2018 in taste and appetite - 1: Reading

If there was ever an "end" to meta-narratives it was only a brief moment, enjoyed by the few who could name it as such — an alibi for those with resources and the freedom to spend them. For the rest of us, common stories continue but with renewed urgency. Climate change presents a very real and tangible meta-narrative, even if we don't yet have eyes to see or ears to hear. What we value, consume and celebrate in this moment will forever be relativized by our current way of relating to the planet and the destructive systems that plunder it. History, it seems, will not be kind to us in 2018, no matter how much music we listened to or how many books we read.

We all have rituals that help us cope with the forces that lie beyond our control. Each day I check my news feed because I want to see a breakthrough, a way to avert the coming catastrophe or halt this environmental assault on lives around the globe. But this expression of anxiety — my need to keep up with the news cycle — usually makes me more anxious. Time passes. Sometimes I simply want that impending limit, however destructive, to arrive and prove once and for all that our current trajectory is doomed. In those moments, which are frequent, I realize the pessimism of my appetite. This is not fruitful behaviour, nor is it a healthy place to be. 

Much of what appears in the list below prevented me from lingering there, on the edge of my news feed, for too long. Twitter helped but it also didn't help.

This year, I spent a fair amount of time reading about aesthetics, mostly from Marxist perspectives. Terry Eagleton's major study, The Ideology of the Aesthetic was a springboard for readings from Kant, Schiller, Marcuse, Sontag, Ranciére, Ngai and others. Those readings, mostly essay-length, were left off the list. The big highlights of my year in reading were Billy-Rae Belcourt's poetry collection, This Wound is a World, Miriam Toew's Women Talking and John Berger's posthumous collection, Landscapes. 

I was able to see Belcourt read and discuss his writing with Rosanna Deerchild this past November. His ability to weave through poetics, theory and the politics of indigeneity left a deep impression on me. I've been following his work since finding him in GUTS magazine's "futures" issue. At once personal and philosophical, Belcourt's writing navigates around and through the loneliness rendered by colonization — a form of negativity that "stalks" indigeneity — all the while gesturing toward a future that can't be contained by settler logics. Belcourt thinks deeply about his writing practice, at an almost ontological level, but he avoids the pitfalls of esotericism or academic jargon. I look forward to reading more of his work down the road. 

Miriam Toews also came through Winnipeg this summer to promote her new book. I've never seen McNally Robinson so crowded. Women Talking takes its premise from horrific real-world events — over several years, hundreds of women and girls living in a conservative Mennonite colony in Bolivia were drugged and raped in their sleep. Toews's novel imagines a scenario in which the men of the colony have all gone to town, leaving the women behind to determine whether stay and fight or quickly pack up their belongings and flee. I found the novel quite moving and read it quickly. But in discussing the book with other Mennonites, I've come to realize that many of them have complicated feelings about the book and the way that it frames its subject matter. More than once I heard the complaint that Toews was stealing a story that doesn't belong to her and conflating cultural categories. How many of them actually read it, before levelling those critiques, is another question. I'm suspicious of those who treat Toews as inauthentic or even dangerous because she is "outside" the Mennonite church proper. Her work has always fallen somewhere between truth and fiction, and I can't help thinking that at least part of the Mennonite critique of Miriam Toews is couched in sexism. (It's not uncommon for Rudy Wiebe to be held up as the shining example of what a Mennonite writer should be.) Women Talking raises the stakes, helpfully for some, arguably less helpfully for others. 

In 2018, I continued to read more John Berger. Landscapes collects essays from his long career of art criticism but it's his discussion of drawing, which emerges in several essays, that interests me most. "For the artist," he writes, "drawing is discovery. . . . A line, an area of tone, is important not really because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see." Perhaps that is why I continue to draw, why it so often lifts my spirits. Drawing, at its best, is for me a practice of remaining open to the possibilities of whatever comes next. Often the effect of this practice arrives like the opposite of anxiety. 

Poetry
This Wound is a World by Billy-Rae Belcourt
The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson
Bluets by Maggie Nelson

Fiction
Women Talking by Miriam Toews (2018)
The Kingdom by Emmanuel Carrère
No Strangers in Exile by Hans Harder
Little Fish by Casey Plett (2018)

Non-fiction
Landscapes by John Berger
Stolen City by Owen Toews (2018)
Martin Heidegger by George Steiner
Civil Imagination by Ariella Azoulay
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott
Mourning Becomes the Law by Gillian Rose
Aesthetics and Politics by Adorno et al.

Comics
Why Art? by Eleanor Davis (2018)
Beverly by Nick Drnaso
Wendy by Walter Scott
Sticks Angelica, Folk Hero by Michael Deforge

Virginia Woolf - "Craftmanship" (1937)

The only known surviving recording of Virginia Woolf is part of a BBC radio broadcast from 1937, from a talk entitled “Craftsmanship.”

A Jest of God

Last week, on a whim, I picked up a two dollar copy of Margaret Laurence's 1966 novel, A Jest of God. Halfway through the book, I'm shocked at how much I enjoy Laurence's prose. In two brilliantly uncomfortable scenes, she presents a pair of contrasting church services. The first takes place after Rachel reluctantly accepts the last of several invitations from a fellow elementary school teacher. At this church, or, "the Tabernacle," as her friend Calla calls it, speaking in tongues isn't a rare occurrence. Rachel is on edge the entire time and, on this particular night out, things don't end well. 

Most reviews of the book focus on Rachel's inner struggle, her self-alienation. Rachel is a compellingly complex character with plenty of problems, many of them internal and many more derived from circumstance. But even with all her neuroses, I find Rachel's accounts of these services incredibly resonant. 

Singing. We have to stand, and I must try to make myself narrower so I won't brush against anyone. A piano crashes the tune. Guitars and one trombone are in support. The voices are weak at first, wavering like a radio not quite adjusted, and I'm shaking with effort not to giggle, although God knows it's not amusing me. The voices strengthen, grow muscular, until the room is swollen with the sound of a hymn macabre as the messengers of the apocalypse, the gaunt horsemen, the cloaked skeletons I dreamed of once when I was quite young, and wakened, and she said, "Don't be foolish -- Don't be foolish, Rachel -- there's nothing there." The hymn-sound is too loud -- it washes in my head, sea and waves of it.

Day of wrath! O day of mourning!
See fulfilled the prophet's warning!
Heaven and earth in ashes burning!

