himself traveling some paths of cultural deconstruction, especially in that kind of language reductionism we played out earlier, in terms of private languages and in the book Being Here: Sociology as Poetry. It was his assumption, clearly if beautifully naïve, that he could consistently blend deconstruction with the kind of traditionalist Platonist/universality perspective he gave a somewhat loose formulation to. Was it the “somewhat loose” that gave him wiggle room to put paid to the thought-house under construction in this book? He had to ask himself who and what he was, as he put down Gayatri’s Death of a Discipline. And he had to ask himself a harder question: was there something to be said for establishing, in the word house of this current book of his, a consistent architecture that would seem to stand in any wind? Like the Summa or the Kritik der reinen Vernunft? Why declare one’s residence in the Age of Iron? And if not that kind of construction, what was the endgame of this blog’s writing? Was he taking notes on the wind?



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48 GAYATRI, IS SHE RIGHT?

There can be no doubt that the pathways of thought that sprang loose the present piano roll of aperçus, with a bright colored necktie to bind them, included every kind of personal twist and turn, the corroded labyrinths of a disorganized life that now revels to have ascended a stair or two of the seven-story mountain; the good-faith recovery of an attitude, long preceding the tilt that led from the Midwest into the Classics, of benevolence toward the ancient—and now to the archaic; the unexpected discovery, a kind of epiphany offered up by teaching a class in eighteenthcentury literature at Buffalo after writing a dissertation on European aesthetics. All these twists were elements in the disclosing, from within, not at all of a finer personality, but of one more stakes-are-down realistic about the name of the world we inhabit. The alternative to “absolute” value in aesthetic, or moral, movements seemed to that person increasingly to lead to an unclear position in value. At the same time, though, this inquirer felt ever more tangibly that the problem of knowing through language, our open wound through which the world touches us directly, was never going to free us into a bullseye-accurate targeting of the highest values. (Fuzzy knowledge was at least one element in the imprisoning of us in impression. In addition, value proved resistant to any effort to formulate it, even fuzzily.) The author was all this time questioning the stability of the language walk he teetered over, as he attempted to set his GPS to value: language, the namer of the values, impertinently resisted that call to reliability, which the inherent madness of ordinary conditions refused to stop threatening. Thus the new fascination, with the contours of value, continued fumbling with the equipment details which seemed to accompany the search to affirm value. In short, the author rediscovered Gayatri, on the very topic of that Comparative Literature discipline with which we both began, found her challenging ideas such as my traditionalist universal idea, which I cling to, and much else that I was inclined to, in the way of apparatus for mapping a sane world. Without here undertaking to explain, how I would battle for



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my beleaguered fortresses, let me rather pick out one challenge, from my dear Modernist’s attack book, and try to wrestle it into the present curmudgeonly defense of an older perspective on value, a perspective in terms of which the value-embedded humanisms of seventy-five years ago prove flexible enough to be argued for, and stiff-necked enough to provoke thought. The author has felt that, in the construction of the present blog, he is riding the Western power surge, limiting his conception of the universal to the concept teased into philosophical centrality during the centuries (and perhaps still) when Aristotle dominated the air waves. Nothing about literary universality is the less supportable, for the fact that history has widened the scope of human consciousness, and indeed it has done that; today, far more than a century ago, we are conscious of the global plurality of wits capable of crafting ultimate value in the arts, and of the notinfrequent arrogance of the Western mindset, in the formulation of its own role in value formation. But where strong argument sustains itself, there is no need to hunker down. It is time to bite back, and Gayatri, in dismantling the architecture of what we fondly called Comparative Literature, has used a strong right arm against the very Classical Renaissance Humanistic trend in which she hears (I hope) past glory but a fadingly relevant voice of our time. It is the author’s suspicion that the very fallible West is still a beacon, and that, even though our sense of where masterpieces are made, or even just what they are, must yield some ground to perspectives which would make the Mortimer Adler in us shiver, there’s an axis running from Matthew Arnold through Norman Foerster to Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson—throwing names around!—which will hold firm in the wind of cultural change. Any defense of literary universality that rests comfortably on a canon of Western classics, and scrutinizes them with lenses sharpened in the Western tradition, will need to defend its claims of central regency, and will in doing so have to stand firm against the Mundo Nuevo. Gayatri confesses her own brave steps beyond the Roman Empire, outward into the vast where every step means, if you please, a new global positioning system. She carries out Comparative Literature for the world as it is now, a striving and swollen globus of tribes constricted by an increasingly global currency. She will turn to the new Philippine novel—or Saudi or Ghanaian—and brush up enough Tagalog or Arabic or Pidgin to address it. (The “address it” is the issue. I have two shelf rows of grammars in my study: Syriac, Icelandic, Bengali, Swedish, Russian; pledges of a multiple personality which would be the culturally qualified consciousness of our moment, but which would require a committee for vehicle. Globalization



