Comments (restored) on Orhan Pamuk’s "Silent House" by Daniel Melnick

 The voices of our parents and grandparents do not cease haunting us, for their distant singing or remembered cries can continue to fill our inner ear. Coming to terms with that intense chorus is a task taken up in the multi-generational novel, and a brilliant example is Turkish Nobel-prize winner Orhan Pamuk’s Silent House, which wonderfully captures the multiple voices of three generations – turbulent youth, burdened middle-age, and the wizened old.

The voices of six main characters narrate alternate chapters in the beautifully structured counterpoint of this novel (akin to the structure of modern novels by Virginia Woolf or William Faulkner). This work is the second of Pamuk’s ten books but is only now translated. The novel’s characters are members of a fading bourgeois Turkish family. It is the summer of 1980, when deadly clashes between fascist and communist paramilitary groups flared in Turkey; the novel explores the forces in Turkish society which cause such violence and yield  the military coup at the end of 1980.

The youngest of Pamuk’s six narrators is Hasan, a confused, resentful teenaged cousin who rages against society and belongs to a fascist youth group. He acts out in ways which violently affect his well-off cousins and propel him toward a menacing destiny in Istanbul. “All our country’s sorrows,” he ends by saying, “are on account of some bastards who just enjoy playing with us, but one day I’m going to make fun out of their games. I don’t know yet what it is that I’m going to do, but…Watch out for me from now on!” (324-5)

The family which cousin Hasan’s actions tragically affect is made up of a leftist sister – Nilgun, a lovely college student – and her two brothers (one is a teenager, and the other is an alcoholic historian in his thirties, who plays a role at the start of Pamuk’s third novel, The White Hotel). The rest of this enmeshed family consists of the aged grandmother, Fatma, and her perceptive, compassionate housekeeper, a dwarf, who is the illegitimate son of the late grandfather yet “tries to take care of everybody.” (305)  The three grandchildren are visiting their grandmother’s home, which has served them since childhood as an alluring, summer beach house near Istanbul.

Fatma, ninety and frail, is vigilant about behavior in her household yet unable even to know what happens there. Feeling trapped at night in the upstairs bedroom of the silent house, she thinks often of death and especially about her deceased husband, a bitterly disappointed intellectual who never completed his enlightened skeptic’s encyclopedia and whose starkly secular voice haunts her reveries and much of the novel: “we all sink into Nothingness, Fatma;…you decay down to the last strand of hair, with no right even to hope of coming back again.” (297)

At the core of this novel’s power are the moments of existential self-confrontation experienced by the six vivid narrating characters, and particularly by Fatma, who is haunted by her late husband – this cranky, nearly voiceless old woman to whom Pamuk gives a voice. Analyzed almost unto death by her late husband, she feels her interior life spill helplessly out of her, enraged and excoriated: “it’s as though my outside has become my inside and my inside my outside, and in the dark I can’t figure out which one I am.” (331)

The grandchild who most shares Fatma’s alarmed self-awareness is the historian in his thirties, Faruk. And his crisis arises partly from his doubt about writing history. He has come to see the writing of history as pure storytelling, in his time and place in Turkey and not only there (for, of course, corrupting deception and self-deception exist not only in Asia Minor). Faruk’s self-consciousness about what he does is shared by Pamuk himself, and the works of this great novelist – for example, My Name Is Red and Snow – become increasingly ambitious in content and narrative experiment. These wonderful novels are invariably filled with moving characters like Fatma, Faruk, and even dangerous Hasan, who struggle to fabricate their identities in the midst of a collapsing society and, so, to “make sense of the world by means of tales.” (165)

Healing Light Illuminates John Banville's New Novel

A review of mine appeared in The Plain Dealer this Sunday, October 28; here's the link to that review posted on the paper’s website: http://www.cleveland.com/books/index.ssf/2012/11/john_banville_makes_ancient_li.html#incart_flyout_entertainment
My post here offers my fuller, original thoughts at about twice the length of the edited version appearing in the newspaper:

A Healing Light Illuminates John Banville’s New Novel Ancient Light.

Alex Cleave has turned sixty-five, an age when the siren song of memory can call with particular urgency. It is a memory of adolescence that fills the character’s mind in this brilliant new novel by award-winning Irish writer John Banville. During the summer Alex was fifteen, his best friend’s mother – Mrs. Gray – seduced him.

The extremity of the subject is complicated in John Banville’s new novel by telling the story from Alex’s doubly unreliable point of view, reflecting both the adolescent’s unsteady initiation into sex and the aging man’s searching yet nostalgic memories of youth.

After young Alex’s first encounter with Mrs. Gray, “the April day that I stepped out into was, of course, transfigured, was all flush and shiver and skimming light, in contrast to the sluggishness of my sated state.” The singing lyricism of memory is shadowed here by irony (“of course”). The disturbing yet compelling beauty of the novel is that it balances luminous prose with a darkly realistic sense of life’s fragilities and fatalities.

In the novel, a series of deaths confront Alex Cleave, including the “decade-long grief” resulting from the tragic and mysterious suicide of his adult daughter, Cass. His grief floods his consciousness, just as it haunts his wife Lydia, yet Alex also manages partly in defense to immerse himself in memories of his adolescent tryst with Mrs. Gray.

Ancient Light – Banville’s latest work after The Infinities, the Booker Prize winning The Sea, and the dark Benjamin Black mysteries – contains many flashes of comedy. Alex Cleave is a stage actor toward the end of his career (he had a disastrous on-stage breakdown ten years before; that experience and the discovery of his daughter’s suicide are narrated in Banville’s earlier novel Eclipse from 2001). To his delight, he has been offered a film role, in a docudrama, playing opposite the beautiful young star Dawn Devonport, “grave and grey-eyed, sweetly sad, omnivorously erotic.”

The mature Alex Cleave is as capable of delight as of profound self-criticism and is the source of the novel’s probing, humane comedy. Compassionate and ironically apologetic, Alex is always as open to life as he is alert to death’s power.