I hate this. I would like to go home. Sit down. The others are sitting down. Just don't be noticeable. Oh God -- do I know anyone? Suddenly I'm scanning rows, searching. Seek and ye shall find. Mrs. Pusey, ancient arch-enemy of my mother, tongue like a cat-'o-nine-tails, and Alvin Jarrett, who works at the bakery, and old Miss Murdoch from the bank. How in hell can I get out of this bloody place without being seen?

Of course, Rachel doesn't escape before the end of the service and we're treated to more of her sardonic inner monologue, occasionally interrupted by the words of a zealous preacher. The next chapter finds Rachel attending church again, this time with her mother (the unnamed woman scolding her for her young superstition in the passage above). While the Tabernacle service is full of flare, the Presbyterian church service is as bland as the members of the town establishment who attend it. Rachel, again, sees the service for what it is: an expression of the neutered desires of its congregation.

Here we are. Mother flicks through the Hymnary to look up the hymns in advance. I wonder what she believes, if anything. She's never said. It was not a subject for discussion. She loves coming to church because she sees everyone, and in spring the new hats are like a forest of tulips. But as for faith -- I suppose she takes for granted that she believes. Yet if the Reverend MacElfrish should suddenly lose his mind and speak of God with anguish or joy, or out of some need should pray with fierce humility as though God had to be there, Mother would be shocked to the core. Luckily it will never happen. 

Mr. MacElfrish's voice is as smooth and mellifluous as always, and he's careful not to say anything which might be upsetting. His sermon deals with Gratitude. He says we are fortunate to be living here, in plenty, and we ought not to take our blessings for granted. Who is likely to quibble with that? 

The wood in this church is beautifully finished. Nothing ornate -- heaven forbid. The congregation has good taste. Simple furnishings, but the grain of the wood shows deeply brown-gold, and at the front where the high alter would be if this had been a church which paid court to high alters, a stained-glass window shows a pretty and clean-cut Jesus expiring gently and with absolutely no inconvenience, no gore, no pain, just this nice and slightly effeminate insurance salesman who, somewhat incongruously, happens to be clad in a toga, holding his arms languidly up to something which might in other circumstances have been a cross.

RIP Seamus Heaney

Reading and the Early Modern Liberal Subject (revised)

*The following is a working abstract that's currently being prepared for submission.

England's seventeenth century included a prolonged parliamentary struggle, a civil war, a period of republican experimentation, a restoration of its monarchy, and a constitutional revolution that would keep intact a Protestant state church. Centuries later, Christopher Hill famously argued for a reading of these events as the unfolding of England's "bourgeois revolution," the result of which was to establish conditions that were increasingly favourable to capitalist development. Alongside this socio-economic reorganization, liberal political thought, beginning with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, posited a model of the individual as a self-possessed, autonomous agent.

This essay engages the correspondence of bourgeoning liberal and literary histories in both the critical and contemporary reception of the later works of John Milton and emphasizes the role of reading as a crucial element in both histories. Through its fixation on the act of reading, Milton's poetry and prose reveal a link between the cause of self-possessive freedom and the hegemonic interests of the emerging bourgeois subject. Areopagitica (1645), for example, articulates the close relationship between conditions of reading and conditions of exchange within the marketplace, treating the threat of censorship as a disastrous intervention that is conceptually indebted to the threats of the Catholic institutionalism on the one hand and state-sanctioned monopolies on the other. In this case, reading becomes a constitutive activity of the Reformed English subject who relies upon open access to a plurality of texts in order to exercise individual choice and discernment.

This essay argues that Milton's late poems install reading as an overdetermined activity through which a modern, liberal subjectivity aligns itself with literary discipline. The term "literary" in this case refers to socially valued forms of writing that gain their support not simply from material conditions but from a historical network of circulation and reproduction; by literary discipline, I mean a specific conception of reading that is both represented and conditioned by Milton's late poetry, and by liberal subjectivity, I point ahead to the bourgeois individual who today remains a residual product of early modern England's socio-economic upheaval.

Already fraught with theological and economic significance, reading assumes an intensified political significance in Milton’s post-Restoration writing. Of True Religion (1673), his short essay on religious toleration, came late in the poet's career, but its argument for a theory of religious freedom based on "searching the scriptures" reveals the underlying logic of reading set out in Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise Regained (1671), and Samson Agonistes (1671). For Milton, the act of reading is necessary for salvation, not because reading somehow accomplishes God's work, but because without textual engagement one cannot be prepared to recognize and receive salvation as a free gift. To this end, Paradise Lost establishes interpretative activity as a prelapsarian, prehistorical reality: it thus naturalizes a liberal paradigm of ambiguity, competition, and discernment.

First published together, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes further this project by directly addressing the material conditions of reading in a hostile political climate. Through their joint format, Milton’s final poems lock their audience into a posture of reading that becomes tautological and, in this way, rehearses the contradictions of liberal ideology. Rather than a stance of tolerance and openness, Miltonic readers find themselves in an irreducibly active space of interpretation. While some contemporary critics have celebrated the activist content of Milton's poems, they have ignored the way in which it functions ideologically within an emerging capitalist environment.

Beginning with a genealogy of reading in Milton's early writing, I locate liberalism's ideological origins within a distinctly Protestant approach to interpretation. By focusing on Milton's late poems, I explore early modern reading as an active form of individual trial, increasingly disconnected from its social surroundings. I suggest that Milton's post-Restoration poetry develops a distinction between "fixed" and "fit" forms of reading, which corresponds to a capacity for individual and collective mobility despite what Milton perceived as the closure of England's political horizon. What first appears as a politically, theologically, and ethically overdetermined site of struggle in Milton’s writing returns as a versatile aspect of liberal ideology.

A new project

I've decided to put my thesis research to good use and assemble a chapter for the following book project. Of course, I first need to get my abstract approved. I'll be sharing bits and pieces of the project as it comes together. For now, here's the CFP that got the ball rolling.

