Strange new design

Just wrote a long post that somehow disappeared into the ether!  Blogger has a new posting design that, clearly, I need to spend some time figuring out.  Alas.

Short version: 1) I gave a bunch of lectures this month, and had the privilege of hearing thought-provoking presentations by Ineke Sluiter (rumor, gossip, and theory of mind in Greek epic and tragedy) and Tazuko van Berkel (how economic concepts like exchange colonize and trouble representations of friendship and other human relations in classical Athenian drama and philosophy) here at the NIAS on Friday.

2) Go read John Williams' Butcher's Crossing, a mid-20th century Western about an 1870s Harvard student who heads to western Kansas to join a buffalo hunt.   I was turned on to Williams by Michèle Lowrie, who recommended his epistolary novel Augustus.  That was perfectly good, but the Western is more to my taste these days (I've been hoovering up Elmore Leonard short stories late at night lately, e.g., "The 3.10 to Yuma").  I'll save Williams' semi-autobiographical novel Stoner for another day: college novels (with the striking exception of Amis' brilliant and hilarious Lucky Jim) rarely hold my attention for long -- or if they do, I can't escape the feeling that the pleasure is just omphaloskepsis.

At a recent dinner a fellow classicist/hiker made me reconsider the joys of bushwhacking.  I tend to aim for a telos when I hit the countryside, evidence of which is that my partner and I are gradually knocking off all 48 of New Hampshire's 4000-footers.  But his inspired Thoreauian descriptions of what it's possible to see, hear, and smell while off-trail -- animals, animal sounds and traces, tiny flowers, mushroom patches, the deepest of mosses, trickles of water too small to call a stream -- resonate with the rich descriptions of the Kansas plains and Colorado mountains in Butcher's Crossing.  You can read the novel as a psychological study of postbellum (and contemporary) youthful malaise, and it surely is that, but its pictures of nature also tap into the woe of the taming of the American West.

 

O tempora, o mores!

The Republican presidential candidates' rhetoric reminds me of Frederick Dolan's insights in his Allegories of America, where he represents American politics as "entirely given over to phantasms and simulacra but whose actors are driven by the need to reduce the interpretive ambiguity of their world to the reassuring forms of a metaphysical allegory." 


It also recalls Bonnie Honig's dry comment in her brilliant book Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics: "The perpetuity of contest is not easy to celebrate." 


No wonder I'm finding it easier these days to read political theory, novels, poetry, and art criticism: all grist for the mental mill -- to quote Pierre Rosanvallon in Democracy Past and Future, literature and poetry open us up the the presence of the world by the devices of language; art surveys the ambiguity and clears the silence of language; it remains open to the contradictions of the world and never allows concepts to exhaust the density of the real.  


Now back to figuring out Nadia Urbinati's concept of representativity.  

Aesthetic judgment and moral judgment

Anyway, the sheer pleasure I take in art is only part of its fascination for me.  I am also intrigued by the connections between aesthetic judgment, or taste, and moral and political judgment (for me these latter two are closely aligned: like John Dewey, I divide up judgments into private and public ones, and the latter are political).  Hannah Arendt makes a move that never ceases to shock me, first because it's so radical as a way to think about Kantian thought, but second because it's so familiar: it's a classical move.  (I want to specify "Roman," because the automatic connection might appear to be a Greek one, since "to kalon" means "good, noble, beautiful"; I do think it is a move associated more profoundly with Roman than Greek concerns, but that's a separate point, so I'll go with "classical.")

Arendt notes in her lecture series "Some Questions of Moral Philosophy" that Kant analyzed aesthetic experience in terms of judgment -- and only aesthetics, as opposed to morality, because "it seems to him that only in this field [aesthetics] do we judge without having general rules which are either demonstrably true or self-evident to go by."  Then the kicker, in the next sentence: "If therefore I shall now use his results for the field of morality, I assume that the field of human intercourse and conduct and the phenomena we confront in it are somehow of the same nature."