The role he plays in his film is that of the aging and corrupt academic Axel Vander. Even as Dawn, the young star, is seduced by him, she exposes him as a fake, an “old monster” with a fascist past and a false identity. (Vander is the subject of Banville’s Shroud from 2003; he is reminiscent of the disgraced literary theorist, the late Paul de Man.)

Ancient Light is, in any case, an independent work. Its tragicomic power arises from the collision between its plots – the headlong rush of Alex’s often bawdy evocation of being seduced as an adolescent by an older woman versus the developing possibility that the aging Alex may attempt to seduce the young actress. To do so would create a dangerous off-screen echo of their on-screen plot, and such a scenario would also be an inverted repetition of what happened to Alex at fifteen.

Even, as it happens, an incestuous repetition: Alex’s memories of his late daughter continually impinge on his meetings with Dawn, and in one of the novel’s sinister parallels the actress attempts suicide, echoing the daughter Cass’s suicide. Feeling himself become more and more “a thing of fragments,” Alex finds the example of Vander’s rapaciousness almost “overtaking” him. Then, an even more sinister parallel involves the suggestion that Cass was driven to suicide ten years before by the monstrous Axel Vander, whom Alex Cleave plays in the film.

Late in the novel, Alex writes, “But what, you will be asking, what happened” between him and Dawn? In unexpected ways, Alex holds his own against the looming tragic possibilities of the plot; he manages to refuse the pressure to descend to the lowest level or to act out the most destructive roles.

If we were to subtract Alex’s probing, mordant, and humane voice from the novel, the multiple parallels in its plotting could resemble a rather ornate maze, and Banville’s lush prose can verge on the overwritten, that of a “chap who writes like Walter Pater in a delirium.” The words are Alex’s about the screenwriter of the film he is in – known as JB.  Part of the comedy of John Banville’s novel, with its moments of intentional self-parody, is that it includes a self-mocking portrait of the novelist. And it is testimony to how fine a character Alex is that Banville’s surrogate JB remarkably befriends him toward the end of the novel; they are to go to California to attend an Axel Vander conference together.

By the ending of this brilliant novel, Alex discovers that he “was mistaken about everything,” above all about Mrs. Gray, and the plot reversals involving her are as stunning and moving as those in Julian Barnes’ recent The Sense of An Ending. Alex is a wonderfully living character, who honors the elegiac wisdom of Ancient Light, the light from the past, and it is that contingent, fragile, yet healing light which illuminates Banville’s tragicomic new novel: “all my dead are all alive to me, for whom the past is a luminous and everlasting present; alive to me yet lost, except in the frail afterworld of these words.”

an essay on "responsibility" by Adam Thurschwell

Adam Thurschwell was a wonderful member of our Cleveland reading group for some years in the late 1990s and 2000s, before moving to Washington D.C. His extraordinary contributions are evident from what his brilliant essays offer – for example, one on Derrida and law, or the fine essay entitled “Cutting the Branches for Akiba – Agamben’s critique of Derrida.”

I’ll not attempt to summarize the essay – or its response to Agamben’s use of the Haggadah’s Talmudic parable about Rabbi Akiba, who succeeds in contemplating the transcendent whole, in contrast to Aher, who analytically isolates the separate qualities of the whole, thus “cutting the branches for Akiba.”

Instead, I’ll just mention some of what I found particularly stimulating about the larger themes at work in Adam’s essay.

The potential to achieve the highest meanings can be thwarted by isolating and separating meaning into the constituent parts that can be communicated – that can be said. As a result, “saying” the separate parts can “occlude” that larger potential to posit and sustain transcendent meaning, what can be termed “sayability.”

In a sense, Akiba’s attainment of the embrace of transcendent wholeness is an example of the Paradisal state Walter Benjamin identifies in the Edenic Adam’s naming of the contents of the world, a state of being in which the name and the named, the word and the thing, sustain an organic connection and embody a transcendent meaning, proclaiming an ideal world where the symbol conjures up the spirit, where to say is to be.

We live in a world in which that organic connection is broken, in which the edifice of power and of images is fractured in a wide range of ways. Allegory replaces symbol and is a symptom of the break, embodying a recognition of that breakdown of connection between language and reality or sign and signified, “leaving language in an arbitrary and ‘autonomous’ relationship to reference” (page 177 in Adam’s essay).

What sort of ethics can emerge in the face of the broken connections? Here’s a rough summary of the logic Adam Thurschwell presents (though all distortions in this representation of his pages 192-6 of his essay are mine alone):

There is the ethical challenge to identify the showing forth of transcendent possibilities as if through cracks in the edifice of speech and acts, of the here and now. Derrida’s exploration of Benjamin’s thinking explores this challenge to resurrect the broken, abandoned, discarded hopes of human beings – what Benjamin calls a second order of messianic possibilities.

Yet the search through the perpetually collapsing edifice can be misguided. Another possibility is to call for an end to it, a sort of death of law, the state, and history itself – to follow Agamben in comprehending death as an opening-up or unfolding of being, “an eschatological ontology.” But even for Agamben, a sort of messianic ethics can apply in “the time that remains” before the end of history.

Agamben finally builds on the ideas of Benjamin and Derrida (and finally also Levinas) by developing the notion of “responsibility” – almost in the sense of ‘responsability’ or the ability to respond, and the obligation. For responsibility is presupposed by the urgency even of posing a question, of speaking itself, of saying. Language itself emerges finally from the ability and necessity to respond. Such at least is the hope.