We invite proposals for a collection of essays on the relationship between the history of literary history and the history of liberalism. If both concepts—literary history and liberalism—emerged in the late seventeenth century and if both concepts seem obsolete, outmoded, or eclipsed in the twenty-first century, then what can we learn from the history of their entanglements and estrangements? As abstract concepts whose modes of valuation have far-reaching and closely-felt material effects, literary history and liberalism are disciplinarily and ethically distinct—after all literary history is elitist and ties us to the culture of the past while liberalism imagines progress towards individuality, equality, and universality. Yet liberalism and literary history are mutually implicated in the secular and democratic projects of modernity, and the premise of this project is that a thick description of their shared history is both timely and possibly revelatory of the telos of that history. Does their apparently mutual demise herald a new era in both politics and culture—or does this prospect of demise constitute a recurrent, persistent feature of their ongoing history, rather than the end of their history as such? We seek to avoid rehearsing debates about aesthetics and politics, or the elite literary field versus material history, or ancients versus moderns. Instead we endeavor to historicize the relationship between literary history and liberalism, in order to uncover the factors that have tied their destinies so closely together and thereby to shed light on a present moment when the futures of both seem so uncertain. The post-humanist and post-secular turns, the focus on eco-critical and biopolitical modes of analysis, and the seemingly inexorable eclipse of literary history by cultural studies pose striking challenges to the modes of valuation and cognition that the nexus of literary history/liberalism undergirded—making analysis of this nexus all the more pressing. 

Contributions to the project might venture specific case studies in the entanglement of liberalism and literary history, or might focus more conceptually on some specific aspect of the relationship between the two. Possible topics include: 

· the tempestuous relations of literary and political epistemologies, hermeneutics, and critique
· the periodization or the temporalities of literary history and liberal history
· aesthetic judgment, ethical judgment, and the lures of disinterest
· liberal histories of the book/histories of the liberal book
· literary circulation and/as liberal circulation
· secularization, liberalism, literary history
· literary sovereignty/liberal sovereignty
· evidentiary genres
· liberalism, literary history, and ecological critique
· neoliberalism and literary history
· failure and/as resilience in liberalism and literary history
· afterlives of liberalism and literary history

The Ghost of Tom Joad

A week and a half ago, I took a trip down south to visit my grandpa. My connecting flights were short but spread out across most of the day. So when I arrived in Arizona, after being in transit for 10 hours, I found myself well into a book I'd long meant to read. I can now finally say that I've read John Steinbeck's novel, The Grapes of Wrath. There are all kinds of reasons why a book like this deserves to sit on high school and university syllabi, and Bruce Springsteen's 1995 album, The Ghost of Tom Joad, wasn't off the mark when it linked Steinbeck's courageous protagonist to the rights of migrant workers and the broader working class in the mid-90s. But for me, the haunting presence of the novel isn't so much the figure of Tom Joad, who, following the murder of Casey, the preacher, departs from the family to fight as a vigilante for workers' rights. Rather, as the novel's conclusion again highlights, it's the nameless mother (simply "Ma") that has been the real source of endurance for the Joads as they struggle to survive the constant horrors of the depression.

It's an incredible scene. The rain is pounding and the family camp has been flooded out; in the midst of this, Rose of Sharon has given birth to a stillborn child. Fearing pneumonia, Ma Joad pushes the family to higher ground and they happen upon an open barn. Here, Ma gets Rose of Sharon out of her wet clothes and sees to another child who has taken shelter there with his starving father. With the flood looming, she clears out the family and directs Rose of Sharon to nurse the dying stranger. It's with this bleak image that the novel ends.

My experience of reading Steinbeck's novel was also conditioned by another current reading project: I've been slowly working through the first volume of Marx's Capital with some friends here in Edmonton. The chapter we've discussed most recently is "The Working Day," which features a host of memorable quotes, metaphors, and allusions. Along with his famous comparison of capital to "dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour," I was struck by Marx's explication of so-called equal rights, which articulates much of what's going on in The Grapes of Wrath:

We see then, that, apart from extremely elastic bounds, the nature of the exchange of commodities itself imposes no limit to the working-day, no limit to surplus-labour. The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working-day as long as possible, and to make, whenever possible, two working-days out of one. On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the labourer maintains his right as seller when he wishes to reduce the working-day to one of definite normal duration. There is here, therefore, an antinomy, right against right, both equally bearing the seal of the law of exchanges. Between equal rights force decides. Hence is it that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the working-class. 

Here's Springsteen performing the Grapes of Wrath-inspired title track from his 1995 album.

The four last things

This past December, a former professor of mine preached on George Herbert's "four last things" poems as a way to mark the four Sundays of Advent. The texts have been made available online and each one of them is worth a look.

• Sermon 1: Death
• Sermon 2: Judgment
• Sermon 3: Heaven 
• Sermon 4: Hell 

George Eliot and atheism

I regard these writings as histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction, and while I admire and cherish much of what I believe to have been the moral teaching of Jesus himself, I consider the system of doctrines built upon the facts of his life . . . to be most dishonorable to God and most pernicious in its influence on individual and social happiness. 

--Mary Anne Evans (aka George Eliot) on the Bible, 1842

Decades after offering this passionate account of her disbelief in a letter to her father, Mary Anne Evans would move to London, become Marian Evans, and eventually assume her status as the Victorian literary giant, George Eliot. Contemporary treatments of George Eliot rightly celebrate her writing for its affirmation of everyday life, and more often than not invoke her self-proclaimed atheism as one of its key components. The most recent example is an article in Salon called "Good without God," (originally published by the LA Review of Books) which argues that Eliot can teach modern atheists and skeptics how to be more inclusive and affirming of those who, for whatever reason, are still holding on to their religious beliefs. The article suggests that Eliot's loss of faith can temper those like Dawkins or Harris who sacrifice dialogue and community for the smug certainty of their exclusively "rational" position. Not a bad corrective, but it still comes off sounding rather patronizing where religious belief is involved. Gone is the antagonism that seems to be fuelling most contemporary atheism and its religious rebuttals.  Despite losing the rigid Methodism of her youth, Eliot, in fact, kept attending church ceremonies, in part because she simply appreciated the form of the service and its liturgies. But for her, it seemed necessary that we not confuse institutionalized ritual with what was most important: cultivating a sense of "sympathy with the difficulty of the human lot."

For Zadie Smith, one of many contemporary novelists who has celebrated Eliot's ability to embrace the faithful from a faithless position, Middlemarch gives us the story of Dorothea (a work of brilliant self-parody for Eliot), who begins as a self-effacing servant of lofty principles untempered by actual living. After a disappointing marriage, she is finally able to recognize the importance of emotional experience as a form of knowledge that is perhaps even more valuable than that of the intellect.

