Review of Henry Blake Fuller's "Bertram Cope's Year"

[The above 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.]

There are two kinds of forgotten writer. One is vaguely remembered when perusing a book shelf or in passing conversation. Hamlin Garland – didn’t he write about farmers? Or maybe William Dean Howells – didn’t he used to be considered one of America’s greatest writers? This is a precarious and perhaps the most painful of literary deaths, being half-remembered and half-forgotten. Perhaps more graceful is the obsolescence of the completely and utterly forgotten. These include George Washington Cable, Zitkala-Sa, or, alas, the subject of this review, Henry Flake Fuller and his novel “Bertram Cope’s Year.” 

To be quite frank, we need not mourn the cultural loss of every writer who ever set pen to paper and, judging solely from my reading of “Bertram Cope’s Year,” the only novel I’ve read by him, Fuller is one of those writers. My Triangle Classics edition has a very generous introduction full of biographical and literary material written by Edmund Wilson and originally published in the New Yorker in 1970, which hails him as an important American writer of the early twentieth century. Wilson has been known to tend toward the effusive in his praise.

The novel tells the story of Bertram Cope, fresh from undergraduate school, who has decided that pursing a Master’s degree might further his career prospects. He soon falls under the heavy-handed charms of the grande dame of local literary society, Medora Phillips and the three young ingénues, including a poet and a composer, whom she supports with her independent wealth. Somehow, magically – by his ravishing good looks, his innocence newness to the place? – all of these women are attracted to him, inviting him to endless teas and evening soirees. There’s even an older man named Basil Randolph who frequents these get-togethers looking for young men from the university to “mentor,” and is frustrated by Bertram’s constant passive-aggressive rebuffs.

At home, however, Bertram writes to his friend Arthur Lemoyne, telling him how much he misses him and wants to see him. Eventually, Arthur discusses moving to live with Bertram in order to see if he can get a role in the local musical productions at the university. Locals are a little surprised when Arthur is cast in the role of a woman in the musical, but they naively don’t read much into it. The novel ends with Bertram graduating with his degree and going back home without Arthur, who made an overt pass at one of the male members of the musical cast. 

This is a novel of manners, particularly highly stylized because the subject matter demands a cloak of ambiguity. Fuller never mentions the word the word “homosexual,” and the entire book is completely devoid of sexual behavior of any kind beyond a little heterosexual flirtation here and there. The ambiguity seemed a little too much for even some of its more literary readership. The American Library Association’s publication Booklist described it “a story of superficial social university life in a suburb of Chicago, with live enough people and a sense of humor hovering near the surface." “New Outlook” said that “the study of this weak but agreeable man is subtle but far from exciting." The cluelessness of these reactions and their lack of ability to interpret social situations is a credit to Flake’s subtlety, even a century later when what we sometimes identify as “gay fiction” is anything but subtle or stylized. 

This novel struck me very much as Radclyffe Hall’s “Well of Loneliness” or Virgilio Pinera’s “Le carne de Rene” did – full of historical interest, but ultimately failing short of being the timeless LGBT fiction they’re often vaunted to be. The manneristic writing, roughly contemporary with the later novels of Henry James, hasn’t aged nearly as well. The criticism of small, bourgeois minds is nothing new and isn’t handled particularly deftly. However, as a “gay novel,” it stands out as more than just a bizarre curio of literary history. It is, probably accurately, called the first gay novel published in the United States, in 1919. This alone should earn it some attention, even if Bertram and his worldly sprezzatura don’t brashly shove more contemporary expectations in our face.

Review of Jean Baudrillard's "The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena"

[The above 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.]

Jean Baudrillard was probably one of the contemporary French postmodern philosophers and sociologists whose ideas were most accessible (relatively speaking) and well-received in the United States. This was my first time reading Baudrillard first-hand, and some of the ideas were surprising. This book is from the Verso Radical Thinkers imprint, which always has me expecting politically revolutionary ideas, or overt Marxism, neither of which Baudrillard embraces. In fact, he explicitly identifies himself as a post-Marxist.

I sometimes have a problem with shorter pieces (not just in philosophy), and this book can at times seem to be a mile wide and only an inch deep. In only two-hundred pages, there are twenty-two chapters, although there are a few general ideas that he keeps hammering home: he is infatuated with scientific and especially medical metaphors, and continually uses them in trying to diagnose the postmodern society; AIDS, cancer, and computer viruses pop up over and over again throughout the essays. He argues that instead of destroying organisms, these things just change the way they function – AIDS inhibits sexual behavior, cancer is rooted in regular cellular division except that it has gone radically metastatic, et cetera. He also sees all areas of discourse which have previously been separated from one another as bleeding into one another indiscriminately: the aesthetic is now trans-aesthetic, the economic is now trans-economic, any formerly balkanized category can apply to anything else.

