Horner's Corner

The Rebellion against Britain in the 1770s including the infamous ‘tea party’ was more about economics than ideals…

“Insurgencies are not movements for the faint of heart,” T. H. Breen writes, in “American Insurgents, American Patriots” (Hill & Wang; $27), a scholarly, unnerving account of the American Revolution’s darker side—the violence, death threats, false rumors, and extremist rhetoric that introduced a new political order. Breen suggests that Americans today “have come to regard insurgency as a foreign and unpleasant phenomenon” and are now so imperial in outlook that we’d rather not remember that American revolutionaries, too, were irrational and cruel. The implied comparison with the contemporary insurgencies of Iraq and Afghanistan is interesting, but over the past two years the history of America’s first insurgency has taken on a new pertinence, as the Tea Party movement has laid claim to its anti-tax and pro-liberty principles—and has inadvertently reproduced its penchant for conspiracy theory, misinformation, demagoguery, and even threats of violence. Furthermore, in much the way that journalists have begun to ask whether shadowy corporate interests may be sponsoring today’s Tea Party, historians have long speculated that merchants may have instigated early unrest to protect smuggling profits from British regulators—that the start of the Revolution may have been Astroturfed. Archer’s history focusses on the years 1768 to 1770, and Breen’s on 1774-75; Benjamin L. Carp’s assiduously researched “Defiance of the Patriots” (Yale; $30) tackles the 1773 Tea Party itself. Breen is not concerned with the revolutionaries’ financial motives, and Carp sometimes takes the rebels’ rhetoric at face value. Nonetheless, the three books together offer a chance to ask new questions about the American Revolution, including one that the conventions of political sentimentality usually render unspeakable: Was the Tea Party even such a good idea the first time around?

Read more via Principle, pragmatism and the American Revolution : The New Yorker.

When did English writers lose their ambition? Why is it that Ian McEwan,  Martin Amis and Julian Barnes are regarded as leading lights of the contemporary novel? They, and their like, fill the review pages of the ‘quality’ newspapers every week. Yet their archness, fear of emotion and avoidance of experiment leave them as mere purveyors of bourgeois comfort food. They are raised middlebrow: middle brow fiction that gets treated as if it were high art.

Middlebrow, says Wikipedia is a term for ‘forced and ineffective attempt at cultural and intellectual achievement, as well as characterizing literature that emphasizes emotional and sentimental connections rather than literary quality and innovation’. Of course,  Amis & co publish  novels about ‘important’ and ‘significant’ things: death, rites of passage, violence, and they are knowing and cynical, rather than sentimental in any obvious way. But they are a variety of middlebrow, middlebrow that gets taken seriously.

This is because they do what middlebrow has always done:  giving the reader what s/he wants, what won’t confuse or disturb, while simulating ‘literary quality and achievement’. What the  reader seems to want just now is  fast paced narrative larded with semi digested popular science, (McEwan), an authorial voice that never lets itself go and is never surprised by anything real, such as emotion (Barnes), fast moving yet erudite sex ‘n’ violence, US style, (Amis). And then there are the Justin Cartwrights and Hilary Mantels reinventing the historical novel, and practically every bloody Booker prize winner since the 70s (the theatre has this kind of thing too: think of the way Tom Stoppard flatters his audience’s intelligence).

The  overvaluation of this stuff as art it what gives me a pain. and it  seems to be a peculiar problem from anglophone, and especially English lit right now.

But what’s wrong if people like this sort of thing? If this is what the reader wants, why not give it to them?

Imagine this: suppose an artist (or better, a large and influential mass of artists) were still painting in broadly the styles inspired by Constable, or Gainsborough, but in 2010. Would anything be wrong with this? well, on one level, obviously not: no one is gets hurt by an oil painting; lots of people like pictures of haywains. In music, suppose composers just wrote pieces essentially in the style of the classicists, Beethoven etc. Same point: we all like a good tune, after all.