Henry James complained that Middlemarch seemed too diffuse and disorganized, but he seems to miss its point. He wanted more of Dorothea and less of those who should have been minor characters, like Fred Vincy and Dr Lydgate. Like many others before her, Smith claims this as the novel's great strength: it is a novel about "everybody." For Smith, Fred is "Eliot's ideal Spinozian subject" because his "moral luck is all encounter, arrangement, combination," and the love that he is continuously striving for throughout the novel--that of Mary Garth-- "is that encounter; she is Fred's reason to be good." Smith's point is well-made, but then she goes and says this: "This is not biblical morality but practical morality." Here, in Eliot's novel, Smith writes, "Love is a kind of knowledge." Again, I'm left wondering how Smith's categories work. It all sounds incredibly biblical and damn near Augustinian to me. Smith argues that "Eliot has replaced metaphysics with human relationships," but this kind of humanism, this opening to earthly relations in all their practicality, seems like the point of most Christian literature as well. "What is universal and timeless in literature is need," she claims. "Forms, styles, structures . . . should change like skirt lengths. They have to; otherwise we make a rule, a religion, of one form." She's taking her cue from Spinoza, but this claim about "need" is also there in Augustine; of course, the two philosophers go off in significantly different directions, but Smith's reading doesn't go further than a simple affirmation of desire as such. An ontology of desire, in other words, runs up against the stale forms of tradition and ritual. Nothing new here, especially when you look at the history of Christianity. Smith ends up sounding like a postmodern Protestant.

But back to the "Good without God" article, which is a good example of modern attempts to "rescue" the energy of religious belief from an absent projection of transcendence. It closes with what should an inspiring claim: "people can be their own salvation." (And perhaps it would be a bit more inspiring if it affirmed a collective politics as something more consequential.) But as I was searching for the article yesterday, I came across another article of the same name, this time in the American Catholic publication First Things, this time by Alan Jacobs. It's much smarter and provides a good contrast to the Salon piece because it recognizes that modern atheism is often simply a watered down version of Christian morality. Jacobs does us the service of highlighting Nietzsche's brief dismissal of George Eliot, which is, like most of Nietzsche's writing, to be taken with a grain of salt. Still the point is well-made. Nietzsche's certainty is our ambivalence.

G. Eliot.—They have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality: that is English consistency, let us not blame it on little bluestockings la Eliot. In England, in response to every little emancipation from theology one has to reassert one’s position in a fear–inspiring manner as a moral fanatic. That is the penance one pays there. With us it is different. When one gives up Christian belief one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality.

lilacs everywhere

From Marcel Proust's Swann's Way, which I've recently started, and happens to be the most suggestive literary rendering I can find on the flower.

. . . [W]e would leave town by the lane that ran along the white gate of M. Swann’s park. Before reaching it, we would meet the smell of his lilacs, coming out to greet the strangers. From among the fresh green little hearts of their leaves, the flowers would curiously lift above the gate of the park their tufts of mauve or white feathers, glazed, even in the shade, by the sun in which they had bathed. A few, half hidden by the little tiled lodge called the Archers’ House, where the caretaker lived, overtopped its Gothic gable with their pink minarets. The Nymphs of Spring would have seemed vulgar compared to these young houris, which preserved within this French garden the pure and vivid tones of Persian miniatures. Despite my desire to entwine their supple waists and draw down to me the starry curls of their fragrant heads, we would pass by without stopping because my parents had ceased to visit Tansonville since Swann’s marriage…

We stopped for a moment in front of the gate. Lilac time was nearly over; a few, still, poured forth in tall mauve chandeliers the delicate bubbles of their flowers, but in many places among the leaves where only a week before they had still been breaking in waves of fragrant foam, a hollow scum now withered, shrunken and dark, dry and odorless.

Milton, Reading, and Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence"

Violence, in Benjamin’s theory, occurs at the instance that any positive law is put into place. “Law-instating violence” falls under the category of “mythic violence” because it unfolds arbitrarily, as though by fate. “Law-preserving violence” is a byproduct of mythic violence; it is tautological in the sense that it legitimates violence for the sake of its own name. It reproduces the law by re-asserting its binding function through state institutions and policing. These overlapping forms of violence work together to produce a subject accountable to the law. Benjamin’s theory of divine violence attempts to articulate a form of violence that occurs outside of this framework and, similarly, outside of the instrumental logic of means and ends that defines the activity of its agents. In her reading of Benjamin’s essay, Judith Butler highlights the distinction between the guilt necessary to legal accountability, and the divine violence of the Jewish God who, for Benjamin, is “decidedly not punitive.” Rather than a guilt-inducing law, she writes, Benjamin understands the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” as

mandating only that individual struggle with the ethical edict [that is] communicated by the imperative. This is an imperative that does not dictate, but leaves open the modes of its applicability, the possibilities of its interpretation, including the conditions under which it may be refused.

The commandment is not coercive, but is rather an occasion for interpretive struggle, from which, Benjamin writes, “no judgment of the deed can be derived.” As he acknowledges in the essay’s conclusion, divine violence will not be recognizable with the certainty that can be attached to mythic violence “because the expiatory power of violence is not visible to men.”  Benjamin’s definition thus helps us to articulate the moment of transition that Samson’s destruction initiates.

Rather than producing a site of free interpretation for his audience, I want to suggest that Samson’s violence reproduces a textual space: a space of reading and struggle, premised on the destruction of theatrical spectacle. Indeed, a similar kind of operation is at work in Milton’s 1671 publication. In a recent essay for the PMLA, Daniel Shore notes how Milton’s rhetorical strategy in the combat of idolatry is not to destroy idols, but to preserve such monuments by putting them on display for his readers. “Like errors more generally,” he writes, “idols must be singled out, materially preserved, and made available for ‘survay’ and ‘scanning.’” Milton’s late poetry, in particular, finds him countering his opponents by reinscribing them in the material text, thus reintroducing them to an active ground of biblical hermeneutics. The point is to deliver an interpretive situation to his audience that reveals the contradiction of their present political moment. No surprise, then, that Milton’s preface to Samson Agonistes is preoccupied with the development of a reading audience against the popular appetite for theatrical spectacle. Rather than a revolution in form, however, Milton’s description sees the poem as a reformation of classical elements. Scolding his contemporaries for having embraced the “intermixing” of comic and tragic elements on the Elizabethan stage, Milton presents Samson Agonistes in opposition to common taste and public opinion, working against the grain, not simply “to gratify the people,” but by raising “pity and fear, or terror, to purge the mind of those such-like passions . . . stirred up by reading or seeing those passions well-imitated.” At once gesturing back to the Greek tradition and forward to the cathartic potential of his dramatic poem, Milton’s preface reconfigures the genre specifically for an audience of readers.

