Mantel wins Booker in split vote

The historical novelist Hilary Mantel has captured the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Wolf Hall, described by the Times as a “650-page doorstopper about political manoeuvring at the court of Henry VIII.”

The prize jury split three-to-two between Mantel’s novel and another book that James Naughtie, the jury’s foreman, declined to name. Wolf Hall beat out Sarah Waters’s Little Stranger, my own favorite, along with A. S. Byatt’s Children’s Book and J. M. Coetzee’s Summertime.

In the Guardian, Claire Armistead regrets the awarding of the prize, saying ruefully that Mantel’s loyal readers “have always regarded her as our secret.” As someone who enjoys a well-researched historical novel—a genre that often performs the job of reenacting history better than academic historiography—I have to say that the Booker has accomplished its goal of creating at least one new reader for its prize-winner.

Wolf Hall has yet to be released in this country, however.

Influence and literary history

On my showing, influence is the lasting effect upon the corporate understanding of an intellectual or literary genre or period. The truly influential novelist is not Harry Bellamann, whose Kings Row (1942) infected hundreds of other potboiler-makers with the virus that causes sex scenes, but Jane Austen, who changed the understanding of the novel for all time despite relative neglect during her own lifetime.

The job of literary history, as I understand it, would then be to reconstruct the literary context out of which the truly influential writers emerged, which includes projects like Miriam Burstein’s to recover the subgenres and movements and styles that once flourished but were lost or abandoned, because they proved not to be influential after all. Literary history—and the same would hold for the history of philosophy, I would bet—is not the same as political history or even intellectual history.

The historian is concerned only with making the past intelligible in its own terms, and thus for him a person’s contemporary influence is all that matters—even if the person is subsequently forgotten. He does not relate past events to present understanding, but the literary historian—and the historian of philosophy too, if I am right—cannot escape it. Their subjects are defined by current value in a way the historian’s is not.

Thus when writing his history of Enthusiasm (1950), Ronald Knox was obliged to devote a chapter to François Malaval, Pier Matteo Petrucci, and Michael Molinos, even though no one now is influenced by them. But Burstein cannot ignore Cardinal Newman. He is, after all, to adopt her typography, Cardinal Newman. She is obliged to include him in a history of nineteenth-century conversion novels, even though “the more Victorian Catholic fiction [she] read[s], the less significant [Newman’s novel] Loss and Gain looks.” His significance is his current value.

Influence

Originally, influence was an astrological concept. It was the ethereal fluid streaming from the stars to act upon the character and destiny of men. That at least is how Chaucer used the word. Dr. Johnson uses it repeatedly in his Lives of the Poets, but not to denote one writer’s literary power over another. The closest he comes is in his life of Sir Richard Blackmore, where he observes that, in his Satyr against Wit (1700), Blackmore “degraded himself by conferring that authority over the national taste, which he takes from the poets, upon men of high rank and wide influence, but of less wit and not greater virtue.” The word’s cognate is influenza. Is there such a thing as “swine influence”?

Just recently, Miriam Burstein permitted herself to become grumpy about the very idea of overrated novels, saying that “If the novel has influenced generations of successors, then my aesthetic objections are neither here nor there: I still have to teach the book (if it’s in my field, anyway), whether or not I want to throw it into the nearest recycling bin.” (But wouldn’t your aesthetic objections be part of your teaching?)

In a comment to her post, Brandon Watson restates Burstein’s objection: “We tend to muddle two kinds of importance together: importance in the historical network of causes and effects (extensiveness of influence) and importance relative to the full potential of the genre (comparative excellence as a thing of its kind), and you’re right that we shouldn’t.”

But his example cuts against Watson’s conclusion: “In the early modern period Norris has the best attack on scholasticism (best informed, most careful, and most extensive); but it seems to have influenced nobody (they mostly just repeated the clichés Norris rises above).” Watson is referring here to the English philosopher and poet John Norris of Bemerton (1657–1711) and his Essay towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible Worlds (1701, 1704).

If historical importance is judged by “extensiveness of influence”—what might be called the Citation Index standard—then the repetition of the “clichés Norris rises above” is more important than Norris. Watson names no one who repeats the clichés, however, because they are not important to the history of philosophy. And why? Philosophy is not just anything that is written on philosophical questions or in philosophical language, but the best (“best attack,” “best informed”) and most (“most careful,” “most extensive”).

Isn’t Norris’s historical importance precisely his greatness as a philosopher despite his contemporary neglect? If his excellence as a philosopher is compared to the extensiveness of his influence, wouldn’t Norris be correctly described as an underrated philosopher? “How do we define ‘overrated’?” Burstein asks. But isn’t this how? A writer is overrated if his historical influence is inflated when compared to his true excellence, “aesthetic” or otherwise. And I do mean true.

Like many careful and serious thinkers, Burstein and Watson are terribly suspicious of value terms, which strike them as amateurish approximations that resist demonstration and proof. Theirs is an attitude expressed most memorably (and most snarkily) by the great classicist Basil Gildersleeve. He wished to put literary study, which then passed by the name philology, upon a rigorous scientific footing. The difference between natural science and what he called “historico-philol­ogical sci­ence” was not to be located in their methods, because each relied upon experimen­ta­tion, the verification of research, the certainty of results, and the exclu­sion of error:

“The differ­ence,” Gildersleeve said, “is simply in the material.” Natural science is the exact study of natural phe­nom­ena; histor­ico-philological science is the exact study of the works of man. For Gilder­sleeve the crucial differ­ence was between those who studied the same literary material in two different ways: littérateurs (in his sneer­ing term) versus philologists. The first were florists; the second were botanists. The “florist’s conception of literature,” Gilder­sleeve said, is that “aes­the­tic charm” is the prime deter­minant, the value that qualifies a text for classifi­ca­tion as litera­ture. In truth, how­ever, “aesthetic charm is beside the question.”[1]But I want to reassure Miriam Burstein that she will not be transformed after uneasy dreams into a littérateur if she admits aesthetic considerations into her literary history. Or, if not aesthetic considerations, for I am not convinced that aesthetics are of much use in literary study, then value terms. After all, to speak of a writer’s influence is to assert a value—a historical value, but a value nevertheless. It is, however, an objective value. You can demonstrate that a writer’s influence objectively exists. It has nothing whatever to do with my subjective feelings about him—with, that is, my “aesthetic objections” to his writing.