Well my objection is that the average ‘well made’ novel (or film see: Merchant Ivory)  is like that: perfectly fine for what it is, of course, but from another perspective, aesthetically sterile. To be clear: this complaint is about form and content: it isn’t about gloomy subjects. I’m not saying Beckett is better than Barnes because the former is ‘about’ ageing or death and the other isn’t. Barnes does death too. And there can be joy, ecstasy or whatever in a modernist art (see Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Henry Green, Saramago (and Beckett!) etc or in painting Mondrian, Klee Matisse, Cy Twonbly etc).

Perhaps there is nothing new in this: easy art gets an audience; the difficult stuff has to wait until it has created the taste by which it is to judged. After all, Herman Melville lost readers because he stopped giving them easy fare. Only later was he seen to be doing something wonderful through his ”difficult” novel about a White Whale (which even now most college educated readers I know won’t tackle). I am depressed though, by the lack of interest shown by most critics for anything beyond this, the only exceptions that coming to mind being James Wood and Gabriel Josipovici (do read the latter’s wonderful Whatever Happened to Modernism?)

What sells has usually been unchallenging, and there will always be a market for middlebrow (it’s the sales of that stuff, arguably, that make the harder stuff economically viable). But art should be about more than just churning out what sells, and it’s the way in which critics and reviewers (not always the same thing) have lost the ability or the will to tell the difference which has led to the current literary super stardom of the Amis-Barnes-McEwan cabal. This doesn’t  happen to such a degree in the other arts: whatever the debates may be about the value of the candidates for the Tate prize art critics don’t confuse what they are trying to do with what Jack Vettriano produces.

The Raised Middlebrow Novel  dominates the review pages of the qualities – naturally it does, I suppose.  This is the sort of writing in which the prose reports the events, whether those of the ‘outside’ world, or the inner thoughts of a character, untouched by problems of representation or knowing. Even when it gestures in that direction it remains timid, smug and pleased with itself. It certainly  “does” Gulags, global warming, mid life crises, etc . Middlebrow art groans under the weight of the Serious and Significant.  But: It’s pretty dead, dude. Why do so few critics acknowledge this in print?

If this is what ‘literary fiction’ is supposed to be now I’d rather read genre fiction that doesn’t give itself airs, or non fiction that at least leaves me knowing more at the end than I did when I picked up the book.

Why be against simple enjoyment? I’m not. But middlebrow novels, raised or not, (and the same in  art, music and film)  that pretend to be ‘about’ something, consumed in quantities,   actually helps to contribute  to the deadening of life. Like any pap, too much is bad for the adult digestion. But who will supply the roughage?

This is an interesting article from the NY Times by Sean Kelly. I am not sure I ‘buy it’ entirely, as it seems to me to repeat a problematical American pragmatism that I at least find it difficult to accept. But it is a well written and thought provoking piece -see what you think. Thanks to Emrys Westacott for alerting me to it -CH

“Nihilism stands at the door,” wrote Nietzsche.  “Whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?”  The year was 1885 or 1886, and Nietzsche was writing in a notebook whose contents were not intended for publication.  The discussion of nihilism ─ the sense that it is no longer obvious what our most fundamental commitments are, or what matters in a life of distinction and worth, the sense that the world is an abyss of meaning rather than its God-given preserve ─ finds no sustained treatment in the works that Nietzsche prepared for publication during his lifetime.  But a few years earlier, in 1882, the German philosopher had already published a possible answer to the question of nihilism’s ultimate source.  “God is dead,” Nietzsche wrote in a famous passage from “The Gay Science.”  “God remains dead. And we have killed him.”

There is much debate about the meaning of Nietzsche’s famous claim, and I will not attempt to settle that scholarly dispute here.  But at least one of the things that Nietzsche could have meant is that the social role that the Judeo-Christian God plays in our culture is radically different from the one he has traditionally played in prior epochs of the West.  For it used to be the case  in the European Middle Ages for example ─ that the mainstream of society was grounded so firmly in its Christian  beliefs that someone who did not share those beliefs could therefore not be taken seriously as living an even potentially admirable life.  Indeed, a life outside the Church was not only execrable but condemnable, and in certain periods of European history it invited a close encounter with a burning pyre.