Although Samson Agonistes takes a dramatic form, the author’s preface makes it clear that his work is not to be publicly performed. Rather, the poem is a text awaiting collective interpretation within a culture defined by theatrical representation and architectural restoration. This formal opposition is reproduced within the poem, where, as I’ve mentioned already, the public visibility of Samson’s labor conditions its reception as idolatry for the Israelites and divine proof for the Philistines. At the poem’s ideological centre, is the Philistine temple. “The building,” relays the Messenger,

was a spacious theaterHalf round on two main pillars vaulted high, With seats where all the lords and each degree
Of sort, might sit in order to behold. (1605-8)

The sight of Samson in this highly charged political space is enough to excite the Philistine audience into shouts of praise to Dagon. After he has fulfilled their requirements for performance, Samson is allowed to rest between “two massy pillars / That to the arched roof gave main support.” In what follows, Samson strikes his enemies precisely where they are most powerful: at the very site of cultural production. We, along with Manoa and the Chorus, are again reminded of our textual condition when the Messenger appears and begins to describe the actual violence of the event with a list of natural similes. Along with Manoa and the Chorus, the reader is left to imagine the disaster, prevented from accessing Samson’s inward state at the time of his performance. All that’s clear in the Messenger’s description is the class status of Samson’s victims:

Lords, ladies, captains, counselors, or priests,
Their choice nobility and flower, not only
Of this but of each Philistian city round
Met from all parts to solemnize this feast.
Samson with these immixed, inevitably
Pulled down the same destruction on himself;
The vulgar only scaped who stood without. (1653-59)

Here, Milton alters the biblical account, in which three thousand commoners, watching from the roof, die along with the Philistine nobility. Rather than a moment of transcendent irruption, Samson’s final act repositions his people, along with the vulgar Philistines, as readers within an immanent horizon. Samson embodies what Benjamin has called “the destructive character,” whose only activity is that of “clearing away.” This character is by nature iconoclastic. As Benjamin writes,

No vision inspires the destructive character. He has few needs, and the least of them is to know what will replace what has been destroyed. First of all, for a moment at least, empty space, the place where the thing stood or the victim lived. Someone is sure to be found who needs this space without its being filled.

On the Philistine stage, the identity of labor and idolatry achieves its apotheosis in Samson’s feats of strength: shows of power that would reaffirm the ruling elite but instead lead to its destruction. While it is common for traditionalists, writes Benjamin, to “pass things down to posterity, by making them untouchable and thus conserving them,” the destructive character passes on “situations, by making them practicable and thus liquidating them.” Samson’s demolition of the Philistine temple delivers a pivotal situation to his people; but, by the end of Samson Agonistes, they have again exchanged this textual space for the theatrical space of visible signs and proofs.

Milton and the (post)secular (II)

 

In my last post, I pointed to some recent treatments of Milton (and other English poets from the seventeenth century) that argue for his relevance to current debates over religion and secularism. This post picks up on what I take to be the more convincing half of Feisal G. Mohamed's Milton and the Post-Secular Present. Mohamed opens his second last chapter with an epigraph from John Milbank (a theologian who has, more or less, sought to colonize whatever is meant by the term "post-secular"). Milbank's quote rehearses a familiar move in Christian apologetics: the biblical narrative is shown to break with sacrificial violence in favor of an originary peace. In what follows, Mohamed uses Milton's Samson Agonistes to demonstrate the limits of Milbank’s understanding of biblical narrative, a narrative of order and harmony that Western theologians characteristically impose on what they perceive as an arbitrary violence that is always traced back to the Other. 

Since John Carey’s much scrutinized article in the Times Literary Supplement in September 2002, “A work in praise of terrorism? September 11 and Samson Agonistes,” Milton’s late work in particular has generated sporadic, often reactionary, debates over the nature of religious violence, past and present. Following the religious violence of 9/11, Carey argued, interpretations of Milton’s poem must avoid condoning Samson's final massacre of the Philistines: Israel’s liberator must either be condemned for his religious violence or be avoided altogether. As Mohamed recognizes, Carey’s polemic is a covert attempt to protect Milton and his liberal legacy from its possible endorsement of terrorism, its association with religious violence. One might expect Mohamed to emphasize the ethical ambiguity of Samson’s final act; instead, he argues that Samson is a hero of faith who shows that, with the imposition of uniformity by the state church, Milton has come closer to the “far left wing of Reformed religion.” There is little doubt, in other words, that Milton comes out on the side of Samson. Mohamed’s evidence for this is based on two authorial decisions that characterize the poem. First, the representation of violence in Samson Agonistes is passed over quickly or, at best, described ambiguously, with a host of natural metaphors. Second, there is little or no remorse for the Philistines on the part of the Hebrew chorus, which immediately celebrates Samson’s “miraculous slaughter.” Because of the limited account the Milton chooses to include in his poem, “We are never allowed to forget . . . the victims’ status as Philistine political elite and the attendant association of this class with the oppression of Israel” (103). For Mohamed, the value of Samson Agonistes lies in the way that it retains and represses this ethnic violence. Equally important for contemporary readers is the characterization of Samson as a hero of faith, whose experience of the divine impulse is inaccessible. Unlike Milbank’s claims to Christianity’s original purity, Milton frustrates our attempts to narrate Christianity in such a harmonious manner; with Milton, he writes, echoing Walter Benjamin, we become aware of the barbarism that underlies all civilization.

Mohamed’s last chapter continues his discussion of terrorism by focusing on the silencing of Samson at the conclusion of Milton’s poem. Rather than following the account of Judges, where the captive Samson cries out for God’s assistance in his revenge on the Philistines, Milton obliquely describes Samson’s as bowing his head “as one who pray’d, / Or some great matter in his mind revolv’d” (1637-8). Some critics have suggested that this instance evacuates Samson of his divine status, thus leaving readers with an ambiguous hero, but Mohamed suggests the opposite. With this silencing of Samson, he writes, Samson is removed from the sphere of human motivation. In the same way, the Israelites insist that their hero’s death is not a suicide but an “accident,” which allows him the identity of a martyr. For Mohamed, however, these distinctions, which tend to distance the religious violence of Milton’s time from that of our own, “are the distinctions typical of religious violence, which distances its martyrs from motives of personal vengeance and emphasizes their divine calling.” We thus witness “a consonance with the culture by which those attacks are immortalized” (121). If Milton can remain commendable for the way his poetry effects interpretive ambiguity, it is because of the parallels it draws with modern terrorism. The performative violence of Samson Agonistes, which strains against Restoration triumphalism, unsettles the illusory peace of the nation even while it affirms the progress of human liberty.