But nearly thirty years ago Hilary Putnam argued that “at least some value terms stand for properties of the things they are applied to, and not just for feelings of the person who uses the terms.”[2] His examples are the “cognitive virtues” of coherence and functional simplicity, which make scientific thinking rationally acceptable. Literary texts may also display coherence and functional simplicity. They may even be said to have a value that is not “aesthetic” (for lack of a mutally agreeable term), but historical. They may be described as being “leaps and bounds beyond . . . just about every other nineteenth-century conversion novel” or as the “best informed, most careful, and most extensive” work of its kind. They may have value, that is, in comparison to other texts. And perhaps that might even be characterized as their influence.

Perhaps historical influence should be reconceived, not as an infection that is measured by how many come down with it, but as star-fired power and authority that are exercised over other books and writers by reducing them in comparative importance. A writer is influential if he continues to be read—if he continues to display cognitive virtues—long after the clichés that he once rose above have ceased to be repeated.
____________________

[1] Quoted in The Elephants Teach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 26.

[2] Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 135.

Come, sons of summer

by whose toil
We are the lords of wine and oil:
By whose tough labours, and rough hands,
We rip up first, then reap our lands.
Crowned with the ears of corn, now come,
And to the pipe sing harvest home.
Come forth, my lord, and see the cart
Dressed up with all the country art. . . .

Not a cart, in the Jews’ case, but a hut. Like the ones the Israelites dwelled in while they crossed the desert.

A Commonplace Blog will be offline for the hag of Sukkot until Sunday evening at the earliest.

The link also rises

Speaking of depressing novels, Natasha Wimmer in the Nation nominates Mercè Rodoreda’s Time of the Doves (1962), part of the “small canon of coming-of-age novels by Catalan women.”

I tried to intensify the flavor of 21st century fiction by reducing it to five titles, but the opposite approach is pursued at the Millions, where one hundred and twenty books are said to be among the century’s best. Or, in other words, you can quit your other reading and concentrate only on the fiction of the last decade and you still won’t be done till some time next year. Daniel Green is properly aloof, sniffing that such exercises as these “assume that anything remotely useful can be accomplished by making lists and choosing up sides.”

Miriam Burstein, continuing to demonstrate how a book blog might be used to advance literary scholarship, attends to a work of “anti-Anglo-Catholic fiction”—Elizabeth Jane Whately’s Maude (1869). As she says elsewhere, Burstein reads these books so that you and I don’t have to. A blessing on her head!

Observing that “Knowledge is a form of attentiveness,” Patrick Kurp reflects on the literary attitude that unites Elizabeth Bishop and Dawn Powell.

Oscar Wilde’s “groundbreaking work of criticism” Intentions (1905), recently reprinted by the Cornell University Library, is exposited generously at Hungry Like the Woolf.

Open Letters Monthly is out with its bestseller issue, including reviews of Russo’s That Old Cape Magic, Pat Conroy’s South of Broad, and The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson.

The Scotsman surveys the literary history of Edinburgh, “the world’s first official city of literature.”

The last word that ever need be written on Lionel Trilling.

If only because of the reaction it will provoke on the literary Left, you’ve got to appreciate this book jacket.

Finally, if you have not yet read William Kristol’s eulogy to his late father Irving Kristol, you owe it to yourself to do so. That a father could inspire such a tribute from a son is deeply moving, no matter what your politics.

Oz favored for Nobel

The Nobel Prize in Literature will be announced next Thursday. The Israeli novelist Amos Oz is a four-to-one favorite to win—with the French-language feminist Assia Djebar, an Algerian Arab expatriate teaching at New York University, and the wholly improbable Joyce Carol Oates running behind at five to one (h/t: Michael Schaub). A contest between a post-colonialist Arab and an Israeli, even one as dovish and anti-settlement as Oz, is no contest. Besides, Oz blamed Hamas for the war in Gaza and initially supported Israeli military action there.

As for Oates. I was astonished recently to find Malcolm Bradbury praising her in his Modern American Novel (new edition, 1992). Locating her in the Gothic tradition and calling her “multitalented,” Bradbury says that Oates has “constructed an enormously varied fictional world, at times highly literary and allusive, but also distinctively hers—marked by her preoccupation with estrangement and horror, with the dynastic contemporary success-driven and violent American present.” Although the quality of her work varies tremendously, and though she is “apt to use sensation for its own sake” (you think?), Bradbury concluded that she is a “writer of great importance.” Color me flabbergasted.

The greatest living American novelist has no better than a seven-to-one chance to win the Nobel, according to oddsmakers. Although an American has not taken home the prize since 1993, when Toni Morrison was named, English-language writers have won four of the last ten. There is little to no chance of an American’s winning in 2009, and an even smaller chance that the winner will be Philip Roth.

Five months ago I predicted that the Peruvian poet Carmen Ollé would be given the nod, and I am standing by that prediction. Although Djebar has the right ethnic and political credentials, she is handicapped by writing in French, the same language as last year’s winner Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio. The last time that the prize went in consecutive years to writers in the same language was also 1993, when Morrison succeeded Derek Walcott, who himself followed Nadine Gordimer. A South American writer has not been honored since 1982, when Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia was singled out. Another possible laureate is Cristina Peri Rossi, an expatriate Uruguayan poet and novelist living in Barcelona, who writes sexually charged stuff from a feminist viewpoint.

Anyone who thinks the Nobel Prize in Literature has anything to do with literature is deluding himself.

Top ten depressing novels

Over at the American Book Exchange—the only place I buy used books any more—Scott Laming has compiled a list of the top ten depressing novels of all time:

( 1.) Cormac McCarthy, The Road
( 2.) Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
( 3.) Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
( 4.) George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
( 5.) Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
( 6.) John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
( 7.) Elie Wiesel, Night
( 8.) Nevil Shute, On the Beach
( 9.) Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
(10.) William Golding, Lord of the Flies

A good list—but some essential titles for the bitter and pessimistic have been left off.

What about Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and the other novels from the ’thirties, that noir decade? I am thinking of Appointment in Samarra, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Butterfield 8, Call It Sleep, and if you include novels written during the ’thirties, though published later, Native Son and The Ox Bow Incident.