Beethoven xiv: Adorno on Beethoven iii (revised) - the late works

In approaching Beethoven’s late works, Theodor Adorno in his Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music (pages 90-111) earlier explores “the renunciation of symphonic mastery" even in the Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral (1808-9) or in the Archduke Trio, opus 97 (begun in 1810) and in the last Violin-Piano Sonata, opus 96 (1812). This loosening of the grip of sonata structure – of conflict and resolution – occurs in works which are contemporaneous with the great sonata-form works Beethoven composed in his late thirties and early forties (for example, the Fifth Symphony, finished in 1807 and revised in 1809, and the Seventh Symphony from 1811-12). In contrast to the Appassionata’s first-movement struggle against the recapitulation, the Archduke Trio contains an “unobtrusive recapitulation.” Characteristic of this alternative version of the sonata form is a sort of “smiling play” which is “reticent and not triumphal” – in the Pastoral Symphony, for example, we hear a sort of “dillydallying as utopia,” “setting time free.” In such moments “of stand-still: here the memory of the human survives, that all reification is not quite serious, that the spell [of domination] can be suspended and we can be called back to the human.”

The spell of domination, as I tried to show in my previous post, is located by Adorno in the mechanistic “autocracy of the recapitulation” but also in the occasional moments of “ostentation…intended to present something magnificent [but] remaining simply empty” (75-79). Adorno is by no means referring to the cohesive intensity of the Appassionata, with its moments of violence as it drives sonata form into extremity. Rather he is identifying an opposed tendency when Beethoven’s music “takes on something brutal, Germanic, triumphalist” – not merely in Wellington’s Victory but even in the Piano Sonata, opus 31 #1, which is almost a parody illustrating “the entanglement of lucidity with pomp.”

Beethoven’s late works “show how it is possible for art to divest itself of the ‘self-deception’ of totality,” of such dominance (80). These great works were written in his late forties and his fifties – from 1817 to 1827, during the last ten years of his life. This achievement is the focus of the final seventy pages of Adorno’s book (pages 123-193). The first four pages reproduce “Beethoven’s Late Style” from Adorno’s Moments Musicaux, (pages 123-126), and the opening sentences are not infrequently quoted: “The maturity of the late works of important artists is not like the ripeness of fruit. As a rule, these works are not well rounded, but wrinkled, even fissured…They lack all that harmony which the classicist aesthetic is accustomed to demand from the work of art.” The reprinted essay’s few pages offer a brilliantly compressed account of Beethoven’s own late aesthetic, accounting for the insertion of conventional formulas and phrases into the late sonatas and quartets – the decorative trills, cadences, the improvisatory embellishing fiorituras, abrupt breaks, sudden crescendos and diminuendos, the octave unisons of empty phrases, then passages of baroque polyphony, etc.  As we listen to these effects in the last sonatas, the Diabelli Variations, and the late quartets, the question Adorno poses is why these “conventions are made visible in their unconcealed, untransformed bareness.”

“Conventions are split off” in “fissures, rifts, and fragments,” in response to the fact that the purposeful subjectivity of unfolding Appassionata-like sonata structures “breaks away” or has broken down. All the often antique conventional effects – “as splinters, derelict and abandoned – finally themselves become expression…no longer of the isolated ego but of the mythical nature of the creative and its fall.” In this way, conventions and antique phrases become “expression in the naked depiction of themselves” – become emancipated: “To liberate these phrases from the illusion of subjective control, the emancipated phrase speaks for itself.”

Beethoven’s late works, Adorno writes, “still remain a process, but not as a development” like the middle-period sonata forms; the “process” of the late sonatas and quartets “is an ignition between extremes.” Extremes are forced together within the moment, where “the empty phrase is set in place as a monument to what has been – a monument in which subjectivity is petrified,” the now dying subjectivity of Beethoven’s past. The sudden “caesurae, however, the abrupt stops” are, however, moments of breaking free, for “the work falls silent as it is deserted, turning its hollowness outwards. Only then is the next fragment added, ordered to its place by escaping subjectivity,” the failing “light in which the fragmented landscape grows.” In his late creation of fragmented and juxtaposed phrases, Beethoven “as a dissociative force tears them apart in time, perhaps in order to preserve them for the eternal. In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes” (126).

In the pages that follow the above essay, Adorno’s notes (for those are what much of his book is comprised of) offer many, often fragmentary insights into the five late piano sonatas (opuses 101, 106, 109, 110, and 111), the Bagatelles for piano opus 126, and the late quartets (particularly opus 132 in A minor receives more sustained treatment). The Ninth symphony, finished in 1825, is criticized as a reversion to the middle period – a late work not in his late style. There are some brilliant comments on the late style’s sudden “harsh contrasts” between fugal effects and chord-like “simplicity,” its “splitting itself into monody and polyphony,” and the purity and depth of its commitment to such fragmentation of effect – clear for example in the wondrous shifts of effect in the great last piano sonata, opus 111 – classical music’s last great piano sonata, marking, as Adorno explained to Thomas Mann, the death of sonata form itself. This is Adorno’s key focus, then: “To be purely the matter itself, to be ‘classical’ without adjuncts, classicity bursts into fragments. This is one of the decisive tenets of my interpretation.” Here is a link to Stephen Kovacevich’s brilliant performance of op. 111; the slow Arietta begins at 8:35: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3E_amCDr77Q&feature=related.

Rather than detailing additional specific insights into the music (there will be another time and place for that part of my effort), I’ll conclude by mentioning two of Adorno’s more startling formulations. One is in response to Walter Benjamin’s conception of “the name,” of Adam’s task of naming in Genesis, as a form of prayer. Adorno sees Beethoven’s music as a similar process with a similar relationship to language (161-4). “Music saves the name as pure sound, but at the cost of separating it from things.” In enacting that separation, it conveys ultimately an awareness of death, of the self-awareness of the disappearance or “insignificance” of subjective individual experience. Music’s “gaze” may be on the human, but the art of music is “imageless:” like prayer, it is an “image of the imageless.” Later (on 176) Adorno likens imageless music’s “destruction of the particular,” of the relationship with the life of “things,” to the Talmudic prayer about the “grass angels:” “all perishes in the sacred fire.” And yet Adorno’s speculations paradoxically convey the power of prayer, aesthetic and secular as may be the hope embodied by Beethoven’s “demythologizing” late music (193). It is as if Adorno here seeks an art form that can withstand the terrible fire which consumed the period he survived of the Holocaust.