Introducing my thesis

I've been relatively quiet on the thesis front lately, but I've decided to break my silence and share the first draft of my introduction. Apologies for the inflated rhetoric. It's impossible not to be polemical when you're writing about a polemicist. With any luck, I'll be ready to post my conclusion later next week.

           

This study of Milton's 1671 poems is an attempt to take seriously the activity of Milton’s “fit” reader. Over the course of the following chapters, it will become clear that, within Paradise Regain’d . . . to which is added Samson Agonistes, such activity is as much a strategy within a culture of domination as it is constitutive of Christian virtue. Although Milton’s remarks and appeals to the reader might suggest a “real” audience, the fit reader is a textual production through and through. Between approaches that emphasize the book as a determinate object of material history, on the one hand, and those that reduce reading to the operation of free, interpretive agency, I focus on reading as a materially dependent practice that is ideologically situated. Such an approach, I argue, is necessary to appreciate the production of Milton’s post-Restoration reader. This also means, however, that although interpretation, as a socially symbolic act, is finally answerable to history, the reading of literature must be treated as a specific kind of practice that cannot be simply reduced to the reader’s time, place, or interpretive community. In their reading, writes Fredric Jameson, works of literature produce “that very situation to which [they are] also, at one and the same time, a reaction” (46). Just as the 1671 poems work to produce specific kinds of readers, they also work to construct the enemies of such activity, which always appear for Milton as interpretive foils.

The politics of interpretation in Restoration England were, of course, a result of a larger social transformation that, for Reformers like Milton, remained unfinished. Chapter 1 sketches the dominant trends of early modern Protestant interpretation and thus locates Milton’s hermeneutic method in its historical and ideological moment. In this context, the poet-theologian figures as a harsh critic of extra-biblical authority and a vigorous advocate of further Reformation in England. Under this banner, Milton engages the limits of Protestant hermeneutics in order undercut the prohibition of divorce. In the tracts of his early career, Milton appeals to an audience for whom the bible is a “self-interpreting” text and builds his argument for divorce upon the “key of charity” and the “analogy of faith.”  Over the course of his argument, Milton suggests that an unhappy marriage diverts one’s labor from his vocation and prevents the leisure time necessary for one’s public work to be productive. Productive labor is defined less in terms of material wealth than it is by bringing a “helpful hand to this slow-moving reformation which we labor under” (963). In this way, Milton’s early published writing advocates for the labor of authorship and the labor of reading. While the activity of reading in this period is still associated with leisured classes, Areopagitica demonstrates how books are not only “published labors” but are also “as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon’s teeth, and, being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed me” (930). This chapter argues that the privilege of both authorial and interpretive labor must be thought alongside the material labor of textual production: the operations of the print shop and the circulation of the market.

           

The Licensing Order of 1643 signaled the revival of pre-publication censorship in England’s book trade. The ethical vision of this tract locates a free market system of exchange as the expression of the nation’s will towards Reformation, a sign of trust in its collective ability to “search after truth.” Freedom from external constraint here entails an opposition to licensing’s monopoly over the book trade. In treating the published book as the author’s property, Milton’s discussion prefigures the formal of material labor in the production process and follows what some critics have identified as “possessive individualism,” the objectification and instrumentalization of social relations. Where Areopagitica can be compared with Milton’s first post-Restoration tract, Of True Religion (1673), as establishing a more inclusive theory of toleration, I read this discourse on liberty as a depiction of an emerging capitalist appetite for socialized labor.

This optimistic image of a reading republic is effectively smashed in Milton’s 1671 publication, Paradise Regain’d . . . to which is added Samson Agonistes. Chapter 2 and 3 both show how Milton’s understanding of reading works within defined limits. In Paradise Regain’d the act of reading is productive and mobile, while in Samson Agonistes reading operates as a process of negation and iconoclasm. In both poems, the formal characteristics of the printed book are highlighted, first, as the contradictory ground of interpretive labor and, second, as a strategy of opposition to the spectacular representations of the Restoration. In my second chapter I look at the social and political context of the London book-trade following the Restoration. Key to this setting is what I call the “ideology of completion,” a strategy by which England’s restored government convinced its citizens of the necessity of monarchic rule and a centralized state church. Milton’s 1671 publication occurs in this context as a material disruption of fixed (or restored) categories. Arguing that Paradise Regain’d works to construct a mobile reader who appreciates the contingency of the material text, this chapter explores how the Son upsets the conditions of identity by dismantling the hermeneutical binaries—means/ends, internal/external, contemplative/active, private/public—through which Satan interprets God’s kingdom. Although both the Son and his adversary draw on verses from scripture in their debate, Satan is revealed to rely on extra-textual modes of domination, while the Son embodies an immanent relation to God’s Word. This Protestant approach to scripture is also reflected in Mary, whose memory practices are picked up by the Son, and later in the volume by Samson.

Parallel to the Son’s mode of reading, or “revolving,” I position the material format of the 1671 edition against the arguments of those like Walter Ong, who understand the advent of print merely as the further reification of the written word. Print, argues Ong, “is comfortable only with finality” (132). Rather, drawing on the material features of Milton’s text, I argue that the apparently “fixed” limits of print are mobilized and effectively opened through a process of reading and re-reading encouraged by the 1671 Omissa. We thus begin to see how Milton’s strategy of biblical reading, as developed in Chapter 1, informs the political, oppositional stance of the 1671 poems. The Omissa represents a crucial component of this study, not simply because it marks the material format of the text as irregular, but also because, along with Milton’s protagonists, it opposes the ideology of completion that conditions textual interpretation.

While Chapter 2 shows how the labor of reading is assumed and transformed through the Son’s posture of interpretation in Paradise Regain’d, my final chapter considers how Samson Agonistes puts this mode of reading into crisis. By focusing on the collapse of labor into idolatry, I argue that Milton’s tragic poem is positioned against those who would valorize human industry without thinking through its political and theological consequences. Israel’s captivity means that there is no “outside” of idolatry for Samson or his audience, except through what Walter Benjamin calls “divine violence.” Such violence operates outside of the visibility that constrains Samson and corrupts his people. Again, I try to demonstrate how Milton’s publication relies on its formal features to produce a particular kind of reading subject. Alongside Samson’s toppling of the Philistine temple, Milton positions his dramatic poem against popular entertainment: against the spectacle of theatrical production, and against pre-given modes of representation. The Omissa again functions as a built-in mode of resistance to an ideology of completion, but here assists in turning the poet’s audience from spectators to readers. With Samson Agonistes, in other words, Milton preserves the possibility of an audience by forcing his readers to pass through the violence of Samson’s destruction, marking a transition from theatrical spectacle to textual space. This chapter concludes with return to the problem of the vocation for early modern Protestants and its articulation through Max Weber’s theory of the Protestant work ethic. With the help of Giorgio Agamben, I suggest that Milton’s 1671 poems together establish a radical critique of identity politics, instead putting forward a notion of collectivity that is open to the future in the figure of the “remnant.”