How does Arendt justify her application of Kant's work on taste to moral judgment?  Because she believes the fundamental element of the human condition is plurality.  You are not I, I am not you, I am not the person down the hall, but we co-exist.  And only in the case of aesthetic judgment, she points out, did Kant "consider men in the plural, as living in a community."  It follows that it will be worthwhile to reflect on the experience of why we find a particular painting beautiful, because it turns out that this kind of judgment is a common-sense one, in that it occurs not strictly within the self alone, but in the imagined company of others, starting with the internal conversations we hold with ourselves.  So with moral judgment.  The people who refused to go along with the Nazis explained their choice as deriving not from any sense of moral law, but from their sense of intense internal disharmony at the prospect of giving in and going along.  They had the ingrained habit of living with themselves, that is, they had the habit of judging and testing their judgments within themselves (and perhaps some friends or family members).  When they found they faced acting in a way that they couldn't account for in the common-sense company of themselves, they had to resist.

The promise that her writing holds out is reflected, for me, in the best writing about paintings (and perhaps music, though I don't know that field at all).  This writing draws my attention to the way the world (even in the form of abstract drips or blotches) presents itself to me, how I experience what I call "harmony" and "balance" and "inconcinnity" and "chaos."  The experience of close looking drives me into myself and also to the person next to me in the gallery, whose reactions I'm curious about.  It focuses me on the grain of the everyday, and from time to time, I feel deep down in my gut that I am seeing the everyday in a different way than before -- because of that Sanraedam, that Motherwell, that Bronzino.  Am I better?  No.  More thoughtful?  Yes.  More open to the lived experience of the world?  Yes.  Alive to the judgment of others experiencing the same?  Yes.  More attuned to injustice?  Well...perhaps.  

Obviously the habit of aesthetic judgment as Arendt describes it isn't the whole picture (no pun intended).  Hang out with a bunch of artists or art historians, it's no moral utopia.  But I think of her reference to Cicero's comment that at the end of the day, put Protagoras against Plato, and he would rather be wrong with Plato, the question is, whom we wish to be together with: "our decisions about right and wrong will depend upon our choice of company."  The problem is what to do with those people who'd rather have a beer with George W. -- or these days, a glass of milk with Rick Santorum.    

Art, taste, pleasure

I've mentioned my interest in aesthetic judgment before.  Part of it arises from pure pleasure in looking at art.  I've met perhaps ten people in as many years who tell me that they just don't understand art, or they don't like it (one of them, as I will never forget, in the middle of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, steps away from Titians and a Bronzino that take your breath away).  It's difficult to know what to say to these people, except "why?" but to that question I've rarely got a good answer.  The man in the Pitti was depressingly typical in his struggle to reply.  "It's boring," he stammered, "I feel like there's too much to know...really, the paintings all look the same."

As someone who, until well into her twenties, had virtually no knowledge of classical music except the few pieces I practiced on the piano or that my mother played on records when I was young (Smetana's "Moldau" stands out in my memory: why that piece, I wonder?), I can easily remember the bewilderment and boredom I felt in my first few classical concerts.  Even Verdi's "Otello," my first opera, which I attended at the age of seventeen because my residential college was giving out free tickets, left me impressed by its Zeffirelli grandiosity but mostly unmoved by the music.  The few moments that struck me as genuinely beautiful, where I glimpsed a flash of how a person might come to love this artform, were drowned out by long stretches where singers sang, sets moved, and I waited for the show to end.  But it never crossed my mind to say "I don't like music," or "Music is boring."  So the experience of ignorant confusion doesn't help me understand the people who dislike art, and if anything, since I've long moved on, it makes me more impatient with them -- though I suppose it's inappropriate to feel impatience with people suffering from what I can't help calling a disability.

Art criticism and its surprising delights

One of my deep if unsecret vices is reading art history and art criticism, especially of a philosophical bent -- Michael Baxandall, Svetlana Alpers, Michael Fried, Rosalind Krauss, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Yve-Alain Bois, Arthur Danto, Timothy Clark.  It's a true vice, because what fascinates me about it has just enough of a connection to my professional interests that I can all too easily convince myself that a day spent reading this stuff is essentially a day spent working.