I mentioned Baudrillard’s post-Marxism earlier. In fact, he might even describe himself as post-political, since he seems to think that even politics itself has come to an end. Applying his idea of simulacra and simulation to the political sphere, he says “But what can we do? This is the state of simulation, a state in which we are obliged to replay all scenarios precisely because they have taken place already, whether actually or potentially. The state of utopia realized, of all utopias realized, wherein paradoxically we must continue to live as though they had not been. But since they have, and since we can no longer, therefore, nourish the hope of realizing them, we can only ‘hyper-realize’ them through interminable simulation” (p. 4). This almost reads like a conservative kind of cynicism or nihilism, which sort of caught me off guard.

Some of the observations struck me as bizarre and wrong-headed, like what he has to say about AIDS. “AIDS is not the reflection not so much of an excess of sex or sexual pleasure as of sex’s decompensation through its general spread into all areas of life, its venting through all the trivial variants of sexual incantation. The real loss of immunity concerns sex as a whole, with the disappearance of sexual difference and hence of sexuality per se. It is in this diffraction of the sexual reality principle, at the fractal, micrological and non-human level, that the essential confusion of the epidemic takes hold” (p. 9). I’m sorry, but this is simply false. The virus responsible for causing AIDS knows nothing about the “sexuality reality principle,” and even saying something like this sounds silly. 

Sweeping statements like the one on AIDS occasionally stud and inevitably mar the power of any critical philosophy Baudrillard has to offer, if he wants to offer one at all. It makes for wonderfully audacious and exciting theory, but shoddy philosophy. Maybe Baudrillard wouldn’t draw such a definitive line between the two, but I think with the former, metaphorical or analogical thought can help push theory along into unknown realms and aid in understanding things in different ways. Philosophy, being more closely related to logic, has to be more careful. And Baudrillard is working analogically here: saying that X resembles A in some sense and Y resembles A in another sense, therefore X is Y. This opens up new vistas of understanding, but when presented as philosophy can do just as much to obscure as it can to clarify.

These quibbles aside, this is probably one of the better introductions to Baudrillard’s large output. You don’t have to be overly familiar with all of his work to walk away from the essays feeling that you’ve learned something about him. And for those just getting their feet wet, this isn’t full of the obfuscatory prose we’re familiar with from other continental philosophy “Of Grammatology” or “Difference and Repetition,” and for that we can all be grateful.

Review of Julian Barnes' "The Sense of an Ending"

[The above 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 recently finished Barnes’ “A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters,” and gave it a pretty glowing review. Its combination of clever playfulness and meditations on important questions was one I tend to find less frequently in contemporary fiction, and was therefore a welcome one. Just as in “A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters,” the themes of memory and our relationship with it loom large, but here they are transmuted into a poignant story of personal revelation, not the latter’s illustration of the vast canvas of humanity. “The Sense of an Ending” retains Barnes’ humorous voice despite its subject, which could have easily let it devolve into a cheap, sentimental pity party.

The novel is told in two parts. The first introduces us to the narrator, Tony Webster, and his small circle of smart-alecky, pretentious friends in their last years before going off to university. They all think pretty highly of themselves (I guess that’s not too atypical of boys this age), but one among them – Adrian – really and truly does stand out. The other friends were too alike and immature to really stick out in my imagination. But Adrian’s interest in ideas, philosophy, and history even has his history teacher offering him his job one day if it wants it, and he wasn’t kidding. Adrian has such heightened moral scruples that he even writes a letter to Tony asking if it’s okay that he dates one of his ex-girlfriends, Veronica. Veronica, despite being a total passive-aggressive bitch who led Tony along on a string, was one of the few oases in an adolescence otherwise wholly unvisited by reciprocated love interests. Tony replies with a very sardonic, sarcastic, cutting letter in reply saying in effect, “Sure, but don’t mind my damaged goods.” 

After graduating from school, Adrian is accepted, to no one’s surprise, to Cambridge University. However, Adrian’s precocity turns out to be very much a mixed blessing; during their college years they lose touch, and Tony learns that Adrian has, apparently because of his unshakeable philosophical convictions, committed suicide. 

One day, Tony receives a letter from a solicitor informing him that Veronica’s mother has passed away, and that she wants to leave him Adrian’s diary. This re-opens a slew of old memories and associations that Tony may very well have wanted to leave untouched. After repeated attempts, he finally makes contact again with Veronica, who is still as conniving and cold as ever, even though we understand as the story wears on that she might have some small reason to be this way. In most reviews, I wouldn’t hesitate divulging even the most important parts of the book, but the unwinding of Tony’s memories come so quickly and are so important to the unfolding of the book that I would feel something would be lost to people who wanted to read it.

