Review of Mark Kishlansky's "A Monarchy Transformed: 1603-1714"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, which an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

I read this book several months ago, and don’t remember many of the details of the individual narratives, but these are some general impressions on finishing the book. 

This is the sixth volume in the (so far) ten-volume Penguin History of Britain series. As with many of these, this was a bit of a slog. I don’t know why I keep doing this to myself. The author, Mark Kishlansky, professor of English and English History at Harvard, seems eminently qualified to make this an engaging book, but it really isn’t. Some reviews have referred to this as a good “undergraduate history” of the Stuart period, and that may be the case; I would only want to read it in a class where information was also pulled together in a more compelling way. 

A period that was so riven by political and social conflict should, perhaps, be handled with that kind of history. I have always been more interested in intellectual and cultural history, which this volume (and, it seems, most volume in this series) ignores, though I’ve tried not to fault it for that in my rating. A reader who asks herself, at the end of the book, “How was the monarchy transformed?” would have a difficult time answering the question precisely because of the way Kishlansky wrote the book: as a series of vivid vignettes full of vibrant personalities. The changes that happened to the important institutions, however, are much less apparent.

Review of David Hawkes' "John Milton: A Hero For Our Time"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, which an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

This biography, written for the 400th anniversary of Milton’s birth, is a rather mediocre offering, and hardly worth being associated with the great poet’s name. Hawkes argues, rightly I think, that Milton’s perennial encounters with religious strife and political contretemps should have us embracing him as a contemporary, not as an austere figure of worldly timelessness. Milton was a world-class heterodox: he ceaselessly questioned the authority of institutions (including the English monarchy), wrote jeremiads against human obsequiousness and psychological idolatry, and led a far-from-ordinary family life. 

Hawkes’ continued interest in Milton’s life derives from his interest in iconoclasm in all forms, and Milton’s active embrace of it. One of the few strong points of this book is the author’s willingness to look at the important texts other than just “Paradise Lost.” The pamphleteering, including the “Areopagitica,” is paid due consideration, and Milton’s advocacy of divorce and unfettered freedom of speech strike us as ultra-modern even four centuries later.

Unfortunately, Hawkes seems to be too invested in ideological concerns that I imagine would barely have consumed any of Milton’s attention. He inevitably wants to connect everything to usury (that is, the practice of loaning out money for a profit, which was a relatively new practice in Milton’s time). Milton’s father was a usurer, and this fact is somehow used to interpret, in a bizarre, anachronistic mixture of Freudianism and Marxism, many of Milton’s motivations. While Milton might have had many opinions that put him out of the mainstream, he is very much a member of the seventeenth century when it comes to his opinion on this: usury means making an idol out of money, when the only thing we should make an idol out of is God himself. 

Hawkes also makes reference to Nietzsche at least twice in the book, one time saying that he “fatuously preferred evil” (p. 185). I found this ignorance to be surprising from someone who apparently works at an American university. Nietzsche already suffers from enough willful misinterpretation at the hands of people who know plenty about him than to incur this. And if he’s saying this stuff about Nietzsche, what is he getting wrong about Milton, a figure with whom I’m even less familiar?

Milton is the indispensable poet, both for his time and for ours. This biography, however, can easily be skipped – and should be. It’s amazing how this was, according to the cover, made the “Booklist Top Ten Biography Pick.” While I have yet to read either of these, I do have two more Milton biographies – Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns’ “John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought,” and Anna Beer’s “”Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot.” A quick perusal shows both of them to be far superior to Hawkes’ book, and I look forward to reading them in the future.

Review of Tony Judt's "Ill Fares the Land

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

It has often been said that Americans know the value of everything and the worth of nothing. This book serves to historicize why precisely that is the case, and is also a clarion call extolling the virtues of social democracy. According to Judt, we need to completely re-think how we view our neighbors and human community.