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is easy to say and hard to position for. Even when it seems as though empathy will go a long way. I read Mishima’s Spring Snow. Man I love that book! But it’s just that “I love that book” that should make me suspicious. We deal with youthful suicide, promoted by the kind of Wagnerian Weltschmerz this author tried anatomizing earlier in the present book. At least this is how the author saw it in Mishima, extrapolating as the present author did from a Midwestern America where teenaged death seemed to charm every cornfield, and the joy of life seemed nothing more than the loss of life. He threw some sprigs of Nietzsche into the salad, equating optimism with tragedy. But the heroic culture of suicide, inside of which Mishima wrote with pride, was absolutely foreign to the author, for whom suicide and existential fulfillment went together, but hardly suicide and pride. Blandly enough the author went on to teach the small masterpiece, infecting his own students with his Nietzschean-Wagnerian misunderstanding, hoist by the petard of insularity, that assured a long route dividing his own self-analysis from Shintoism. He cannot make this point without reflecting back onto the Changsha episode with which this book opened, and in which he was probably looking at another moment in the Asian-American misunderstanding industry.) Whether the kind of misunderstanding generated here would have been different had the author taken off a season to learn some Japanese, and to look-read at least passages of Spring Snow in that language—and this would seem to be one of Gayatri’s recommendations—is doubtful. The fact is that translation between languages of comparable development, like Japanese and English, is pretty doable, and that the difficulties hampering inter-lingual communication, in such cases, are more likely to be conceptual, not linguistic. Conceptual seems the word, in a case like the Mishima half-understanding. What was missing to me, in the effort to see the universal validity in the argument of Spring Snow, was being invested in Japanese culture from childhood on. Where would such a recognition as this—which one would have to imagine trumping linguistic skill wherever the globe’s texts force themselves beyond regional attention—leave the postulate of the literary universal? It would leave it face-to-face with the challenge of true universality. That is, the text of universal portée would need to go beyond what Mishima achieves—beyond what Fromentin achieves in Dominique or Francois Mauriac in Le Noeud de Vipères, two brilliant but historical local texts spawned by intimacies of French provincial Catholic sensibility; beyond what Walter Pater in The Renaissance or Aldous Huxley in Point Counterpoint salvage from the late-nineteenth-century