The best critics have a way of working from close descriptions of paint and canvas, line and color, that causes you to see things in paintings and to think thoughts about paintings that you would never otherwise have done.  This may sound like a banal thing to say, but their capacities of detailed description need to be read to be believed: from the thick impasto of details arise audacious insights.  They inspire me to read the Roman authors I'm working with now, mainly Sallust and Horace, with greater care for small effects and the larger trains of thought that these effects generate.

Take Clark on Cézanne's Bathers at Rest: "Never, for a start, has a picture declared itself so openly -- so awkwardly -- as made out of separate, overdetermined parts coexisting only on sufferance.  The paint is piled up and up around the contours of the bather in the center, or the one lying on the ground, or the smaller one at rear staring off into the landscape, and the build-up in each case seems intended to effect some final disengagement of figure from ground -- some absolute, and no doubt absurd, isolation of the body not just from the others next to it but from anything else.  Even from light (which snaps at the heels of the figure in the background like an ineffectual shark).  The picture is paratactic... Even the clouds seem to participate in the general dementia.  They peer down on the poor bathers' doings with shocked solicitude, inquisitive despite themselves, like the gods in Homer."

Having read Clark -- clouds peering down like Homeric divinities! -- I can't help but see this picture as a time-lapse portrait of Odysseus cleaning up on Phaeacia, Nausicaa's island.  More seriously, I see a personalization of nature that gives the painting a manic tone, both anthropocentric (the trees and clouds bend themselves around man) and alienating (as in a de Chirico cityscape, man seems fundamentally out of place).  I find Cézanne difficult to think about and Clark's close-to-offhand comment brightens and energizes my thoughts, like the triangle of sunlight nipping at the heels of the bather in the back.

Another more surprising pleasure involved in reading about art is the sheer delight the writers take in reading, not the work of other art critics but poetry, film criticism, novels, philosophy, musicology, histories, you name it.  If you have to guess the academic field where you're most likely to meet Pollock, Gramsci, Pound, Levi, Beckett, and Pasolini on the same page, it's this kind of writing.  These names appear on p 407 of Timothy Clark's Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism.  And here's the real point of this post, with apologies for the delay and the awkward translation.  It's a poem about the poor, the left-wing dream or fantasy of the masses' possession of political power, the terror of the knowledge that history in the progressive sense has vanished and along with it, perhaps, the hopes of the left.  

from Pasolini's The Ashes of Gramsci (1954)

eccoli, miseri, la sera: e potente
in essi, inermi, per essi, il mito
rinasce... Ma io, con il cuore cosciente

di chi soltanto nella storia ha vita,
potrò mai più con pura passione operare,
se so che la nostra storia è finita?

(Look, the wretched ones, at dusk. And powerful
in them, defenseless as they are, through them, the myth
is reborn.  But I, with the knowing heart

of one who can live only in history,
shall I ever again be able to work with pure passion,
when I know that history is finished?)

Erotic panegyric

Statius is a Roman poet who wrote several fascinating panegyrics of the Roman emperor Domitian.  The one I know best opens a collection of poems called Silvae, occasional pieces Statius wrote for patrons and friends.  Dedicated to praising an enormous new equestrian sculpture of the emperor, it sews references to the statue's enormous, almost monstrous, size together with admiring commentary on the gentle grace of Domitian's expression and gesture.  The effect is sensual, slightly comical, and (for a poem about an autocrat) oddly humanizing.  

I thought of Silvae 1.1 when I read this erotic panegyric by Jonathan Galassi on the plane to Amsterdam last month. It appeared in the New York Review of Books under the title "Tom in Rome." Its tone of rueful infatuation rings truer than most. 


Bolder than Antonio Canova
outdoing the Apollo Belvedere,
you demolish every Red Guide reader’s
half-baked callow notion of an
adequate response to what we see:
forensically investigating Daphne,
how she limb by limb becomes a tree,
you scant the art, stern sage who’s always known
what matters in a figure is the stone.