After the boom times of the ’fifties, unrelieved grimness came back into style. Flannery O’Connor’s Violent Bear It Away (1960) is depressing unless thoughts of the Apocalypse cheer you. E. L. Doctorow’s Welcome to Hard Times, published the same year, is an “anti-Western” without anyone to stand up to the cruel men who rape and murder. Revolutionary Road (1961) put paid to any hope for happiness in suburbia. Jerzy Kosinski’s 1965 novel The Painted Bird is a carefully detailed chronicle of human pitilessness and blank suffering. James Dickey’s Deliverance (1970) is terrifying in addition to grim, and then ends on a note of hopelessness.

My favorite feel-bad novel of all time is Charles Willeford’s delightfully amoral Shark-Infested Custard (1993). The novel follows a group of four friends, swinging bachelors in Miami, who start their career by dumping the corpse of an underage pickup and end by facing the same problem—with one of their own number. [Update: More than a year after compiling this list, I finally got around to a full-length discussion of The Shark-Infested Custard.] Willeford is among the most underrated novelists in American literature. His better known “Hoke Moseley” mysteries, although they are not mysteries, uphold a vision best captured in the title of the second book in the series: New Hope for the Dead. No hope at all, in other words.

I am sure I have forgotten some significant entries.

Shakespeare is the problem

James Atherton, a British educator, is not sure what to make of the core terms that I hold every student at a nearby private school should know by the time they “graduate and head off to college.”

Atherton wonders whether the list of terms is “idiosyncratic? Just one scholar’s way of distilling the essential of his discipline? Or is this kind of list routine?” One thing for sure: “despite all of this being (potentially) about literature, it is totally non-prescriptive about literature itself.”

I am grateful that at least one critic, unacquainted with my thought as a whole, gets its major premise right. Literature, as I have said on more than one occasion, is simply good writing—where “good,” by definition, yields no fixed definition. “From which it follows,” I argue, “that literature is not a body of poems, stories, novels, plays, memoirs, etc., but the act of judgment by which such things come to be named as literature. Literature is the worry of literary criticism.”

Or, in other words, literature (more properly, literary criticism) is a discipline of knowledge, a distinct and autonomous way of blinking at things—human experience sub specie textum. My list of core terms is an attempt to boil down the discipline of literary criticism to manageable college-prepatory proportions.

But literary criticism is not the only discipline of literary study. J. V. Cunningham once listed the four disciplines of graduate study in literature: bibliography, textual criticism, philology, and literary history. Of these the most important for beginning students is literary history. And if I were to contract English literary history to an irreducible minimum it would have to be Shakespeare.

When the department at Texas A&M University did away with its Shakespeare requirement for English majors some time ago, the more conservative scholars objected. “Shakespeare is the problem,” a more radical scholar replied. This is everything that is the case: the problem of English education on the secondary level is that Shakespeare is a problem on the next level.

High school students should learn the core terms of literary criticism, on my view, in order to be prepared for college classes in which the literary tradition has been abandoned. But they should also learn the outlines of that tradition, starting with Shakespeare, in order to make their way in a literate culture where Shakespeare and other great writers are not a problem, but a source of reference and wisdom.

Meet Humbert Polanski

I don’t want to wade into the controversy over filmmaker Roman Polanski’s arrest at the Zurich airport on Saturday for raping a 13-year-old girl in 1977, mainly because I don’t see any controversy. Polanski raped a child; he confessed; then he fled to escape punishment; he deserves prison time. End of controversy.

No, what has caught my attention is the degree to which Polanski’s defenders are unconsciously repeating the involved and sophisticated defense of his “nympholepsy” offered by Humbert Humbert, who did his imitation of Polanski back in the ’fifties.

Thus Polanski is a “renown [sic] and international artist,” say Woody Allen, Pedro Almodovar, Martin Scorsese, and other film people in a petition demanding his immediate release. “The gentle and dreamy regions through which I crept were the patrimonies of poets,” Humbert protests—“not crime’s prowling ground.”[1]

“I know it wasn’t ‘rape’ rape. I think it was something else, but I don’t believe it was ‘rape’ rape,” Whoopi Goldberg says on the ABC chat show The View. Such men as he, Humbert agrees, “are not sex fiends! We do not rape as good soldiers do. We are unhappy, mild, dog-eyed gentlemen, sufficiently well integrated to control our urge in the presence of adults, but ready to give years and years of life for one chance to touch a nymphet” (p. 88).

“The 13-year old model ‘seduced’ by Polanski had been thrust onto him by her mother, who wanted her in the movies,” Joan Z. Shore writes in the Huffington Post. “I am going to tell you something very strange,” Humbert confides: “it was she who seduced me” (p. 132).

“The girl was just a few weeks short of her 14th birthday,” Shore goes on, “which was the age of consent in California. (It’s probably 13 by now!)” “Marriage and cohabitation before the age of puberty are still not uncommon in certain East Indian provinces,” Humbert observes learnedly. “Lepcha old men of eighty copulate with girls of eight, and nobody minds” (p. 19).

The difference between them is that Humbert Humbert abandons these lame justifications when, as I have argued elsewhere, he atones for his sin, which he comes to acknowledge as a sin.

And Polanski? “If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see?” he told Martin Amis in 1979. “But . . . f---ing, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to f--- young girls. Juries want to f--- young girls. Everyone wants to f--- young girls!”

Not everyone, you monster. Not Humbert Humbert, for example. Not any longer.
____________________

[1] Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita [1955] (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 131. Subsequent references in parentheses.

The 1,000-page morality tale

. . . that advocates killing homosexual men. This is how a commentator on the question of overrated novels, taunting bravely from behind the screen of anonymity, characterized the Bible. No other book in Western literature is so likely to generate an automated response. And nothing that I can say about it will change anyone’s mind at this late date.