Social democracy, as I said, is at the heart of the book, and Judt makes it quite clear that this isn’t just a generic term for liberalism. “They [social democrats] share with liberals a commitment to cultural and religious tolerance. But in public policy social democrats believe in the possibility and virtue of collective action for the collective good. Like most liberals, social democrats favor progressive taxation in order to pay for public services and other social goods that individuals cannot provide themselves; but whereas many liberals might see such taxation or public provision as a necessary evil, a social democratic vision of the good society entails from the outset a greater role for the state and the public sector” (p. 7). Note the terms “collective good” and “collective action.” They are at the center of reconceptualizing society in terms of something other than market share or a growing economy. Judt offers much evidence toward the beginning of the book showing how inequality – not wealth, but inequality – within a society is directly correlated with “infant mortality, life expectancy, criminality, the prison population, mental illness, unemployment, obesity, malnutrition, teenage pregnancy, illegal drug use, economic insecurity, personal indebtedness, and anxiety” (p. 18).

But matters didn’t always look so bleak. After the Great Depression and World War II, it quickly became the consensus economic opinion that the state had an integral role to play in keeping events like this from ever happening again. Judt is especially interested in the arguments and contributions of John Maynard Keynes here. The trust and cooperation of the interventionist state, largely the work of Keynes, provided England and the United States with security, prosperity, social services, and greater equality” (p. 72). For a generation, no one questioned that these ends were also public goods, or if they were questioned, they were by the most marginal of political figures.

What happened? Ironically, Judt lays much of the blame for the disintegration of the welfare state on the radical political movements of the 1960s, which he claims “rejected the inherited collectivism of its predecessor.” (Christopher Lasch similarly blames this set of movements in “The Culture of Narcissism” – a book which complements this one in subtle and complex ways.) Judt argues that social justice wasn’t central to the mission of liberal sixties activism. In fact, it even co-opted the rhetoric of fierce individualism; it was all about “doing your own thing” and “letting it all hang out.” 

This consequently left a vacuum into which Austrian economics and its various supporters could rush – Karl Popper, Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter, Peter Drucker, and Friedrich Hayek. These men – all Austrians – were all profoundly influenced by the “introduction into post-1918 Austria state-directed planning, municipally owned services and collectivized economic activity” (p. 99). Of course, this attempt was a failure which seemed to leave a gigantic psychic wound on these thinkers and their future thought about the possibility of state interventionism or even short-term economic planning. Also, these men knew a Left that believed in human reason and (Marxist) historical laws whereas the Fascists acted, and acted violently. Judt therefore reminds us that most contemporary recapitulations of this debate are really just variations on this one-hundred year-old theme. 

The prominence of Austrian economics and neoliberal policies allowed for the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, whose reigns saw a liquidation of much of the public sector in their respective countries during the 1980s. For Judt, these massive efforts at privatization were largely responsible for a loss of community and communal trust. We now live in our gated communities with closed-circuit cameras, terrified of our neighbors, rules by feckless, soulless politicians like Bill and Hillary Clinton (someone has to say it, so thank you, Tony), as well as Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. With people like these, it’s a small wonder why we’re so cynical about politicians and political efficacy. 

Judt ends the book with a call for both a renewed fervor for political dissent and the recasting of public conversation. Intellectuals used to be respected for broadcasting their unpopular opinions, but today that ability too seems to be enervated. Through a sheer act of moral will, we have to rediscover how to think through these issues and learn how to express disapproval in a country that has historically been incredibly conformist. 

To this end, we need to “think the state” and “think the community” in radically different ways, which means brushing away old shibboleths like “We all want the same thing, we just disagree on how to get there” and “You either believe in freedom or tyranny, capitalism or communism.” These slogans, so totally inculcated into popular political “thinking” and the gruel offered up by media pundits, should be recognized for what they are: simplistic and reductive, aimed at making one think that there are no middle ways, no third (or fourth, or fifth) options. Old habits are hard to slough off. Acts of pure imagination and appropriating the political world anew are terrifically difficult. But, at least according to Judt, now is the time.

Book Haul #6

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.