You are toffee, you are sand in sunlight,
you are handsome, winsome, bright, and lithe:
chaste Carrara, blue-veined Parian,
hand-warmed Pentelic when you buck and writhe
more contorted than Laocoön,
diminutive fine subtle lordship, master-
work surpassing alabaster,
as I am tufa to your travertine.

Go ahead and shame us in the Forum
with your ironic fine decorum, do:
Antinous with glasses and umbrella,
deus ex machina of the novella
whose story was that my roads led to you.

Sallust's appeal

The Roman historian Sallust never ceases to fascinate.  His tale of the north African king Jugurtha, who makes war against Rome in the late second century BCE, the Bellum Jugurthinum, constantly strays from its own narrative line and undercuts the oppositions it sets up at the start.  He cuts off thoughts before they are fully articulated, jumps forward and backward in time, and makes a show out of silencing himself ("Now I return to my story," he says more than once).   

Contrast Sallust to Walter Benjamin’s ideal storyteller, who has the ability to recount the whole life, not only of another, but of himself: he is the man who, letting his life “be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story,” becomes a sage for the multitudes.  But Sallust, to borrow a phrase from Ronald Syme, is “cut short” both in his brief careers as politician and writer and in his choice of a startlingly choppy style.  

Perhaps the strangest story in the BJ is the digression prompted by Sallust's reference to the town of Lepcis, which finds itself caught between Rome and Numidia. "Now that we've reached this region, it seems not unworthy to recall the outstanding, amazing deed of two Carthaginians," he says by way of bare introduction.  

Once upon a time, back before the last Punic War, the powerful states of Carthage and Cyrene disagreed over the exact location of the boundary between them, which lay on a totally featureless sandy plain.  After a long struggle on land and sea, the two city-states finally agree to a settlement.  Each will send out envoys from their capitals, and the border will be established on the spot where the two groups meet.  Two Carthaginians and two Cyrenians are chosen and the date of their simultaneous departure is set.  The Carthaginians make excellent time, but the Cyrenians are delayed, whether by laziness or sandstorms, Sallust says, is impossible to say.  When they finally meet well into Cyrenian-claimed territory, the Cyrenians (terrified of returning home to explain their failure) accuse the Carthaginians of cheating by leaving their capital early.  Preferring to bargain rather than go home and start the war all over again (or maybe they're suffering from guilty consciences?), the two Carthaginians demand a new agreement, so long as it's fair ("tantum modo aequam").   The cunning Greeks -- Sallust suddenly starts referring to them at this point as "Graeci" rather than "Cyrenenses" -- devise an awful choice: either the border will be set on the spot where they met, but the two Carthaginians will be buried alive there; or the Carthaginians will allow the Cyrenians to advance the line as far as they wish, with the same capital condition applying to them.  The Carthaginians accept these terms as fair, and they are buried alive (79.2-10).  The city of Carthage sets up altars in their memory on the spot.  And that is it.  Nunc ad rem redeo, Sallust says: "now I return to my story."  

What's the point of this story that literally comes out of nowhere, geographically as well as narratologically?  It exposes the mortal investment men make in political conflict; it turns conflict into a game of sorts, where virtue contends with cunning; it asks us to balance the value of lived life against eternal memory and civic greatness.  It is typically Sallustian.   

Brilliant civic vision

Rick Santorum's empty-headed comments on JFK's speech on the separation of church and state, as well as his dismissal of university education, call to mind John Adams on education:

“Before any great things are accomplished, a memorable change must be made in the system of education and knowledge must become so general as to raise the lower ranks of society nearer to the higher. The education of a nation instead of being confined to a few schools and universities for the instruction of the few, must become the national care and expense for the formation of the many.”
That's a private letter, but in his draft of the constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Adams writes:
"Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences, and all seminaries of them, especially the university at Cambridge, public schools, and grammar schools in the towns; to encourage private societies and public institutions, rewards and immunities, for the promotion of agriculture, arts, sciences, commerce, trades, manufactures, and a natural history of the country; to countenance and inculcate the principles of humanity and general benevolence, public and private charity, industry and frugality, honesty and punctuality in their dealings, sincerity, good humor, and all social affections, and generous sentiments among the people."