Perhaps, though, I might correct a couple of errors. I am not qualified to speak of the Christian Bible, except to observe that grafting the Greek testamentum, written between 51 and 150 C.E., onto the Hebrew scriptures, some of which was written fifteen centuries earlier, created a literary monster. As a literary critic, Marcion had the better of the argument. But the early Church fathers, who decided to include the Hebrew scriptures in the Christian canon and to ostracize Marcionite views as heretical, were not interested in creating a book. The word bible derives from the Greek phrase employed by Hellenized Jews and later by Jewish Christians to refer to their sacred books—ta biblia. The expression was plural, and so was the canon. In canonizing what came to be called the Old Testament, the Church fathers were agreeing to recognize a textual tradition. They were not creating a singular text.

So too for the Hebrew scriptures. In my classes on the Bible as literature, in fact, I like to tell my students that the book might be more accurately called The Norton Anthology of Ancient Hebrew Literature. It is, in any event, a library—and no singular term, certainly not “1,000-page morality tale,” can adequately describe it. It contains tales, yes; but also historical chronicles, genealogies, songs and poems, legal codes, sermons, political tracts and propaganda, prayers, elegies, allegories, dream visions and apocalyptic visions, and proverbs and other wisdom literature. The only true “morality tale” is the book of Job, which belongs to that last genre.

But does it advocate the killing of homosexual men?

The post-Christian bien-pensant, for whom sexual freedom is the only freedom that dare speak its name, hasten to isolate two prooftexts to substantiate the charge. (Never mind that prooftexting entails a perversion of the text.) These are Leviticus 18.22 and 20.13. Since those who advocate the view that the Hebrew Bible advocates killing homosexual men are ignorant of the actual Hebrew text, I will set down the two pasukim (“verses”) here:

18.22: V’et zakhar lo tishkav mish’k’vey ishah toevah hi. And with a male do not bed down as you bed down with a woman: an adomination it is.

20.13: V’im asher ishkav et-zakhar mish’k’vey ishah toevah asu sh’neyhem mot yumato d’meyhem bam. And if a man beds down with a male as you bed down with a woman—an abomination done by both—they will die, yes, die; upon them is blood.Although the interpretive traditions of both Judaism and Christianity treat the meanings of these two sentences as straightforward and obvious, they are anything but. Notice, first, that the prohibition is upon going to bed with a zakhar. A man (ish) is not forbidden to lie with a man (ish), but with a zakhar. Usually the word is translated “male,” and perhaps that is what it means here. But the word can also refer to a male child (Gen 17.10, Lev 12.2), and then the proscription takes on a very different meaning. What is abominable then is not male homosexuality, but child rape.

This reading takes on even greater plausibility when you step back and realize that lesbianism is not being proscribed. And lest you object that the prohibitions concern men alone, consider the very next prohibition in chapter 18. Not only is the sex act explicitly spelled out—“emission of seed” as compared to the more equivocal “bedding down”—but a woman is explicily commanded not to mate with an animal. If Leviticus had wanted to proscribe a man’s emission of seed into another man, or had wanted to forbid women from lying down with each other, the language was available to it to do so.

And as for the death penalty. The Hebrew text says only that a man who beds down with a male, perhaps a male child, will die—along with his partner or victim. No legal mechanism is created to carry out the punishment, which is spoken of as merely inevitable. Nor is anyone instructed to “kill” them. Again, the Bible could have given the instruction. After all, in the very first chapter of Leviticus, the Israelites are given detailed instructions to kill the cattle they are offering to YHVH. They could have been given equally detailed instructions to kill homosexual men. But they are not, because nothing of the sort appears anywhere in the Hebrew Bible.

A difficult fast

As they head into Yom Kippur, Jews wish one another a tsom kal, an “easy fast.” The wish may be contrary to God’s plans. The Jews fast on Yom Kippur, after all, to afflict themselves. “An easy affliction,” they might as well say.

Yesterday’s fast was an especially difficult one for me. My caffeine-withdrawal headache struck early and often. And I did not think that the book I was reading—Roland Merullo’s smart and witty American Savior, in which Jesus runs for president—was appropriate for shul. I can usually find something in the 800-page mahzor to divert if not to inspire me. Not yesterday, for some reason. (When asked to explain Yom Kippur, I say that the Jews afflict themselves by fasting and by reading a 800-page book aloud in public. When the book is finished, so is Yom Kippur, and the fast.)

My wife was canny and brought three books, including two by Rebbetzin Jungreis. I am allergic to inspirational literature, though. And so I was stuck with Irving Kristol’s Reflections of a Neoconservative, which I was rereading for the first time in twenty years. The essays on income redistribution and foreign policy did not hold my attention. I turned to the end of the book, where Kristol talks about the Jewish religion.

“Christianity, Judaism, and Socialism,” the book’s concluding essay, reminded me that I had begun my journey to Jewish Orthodoxy about the same time that I broke with the political Left, and for much the same reason. Kristol prefaces his remarks by observing that he “speak[s] as a neo-Orthodox Jew,” that is, as a Jew who is not religiously observant “but, in principle, very sympathetic to the spirit of orthodoxy.”

Two different tempers divide the worlds of politics and religion between them. Kristol calls them “rabbinic Judaism” or “rabbinic Christianity—to coin a phrase”—and “prophetic Judaism” or “prophetic Christianity.” These religious traditions correspond to the spirit of orthodoxy and the spirit of gnosticism. In the “eternal debate about the nature of reality, about the nature of human authenticity,” one of these always adopts the Affirmative and the other always adopts the Negative.

The gnostic position is that human authenticity, keening aware of injustice and human suffering, demands “some kind of indignant metaphysical rebellion, a rebellion that will liberate us from the prison of this world.” Gnosticisms tend to be antinomian and millenarian, “to insist that this hell in which live, this ‘unfair’ world, can be radically corrected.”

Orthodoxy takes the opposite view. “The function of orthodoxy in all religions is to sanctify daily life and to urge us to achieve our fullest human potential through virtuous practice in our daily life, whether it be the fulfillment of the law in Judaism or Islam or imitatio Christi in Christianity.” Orthodoxy is stoical; it accepts the existence of injustice and suffering without believing they can ever be wholly eradicated; they must be fought where they are found, and endured when they cannot be fought. Orthodoxy is the encouragement of “spiritual governance” rather than metaphysical rebellion.