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aestheticism of an English settling for sun on the leaves—and would need to reach, if we wish our examples to be Asian, to stay on course, to keep the universal pulse. Of all of the above examples, if I am not mistaken, it would be possible to say that if one approached from, say, the seeing standpoint of a contemporary reader in America, precisely what mattered most in these texts—the narcissistic curvature over the soul’s private cooking pot—would be the hardest to disengage, and only a template like The Catcher in the Rye around even to suggest the lost world of aesthetic privacy. The universal would have slipped through our hands. It is in a micro-perspective like this that we note the steel in the demand for true universality in the literary text—in the Odyssey or Leaves of Grass or For Whom the Bell Tolls. Other arts make their own game rules, permitting a select quarry of realized inspirations, Michelangelo’s David, the Parthenon, the Razumovsky quartets to set the standards for their revered sensibility. The canonical ascriptions, to which the stub just listed might serve as introduction, would prove supremely invidious in a better time than this, while today they would seem to fly in the face of the cutting edge of our time. …wie wir’s dann zuletzt so herrlich weit gebracht! And yet the test of time, which brought blood and tears and “bon sens” to the formation of a canon in the arts, may have its own reason. Respect for historical investment? Let the dead bury their dead! We move across a globe where the webwork of ancestral presence is as vulnerable as the ozone layer, and through rents in which every toxin can pass. We forget how recently it seemed clear, to many who made much of our second millennium both lively and stable, that the past is the feeding trough of the present. I note this without coveting a neck descriptor reading laudator temporis acti, and without opting out on a new globus crammed with self-improvement devices, from wi fi through international communitarianism to breast cancer “breakthroughs”, though also, just to keep the record straight, without opting in a bravo to these “forward moves”, so many of which have been rendered mandatory by the selfmutilation of an otherwise human species. No laudatory neck tags, please. Simply a plea—do you hear it, Gayatri?—for a realistic assessment of where we have come in time, on the planet. I don’t doubt that somewhere in India, somewhere in Jerusalem, somewhere in Ghana sits my counterpart this morning, saying to a keyboard his/her version of what I am saying to mine: in the classics of my tradition—in the Bhagavad Gita, in the Mishnah, in Sundiata—I have tracks of the wisdom of my culture, beacon absolutes to shoot for in behavior, writing, art; I am where my GPS starts, not a centimeter to right or left. Platonism? It is theirs and valuable to them, and I can read about it



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and raid it for what I can get. Fair fame. But it’s theirs, not mine. Of course I hear this dialogue, because it is me, too. The entire preceding text has been in some sense a Vaihinger-type what-if argument, spun out as an hypothesis, one way among many of mapping the world. Confiteor. How could that not be an accurate analysis, given the relation between language and “belief”? Language has a profile of its own, tangentially rooted in need and behavior, in the Neolithic vegetative we all live, and that profile generates images of paradise lost, paradise tweaked as foregoing generations have characterized it. No there is not, certainly, anything unique to the paradise being recreated in the argument of the present text, and yet that argument is not about to wash away its self-identity, for the sake of a polite nod to the pluralism of our time. I am greeting my friends in India, Jerusalem, and Ghana with the hope that their ways and mine have an omega point, and intersect in a singularity of value. Our common Neolithic, plus our common conative, as consumers behind the phenomena—“savers of the phenomena”—suggests that we are not isolated workers, but know to a point. It is to my version of that point, a version including the backsweat of the Classical, that I look in this book of local values.



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49 THE SEARCH FOR MEANING

How local can hardly be overstated. Values cooked to perfection in a senescent corner of the Great World. Paradises have been re-establishing themselves from this corner for decades—count those decades in coffee spoons and backsweat, yes the Classical—putting the author up for rehab and remake, eyeing him like a new stallion, dumping him like an ex-lover. It seems to him, in a sense, that his unknown writing and righting project has been about finding his name. In many cultures, for ages, naming has been a decision fraught with the attention of the culture. Some names (in some countries) are today forbidden—in such countries as Iceland, the United States, and China, where distinctive rules exclude certain names; in orthodox Muslim practice, where names associated proprietarily with Allah are not allowed. Some names are simply withheld, while their owners seek them under pseudonyms. The present author has for many decades been turning in circles, darting this way and that following this or that half-light of truth, imagining always that behind the ignis seemingly fatuus there lies a light source across the marsh; that the glow comes thence, that his name belongs in the groves of light in the undisclosed radiance. Through a web of texts—lyric and dramatic poems, three novels, arguably seven bona fide autobiographies, several books—they are called criticism—about how literature feeds, and feeds from, the self—books of travel observation and labor characterization—records of trips in language through places, from Baja California to Nouakchott, in which the GPS shifts pulls and punches the heat-seeking I—down this alleyway of cultural history, then that, but forever lured back to a silence in which he inquires who wrote him—through this thicket of addresses to his own source he appeals for a profile of the forms that made him. It is his longing, of course, that from this quest he would be relieved of the burden of being here on the ground level. It is also an irresistible thought that like his questing contemporaries at diverse points around the globe, he might make his way to an orbiting stand on which our other figures join us as one in the meaning we reach for.