In the light of those speculations in extremis, the other extraordinary formulation I would mention speaks for itself (154): “In Beethoven, the spirit remains master of itself in experiences which are otherwise inevitably purchased with madness. These experiences, however, are not those of subjectivity but of language…Beethoven looks the bare language of music in the eye.”

Notes on the modern period - 20 - Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway

In my twenties, I found Woolf too ensconced in her class for her gifts to be fully accessible, though it was clear to me that those gifts were extraordinary – the sensitivity to how consciousness worked and the attunement to how language can evoke its rhythms and intensities. Then at a certain point in my life, there she was! I began to love Woolf’s novels for their depth of understanding and their wonderful language and structure. My writing, in its odd and lesser way, began to resonate with the appreciation of her work, and this was partly due to my undertaking at the age of forty to write the first of my novels; that will do it for one. The novel I began to draft then has finally become my new novella, Acts of Terror and Contrition: A Nuclear Fable.

In any case, here I want to try to suggest the basis of my admiration for Woolf. The novel of hers which I have read and taught most often is Mrs. Dalloway. Particularly in the various versions of my course on modernism, that work powerfully (and usefully) evokes several crucial concerns of the modern period: the nature of the stream of consciousness, the shock of the First World War, and the issue of “moments” of intense experience, of “being.” Woolf’s use of limited omniscience to focus, first, on the stream of Clarissa Dalloway’s consciousness renders the great range of her receptivity to existence – her sensitivity to the presence of death (evoked by the repetition of the Shakespearean song “Fear no more the heat of the sun” or by Big Ben tolling the hour, etc.) as well as her attunement to the flux and flow of life: “In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.” This is not Leopold Bloom’s Joycean free associative stream of consciousness, for Woolf has selected and rhythmically arrayed these phrases and perceptions (and often she uses other distancing controls, locutions like “one would think” employing the conditional and the impersonal pronoun), yet her characterization of Clarissa Dalloway does capture an affirmation akin to Bloom’s – a lyric upwelling of Clarissa’s sense of life as she simultaneously prepares to give her upper-class party and simultaneously resonates with memory, with her alertness to the proximity of death, and with the possibility of vivid, vital life.

“This moment in June” can stand for the primacy of momentaneous experience in this 1925 novel’s vision of modern existence. She has inherited Pater’s pre-modern aesthetic of the vital, hallowed “moment” and ushered it into modernity. Her great tragicomic novel renders the unfolding of intense moments of life and of death, of passion and of loss, as they struggle to endure after the Great War in the face of cultural mourning for death’s massive presence in “one’s” consciousness. Clarissa Dalloway’s “double” in this beautifully double-plotted novel is Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked veteran of the First World War. Septimus’ capacity to respond "normally," "to feel," has been exhausted – burned out of him – by the horror he has witnessed, above all by the death of a friend, Evans, a soldier blown to bits before his eyes. As a result, Smith lacks a protective layer insulating him from the forces and voices around him which would “scrape and rasp his spine.” Nevertheless, he responds to the interconnectedness of life, to the canopy of trees “quickened” to life or to the sounds of birds, which in his painfully distorted case chatter on in Greek. His struggling existence parallels Clarissa’s, often in shared imagery and language: her love of the canopy of trees at her childhood home, her terror at the forces which scrape and rasp her spine, or her incantation – like his – of “Fear no more.”

Septimus Smith is driven to suicide by his obtuse psychiatrists, who in the early 1920s make him feel that he is a freak who must be locked away for his failure to maintain “a sense of proportion.” Woolf’s censure of these doctors may well stem from her own experiences of their treatments, but more deeply, her horror at their inability to understand how to mourn, how to face tragic loss, is a signal feature of her modernist vision; it is conveyed in a quasi-omniscient sequence almost exactly in the middle of the novel: “But Proportion has a sister, less smiling, more formidable, a Goddess even now engaged – in the heat and sands of India, the mud and swamp of Africa, the purlieus of London.” Psychiatry’s occupation of the psyche becomes linked to Imperialism’s conquests. “Conversion is her name, and she feasts on the wills of the weakly, to impress, to impose, adoring her own features stamped on the face of the populace.” Again, in an echo between the double plots, Clarissa responds as follows to the efforts of a Dickensian-named, born-again Miss Kilman to convert her daughter: “Had [Clarissa] ever tried to convert any one herself? Did she not wish everybody merely to be themselves?...[L]ove and religion would destroy that, whatever it was, the privacy of the soul.”

In the climax of the novel, as Clarissa is made to hear about the suicide of the psychiatrist’s patient, she has a series of epiphanies. There is the moment of revelation when Sally Seton arrives at the party; when they were young women, she had given Clarissa the passionate “gift” of a kiss, and here she was now, “older, happier, less lovely,” talking about her “five enormous boys.” Earlier there had been the arrival of Peter Walsh, the man who had been passionate toward her in youth, and there is her realization that he is now, in his mid-fifties, perturbed and injured by life. Most important for Clarissa, though, is her hearing of Septimus throwing himself to his death: “her body went through it first…Up had flashed the rusty spikes. There he lay with a thud, thud, thud in his brain, and then a suffocation of blackness. So she saw it….He had flung it away. They went on living…they would grow old. A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter. This he had preserved. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate.”

In exploring what death communicates, Woolf is writing from the center of modernist vision. “There was an embrace in death” of all that had been negated by the “sense of proportion,” the “converted” self, and a moribund society. Septimus “made her feel the beauty; he made her feel the fun,” for his death stirred in her 'sympathetic imagination' (which is her "gift") all of the silenced possibilities for meaning obliterated by the spiritual death in Clarissa’s world: “the impossibility of reaching the center” – the “closeness” and “rapture.” Given the enormity of World War deaths, of what seemed the death throes of a civilization, all humans struggled to see how death could be understood beyond the chaos, bitter emptiness, and fear (“Fear no more the heat of the sun / Nor the furious winter’s rages”). Woolf’s novel shows us that the challenge of modernity is to imagine how death can function as a portal through which transfiguring knowledge can speak – how it can function as the sign of an autonomous new sense of being, bridging the torrent of death.