While trying to endure yesterday’s fast—an annual rite of governing my appetites—I was distracted by Kristol’s argument. I began to wonder if the dichotomy between the rabbis and the prophets, between gnosticism and orthodoxy, might also apply to the universe of literature. My head pounded, I paid little attention to the hazzan chanting musaf, but at least, in this way, I made it through the afternoon.

The form of modern degradation

A mere ten years after the United States government tried for the last time to censor obscene literature, Philip Roth published a novel that blew the doors off charges of obscenity. Portnoy’s Complaint set out to épater community standards, which the Supreme Court had held, in creating the ironically named Roth test, constituted the yardstick for judging obscenity. The community was obligingly épatés. “I’m not impressed by his writing,” sniffed Roth’s French teacher at Weequahic High School in Newark. “Why does he beat this one, narrow, little vein of human experience?”[1] Indeed, Jacqueline Susann notoriously told Johnny Carson that she would not shake the hand that beat that vein. “In my writing lifetime,” Roth replied, “the use of obscenity has by and large been governed by one’s literary taste and tact and not by the mores of the audience.”[2]

Taste and tact are not the first words that crowd into the mind upon reaching the novel’s second chapter:

Then came adolescence—half my waking life spent locked behind the bathroom door, firing my wad down the toilet bowl, or into the soiled clothes in the laundry hamper, or splat, up against the medicine-chest mirror, before which I stood in my dropped drawers so I could see how it looked coming out. Or else I was doubled over my flying fist, eyes pressed closed but mouth wide open, to take that sticky sauce of buttermilk and Clorox on my own tongue and teeth—though not infrequently, in my blindness and ecstasy, I got it all in the pompadour, like a blast of Wildroot Cream Oil.[3]Top that, Updike! Published the year before, Couples had dynamited the prohibition on sex chatter. “Let me make you come,” he begs. “With my mouth.” “No,” she demurs. “I’m all wet down there.” “But it’s me,” he protests, “it’s my wetness.” Although he self-defensively cited Updike as a forerunner in the “deliberate” and “artistic” use of obscenity, Roth was after something bigger in Portnoy’s Complaint. He wanted to smash the taboo on the sexual degradation of another human being.

Since the novel takes the form of a Freudian psychoanalysis, it is only fitting that Freud should be Alexander Portnoy’s source for the concept of erotic degradation. Explaining to his analyst that he is “under the influence at the moment of an essay entitled ‘The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life’ ”—also the title of the novel’s fifth chapter—Portnoy exposits the concept:In the “Degradation” essay there is that phrase, “currents of feeling.” For a “fully normal attitude in love” (deserving of semantic scrutiny, that “fully normal,” but go on— ) for a fully normal attitude toward love, says [Freud], it is necessary that two currents of feeling be united: the tender, affectionate feelings, and the sensuous feelings. And in many instances this just doesn’t happen, sad to say. “Where such men love they have no desire, and where they desire they cannot love.” (pp. 185–86)The characterization suits Portnoy. It accounts for his refusal to “enter into a contract to sleep with just one woman for the rest of [his] days” (p. 104). People don’t marry out of the love that “the marriage counselors and the songwriters and the psychotherapists are forever dreaming about,” he insists. They marry out of “convenience and apathy and guilt,” out of “fear and exhaustion and inertia, gutlessness plain and simple. . .” (p. 105). What are they so afraid of? The answer: sexual freedom—the great bugaboo of the bourgeoisie, to whom it rather threatnest, than dost promise aught. “Why should I bend to the bourgeoisie?” Portnoy asks. “Do I ask them to bend to me? Maybe I’ve been touched by the tarbush of Bohemia a little—is that so awful?” (p. 103).

Perhaps it is. Wouldn’t that be a shocker? Although he declares that “to be bad—and to enjoy it”—is the “real struggle,” Portnoy cannot bring himself to plunge into badness. He does not smoke, does not take drugs, does not gamble nor borrow money. “Sure, I say fuck a lot,” he admits, “but I assure you, that’s about the sum of my success with transgressing.” His soul is tormented by his inability to smash the taboos. “Why must the least deviation from respectable conventions cause me inner hell?” he moans. “When I hate those fucking conventions!” (p. 124).

All that changes when he meets Mary Jane Reed. Portnoy calls her the Monkey, because of an incident from her earlier life that she tells him about. One evening a couple of swingers picked her up and asked her to watch while they copulated in front of her. While she watched, she grabbed a banana and started eating (p. 159). The nickname is degrading, of course, and so is the incident: not perhaps in her telling, because the Monkey seems to want only to titillate Portnoy. But in his retelling: for him it is the baptismal image of her degradation.

And so he proceeds to degrade her in his turn. On a weekend trip to Vermont, he unexpectedly finds his sensuous feelings for her beginning to unite with tender, affectionate feelings. But on their return to New York, where Portnoy serves as assistant commissioner for human opportunity under Mayor John V. Lindsay, his usual feelings for her, never far from contempt, begin to resurface. She is a miner’s daughter from rural West Virginia; she can barely spell; she goes to a reception at Gracie Mansion looking like a stripper; she once accepted money from a one-night lover in Las Vegas. Besides, there is his dignity to consider. Precisely because she is the incarnation of all his erotic dreams (a “fantasy begging you to make it real!”), precisely because she is beautiful and wanton (a “wild piece of ass”), anyone who sees them together will divine the reason why: “Take her fully for my own, you see, and the whole neighborhood will know at last the truth about my dirty little mind” (p. 201).

He does bend to the bourgeoisie, then, after all? Unable to accept the thought of marrying someone for whom the whole world knows he has sensuous feelings, he forces her, on successive nights, into a menage à trois with a streetwalker in Rome. Although he thinks No! No! No! he goes ahead with it: “Into whose hole, into what sort of hole, I deposited my final load is entirely a matter for conjecture.” And then he vomits into the toilet bowl. The Monkey is even more distraught; she cries that Portnoy has “delivered her into evil” (p. 138). She is convinced that he will leave her, since he has got what he wanted: “To you I’m just another her, anyway! You, will all your big words and big shit holy ideals and all I am in your eyes is just a cunt—and a lesbian!—and a whore!” (p. 141). Portnoy takes her to Athens, but she is unpropitiated. She wants a husband, a home, and a child. “I am not a lesbian!” she shrieks. “I am not a whore!” She climbs on the hotel balcony and threatens to jump unless Portnoy marries her. He leaves her instead.