Whatever role religion plays in our society today, it is not this one.  For today’s religious believers feel strong social pressure to admit that someone who doesn’t share their religious belief might nevertheless be living a life worthy of their admiration.  That is not to say that every religious believer accepts this constraint.  But to the extent that they do not, then society now rightly condemns them as dangerous religious fanatics rather than sanctioning them as scions of the Church or mosque.  God is dead, therefore, in a very particular sense.  He no longer plays his traditional social role of organizing us around a commitment to a single right way to live.  Nihilism is one state a culture may reach when it no longer has a unique and agreed upon social ground.

The 20th century saw an onslaught of literary depictions of the nihilistic state.  The story had both positive and negative sides.  On the positive end, when it is no longer clear in a culture what its most basic commitments are, when the structure of a worthwhile and well-lived life is no longer agreed upon and taken for granted, then a new sense of freedom may open up.  Ways of living life that had earlier been marginalized or demonized may now achieve recognition or even be held up and celebrated.  Social mobility ─ for African Americans, gays, women, workers, people with disabilities or others who had been held down by the traditional culture ─ may finally become a possibility.  The exploration and articulation of these new possibilities for living a life was found in such great 20^th-century figures as Martin Luther King, Jr., Simone de Beauvoir, Studs Terkel, and many others.

But there is a downside to the freedom of nihilism as well, and the people living in the culture may experience this in a variety of ways.  Without any clear and agreed upon sense for what to be aiming at in a life, people may experience the paralyzing type of indecision depicted by T.S. Eliot in his famously vacillating character Prufrock; or they may feel, like the characters in a Samuel Beckett play, as though they are continuously waiting for something to become clear in their lives before they can get on with living them; or they may feel the kind of “stomach level sadness” that David Foster Wallace described, a sadness that drives them to distract themselves by any number of entertainments, addictions, competitions, or arbitrary goals, each of which leaves them feeling emptier than the last.  The threat of nihilism is the threat that freedom from the constraint of agreed upon norms opens up new possibilities in the culture only through its fundamentally destabilizing force.

There may be parts of the culture where this destabilizing force is not felt.  The Times’s David Brooks argued recently for example, in a column discussing Jonathan Franzen’s novel “Freedom,” that Franzen’s depiction of America as a society of lost and fumbling souls tells us “more about America’s literary culture than about America itself.”  The suburban life full of “quiet desperation,” according to Brooks, is a literary trope that has taken on a life of its own.  It fails to recognize the happiness, and even fulfillment, that is found in the everyday engagements with religion, work, ethnic heritage, military service and any of the other pursuits in life that are “potentially lofty and ennobling”.

There is something right about Brooks’s observation, but he leaves the crucial question unasked.  Has Brooks’s happy, suburban life revealed a new kind of contentment, a happiness that is possible even after the death of God?  Or is the happy suburban world Brooks describes simply self-deceived in its happiness, failing to face up to the effects of the destabilizing force that Franzen and his literary compatriots feel? I won’t pretend to claim which of these options actually prevails in the suburbs today, but let me try at least to lay them out.

Consider the options in reverse order.  To begin with, perhaps the writers and poets whom Brooks questions have actually noticed something that the rest of us are ignoring or covering up.  This is what Nietzsche himself thought.  “I have come too early,” he wrote.  “God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.”  On this account there really is no agreement in the culture about what constitutes a well-lived life; God is dead in this particular sense.  But many people carry on in God’s shadow nevertheless; they take the life at which they are aiming to be one that is justifiable universally.  In this case the happiness that Brooks identifies in the suburbs is not genuine happiness but self-deceit.