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50 MIDLIFE FICTIONS

The three novels—or essays, or thought embodiments—of The Male’s Midlife Rite of Passage see the author giving himself up—je sème a tout vent—to whatever architecture of being will concur in meaning him. Each of the three novels shreds off the DNA strand at a different, but related, point: in Adventure in Algiers, Charles Morot is strolling down the street in downtown Algiers, when he is smashed into by a two-person bolus, a woman being snatched by a hostage-taker who has leaped from a passing vehicle, and who heaves both Morot and the lady into the car, leaping in himself while the driver shoots off like greased lightning; in The Poppy Web, Hayes Straglund is beach camping in a quiet Peloponnesian cove— on a self-promised return to the Greece he had once known well—when he is caught up as an involuntary witness of a drug transaction, bundled and drugged to keep him quiet, and once again transported into the wilderness of himself, this time located in Bulgaria and Detroit, not southern Algeria, and written by history; in The Disparition, a third version of the professor in retired mode, Alfred is robbed of his laptop, which contains enough of his life to seem worth chasing around some of the world, and, as it turns out in the end, worth in the end evanescing, like the self-fissuring Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita, into the bodiless awareness of himself. The challenge of raising this sequence of narrative peel-offs into more than obscure self-therapy lay in finding what in them participated in the forms, saved the phenomena, and did not simply become new phenomena. This was a tall order for prose fiction which was built out of happenstance and passivity—like the Divine Comedy—and told to keep walking until its protagonist was translated. It was necessary for Straglund’s career as hostage, Charles’ as forcibly addicted hostage, and Alfred’s as embodied quest to become one again with the documents that were their history— each profile should so sharply self-stamp as homo viator as to become the reflection of itself—and in that way to capture what lasts in what is passing. The career of the self in words finds in the novel the seduction of repeating the world, of basking in human curiosity, but, within the



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curiosities aroused and displayed, of finding the entity profiles that stall in the sky and form constellations. As a critic, the present author meets soul as constellation in the presence of self to self. The DNA of selfhood— watch it parade itself down the aisle at the supermarket, at mass, at the football game—the carved profile of the individual, the one who cannot be divided, who does not separate when body and mind go, that is the reservoir character drinks from as it ascends to its inner form, and—were the work so good!—becomes the lasting face of Charles, Alfred, or Hayes. Were a theologian to intrude, the talk would turn to soul, which to the author now seems a useful addition to the discussion, filling a space left empty after body and mind have done their brilliant but narrow work. The character, to wit that jovial/tragic Falstaff, to whom we earlier imputed the power of the concrete universal, would, had the materials of him been sufficiently appreciated by the present author, become the stuff of which Hayes, Alfred, and Charles would have been made. That less than that was achieved will have resulted, the author guesses, not from the fact that he did not “study writing,” but from the fact that he is not sufficiently at his own disposal to free up a motherless child in language. The literary universal, as we come finally around to saying, is derived from art, but at the point where a life of sufficient fullness tips over into its mirror enrichment. Plot, of course, mattered more to Aristotle’s poetic than did character, and that for the reason that the plot is the backbone of the tragic drama— as it is of the mass, for which form history had readied the Catholic Church, impacted as it was with a memory to preserve. The plots set loose from the three interventions, that generate the three midlife peel-offs in question here, gathered the dynamic of their protagonists, and tracked them into mini-documents whose end aspired only to be the clearer statement of their beginnings. Charles Morot, Helene, and a voluminous trip through the desert, studded with efforts at escape and love, disperse in the end as in shrapnel fragments: …the Sahara is of huge relative magnitude, and exercises moral authority. It is the ultimate actor in a tale like ours, casting hostages, hostage-takers, political figures, traditionalist nomads into the shadow of its greatness. Against the silent backdrop of that desert intimacies are deepened, anxieties sharpened, conflicts hardened to steel. The human comedy is seen for what it is, unblinkingly beautiful, finally empty.