Books discussed include (not including the ones I forgot from the last book haul):

The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History, Philip Bobbitt

Introduction to the Human Sciences, Wilhelm Dilthey

Testaments Betrayed, Milan Kundera

A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor

William Marshal, Georges Duby

The Idea of the Self, Jerrold Seigel

Axel’s Castle, Edmund Wilson

An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Pierre Bourdieu

The Cradle of Humanity, George Bataille

Review of Christopher Lasch’s “The Culture of Narcissism"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Christopher Lasch’s “The Culture of Narcissism” was originally published in 1979, and has been a major cynosure of cultural and social criticism ever since. English literary critic Frank Kermode called it, not inaccurately, a “hellfire sermon.” It is a wholesale indictment of contemporary American culture. It also happens to fall into a group of other books which share the same body of concerns that I have been working my way through, or around, in recent months: Daniel Boorstin’s “The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America,” Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle,” Philip Rieff’s entire corpus (especially “Charisma,” but also his earlier work on Freud), and even the book I’m currently reading, Tony Judt’s “Ill Fares the Land.”

All of these books discuss some aspect of social anomie, loss of community, and subsequent feelings of dissolution. This isn’t by any means a new debate; in the field of sociology, it dates at least as far back as Ferdinand Tonnies’ distinction between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft, a distinction that was almost a prerequisite for the invention of modernism.

First, a note on the word “narcissism.” It was formerly a clinical term to diagnose the individual, but has “gone global” - or at least national. Lasch doesn’t really mean for the term to be a diagnosis in the clinical sense, but rather a “metaphor for the human condition” in contemporary times. In his argot, the word means much more than just lack of empathy, a tendency toward manipulative actions and pretentious behavior. “People today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security” (p. 7). Lasch is more interested in the dissolution of communities and relationships that makes us feel as if we live highly individualized, atomized lives detached from the concerns of others. The book spells out the ways in which these patterns are positively correlated with the rise of materialism, technologism, “personal liberation” (those bywords of sixties radicalism) and nominal egalitarianism. 

His few words on contemporary corporate America will strike anyone who has ever worked in one of these organizational hellscapes: he states that corporate bureaucracies “put a premium on the manipulation of interpersonal relations, discourage the formation of deep personal attachments and at the same time provide the narcissist with the approval he needs in order to validate his self-esteem.” 

A la Debord, the politics of narcissism become more about “managing impressions” and “human relations” more than actually solving problems, citing Kennedy’s disaster at the Bay of Pigs as an example. To steal from the language of yet another late French thinker, it’s all about the simulacra. In a chapter called “The Degradation of Sport,” he notes that enormous amounts of corporate money have turned athletes into mere entertainers to be sold to the most prestigious sports syndicate. The central concept of the sporting even – the agon, the contest – has been displaced in order to sell products and personalities who will invariably be with the team for only a short time.

Lasch’s political affiliations are sometimes interestingly and tellingly misconstrued. Though often criticized for being a reactionary conservative simply because he points to the radicalism of the sixties as one of the desiderata under consideration, Lasch’s analysis is self-consciously informed by both Marx and Freud, two figures hardly recognized for being popularly co-opted by various brands of twentieth-century conservatism. Those who believe that Lasch is a blind ideologue on other side of the spectrum need to read him again: he explicitly faults both the right for their veneration of the market’s “invisible hand” and the left for their cultural progressivism. Lasch is in politics, above all else, a democratic humanist.

He writes in the Afterword, “The best defenses against the terrors of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs. It is through love and work, as Freud noted … that we exchange crippling emotional conflict for ordinary unhappiness.” It might not sound like a prognosis abounding in optimism, but it drips with the sincerity of an honest, heartfelt critic of American culture.

Review of Keith Thomson's "Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

When we think about the modern biological sciences, one name invariably pops into mind: Charles Darwin. Keith Thomson’s book, “Before Darwin: Reconciling God and Nature,” looks at the approximately two centuries of science that predate Darwin, partially in an attempt to see what influenced him, but mostly because it’s a fascinating history in and of itself. Thomson is almost wholly concerned with an age in which all natural science (then still often called “natural philosophy”) was almost always natural theology – that is, an understanding that the study of science and nature would draw one close to understanding the mind of God. William Paley, the eighteenth-century English naturalist whose book “Natural Theology” had a tremendous influence on Darwin’s early career, thought that the ways of God are shown to man through a rigorous and critical study of the natural world.

We get a quick, breathless account of big scientific developments from Copernicus to Newton, and see that the more we learn about God, the less ground natural theologians have to stand on. Thomson rhetorically asks, “Once Pandora’s Box was opened and a new, lesser, role ascribed to God, who could predict where matters would end?” (p. 44). 