Although he remarks that “the worst thing” he has ever done was to masturbate into the beef liver that his mother served the family later the same night, Portnoy knows that the Monkey is right when she says that his degradation and abandonment of her is evil. He flees to Israel, but he fails “to convert [himself] from the bewildered runaway into a man again” (p. 252). He meets a young Israeli from a kibbutz near the Lebanon border, a “red-headed, freckled, ideological hunk of a girl,” who successfully wards off his advances and informs him that he is the most unhappy person she has ever known:     “I don’t believe you actually want to improve your life. Everything you say is somehow always twisted, some way or another, to come out ‘funny.’ All day long the same thing. In some little way or other, everything is ironical, or self-depreciating. Self-depreciating?”
     “Self-deprecating. Self-mocking.”
     “Exactly! And you are a highly intelligent man—that is what makes it even more disagreeable. The contribution you could make! Such stupid self-deprecation. How disagreeable!”
     “Oh, I don’t know,” I said, “self-deprecation is, after all, a classic form of Jewish humor.”
     “Not Jewish humor! No! Ghetto humor.” (pp. 264–65)And she is right too. The late Irving Kristol pointed out that Jewish humor, taking as its “frame of reference the complex structure of ghetto society, ghetto life, and Jewish tradition,” was born out of a “God-forsaken religiosity.” It became possible only when the Jewish people were thrust into modernity, and began to lose their faith. Like the Israelis, who “prefer not to think of the ghetto,” Kristol wondered if Jewish humor had really survived the Holocaust: “For just as humor cannot mature in a life of utter religious faith, so it cannot survive a life of sheer nihilism.”

Portnoy is scornful of what he calls the Nazi excuse. The source of his life’s nihilism lies elsewhere. He finally admits that his life is empty:[I]nstead of tucking in my children and lying down beside a loyal wife (to whom I am loyal too), I have, on two different evenings, taken to bed with me—coinstanteously, as they say in the whorehouses—a fat little Italian whore and an illiterate, unbalanced American mannequin. And that isn’t even my idea of a good time, damn it. What is? I told you! And I meant it—sitting at home listening to Jack Benny with my kids! Raising intelligent, loving, sturdy children! Protecting some good woman! Dignity! Health! Love! Industry! Intelligence! Trust! Decency! High Spirits! Compassion! What the hell do I care about sensational sex? (p.248)But if he does not care about sensational sex, what has Portnoy’s Complaint been about? Up to this point, after all, it has consisted of practically nothing but sensational sex.

What Portnoy learns is that discarding the respectable conventions of the bourgeoisie and taking up the tarbrush of Bohemia makes it impossible ever to have the life that he yearns for most deeply. Hard work in an idealistic profession, faithful marriage, children to raise, family forgiveness, love depend for their existence upon the very taboos that he makes it his business to smash. Portnoy is the victim of his own cultural aspirations, his own advanced thinking, his own “big shit holy ideals.”

In commenting on Roth, Eric of Beyond Assumptions worried that “you need to be Jewish to fully appreciate his work.” Here is why I don’t think so. Although Portnoy’s Complaint is packed with Yiddish, despite the narrator’s warning that he only knows twenty-five words of the language, and though its setting is the hothouse of a second-generation lower middle-class Jewish family, the novel established Philip Roth as the diagnostician of the modern predicament. Jew or Gentile, believer or not, you and I are in exactly the same position as Alexander Portnoy. We yearn for the happiness of bourgeois respectability, and we are irritated by its arbitrary fucking conventions, even when we abide by them. Our fragmentation, our inner turmoil, is the most prevalent form of our modern degradation. No literary form embodies this cultural contradiction more fully than the novel, and no novelist has faced up to it more relentlessly than Roth. The result is farce, not tragedy, but the ending is unhappy all the same.
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[1] Quoted in Arnold H. Lubasch, “Philip Roth Shakes Weequahic High,” New York Times (Feb. 28, 1969): 28.

[2] George Plimpton, “Roth’s Exact Intent,” New York Times Book Review (Feb. 23, 1969): 2.

[3] Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint (New York: Random House, 1969), pp. 17–18. Subsequent references in parentheses.

Core terms

A local private school has asked me to help revise and standardize the English curriculum. By the time its students graduate and head off to college, they should know, in my opinion, at least these core terms, arranged under three headings:

Genres
Allegory
Comedy
Drama
Elegy
Epic
Fiction
Lyric
Melodrama
Novel
Poetry
Satire
Sonnet
Short story
Tragedy

Formal components and structural devices
Character
Couplet
Imagery
Meter
Monologue
Plot
Point of view
   First-person
   Omniscient
   Unreliable narrator
Prose
Rhyme
Setting
Stanza
Stream of consciousness
Symbol
Theme and motif
Verse
   Blank verse
   Free verse
   Iambic verse

Elements of style
Alliteration
Cliché
Conceit
Connotation and denotation
Diction
Irony
Metaphor
Onomatopoeia
Personification
Tone
Wit

The accomplished student ought to progress from definition to recognition of literary examples and finally to application of the terms in criticism.

Her scarlet letter

Francine Prose, Touch (New York: Harper Teen, 2009). 262 pp. $16.99.

While other writers of her generation spill their talents in “genre-bending and stylistic play,” Francine Prose quietly goes about her business within the tradition of the novel. With each new book she achieves a significant revision of the tradition—not merely by adding something new and eye-catching, but by subtly altering the received opinion of her percursors’ books. Last year’s Goldengrove was her Mill on the Floss. Where Maggie Tulliver was tragically prevented from enjoying the full life she yearned for, Prose drowns her at the beginning rather than the end of the novel, suggesting that the aftermath of tragedy—its effects upon the survivors—may be the more interesting story.

Her new novel, a young adult novel marketed by an arm of Harper Collins that “features books for all teens,” books that “reflect teens’ own lives,” is her Scarlet Letter. It is a testament to Prose’s seriousness as a novelist that Touch neither mocks nor patronizes the conventions of young adult fiction, bending them to adult self-admiration. She expects her young readers to rise capably to the challenge of a reworking of Hawthorne’s themes. And as a consequence, she writes a novel that will appeal just as powerfully to adults.