Look Homeward, Angel

Reactions to Thomas Wolfe are severely divided these days.  Elizabeth Hardwick, writing on the occasion of the centennial of his birth in 2000: "He is too much, too many rhapsodies, an inundation.  Not a man you'd want to deal with.  Drunken pages and drunken he often was as he prowled the midnight city.  And yet the mystery of the books is that they are written with a rich, fertile vocabulary, sudden, blooming images, a murderous concentration that will turn everyone he meets into words."
I have always loved Walt Whitman, who if he has written perhaps some of the worst lines of English poetry has also written some of the best.  So I'm well prepared to take on Wolfe's linguistic exuberance and fascination with his own powers of perception.  Knowing his reputation, I expected the repetitiveness, the snobbery, the offhand racism, the inconsistent characterizations masquerading as something more under a load of narrative and descriptive detail (Gant's mother Eliza suffers the most in this respect).
What I didn't expect was the bitter comic self-consciousness that expresses itself in terms of national identity.  Just two examples.  First:

Then, for the first time, he thought of the lonely earth he dwelt on.  Suddenly, it was strange to him that he should read Euripides in the wilderness.
       Around him lay the village; beyond, the ugly rolling land, sparse with cheap farmhouses; beyond all this, America -- more land, more wooden houses, more towns, hard and raw and ugly.  He was reading Euripides, and all around him a world of white and black was eating fried food.  He was reading of ancient sorceriers and old ghosts, but did an old ghost ever come to haunt this land?  The ghost of Hamlet's father, in Connecticut:
        '......I am thy father's spirit,
         Doomed for a certain term to walk the night
         Between Bloomington and Portland, Maine.'
       He felt suddenly the devastating impermanence of the nation.  Only the earth endured -- the gigantic American earth, bearing upon its awful breast a world of flimsy rickets.  Only the earth endured -- this broad terrific earth that had no ghosts to haunt it....  Nothing had been done in stone.  Only this earth endured, upon whose lonely breast he read Euripides.  Within its hills he had been held a prisoner; upon its plain he walked, alone, a stranger.
        O God! O God! We have been an exile in another land and a stranger in our own.  The mountains were our masters: they went home to our eye and our heart before we came to five.  Whatever we can do or say must be forever hillbound.  Our senses have been fed by our terrific land; our blood has learned to run to the imperial pulse of America which, leaving, we can never lose and never forget.  We walked along a road in Cumberland, and stooped, because the sky hung down so low; and when we ran away from London, we went by little rivers in a land just big enough.  And nowhere that we went was far: the earth and the sky were close and near.  And the old hunger returned -- the terrible and obscure hunger that haunts and hurts Americans, and that makes us exiles at home and strangers wherever we go.

Later, Wolfe describes Gant (modeled on himself): for me, a portrait of the Tea Party voter in an especially depressing election year.  Watch the movement from contentment, which first appears to excuse Gant's political ignorance and apathy, to discontent to fantasy to -- the most brilliant move -- fantasy that "found extension in reality":

Yet, Eugene was no rebel.  He had no greater need for rebellion than have most Americans, which is none at all.  He was quite content with any system which might give him comfort, security, enough money to do as he liked, and freedom to think, eat, drink, love, read, and write what he chose.  And he did not care under what form of government he lived -- Republican, Democrat, Tory, Socialist, or Bolshevist -- if it could assure him these things.  He did not want to reform the world, or to make it a better place to live in: his whole conviction was that the world was full of pleasant places, enchanted places, if only he could find them.  The life around him was beginning to fetter and annoy him: he wanted to escape from it.  He felt sure things would be better elsewhere.  He always felt sure things would be better elsewhere.
         It was not his quality as a romantic to escape out of life, but into it.  He wanted no land of Make-believe: his fantasies found extension in reality, and he saw no reason to doubt that there really were 1,200 gods in Egypt, and that the centaur, the hippogriff, and the winged bull might all be found in their proper places.  He believed that there was magic in Byzantium, and genii stoppered up in wizards' bottles.