The rest of the book is taken up with discussing the contributions of several scientists, many of them not nearly as recognized as they should be, including Thomas Burnet, John Ray, Robert Plot, and Martin Lister. Paley and Ray especially built an argument from design, but there was one glaring problem: it’s clear there are many things in nature that are not perfect, and that don’t look like they were designed. The human eye – commonly adduced by modern-day creationists as an example of “irreducible complexity” – has a blind spot that lacks photoreceptors and therefore would make us more susceptible to attacks from predators if we still lived out in the open. The sacroiliac region at the base of the spine is mechanically imperfect to bear our weight, which often results in back pain as we age. Someone convinced that the human body is a perfectly designed machine can’t explain the appendix, a vestigial organ for which there is no observable purpose. 

What Thomson seems to be saying is that natural theology had a historical tendency to reverse engineer science to fit its own theological ends. Therefore, what we see here is not so much science as we would understand the term today, but the use of science as a kind of anthropocentric cherry-picking to shore up preformulated beliefs, namely the creation accounts (there are two of them) in Genesis. Ironically, these culminate in a the work of Steno, a Dutch geologist and anatomist who was blithely unconcerned with how much his own work – the work of a Catholic bishop, mind you – confirmed or denied the accounts in Genesis.

There’s tons of other fascinating stuff in here that I won’t get into about interpretations of the fossil record (apparently people used to think that fossils just grew in place in the ground and that their resemblance to animals was purely coincidental), geology, paleontology, and what everyone thought about the Great Flood. It could also serve as a reference work if you’re interested enough in the history of natural science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It’s pretty much rekindled my long-dormant interest in the history of science.

Review of Kenneth R. Miller's "Finding Darwin's God"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Kenneth Miller, a professor of biology at Brown University, has made a name for himself in communities that are deeply concerned with the intersection of religion and science, both on the atheist/skeptical side and the religious side. He successfully manages to irritate both camps because he says that supporting evolution and deistic belief are not necessarily contradictory. (Miller is a Catholic.) This shouldn’t be too controversial of a statement for someone who has thought about the issue for more than a few minutes, but it still seems to disconcert people. 

“Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution” works in some ways, but it is not what it is advertised to be. Judging from the title alone, you might guess that it involves a lot of digging through Darwin’s papers for his (non)religious inclinations, and to be fair we do get a very small amount of this. It will probably come as no surprise that Darwin was at different times throughout his life more conflicted and sometimes less conflicted about the existence of a Christian God, or even the God of deism. Earlier in his career, he was very convinced by the arguments of renowned eighteenth-century English scientist William Paley’s watchmaker analogy set forth in his “Natural Theology,” but seemed to become more skeptical as the publication of “Origin of Species” approached, and certainly toward the end of his life.

First, the part of the book that I wasn’t expecting: approximately the first two-thirds of this book is dedicated to demolishing creationist “science” (not really science at all), and particularly youth earth creationism. I realize the continuing need for popularizing science education, but I was more interested in the “Finding Darwin’s God” angle than a re-hashing of basic high school biology and chemistry which we all *supposed* to have learned. Even though this part of the book was a slog, he was extraordinarily thorough. He shows how a literal interpretation of Genesis no longer makes any sense considering what we know about morphology, radioactive dating, and the fossil record. He also equips someone who might be less familiar with pro-evolution arguments with examples, including the biochemical details of the blood clotting cascade and the development of the eukaryotic cilium. There is also a wonderful part of the book that explains how Gould’s punctuated equilibrium only exists as a different-looking phenomenon when you use shortened geological time scales, and that when you re-elongate these scales, you get the evolutionary tree of common descent that would have been more recognizable to Darwin himself. These couple of hundred pages were largely designed to arm the non-biologist with technical arguments to combat creationist nonsense, and they do a fine job.

The last two chapters are where Miller finally starts to explore the possible arguments for God. None of his arguments are convincing. He even says a couple of things that are embarrassing for a scientist of his caliber, like when he wanders into the field of cosmology: “…when one makes a run backwards in time to the moment before the big bang, one must imagine inconceivable amounts of mass and energy concentrated at a single point in space” (p. 225). Except that even talking about “before the big bang” makes no sense, since that very event is what created space and time as we know it. There was no time before the big bang that we know of. It’s like talking about cakes before the time of baking. It seems that he might be trying to raise the question of what allowed the big bang to occur. A great question, and we have the greatest minds in science working on it. The current answer? We don’t know. 