Rather than the possessive individualist established in readings by Marshall Grossman, Christopher Kendrick, and John Guillory, we witness a poet whose post-Restoration publications find him still in search of a social potential that is not pre-determined by the formal or real subsumption implicit to capitalist modes of exchange. Neither do we see an affirmation of “free” textual or interpretive space in Milton’s late poems, but are engaged in a mode of reading that undertakes a formal opposition to the state. Recognizing the strategic positioning of Paradise Regain’d . . . to which is added Samson Agonistes is crucial to its politics, which, I argue, have been misinterpreted and underemphasized by critics that avoid the question of ideology and neglect the material contingency of text for early modern readers.

In Milton’s development of the “fit” reader, I locate the potential of a non-identical collective, the subject of recent discussions by Giorgio Agamben (The Time That Remains) and Alain Badiou (Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism). Paul represents for both critics a figure that demonstrated the ability to think the social or “universal” without recourse to some prior condition of belonging, whether a people, a city, an empire, a territory, or a class. Rather than objective victory, it is “subjective victory,” writes Badiou, “that produces hope” (95). A subject is born out of her commitment to what Badiou calls, a “truth event,” while the domain of ethics is determined by a subject’s fidelity or faithfulness to such an event. According to Badiou, this is what the Resurrection of Christ means to St Paul. If Milton can be said to oppose a certain “identitarian” logic, it is only because he opposes its use in government surveillance and repression. This to say, the definition of reading that these chapters articulate is strategic. For the philosopher Alain Badiou, the “identity” refers to a static condition of belonging, while the “subjectivity” entails a responsive and excessive kind of agency. In this study, Milton’s “fit” reader corresponds to the latter category. Against laws that divide, enumerate, and name, fit readers work within defined limits to produce a space of grace, which occurs without a condition of debt or duty. In his reading of Roman 6:14 (“for you are not under law, but under grace”) Badiou understands a restructuring of the subject according to a logic of becoming: “For the ‘not being under the law’ negatively indicates the path of the flesh as suspension of the subject’s destiny, while ‘being under grace’ indicates the path of the spirit as fidelity to the event” (63). Here a potential dissolution of various identities is indicated first by a negative declaration; the “but,” on the other hand, “indicates the task, the faithful labor in which the subjects of the process opened up by the event (whose name is ‘grace’) are the coworkers” (64). As Terry Eagleton has recently suggested, Badiou’s work “grasp[s] the vital point that faith articulates a loving commitment before it counts as a description of the way things are” (119). Perhaps, then, Milton’s late poems can, in fact, be understood as signaling a turn to faith. We should, however, be careful not to dismiss such faith as a departure from politics. As the young Milton once wrote, "if other things as great in the church and in the rule of life both economical and political not be looked into and reformed, we have looked so long upon the blaze that Zwinglius and Calvin hath beaconed up to us that we are stark blind."

Works Cited

Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. trans Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Hampton: Yale University Press, 2009).

T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York: The Noonday Press, 1961).

Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, 1983).

John Milton, The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton. eds. William Kerrigan, et al. (New York: The Modern Library, 2007).

Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. (London: Routledge, 2002).

"The problem of community"

Indeed, we have omitted something from our evocation of the kinship between Marxism and religion which must be rectified at this point: it is the way in which all the issues that turn around church organization and the community of the faithful constitute a point-by-point anticipation of all the most vital problems of political organization in our own time: problems of the party, of class solidarity, of the soviets, of communes, of democratic centralism, of council communism, of small group politics, of the relations of intellectuals to the people, of discipline, of bureaucracy – all these crucial issues which are still so very much with us are those most centrally at stake in the great debates of Reformation and of the English cultural revolution. The problem of community – bound for us, for better or worse, to its concrete expression in the institution of the political party – was for them linked to its concrete or allegorical expression in the notion of a church or congregation or community of the faithful; and the excitement and actuality of the English cultural revolution as it unfolds from 1642 to 1660 is surely at one with this burning preoccupation with the nature of collective life.

Fredric Jameson, from "Religion and Ideology: A Political Reading of Paradise Lost." Delivered at the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature July, 1980.

"A Hymn to God the Father"

Back in January, I joined a choir, mostly made up of alumni from a Lutheran college. I've been enjoying it for the most part, though I still cringe through some of our material. We had our final performance last night. Each one of our songs was introduced by a different member of the choir. While one might expect such introductions to give some background to our repertoire, they all tended to focus on aspects of personal salvation. Rather than providing the audience with insight into our selections, each introductory description drew on themes of atonement (as penal substitution), sinful depravity, and God's infallible Word. It all put me in a bad mood.

It was my job to give the introduction to John Ness Beck's "A Hymn to God the Father." I'm not really a fan of the arrangement, but, as it uses John Donne's original text, I couldn't resist the opportunity to expound on the work of one of my favorite poets. To my mind, Donne's hymn actually resists the triumphant narrative of individual salvation that came to define the evening's program.

WILT Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
    Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
    And do run still, though still I do deplore?
        When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
                    For I have more.

Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won
    Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
    A year or two, but wallowed in a score?
        When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
                    For I have more.

I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
    My last thread, I shall perish on the shore ;
But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son
    Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore ;
        And having done that, Thou hast done ;
                    I fear no more.

Written during a time of serious illness in the winter of 1623, this text is at once a work of praise and confession. According to the early biographer Thomas Watton, Donne "caused it to be set to a most grave and solemn tune and to be often sung to the organ by the choristers at St. Paul's church in his own hearing, especially at the evening service."

In the hymn, the speaker is driven to confession by his fear of an outstanding sin. You'll notice that at the end of each stanza, Donne puns on his name repeatedly, suggesting that God's work of forgiveness is not yet finished because of his impulse to sin. By punning on his name Donne joins together his identity with the worst kind of spiritual anxiety. Sin initially assumes a kind of infinity (it defines past, present, and future, overflowing God's sacrificial act); in this way, becomes an idol. As the poem continues, such fear is revealed as a mark of pride, for in despairing over his outstanding sins, the speaker forgets the infinite mercy of God and remains focused on himself.