What would such a self-deceiving life look like?  It would be a matter not only of finding meaning in one’s everyday engagements, but of clinging to the meanings those engagements offer as if they were universal and absolute.   Take the case of religion, for example.  One can imagine a happy suburban member of a religious congregation who, in addition to finding fulfillment for herself in her lofty and ennobling religious pursuits, experiences the aspiration to this kind of fulfillment as one demanded of all other human beings as well.  Indeed, one can imagine that the kind of fulfillment she experiences through her own religious commitments depends upon her experiencing those commitments as universal, and therefore depends upon her experiencing those people not living in the fold of her church as somehow living depleted or unfulfilled lives.  I suppose this is not an impossible case.  But if this is the kind of fulfillment one achieves through one’s happy suburban religious pursuit, then in our culture today it is self-deception at best and fanaticism at worst.  For it stands in constant tension with the demand in the culture to recognize that those who don’t share your religious commitments might nevertheless be living admirable lives.  There is therefore a kind of happiness in a suburban life like this.  But its continuation depends upon deceiving oneself about the role that any kind of religious commitment can now play in grounding the meanings for a life.

But there is another option available.  Perhaps Nietzsche was wrong about how long it would take for the news of God’s death to reach the ears of men.  Perhaps he was wrong, in other words, about how long it would take before the happiness to which we can imagine aspiring would no longer need to aim at universal validity in order for us to feel satisfied by it.  In this case the happiness of the suburbs would be consistent with the death of God, but it would be a radically different kind of happiness from that which the Judeo-Christian epoch of Western history sustained.

Herman Melville seems to have articulated and hoped for this kind of possibility.  Writing 30 years before Nietzsche, in his great novel “Moby Dick,” the canonical American author encourages us to “lower the conceit of attainable felicity”; to find happiness and meaning, in other words, not in some universal religious account of the order of the universe that holds for everyone at all times, but rather in the local and small-scale commitments that animate a life well-lived.  The meaning that one finds in a life dedicated to “the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country,” these are genuine meanings.  They are, in other words, completely sufficient to hold off the threat of nihilism, the threat that life will dissolve into a sequence of meaningless events.  But they are nothing like the kind of universal meanings for which the monotheistic tradition of Christianity had hoped.  Indeed, when taken up in the appropriate way, the commitments that animate the meanings in one person’s life ─ to family, say, or work, or country, or even local religious community ─ become completely consistent with the possibility that someone else with radically different commitments might nevertheless be living in a way that deserves one’s admiration.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The new possibility that Melville hoped for, therefore, is a life that steers happily between two dangers:  the monotheistic aspiration to universal validity, which leads to a culture of fanaticism and self-deceit, and the atheistic descent into nihilism, which leads to a culture of purposelessness and angst.  To give a name to Melville’s new possibility — a name with an appropriately rich range of historical resonances — we could call it polytheism.  Not every life is worth living from the polytheistic point of view — there are lots of lives that don’t inspire one’s admiration.  But there are nevertheless many different lives of worth, and there is no single principle or source or meaning in virtue of which one properly admires them all.

Melville himself seems to have recognized that the presence of many gods — many distinct and incommensurate good ways of life — was a possibility our own American culture could and should be aiming at.  The death of God therefore, in Melville’s inspiring picture, leads not to a culture overtaken by meaninglessness but to a culture directed by a rich sense for many new possible and incommensurate meanings.  Such a nation would have to be “highly cultured and poetical,” according to Melville.  It would have to take seriously, in other words, its sense of itself as having grown out of a rich history that needs to be preserved and celebrated, but also a history that needs to be re-appropriated for an even richer future.  Indeed, Melville’s own novel could be the founding text for such a culture.  Though the details of that story will have to wait for another day, I can at least leave you with Melville’s own cryptic, but inspirational comment on this possibility.  “If hereafter any highly cultured, poetical nation,” he writes:

 

 

Shall lure back to their birthright, the merry May-day gods of old; and livingly enthrone them again in the now egotistical sky; on the now unhaunted hill; then be sure, exalted to Jove’s high seat, the great Sperm Whale shall lord it.

Navigating Past Nihilism – NYTimes.com.