A bit later, Miller delves into the miraculous: “What can science say about a miracle? Nothing. By definition, the miraculous is beyond explanation, beyond our understanding, beyond science. This does not mean that miracles do not occur. A key doctrine in my own faith is that Jesus was born of a virgin, even though it makes no scientific sense – there is the matter of Jesus’s Y-chromosome to account for. But that is the point. Miracles, by definition, do not have to make scientific sense” (p. 239). This truly is a disappointing argument from someone who just spent two-hundred pages arguing against creationism because it *doesn’t make scientific sense*. One of the points of science is to try to build heuristic models that explain the universe around us, or some aspect of that universe, that account for the most observable data. We must either reject or be agnostic about those phenomena which cannot be assimilated into these models.

Miller sometimes waxes philosophical, with about as much success. On God’s eternality: “This means that God, who always has been and always will be, transcends time and therefore is the master of it” (p. 242). I realize this is a stock-in-trade argument from classical Christian theology, but it is fundamentally flawed: something cannot exist outside of time because time is a predicate of existence. To exist means to have *come into existence*. The popular formulation of this argument is when a theist asks an atheist “What caused the big bang?” and the atheist responds “What caused God?” If you’re operating under the assumption that everything needs a cause, as classical Christian theology does, saying that God is an exception to your own rule isn’t going to work. It’s a logical fallacy called special pleading. 

So, why does Kenneth Miller believe in God? One reason is his acceptance of the God of the Gaps arguments; he seems to be perplexed by the fact that we don’t have all of cosmology explained away. The second is his peculiar interpretation of quantum mechanics. He thinks that the random events of quantum mechanics and the simultaneous orderliness of the universe have something to with a God, though he never comes out and explicitly states it, and never clarifies how the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics would provide evidence for God.

What kind of God does Miller believe in? In the closing lines of the book, he quotes Darwin: “There is grandeur in this view of life; with its several powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most wonderful and most beautiful have been, and are being evolved” (p. 292). This is awe-filled Darwin at his most wondrous. However, even when Darwin indulged these sentiments, this is clearly the God of deism: a world set into motion by a distant, non-personal God who created natural laws and then let happen what may. It doesn’t at all comport with the fundamental tenets of the Catholic Church (the virgin birth, the assumption, et cetera) in which Miller claims to believe. 

Darwin’s God wasn’t the God of miracles, and therefore isn’t Miller’s God. He was the God of reverence for the mysteries of the universe, which have been slowly decreasing in number since the rise of modern science. This number will never reach zero; there will always be something new to learn, and science will never disappear. But looking for God in the unexplained nooks and crannies of science leaves a smaller and smaller place for Him/Her/It with each passing year, and this seems to be a theological approach in danger of having God slip through its very fingers.

Review of James Wood's "The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

You can’t accuse James Wood of lacking range. These essays run the gamut from Harold Bloom’s influence on Shakespeare studies to the “theology” of George Steiner to the lasting (though indirect) impact of Ernst Renan. Unfortunately, had I not taken notes as I read these two dozen or so essays, I would have quickly forgotten most of the arguments presented herein. At their worst, they are uncontroversial and too subtle perhaps to make an impression. There are a few, though, that are fascinating and thought-provoking enough to make you reconsider the topic at hand – but they are the exception in an otherwise relatively pedestrian set of essays.

Wood has the odd habit of writing something vaguely resembling a book review which in reality is just an opportunity for him to get on a soapbox concerning the subject at hand. This is precisely what he does what the aforementioned essay, titled “Shakespeare in Bloom.” It purports to be a review of Bloom’s “Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.” In a sixteen-page-long review, he mentions the book perhaps two or three times, choosing to spend most of his time wrapped up in discussion of the place of ontology in artistic creativity: namely, did we invent Shakespeare (that is, his place in the literary canon), or did he invent us? His answers to these questions draw much more from Hazlitt, Coleridge, and other twentieth century critics than they do from the book being considered, and therefore Bloom’s book, no matter your opinion of it, seems to come off as a cipher, an empty vessel upon which Wood can expatiate as he sees fit. His review of Peter Ackroyd’s “The Life of Thomas More” and the Melville essay, “The All and The If: God and Metaphor in Melville” (mostly a review of Hershel Parker’s biography of Melville), are similar in that they are really more polemical in nature, but still operate under the conceit of a book review.