How Woolf imagines these possibilities needs more explanation than I’ve offered here, and in my next post I’ll try further to sketch her vision in the context of her ideas and of her other novels. Here's a link to the novel about Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith: Mrs Dalloway.

Notes on the Modern period - 12: Eliot's Purgatory

T. S. Eliot’s poetry traces one arc of the modern, a development from self-questioning aestheticism, through an often violent, experimental vision of the modern ‘wasteland,’ to a retrenchment or contraction of ambition – whether in adopting neoclassical forms, in focusing on ideological critique (either from the left or the right), or in performing a sort of purgation of the modern waste of spirit. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” exemplifies that retrenchment and contraction. (See Eliot's Four Quartets.)

I’ll concentrate here on “Little Gidding,” which was written at the start of the Nazi bombardment of England, 1940-41. This poem, like the other “Quartets,” speaks above all in the form of oxymoron, in paradoxes which continually take back any assertion of living vitality. In part I, the initial, sensuous image of “midwinter spring” (“Between melting and freezing / The soul’s sap quivers”) is framed by a continuous and stark taking-back: “with frost and fire, / The brief sun flames the ice… / In windless cold that is the heart’s heat.” Or “no wind, but Pentecostal fire / In the dark time of the year.” Trapped inside a sort of machine of negation, all the brilliant energy of Eliot’s characteristic use of rhetorical repetition (threaded together with small, haunting changes and embroidered by random rhymes) here avoids any evocation of the sloppy, grimy struggles of living which simultaneously besmirch and enliven “Prufrock” and “The Wasteland.” In the second stanza, the phrase “if you came” becomes a repeated apposition eloquently leading us down a path into the zone of death’s purgatory at “the world’s end.” The only solace is the yearning language of an abstractly unfolding prayer, and the crucial repeated image is that of purgatorial fire: “the communication / Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”


In part II of “Little Gidding,” we experience bombed London as the scene of an implacable apocalypse, and onto this cityscape, Eliot leads the ghost of Yeats, who is made to offer Eliot-like advice and self-critique from the beyond the grave. This Yeats is stripped of all his late inspiration: his taking on the Crazy Jane persona in “Word to Music, Perhaps,” or his locating the source of his images in “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart” in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” or his monument-building “Under Ben Bulben.” No, Eliot’s Yeats becomes a pale version of Mallarmé: his “concern was speech, and speech impelled us / To purify the dialect of the tribe” – purified and prayerful language must be purged of the “sting” and “stain” of life and “restored by that refining fire / Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.” The form of that restoration is an ascetic, neo-classical retrieval of Dante’s terza rima – to “move in measure,” though without Dante’s intricate rhyme scheme or the pathos and fecundity of Dante’s images, as Eliot here echoes scenes from Dante’s Purgatorio and particularly Inferno (Canto xv where Dante’s meets with his damned teacher Brunetto Latini).

Part III introduces into the cycle of prayer – the movement toward “detachment” and the “transfigured” – the figure of a fourteenth century mystic, Dame Julia of Norwich, whose repeated incantation that “all shall be well” becomes “a symbol: / A symbol perfected in death.” In this pure, autonomous, and even claustrophobically closed cycle, prayer feeds on itself, becoming the “ground” of prayer. The brief part IV is another eloquent evocation of burning “incandescent terror” descending on both bombed London and the enclosed ascetic spirit; such is the double fire of purgatory and of the burning city. The prayer emerging from “tongues” of flame conveys that implacable purgatorial vision: “We only live, only suspire / Consumed by either fire or fire.” Part V is the poem’s concluding “movement” and uses a public, didactic prosody “where every word is at home…neither diffident nor ostentatious” – Dryden-like and neoclassical in manner – which reminds us that Eliot is affirming not only an idea (and ideology) of purgatorial fire but also, in a moment of peril, his profound Anglophilia: “History is now and England.” The great assurance and authority of Eliot’s voice operate here in tone and diction to proclaim the purgatorial cycling of spirit and of language itself; in this vision (akin to that in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent”) all writing is rewriting, and “every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, / Every poem an epitaph.” The authority of Eliot’s “we” reveals the ultimate tradition he celebrates: “We are born with the dead: / See, they return, and bring us with them.” England was, of course, victorious by the end of World War II, but Eliot’s “Little Gidding” suggests the claustrophobia and contraction of spirit which beset Eliot’s vision not only of his nation but of Western Civilization, of its failure and self-destruction in its second cataclysmic war to end all wars. In this poem “consumed by either fire or fire,” Eliot envisions – and celebrates – a purgatorial incineration haunting modernity.

“The Four Quartets” also represent Eliot’s attempt to find in language a parallel form to Beethoven’s four late quartets. These quartets from the 1820s abjure much of the forward thrust of dramatic structure in Beethoven’s previous quartets; those earlier works’ arc of development and their momentum in rhythm and harmony give way in the late works to exfoliating abstruse melodies, which seem sometimes simple and yet continually violate expectations of closure and movement, both harmonically and rhythmically. The slowing of momentum and the interruption of the dramatic arc enable Beethoven to render states of transcendent serenity, spiritual exploration, and sometimes violent fragmentation; the vital, often off-beat, experimental quality of the music breaks new ground in classical music. It does so with a sort of unleashed expressiveness, a creative upwelling which makes Beethoven’s four late quartets one of the great achievements in the history of classical music. Eliot’s ambition (or perhaps his pretention) is to associate his own late poems with the quartets for a variety of reasons, both structural and spiritual, and the most significant of these reasons is that the poems aim to consecrate the state of transcendence associated with Beethoven’s late quartets. That association between the poems and the quartets is questionable, as I hope I’ve shown, for Beethoven’s works are the opposite of a recantation or retrenchment. The music conveys an inspired and generous fertility of feeling, and its constantly exfoliating inventiveness both embraces past musical technique and forecasts future technique. Beethoven’s late quartets do not mark a withdrawal into the circle of purgatorial fire, which constitutes the curtailed vision of Eliot’s ascetic late poems.