Thankfully, it won’t be divulging too much to say that this novel is about our complicated relationship with the past, how we come to understand and build that past, and how we must reconcile ourselves with it. A few people have noted that Tony seems to be self-pitying and his mistaken analyses of his friends. Of course, that’s Barnes’ point: wisdom and self-knowledge mean nothing, and might not even be possible, until we are blessed with the distinction between the promethean and the epimethean, before foresight and hindsight. The entire novel is about Tony slowly and painfully finding this out for himself.

Review of Michael J. Sandel's "Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics"

[The above 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 was first introduced to Michael Sandel a couple of years ago on YouTube while I was looking for a productive way to spend my newly free summer days. His course at Harvard called “Justice” is one of the fastest in the entire university to fill up – not something I had to worry about, since I could watch all twelve of the lectures at my leisure. The lectures were filmed in an enormous hall (over 1,000 student register for his class every time it is offered), and are full of students who would never think of necessarily majoring in philosophy, but are still interested in deep, meaningful questions like “What does it mean to be a citizen in a democratic society?” and “How does one pursue the good life in a world of so many competing interests?” This searching quality, and Sandel’s open, interactive maieutic method of engaging his students were some of the best parts of his lectures.

That same Socratic spirit continues within the pages of this book, a series of previously published essays. Sandel’s willingness and insistence on being a knowledgeable cicerone through the history of liberal political theory is a sincere and much-appreciated one. However, some of these pieces are simply too short, both in length and in moral force, to merit inclusion in what otherwise could have been an extremely powerful collection. Most of the short pieces I’m talking about are in Part II, “Moral and Political Arguments.” These are articles (I use this word instead of “essay” because they almost look more like, and it pains me to say it, op-ed pieces than they do well-considered philosophical arguments) discussing the relative positives and negatives of state lotteries, advertising in public classrooms, the morality of buying and selling pollution credits, affirmative action, and the Clinton imbroglio. Some of these sound a little dated, having been written while the public discussions behind these issues was still hot; some of them haven’t been updated, not to mention more fully fleshed out as they should be.

The lengths of the pieces here are pretty proportional to their quality. The opening essay, “America’s Search for a Public Philosophy,” (p. 9-34) nicely sets the tone and informs the body of concerns that resurface throughout the book: our shift away from a kind of communitarian liberalism toward a more rights-based, autonomy-based, voluntarist liberalism in which the state is value-neutral. (This seems to be an essay-long distillation of his book, “Democracy’s Discontent.”) The best essays point out some of the contradictions residing within liberalism (liberalism in the broad philosophical sense, not the narrow sense pundits use the word): for example, is toleration a good in itself if the thing being tolerated is morally dubious, like the neo-Nazis marching in Skokie, Illinois? In other words, which is more morally fundamental – the toleration itself, or the inherent goodness or badness of the thing being tolerated? Sandel is right to point out that rudimentary questions like this rarely present themselves in the matter of public discourse.

Two more essays, “Dewey’s Liberalism and Ours” and “Political Liberalism,” a discussion of some of the readings and misreadings Dewey has incurred since his death and a critical discussion of John Rawls respectively, are both equally worthy of attention. In fact, Dewey’s influence on Sandel looms large; both are extremely concerned with the cultivation of a democratic citizenry, and what precisely this would entail. Both are also clearly disenchanted with the rights-based, voluntarist liberalism that has come to be almost unquestioned in the United States over the last century. 

While some of the shorter pieces come to the conclusions that you would expect of someone of a Deweyan, communitarian liberal bent who values goods before rights, the longer pieces that I mention above really are good places to see the various ways in which philosophy dovetails into practical political concerns. They are consistently thought-provoking and critical of the liberal tradition within political philosophy when necessary. The short articles, while not totally worthless, are more cursory and may be of interest to those with a passing or historical interest interest, but they don’t provide the intellectual sustenance found in other parts of the book.

Book Haul #11

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

Books discussed include:

Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights, Maria Warner
The Fate of Africa, Martin Meredith
Lincoln's Virtues: An Ethical Biography, William Lee Miller
Mapp and Lucia, E. F. Benson
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, Thomas De Quincey
Pierre; Or, the Ambiguities, Herman Melville
Contemporaries (Collection of Literary Essays), Alfred Kazin
The Modern Mind, Peter Watson
Classics for Pleasure, Michael Dirda
On Jung, Anthony Stevens
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Bernard Williams
Kolyma Tales, Varlam Shalamov
The Return of the Soldier, Rebecca West
The Strength of Poetry: The Oxford Lectures, James Fenton

Reading of Sylvia Plath's "Daddy"