First the lame and the bland. Do we really need another piece on how Jane Austen created successively female characters with more actively interior lives, and therefore was at least in part responsible for bringing the fore the private, internal lives and thoughts of these characters? And what use is it to have Virginia Woolf described for the 72nd time as “mystical”? Or another retelling of how DeLillo’s conspiracy-laden fiction weakens his writing instead of strengthens it? As for the first two observations, they have been fully fleshed out elsewhere and now seem droll and unimaginative. I even happen to agree with the last point, but I certainly don’t want to read another essay about it; it seems to stand on its own merits for anyone who has read almost anything he has written. 

There are some pieces of moderate interest, including one on T. S. Eliot’s anti-Semitism (another cipher of a book review, this time of Anthony Julius’ “Anti-Semitism and Literary Form”). I haven’t read Julius’ book, but it sounds like he goes hopping from poem to poem in Eliot’s oeuvre anxious to kind anti-Jewish sentiment wherever he can find it. Wood rightly take the effort to point out that being a bad person (or having prejudices that today seem less-than-fashionable) doesn’t make you a bad poet.

But I wouldn’t want to leave someone with the impression that the whole book is like this; it has its moments. In the essay on George Steiner’s idea of literature and meaning (mostly as presented in Steiner’s “Real Presences”), Wood accuses Steiner of being “theological.” He suggests Steiner says anything can be said about anything and therefore runs the risk – one could liken it to Pascal’s Wager – that meaning even really exists. He also attacks Steiner’s suggestion that American lacks great art because of its liberal, democratic government. I read one of the essays in “Real Presences” for my undergraduate thesis which is why I was particularly interested in Wood’s assessment, but I don’t remember the anti-Americanism in it. 

This is my first collection by Wood, supposedly one of the better literary critics writing today, but didn’t really see what much of the ado was about. I would suggest that, instead of sitting down to read these all at once, you read them topically as you make your way through the authors themselves. That might provide you with a reading that’s more lasting and memorable than most of the ones I walked away with. Despite my experience here, I’m sure the soi-disant literary critic in me will have me coming back for more James Wood in the future.

Review of Djuna Barnes' "Nightwood"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

For whatever reason, it seems that “Nightwood” has one of the more precarious reputations in twentieth-century literature. The name of its author, Djuna Barnes, is still synonymous with the life of the modern, and Modernist, American expatriate living in Paris; however, like Lawrence Durrell, another author I have been thinking quite a bit about, she seems to have fallen into disfavor – and this is quite a loss. 

And like Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet,” this coheres as fiction in a completely different way from most other fiction. While Durrell’s prose is florid and sometimes downright meretricious, Barnes uses her characters, especially the eccentric Dr. O’Connor, to stretch the limits of language and meaning. O’Connor, a fay dandy and philosopher-mystagogue, is so preposterous and unbelievable it’s a miracle that he even works as a character. He serves as a perennial touching conversational touching stone for all the other characters, endlessly and giddily upending their assumptions and, especially in the case of Nora, emotional commitments.

The other characters, each histrionic in their own way, are all fairly normal in comparison; the plot is barebones and simple. The “Baron,” a self-stylized aristocrat manqué, marries Robin Vote, who seems lost and discontented whoever she surrounds herself with and wherever she goes, often being driven to roam the streets of the city at night, a listless flaneur. The chapter “Watchmen, What of the Night?” is one of the most beautiful meditations on night that I have ever read in literature. 