I stayed up late to finish the book, and I'm glad I did: another sleet storm hit around midnight, short but intense, just like the one that caught me today as I biked back home to the NIAS from Leiden.  On my slanted skylight window, the noise of the sleet is thunderously beautiful.  

Settled in and thinking

So what was the nature of my Rembrandt revelation?  Svetlana Alpers, in her famous book The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century, argued that Dutch painting should be understood as describing the world as it is seen, rather than as imitating or alluding to the world (or texts, or language, or traditions).  She put together the northern European interest in seeing the world more clearly through telescope or microscope with the close attention to detail that appears in the earliest Dutch Madonnas and landscapes, and then lets the concern with seeing guide her through the paintings.  She was able to notice new details about the experience of seeing -- how, for instance, landscape artists like Ruisdael played with the placement of the viewer.  As the viewer of a Ruisdael landscape, where exactly are you standing?  It's not clear: perhaps a neighboring hilltop?  A low-hovering helicopter?  And she puts into words the marvelous feeling that many Dutch landscapes convey, the sense that there's a world beyond the picture frame, that the frame of the painting exists almost by accident, that it doesn't act so much as a window as it does a surface.              

And with the surface is where I started to see Rembrandt afresh at the Mauritshuis.  I've never had much patience with Rembrandt's meditative studies, especially the self-portraits.  (Dramatic corporate pictures like Nightwatch captivate me.) There are too many of these studies, they seem gimmicky, they're burdened with the weight of too many pretentious scholarly claims (the invention of the individual, etc.), they often convey a sense of self-pity that gets on my nerves (though not as much as the complacency of your standard Rubens portrait).  This 1669 example above, in fact, fit all these categories, and when I first entered the room I walked by it without stopping.  I went instead toward his Homerus, kitty-corner to the self-portrait.

For many minutes (was it Robert Hughes who said you need to look at a painting for an hour to get a sense of it?) I just couldn't find my way in.  Homerus is a brown study, "rich with pathos" you might say.  I was about to give up: and then I caught something that doesn't show up on the tiny copy above, a sheen of almost sheer paint in broad vertical stripes on the right-hand side, almost invisible unless you look very closely.  I couldn't identify the color: brownish-black?  But immediately it struck me as a much subtler version of the dramatic stripy effects in Francis Bacon's Innocent X -- to the degree that I began to wonder whether Bacon's Study was as much a reaction to Rembrandt as to Velasquez.  There was something happening on that surface that, I thought, had nothing to do with the clichéd questing blind gaze of the figure.  But then (I thought in the next moment), the effect relates somehow to the subject of the painting: it's inches away, one can only ignore the figure by doing experiential violence to the work.  Perhaps simply virtuoso texture-creation?  Or something else: not the veil before the poet's blind eyes, exactly -- the near-evanescence of the effect made it impossible for me to interpret it as in representational terms -- but a gesture toward the cloudy distance that separates us from Homer, a gesture toward the impossibility of representing the distant past.
Re-energized and now curious, I turned to the self-portrait.  Again it eluded me: I felt impatient and bored.  Then I began to notice the red and ochre threads of paint in Rembrandt's grey hair--or rather, since I'd noticed them earlier, this time I started to think about them.  Ghosts of color, they rusted his head, combining with the black and grey patches in the pinkish face to create the effect of fleshy corrosion.  The theme is extended in the bloody scrapings of vermilion over the black waistcoat.  And here the astonishing mastery of paint, which never ceases to astonish, did the work stylization nearly always does: it distanced the pathos, made the painting a matter of surfaces rather than depth (the false depth that tends to self-dramatize both the subject and the viewer of the painting), re-made the work as something not to fall into but to reflect on, in the deepest sense of the word "reflect".    
I still have more to see in Rembrandt, but this was a major step.  Today I travel to the Franz Hals museum in Haarlem with the other NIAS fellows.  I hope to see more Ruisdaels and -- something I wouldn't have said before Saturday -- more Rembrandts.