Hayes Straglund, once heroin-addicted and bundled off to Bulgaria under traffickers’ control, crosses his own Sahara, eros and terror impacted, returns to the Detroit campus on which he has hitherto contained



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the passion of life, only to be cut down, on a busy street, by a hail of fire from a drug war explosion with which he has no connection except fellow occupancy of the planet. The human comedy is seen for what it is, unblinkingly beautiful, finally empty. Alfred Fisherson, who has been taken from himself by an afternoon laptop theft, pursues his identity from one corner to another of the world, eventually murdering the man most responsible for undermining Alfred’s presence to life, going to prison but while there moving in and out of the Arjuna awareness—being present to one’s life while at the same time holding oneself apart from it—until he eventually…evanesces… His inner part, growingly at home in the spaceless presence of immateriality, had outdistanced his corpus. It was that corpus, withdrawn to thin perceptions, that lay on the prison bed, invisible this morning to Ideo…Alfred had taken residence in his soul…it was the inward principle turned into the strength principle, and it was carving the new face of god out of the day.

Each of these plots does with its generating protagonist what that specter has authorized, and is as potent as the self-unpeeling of its maker, the author. It is in the inner logic of these fictives, that only the third text transmutes its protagonist while insisting that his dwindled identity is but the fitting conclusion to the Arjuna stance.



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51 THE GONCOURT PAR EXCELLENCE!

The moves of self, to make fictions of self, are choices within the wide country of language, which creates us. To those—and today we are all writers, or are dumbed—who would mutate into universals, signs encoded for all languages and all times—the testimonials we write, to those who have truly entered that region of art value—and we started with Emily Dickinson—are flags of self-encouragement, and hurdles of reality. There will be no first prize for the Goncourt or Booker playing out in the frontal lobes of assorted imaginatives in one corner or another, nor will there be a court in which decisions are made concerning, say, the outcome of the initial experiment in this book, to determine whether the cool center within Emily Dickinson’s poetry can read off internationally in a time of conflict. In other words we have inadequate measuring equipment for the candidacies of texts or art works to the universal condition, and yet this limit on the ground is only a limit because we continue, in fact, to generate art of which it is reasonable to make the kind of critical judgments we encountered many pages ago from Sir Joshua Reynolds, or Samuel Johnson, or Winckelmann, when he wrote of the purest water at the center of the well. Doing societal good has its way of winning the lasting Booker or Goncourt or Prix Nobel. We know that. We have come together to recognize, even while inflicting the customary wreckage on one another, that we are a fractious global family with a species-specific interiority. Making the universal from within ourselves can at best mean rising through the impulses of art to make fragments of the felt intelligible, the mobile Platonic as we have put it, for the sharing. In the small Midwestern American town where the author lives there is the custom of leaving FREE items on curbside, for interested fellow citizens to pick up and take home. Sometimes these items just don’t meet one’s needs, although the temptation to take them is there. Sometimes these items do meet needs, to fill a space in the garden, to give as a baby stroller for the grandkids, and in those cases one is glad to open the trunk and drive home with the object. On rare occasions one finds the heart and soul of giving humanity, in the



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profiles of the FREE, and is swept up into the world of a soul that made. We go to Shakespeare and Hafiz and The Tale of Genji on such wonder, and having once been there return only reluctantly to the limited world of trash. For that is the thing about universal value, that once you have been there you are hard to please.