Soon after having a child with the Baron, she leaves him and moves in with Nora, with whom she is just spiritually out of place. Robin then finally leaves Nora for Jenny, at which point Nora turns to Dr. O’Connor for solace. His brand of consolation is some peculiar poesy to say the least. At the height of Nora’s despair, her heart rent in two by a woman she truly loved, O’Connor offers these words: “For the thickness of the sleep that is on the sleeper we ‘forgive,’ as we ‘forgive’ the dead for the account of the earth that lies upon them. What we do not see, we are told, we do not mourn; yet night and sleep trouble us, suspicion being the strongest dream and dead the throng. The heart of the jealous knows the best and the most satisfying love, that of the other’s bed, where the rival perfects the lover’s imperfections. Fancy gallops to take part in that duel, unconstrained by any certain articulation of the laws of that unseen game.”

T. S. Eliot’s beautiful introduction does two things introductions rarely do: holds back any plot spoilers (not that there is really anything to “give away,” per se) and actually sheds light on the text. It can safely be read, as I read it, before finishing the book. And I second Eliot’s take on the novel, especially his observation that in “Nightwood” you will find “great achievement of a style, the beauty of phrasing, the brilliance of wit and characterization, and a quality of horror and doom very nearly related to that of Elizabethan tragedy.” The brilliance of wit and characterization is something I can only second and treble. This is bold, high Modernism at its most audacious, and the sum of its effects is simply stunning.

Book Haul #5

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Books discussed include:

The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace, H. W. Brands

The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer

The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Jonathan Barnes

Metahistory: The Historical Imagination In Nineteenth-Century Europe, Hayden White

Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred, Bateson & Bateson

The Conscience of the Eye: The Design and Social Life of Cities, Richard Sennett

The Successor, Ismail Kadare

Libra, Don DeLillo

Renaissance Diplomacy, Garrett Mattingly

The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides

Mules and Men, Zora Neale Hurston

Eleanor of Aquitaine, Alison Weir

The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left, Todd Gitlin

Habits of the Heart, Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton

Generation: The Seventeenth-Century Scientists Who Unraveled the Secrets of Sex, Life, and Growth, Matthew Cobb

Faustus: The Life and Times of A Renaissance Magician, Leo Ruickbie

God's Chinese Children: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xuiquan, Jonathan D. Spence

A History of Their Own: Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present, Anderson & Zinsser

Review of Hurta Muller's "The Land of Green Plums"

[The above video is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

Herta Muller was born in the German-speaking region of Banat in central Romania, and grew up under Ceausescu. It was only in 1987 at the age of 34 that she and her husband were able to settle in West Berlin. This novel is difficult to appreciate apart from Muller’s personal experience of living under an authoritarian dictatorship, and having German as a first language but being forced to learn Romanian in primary school. 

Herta Muller’s third novel tells the story of a group of young university students living in Ceausescu’s Romania. One of the young women, Lola, has violent sexual encounters with men in semi-public places, and we are left to guess why. (To keep party officials satisfied? For food? Pure sublimation?) She ends up dead one day – found hanging in her closet – under circumstances every bit as mysterious. Everyone’s lives are full of paranoia, angst, and fear of being turned into the state officials, who filter into and out of the characters’ lives in both latent and manifest forms. Unlike her friend who committed suicide (or was she killed?), the narrator of the novel decides to emigrate to Germany to face an uncertain future.

I must admit that I had a very difficult time with this novel, but not in the normal ways: it wasn’t difficult to read, or difficult to understand in historical context. It simply offered nothing new for me. The story, the tale of the lives of a young woman and a few of her male friends seemed, with all of its verisimilitude, straight out of history. Anyone that has read about Romania under Ceausescu knows about his cult of personality, the utter deprivation that his people constantly lived under, and surviving only to think possibly of one day being “disappeared.” The lives of Lola, Edgar, Georg, and Kurt are not unfamiliar to history.

The lessons this book teaches are the lessons of history, not of literature. I have a small amount of familiarity, gained solely through reading, about that time and place. In those books, I read of people like the major characters presented in the book. But at least for me, Muller’s novel presents no added value to the history I already know. Great fiction has to be more than “litterature verite.” It needs to bring something to the table that history cannot, something that speaks to the human condition differently than a historian does. Muller’s writing lacked this, at least for me. 

Michael Hofmann’s translation is poetic, meditative, disjointed, which I found appropriate for the tone and subject matter of Muller’s novel. I look forward to reading more of Muller’s work in the future, and hope to appreciate it more than I did “The Land of Green Plums.”