Notes on the Modern Period - 11 - Eliot and Death

In my earlier posts (on Yeats, on Keats and on Mallarmé, etc.), one theme has involved these poets’ engagement with death. The theme is, of course, a frequent one in poetry; for example, a powerful Renaissance confrontation with death is Donne’s Holy Sonnet 10 with its last line: “Death, thou shalt die.” For nineteenth and early twentieth century poets, the reach toward transcendent possibility often involves the paradoxical death of the ordinary self. For Yeats, the power of the image is to transmute the passion and suffering of lived life into art – of the “fall to earth,” and that fall involves an awareness of how death and life are intertwined; for example in “Byzantium,” the “gold mosaic” images from the walls of Hagia Sophia are hailed as “death-in-life and life-in-death. / …Those images that yet / Fresh images beget, / That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.” Even in this poem set far from Ireland, there is an affirmation of art’s turbulent connection to life, which makes sense perhaps especially in the context of a newly postcolonial culture. In contrast, the recognition of death’s role for Eliot’s imagination is another matter altogether. The difference is suggested by the opening of Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” which is an epigram from Petronius reporting, in the Greek, what the Cumaean Sibyl said: ‘I want to die.’ Eliot’s work gives form not only to the experience of death as a part of life, but also to the yearning for death.

The Sibyl’s desire to die is one part of the many layers of allusion which characterize Eliot’s poem (here we are given the Sibyl’s original Greek, which is embedded within Petronius’ Latin narrative). Eliot’s strategy – constant allusions, often in their original languages – is not simply to impede immediate comprehension; nor is the poet merely challenging the reader to join Eliot as an elitist adept in the arcana of “the mind of Europe” and beyond (by the end of “The Wasteland” we are reading the original Sanskrit words of a prayer calling for humans to “give, sympathize, and control”). Such defensive harboring of past culture is not quite the point, for Eliot does provide footnotes to elucidate his poem’s allusions, and his strategy promotes a sort of delayed comprehension, so that one experiences the shock of confusion and then the decoding clarification. Yet the elucidation give little comfort, for the sensation produced is of an echoing emptiness. It is as if a desperate force is grasping rather hopelessly for pieces of the literary past, and the reader is made to participate with the poet in struggling with the fragmentation of that past, the defeat of inherited culture in the face of the emptiness of the urban present.

The sense of multiple voices haunting at the edge of death is implicit in the initial title Eliot gave the manuscript of the poem: “He do the police in different voices,” with the deadening vulgarity of its knowing self-mockery. Part I of “The Wasteland” is made up of “different voices” or interrelated sections, all of them focused in one way or another on symptoms of spiritual death; the title itself of this part is “The Burial of the Dead,” after the funeral service in the English Book of Common Prayer. The first voice is a bitter and literate voice which takes back Chaucer’s opening pastoral image of regeneration (“When that April with its sweet showers…”): in Eliot’s vision, “April is the cruelest month…” The second series of ten lines offers a trivial, gossipy voice recounting seasons spent in aristocratic leisure. Then, abruptly, the biblical prosody of a third series of lines preaches against the stony deadness and desiccation of modern life. Stoniness here is a symptom of spiritual self-blindness and is rather the opposite of Yeats’ metaphor for the “terrible beauty” of imaginative transformation. Eliot's poetry is never more eloquent than when it inhabits a zone of deadness, whether a lifeless desert or a ring of hell or purgatory. The next fifteen lines return us to the “social” aristocratic voice of the second sequence, but now the speaker is complaining of an abortive sexual liaison (and her complaints are framed by allusions to Wagner’s “Tristan.” Then the penultimate sequence introduces a “famous clairvoyante” with her bad cold, who evokes the mythic Tarot images of death and rebirth, but debased by their modern purveyor. In the final sequence of “The Burial of the Dead,” a new voice emerges, not biblical, but bitterly apocalyptic in evoking the “Unreal City” as a hellish vision (accompanied by an allusion to Dante witnessing the limbo of souls at the entrance of Inferno): here death pervades the “crowd [which] flowed over London Bridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many.” The section ends with an allusion to Baudelaire, a quotation of the last line of “To the Reader,” which bitterly indicts the ultimate symptom of the bourgeois reader’s spiritual torpor: “It’s Boredom! Tears have glued its eyes together. / You know it well, my Reader. This obscene / beast chain-smokes yawning for the guillotine – / you – hypocrite Reader – my double – my brother!” The poem’s subsequent Parts II through V imagine just this “yawning” for death.

In Part II, images of sex without love encompass both past and present, the “withered stumps of time;” this “Game of Chess” first takes back the mythic adoration of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra (of her, and also her own of Antony), then it dissects upper-class ennui (“O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag”), and finally it deflates proletarian squalor and puts Ophelia’s “Good night, sweet ladies” into the demeaning mouth of the bartender at closing time. Part III is “The Fire Sermon,” in which disgust provides an ineffective refuge from the burning flames which are shown to constitute modern life; here the ugly vision of the Thames becomes a rescinding, through disgusted allusions, of the promise of Spenser’s “river” vision of love and Shakespeare’s “island” vision in “The Tempest;” finally the voice of Tiresias, dead and ‘foresuffering,’ takes over the vision of the loveless city, and the lines of the poem break down into short fragments which enact the poem’s statement: “I can connect / Nothing with nothing.” Part IV, the short “Death by Water,” presents the false promise of regenerative water as the instrument of drowning and despair. Finally, in Part V, “What the Thunder Said,” there is a counterpoint between images of death (“Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal”) and a tentative vision of regeneration and refuge in a sort of noble asceticism (there are the Sanskrit words of Hindu prayer as well as allusions to the myth of the Fisher King). However, the healing vision of water gives little relief. The fourth line from the end of the poem proclaims that these images are the “fragments I have shored against my ruins.” The next line is a quotation from Kyd’s Renaissance Revenge Tragedy, an upwelling of mad bloodshed and death. The penultimate line contains the aforementioned Hindu prayer, and the final line invokes three times the Sanskrit word for “the peace which passes understanding.”