Maisie Willard has been friends with three boys “for so long that it seemed perfectly normal.” She “can’t remember a time before the four of [them] were friends.” Kevin is the goofy one. Chris is the one who smoothes things over. Shakes is the one who stands out. His real name is Edward, but afflicted with “some weird kind of palsy,” he prefers to be called Shakes. Having been born “messed up” makes him different, and perhaps even better:

Even when he was little, you could see him stopping and thinking before he said anything, maybe because it was harder for him to talk. And he’d say these totally poetic things. Once when we were at Chris’s house, watching some honeybees fly around, Shakes said you could watch them singing to each other and thanking the flowers for their nectar. In grade school he was elected class president more often than anyone else—not because the other kids felt sorry for him, but because even people who hardly knew him could see what a model human being he was.Although he warns her that “[i]t’s going to be worse there than it is here,” Maisie leaves Philadelphia and her father’s second marriage to a narcissist who wears “outfits you’d expect to see on some slutty high school girl” and who enjoys boasting about her white Volvo SUV; she moves to Milwaukee to live her mother and her new husband, a spoiled brat who throws his dinner on the floor when it is over-salted and yanks the TV remote out of Maisie’s hands in the middle of Top Chef. “If I live to be a thousand years old,” she says, “I’ll never understand why my parents chose the people they married—remarried—after they split up.”

Maisie is only gone a year—her eighth-grade year—but when she returns to Philadelphia everything has changed:I’d gotten a whole new body during my year away. I’d grown breasts and a weird curvy ass. I’d gotten my period, too. I felt like a spectator watching my body do whatever it wanted, without my knowledge or permission. I felt like someone who’d been tricked into thinking she had one body, and now—surprise!—she had another.The boys have changed too. Chris has a girlfriend, with whom he denies having sex. “Kissing isn’t sex,” he says. When Maisie comes by to see them for the first time in a year, they are watching Girls Gone Wild. She glimpses “two blue dots dancing on the chest of a half-naked blond girl.” She realizes they are no longer kids, although they are not yet “even teenage boys.” And she becomes suddenly self-conscious. The problem is that she did not merely get breasts while she was gone. “I had these gigantic mega-boobs,” she says, “the kind movie stars pay fortunes for. I’d gotten them practically overnight, for free.”

Within a few weeks she and Shakes have begun to cuddle and then to neck in the back of the bus on the way to school. She permits Shakes to touch her breasts. Once, when they are caught and the whole bus stares at them, Chris and Kevin are badly upset:[I]t was as if they thought we’d done something to them. As if we’d cheated on them with each other. As if I’d broken up the four-person gang we’d had since we were little. As if I’d chosen Shakes over them, and they would never forgive me.They don’t, either. One morning they confront Maisie on the bus and ask when she is going to let them touch her breasts. “Like Shakes does, every morning?” Kevin adds. Maisie is amazed that Shakes has told them, but she is even more amazed when he does not defend her.

What follows is scandal. The boys paw at her breasts for all the bus to see—either because she offers to let them for cash payment or because they pin her down and assault her against her will or perhaps for some third reason. When the school principal is informed, adults become involved, and things go from bad to worse. Her stepmother sues the school administration, and Maisie’s fellow students jingle change at her approach and urge her to go into the girls’ bathroom where a stick figure labeled with her name has been given “two humongous naked boobs” and a speech balloon which says, How much?

Maisie refuses to back down. “[W]hat did they expect?” she asks. “Did they think I’d just stand there like Hester Prynne and let them make me wear the letter B for Boobs on my chest?” Later she tells her therapist that she is writing a school paper on The Scarlet Letter:“Outrageous, right?” I say. “How typically insensitive to make me sit in a class where the kids are discussing that book, of all the books in the world. I’m so offended by the thought—because now I’m the shunned Hester Prynne, the one the whole community thinks is a slut and maybe even a witch—that I almost forget I’m lying. It takes me a moment to remember that we’re actually not reading it for school.The fact that the allusion is spelled out at such length in the midst of a lie is a giveaway. Maisie’s self-identification with Hester Prynne is also a falsehood—if and only if Hester is conceived of as “the one the whole community thinks is a slut and maybe even a witch.”

Her therapist, believing that Maisie is telling the truth, starts to say that The Scarlet Letter is “the perfect book” for her to read, because it “makes you realize how often the whole community can be wrong, and how crucial it is for the individual to believe in herself and her basic goodness and—” But Maisie interrupts her, putting a stop to the literary pablum. It is a therapeutic version of the interpretation offered by Richard Chase in The American Novel and Its Tradition: “[T]he subject of the book is the moral and psychological results of sin—the isolation and morbidity, the distortion and thwarting of the emotional life.”

Maybe so, but not for Francine Prose. For her—and, consequently, for Maisie—the real subject is the damage that is done, to individuals and communities, by assertions of the truth that assume the voice of certainty, when the telling and retelling of stories—with their particular circumstances, exact details, and the different personalities involved—gradually make certainty conditional. The truth about human events can never be fully and impeccably known, which is why they must be told and retold.

Francine Prose has dedicated her career to some such view of literature’s purpose. Her young adult novels differ from her grownup fiction only in pacing and capaciousness. She allows herself fewer expansions of theme, fewer expository digressions and fascinating subplots, and reduces her narrative to the briskness of story. She is one of the great storytellers of the age.

With one thing more. She also has a moral vision of the novel. In Touch, she shows that Maisie, falsely accused of offering her humongous boobs for money, resembles Hester Prynne not because she is the one everyone considers a slut, but because she is the one person in the community—the only one—with moral courage. Among the conventions of the young adult novel is that it must point a moral, and in characteristic fashion, Francine Prose does so indirectly—with playful allusion to her literary predecessors—but she does not flinch from doing so. Touch is a novel that every American teenager should read. Most grownups too.

Irving Kristol, 1920–2009

Irving Kristol, founder and editor of Encounter and the Public Interest, former managing editor of Commentary, and author of Reflections of a Neoconservative (1983) and Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (1995), died earlier today from complications of lung cancer in Arlington, Va.