Eliot’s reader hears “The Wasteland’s” piteous call for refuge, for our honoring of those fragments, both their content and their brilliant form, so influential and infectious for modern ears. Simultaneously, the reader is acutely aware of the equally piteous voice of a yearning for death, for an end to the torment of modern time. We are left to experience the tension between the two, between the call for refuge and the voice of death, and we are left wondering whether the image of that “peace which passes understanding” can endure, or is ‘achieved,’ in the poem, or whether it too is murdered by the relentless deadness, by both the desiccation and the drowning. Such is the paradox of Eliot’s poem. With great power and ambition, it enacts the dilemma of modernity, its yearning to affirm (even to affirm an ascetic or curtailed spirituality) in conflict with its awareness of the pervasiveness of death – of the self, of decadent and alienated society, of the ten million ‘Great War’ dead, and of entire structures of knowledge and community.

I hope next to post some commentary on one of Eliot's "Four Quartets" and particularly one in which he imagines a meeting with the ghost of Yeats.

Notes on the modern period - 4 - the example of Keats; Verlaine

In previous iterations of my “Birth of the Modern” course, I would early on offer Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” as an example and guide to some seminal ideas about the imagination, ideas whose influence lasted beyond Romanticism to shape modern thought.


Part of what Keats does in the poem is to anatomize forms of death and partly prefigure some of the concerns I’ve tried to describe in my previous posting. Initially the poem speaks of a suicidal state – “as though of hemlock I had drunk” and “Lethe-wards had sunk” – spurred by the nightingale’s “happy” and “melodious” music, for art can make ordinary life seem a sort of dying, “a drowsy numbness.” The poem then portrays a drunken state and the yearning for “a draught of vintage” and “purple-stained mouth” – “That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, / And with thee fade away into the forest dim” – in order to escape “the weariness, the fever, and the fret” here, where death reigns over the old, the young, and also beauty and love. But beyond the implacability of those forms of death, Keats seeks a sanctuary in the “viewless” realm of art – of the nightingale’s music he hears and of poetry – where there is no light and “tender is the night.” This dark sanctuary is simultaneously at a remove, a sort of dying away from ordinary life and a revelation of potentially transformed life, for here in the “embalmed darkness, he “senses” the both sacramental and sensuous images of fertile nature, where even “the murmurous haunt of flies” is hallowed and redeemed. At this peak of “ecstasy,” presenting and absorbing the transcendent richness art can achieve, the poem contemplates death by suicide, for now “more than ever seems it rich to die,” yet that willed death is rejected: “Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain – / To thy high requiem become a sod.” In the face of each of those earthen forms of death – suicide, the blotted mind of drunkenness, the weary grinding down of lives that cannot “keep” – “No hungry generations tread thee down,” for art embodies the possibility of an autonomous state of being, one that transcends the cycling of time and space, of “ancient days,” entering into and transforming “the sad heart of Ruth” and, as we saw, even “the haunt of flies.” The end of the poem acknowledges how difficult it is to sustain that autonomous transformation achieved by art and the music of the nightingale, how words can “toll me back from thee to my sole self,” to his ambiguous and leftover existence. The “Romantic agony” is just this struggle to sustain let alone achieve vision. The existence one finds oneself in is constantly on the border between blindness and vision, between death and life: “Do I wake or sleep?” The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Keats

The difficult autonomy of art is on the mind not only of Keats and the Romantic poets, but also of writers and thinkers later in the nineteenth century and in the modern period. Verlaine, for example in “Art Poétique,” imagines an art departing from and “vaguer” than French classical art. In such an art, “Nuance alone links / The dream to the dream,” and there is “Music again and always! And let your verse be the thing in flight,” for ambiguity must always be sustained through suggestion, connotation, and implication. “Take eloquence and wring its neck.” It is not only in the foreboding romantic agony that aesthetic autonomy dwells but also in the ironic lightness of Verlaine’s symbolist manifesto, in his momentary and sensuous ambiguities: “all the rest is literature.” Baudelaire Rimbaud Verlaine: Selected Verse and Prose Poems

In my next post, I’ll try to suggest the modern shifts or breakthroughs in thinking about art, about society, and about the psyche, achieved by Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud.

Notes on the Modern period - 3 - Precursors: Hegel's influence; Whitman, Dickinson, Chopin, Tennyson, Mallarme

In a recent session of the “Birth of the Modern” course I teach, we examined a few texts by precursors – a brief story by Kate Chopin, two excerpts from Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Emily Dickinson’s “After Great Pain,” a passage from Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit, and Baudelaire’s “To the Reader.” [On the photocopied pages were also a few mournful lines from Tennyson’s “Tears, Idle Tears” and some lines from Mallarmé’s “At Gautier’s Grave.”] The point of these excerpts was to forecast the qualities of the modern shift in the rendering of consciousness (a far-reaching breakthrough particularly in the arts and the social sciences, akin to Kuhn’s idea of the “paradigm shift”).

We began with Americans, for this course takes place in Cleveland, Ohio. In Chopin’s 1894 story, “The Story of an Hour,” a married young woman hears of the accidental death of her husband and finds that after she weeps “with sudden, wild abandonment,” she must withdraw to her room. There, her mind fills with a burgeoning consciousness of what is occurring outside her window, “the tops of trees…all aquiver with the new spring life…[the] delicious breath of rain,…a distant song,…countless sparrows twittering in the eaves,…patches of blue sky.” Finally the sense of being “free” becomes clear to her, free to “live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending her….And yet she had loved him – sometimes….[Yet:] What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion, which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being.” She discovers an independent will and consciousness as a woman previously subject to the “will” which her loving husband “imposed” upon her with “blind persistence.”

Part of what is adumbrated here is the centuries-old history of progress for women’s rights; finally in 1920, of course, women in the United States gained the right to vote. As interesting as this prefiguring of the steps ahead is the accuracy of Chopin’s rendering of the woman’s consciousness, the sense in her of upwelling liberation and freedom. Certainly the abruptly bitter ending of the story suggests that her liberation cannot quite survive in the society of 1894 America, for the rumor of the husband’s death was false, and when he returns to their door, she dies at the threshold – of “heart disease.” But earlier, we had witnessed the emergence of her new-born consciousness and then her laying claim to an independent will and self-awareness transcending any negotiations with her husband and transfiguring the image of his “loving” will into her own “possession of self-assertion.”

A transfiguring self-awareness is given full voice in Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” In the fourth poem, for example, he speaks of the streaming images of existence which “come to me days and nights and go from me again, / But they are not the Me myself.” A sort of flanneur, “watching and wondering” on a city street, he stands “both in and out of the game.” “Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am.” The stream of listed images encompass his life and all he touches, including “some man or woman I love,” or the hallowed “leaf of grass no less than the journey-work of the stars,” or “the plutonic rocks,” or the “esculent roots” of some barbaric and prehistoric swamp. Yet for all the sensuous and gigantic capaciousness of his “incorporating” imagination, he maintains a distance, a core of self-awareness which is the site of freedom and liberated consciousness for him.

Both Whitman’s self-celebrating self-awareness and Chopin’s story of the wife’s discovery of her self-possessed prefigure modernity's exploration of the 'self,' of subjectivity, evident in the “stream of consciousness” novels of the period, in its self-conscious poetry, and in its developing philosophy of phenomenology. These developments are illuminated by at least a brief engagement of Hegel’s thought about the dialectical relations between master and servant in the “Phenomenology of the Spirit” (published in 1807), and of course Marx’s thinking is similarly illuminated. It is not that I see Chopin or Whitman or, more generally, modernity as Hegelian. [I remember once my questioning John Cage’s aleatory music of ‘chance’ sounds, to which my critical older brother replied in exasperation, “You’re so Hegelian.”] It’s rather that Hegel can help us understand some of the logic at work in modern explorations of consciousness.

Hegel’s paragraph 194 in the “On Masters and Servants” section of “Phenomenology” analyzes the way in which the subject who serves the master must introject a consciousness of the master’s ‘mentality’ and needs, in order to serve them successfully. And the servant also maintains his awareness as a subject “worker” (the term is used by Hegel and emphasized in Kojève’s commentary). In this way, the worker develops a critical self-consciousness about each role, becoming doubly aware as he comprehends or ‘psyches out’ both modes. But this double consciousness distances him from life; the resulting critical distance from immediate existence mirrors yet transcends the master’s ‘withering scrutiny’ and, more deeply, his centeredness on himself, his “being-for-itself.” The critical distance of double- or self-consciousness functions finally like the ‘ultimate master’ death in negating all that is not itself, subjecting all – including itself – to a deadly exposure. This simultaneously negating and empowering self-consciousness casts all into a state of doubt where “everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations. But this pure universal movement, the absolute melting-away of everything stable, is the simple, essential nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure being-for-itself, which consequently is implicit in this consciousness.” Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” will echo just this passage when he evokes the Bourgeoisie, which as it upturns the aristocratic order creates a world of constant expansion and continuous change; the working class is left broadly aware of the resulting exploitation, the dizzying chaos, and the death of order: “All that is solid melts into air, all this is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” The Phenomenology of Spirit (The Phenomenology of Mind)

Hegel’s own insistence on the idea of destabilization, on the negation at work in “self-consciousness,” that “absolute melting-away of everything stable,” is striking. Paradoxically joined together here are of the awareness of death (death of the “ordinary” self and of “ordinary” society) with the opening-up of creative potential achieved by self-consciousness with its capacity to see multiple perspectives and to use its critical distance in order to liberate a rich sense of possibility. It is as if the death of former selves leads to liberated new selves, new potentiality.

The confrontation with death in modern thought is evident in works that prefigure the modern. In Baudelaire’s mid-nineteenth-century poem “To the Reader,” spiritual death yields an ennui, an apathy or boredom, that would “willingly annihilate the earth” as it “chain-smokes yawning for the guillotine.” Yet this form of death spurs a sort of self-lacerating “shriek,” the poem’s punishing intensity of address: “you – hypocrite Reader – my double – my brother!” Even Tennyson (and maybe especially he) is fixated on the destruction of a world, of ‘everything stable,’ and on the necessity to mourn for “the days that are no more” in language what is achingly vulnerable and continually polite. Two decades later, Mallarmé (“At Gautier’s Grave”) raises his “empty cup” in an “insane toast to nothingness, because the non-existent corridor gives hope,” for within that grave “nothingness questions the abolished man” and “shrieks” that the dead man’s evanescent poetry (“this toy”) “say what the earth was.” The point here is not merely that life is short, and art lasts; it is rather that death is a portal: a sort of gaping maw through which knowledge of what life might be yet speaks. This paradoxical melding of death and life is envisioned too by Emily Dickinson in her Civil War poems. For example, in 341, “After great pain,” she brings just such stark knowledge out of the experience of nothingness, of death and of mourning. Here she bares her knowledge in images of a snow-bound death (“First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go”) as well as of the chemical elements (“A Quartz contentment, like a stone – / This is the Hour of Lead”). [At some point, perhaps we’ll take a look at how Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale” discerns various modes of death and models the insight that ‘death is a portal’ through which transfiguring knowledge might enter.] In any case, as World War I approached, needless to say, conceptions of how to confront and understand death were rather desperately needed.