Although he did not write a lot, he was a “crafter of English prose almost without peer in his time, strong and bold and authoritative,” John Podhoretz observes in a moving tribute on Commentary’s blog Contentions. And he influenced an entire generation of intellectuals, including me. My copy of Reflections of a Neoconservative is one of the most heavily underlined books in my library. I read it for the first time the year after the public reaction to Israel’s War in Lebanon provoked me to break with the Left at last. Kristol almost singlehandedly converted me to neoconservatism. That I never had a chance to meet him is one of the chief regrets of my life.

Kristol was the husband of the intellectual historian Gertrude Himmelfarb and the father of William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard. His place in the history of American political ideas is permanent and secure.

Overrated novels

Continuing the discussion that he broached in the comments section to a post here, Alex Jurek asks his readers to name the most overrated novel of all time.

His choice is The Lord of the Rings. His readers suggest One Hundred Years of Solitude and Emma (no way, no how).

The highest ranked novel in the Modern Library’s 100 best that does not merit its perch, as I told Jurek when he asked, is Brave New World.

Upon reflection, though, the most overrated novel of all time is Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

And you?

Highbrow and lowbrow

Everybody knows that the terms and the distinction between them were introduced by Van Wyck Brooks, but what is not so widely appreciated is that he introduced them in the service of the Left. The “lyrical Left,” to be specific; America’s first Left, according to the historian John Patrick Diggins. Its intellectual spokesman was Randolph Bourne, creator of the American antiwar movement; its political leader, Eugene V. Debs. Brooks was an undependable Leftist for whom organized politics was secondary, although he pioneered the attitude that was summarized in the later Leftist slogan the Personal Is Political:

The only serious approach to society is the personal approach; and what I have called the quickening realism of contemporary social thought is at bottom simply a restatement for the mass of commercialized men, and in relation to issues which directly concern the mass of men as a whole, of those personal instincts that have been the essence of art, religion, literature—the essence of personality itself—since the beginning of the world. It will remain of the least importance to patch up politics, to become infected with social consciousness, or to do any of the other easy popular contemporary things unless, in some way, personality can be made to release itself on a middle plane between vaporous idealism and self-interested practicality; unless, in short, self-fulfillment as an ideal can be substituted for self-assertion as an ideal. On the economic plane that implies socialism; on every other plane it implies something which a majority of Americans in our day certainly do not possess—an object in living.By the ’sixties, the substitution of ideals that Brooks called for had been attained. The “middle plane between vaporous idealism and self-interested practicality” had become the primary residence of American culture.

For Brooks, that middle was situated between highbrow and lowbrow culture, an antithesis (or what would now be called a binary opposition) that he saw as uniquely American:What side of American life is not touched by this antithesis? What explanation of American life is more central or more illuminating? In everything one finds this frank acceptance of twin values which are not expected to have anything in common: on the one hand a quite unclouded, quite unhypocritical assumption of transcendent theory (“high ideals”); on the other a simultaneous acceptance of catchpenny realities. Between university ethics and business ethics, between American culture and American humor, between Good Government and Tammany, between academic pedantry and pavement slang, there is no community, no genial middle ground.[1]Ever since the “lyrical years” before this country’s entry into World War I, the American Left has sought to cultivate that middle ground. Highbrow and lowbrow were adopted as terms of scorn. Highbrow culture was scorned as the private entertainment of the literate upper class; lowbrow culture was scorned as the commercialized products of modern mass entertainment, which entail the destruction of authentic folk art. If the political purpose of high culture is to train a ruling elite in common values, which are reinforced by repeated allusion to the same art, music, and literature, the political purpose of low culture—popular culture, mass culture—is to reconcile the working classes to their economic conditions. (Think of the popular songs in Nineteen Eighty-Four that are produced “for the benefit of the proles by a sub-section of the Music Department. The words of these songs were composed without any human intervention whatever on an instrument known as a versificator.”)

But the middle culture, when it finally emerged, was not exactly what had been dreamed of by the lyrical Left. It was instead what Dwight Macdonald called a “middlebrow compromise,” a “peculiar hybrid” that resulted from mass culture’s “unnatural intercourse” with high culture:A whole middle culture has come into existence and it threatens to absorb both its parents. This intermediate form—let us call it Midcult—has the essential qualities of Masscult—the formula, the built-in reaction, the lack of any standard except popularity—but it decently covers them with a cultural figleaf. In Masscult the trick is plain—to please the crowd by any means. But Midcult has it both ways: it pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them.[2]As examples of Midcult fiction, Macdonald named Steinback, J. P. Marquand, Pearl Buck, Irwin Shaw, Herman Wouk, and John Hersey; forty years later the obvious examples would be John Irving, Jonathan Franzen, Pat Conroy, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, David Wroblewski, and Lev Grossman.

But a large portion of “serious” contemporary fiction is also written out of the middlebrown compromise. Much of what passes for “genre-bending and stylistic play,” to adopt Michael Chabon’s phrase for it, is little more than the attempt to be simultaneously ordinary and refined. In Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, for example, a sensibility and technique that were once considered avant garde are placed in the service of the vaguely Leftist project of unmasking the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals:Was it possible, that at every gathering—concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back East, wherever—those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?As Macdonald quips, I may agree with what you say, but I will fight to the death your right to say it like that. American literary culture will not be revived by making the “boundaries” of “genres” more “porous.” There is far more literary freedom to be had in the traditional genres, because a firm adherence to formal requirements enables a writer to expand or contract his subject as needed.

How, then? Macdonald found promise in the very fragmentation of the literary marketplace to which I drew attention the other day. After the Second World War, he pointed out, it was discovered thatthere is not One Big Audience but rather a number of smaller more specialized audiences that may still be commercially profitable. (I take it for granted that the less differentiated the audience, the less chance there is of something original and lively creeping in, since the principle of the lowest common denominator applies.) . . . The mass audience is divisible, we have discovered—and the more it is divided, the better. (pp. 73–74)As long as the highest standards are maintained in each division of the market, I might add. And this is one thing that could possibly be meant by establishing the limits of literature.
____________________

[1] Van Wyck Brooks, “Highbrow and Lowbrow,” Forum 53 (April 1915): 481–92.

[2] Dwight Macdonald, “Masscult and Midcult,” in Against the American Grain (New York: Random House, 1962), p. 37. Subsequent reference in parentheses.