Each stanza ends by suspending God's forgiveness and with it, the poet's identity remains undone and unsettled. In the final stanza, this cycle is subverted. Both tropes--the closure of self marked by pride and the opening of self marked by fear--are subtly transformed by the Son's radiance. When the speaker finally orients himself to the Son's sacrifice, he forgets his own sinfulness and accepts his identity as remembered by God.

Like most church liturgies, Donne's hymn moves from confession to praise. What makes it so compelling, however, is how successfully (and affectively) it demonstrates the danger of confession: a necessary posture for the believer, but one that remains precarious because of the prominence it can give to the individual subject. Rather than receiving easy absolution, Donne's speaker passes through his sinfulness, moving from its logical end in despair and isolation to grace.

Rowan Williams on Charles Dickens

The Archbishop of Canterbury's commemorative address, given at Westminster Abbey on the bicentenary of Charles Dickens.

It’s difficult to tell the truth about human beings.  Every novelist knows this in a special way, and when Dickens sets out to tell the truth about human beings he does it outrageously, by exaggeration, by caricature.  The figures we remember most readily from his works are the great grotesques.  We have, we think, never met anyone like them, and then we think again.

The truth is extreme, the truth is excessive.  The truth about human beings is more grotesque and bizarre than we can imagine.  And Dickens’ generous embrace of human beings does not arise out of a chilly sense of what is due to them, but out of a celebratory feeling that there is always more to be discovered.  Even his villains are exuberant.  It was George Orwell who pointed out that when Mr Murdstone sets David Copperfield one of those appalling sums in his unhappy childhood, it is couched in terms of calculating numbers of Double Gloucester cheeses. Orwell points out that a real Murdstone would never have thought of the cheeses - it’s part of that overflow, that unnecessary excessive sense of what is human that takes us from page to page in Dickens, eyebrows raised and breath bated.

Dickens is the enemy not so much of an unjust view of human beings, as of a boring view of human beings.  He loves the poor and the destitute, not from a sense of duty but from a sense of outrage that their lives are being made flat and dead.  He wants them to live.  He wants them to expand into the space that should be available for human beings to be what God meant them to be.  In Hard Times, he left us, of course, one of the most unforgettable pictures of what education looks like if it forgets that exuberance and excess, and treats human beings as small containers for information and skill.

And that sense of the grotesque is, strange as it may sound to say it, one of the things that makes Dickens a great religious writer.  As we’ve heard [in the earlier reading from The Life of Our Lord] he could write simply and movingly about Christ.  He could, in A Christmas Carol, leave us one of the greatest modern myths arising out of the Christian story.  But he had relatively little time for conventional religion, and no time at all for those who substituted conventional religion for that exuberant celebration of the human, which he was interested in.

[Extract from Bleak House] - “Mr Chadsbans he wos a prayin wunst at Mr Sangby’s and I heerd him, but he sounded as if he wos a speakin’ to hisself, and not to me.  He prayed a lot, but I couldn’t make out nothink on it.”

The Chadsbans and the Jellabys and all those other (again, I’m afraid) unforgettably exuberant hypocrites in his books – these are the people for whom at the end of the day, he wishes judgement to be passed.

But that sense of excess in the human spirit and the human heart also leads on to another side of Dickens – equally serious, equally religious, much more disturbing – that side of Dickens which makes him indeed a novelist to stand alongside the very greatest imaginative spirits in Europe.  And this is Dickens’ sense of the tragic.  Dickens writes about people ‘in hell’, and he knows what hell is like.  He describes people in the hell of deceit and self-deceit -  William Dorrit, Mr. Merdle, Lady Dedlock - people who cannot live, literally, when their myths about themselves are destroyed.  Because part of this sense of exuberance in Dickens is the recognition that all of us live by projecting myths and dramas about ourselves.  We tell stories about ourselves, we write scripts for ourselves, and we love to act them out.

But what happens when those stories and those scripts are so far from reality that we cannot actually survive the touch of truth?  Tragedy in Dickens is so often about that appalling moment when a myth is shattered, and a person with it.  And along with the hell of deceit and of self-deceit, there are the hells of obsession – of Mr. Monks and Miss Havisham, Mrs. Clennam and Bradley Headstone.  The people who have lost all their freedom, and for once are losing their exuberance because they have been taken prisoner by something in themselves, locking them in, weighing them down.  They are part of Dickens’ unparalleled portraiture of self-destruction.  And perhaps these depictions of hell – the hells of self-deceit and obsession and self-destruction – perhaps the depictions of these hells owed something to Dickens’ own painful self-awareness.  A man who recognised the gap in his own life, so often, between aspiration and reality; a man who in his own exuberance drove himself towards self-destruction – and yet in that very process, again as we have heard, drew out extraordinary levels of sheer joy, festive celebratory hearing, of what he had to say.

A man, then, who portrays human beings excessively and extravagantly.  A man who portrays human beings in hell.  And yet when we read him, it does not read like bad news.  Because what does he have to say at the end of the day about redemption?  In some ways not a great deal.  Or rather there is a tension again and again in his books between a carefully, neatly resolved happy ending, and an immense burden of recognised, almost unbearable, unresolved suffering.  He achieves the balance of those two most perfectly, for one reader, in Bleak House, where the past tense of Esther’s narrative is balanced by the present tense of unhealed suffering, the rain still falling on the Lincolnshire wolds.  But in that book, which one reader at least thinks is perhaps his most profoundly theological – though he wouldn’t thank me for that – in that book, we have one of the strangest, most shocking images that he ever gives us of compassion and mercy, and that is the figure of Sir Leicester Dedlock.  At the very end of Bleak House, left alone in his decaying mansion, holding open the possibility of forgiveness and restoration, “I revoke no dispositions I have made in her favour” says Sir Leicester, with his typical dryness about his wife who has fled from him in guilt and terror.  And in that appallingly stiff phrase we hear something of the hope of mercy.  Almost silent, powerless, Sir Leicester after his stroke, dying slowly in loneliness, and stubbornly holding open the possibility that there might be, once again, love and harmony.

“We may confidently hope that God will forgive us our sins and mistakes, and enable us to live and die in Peace”, says Dickens for his children.  And perhaps for us as grownups, or people who might quite like to be grownups one day, that image of the hope of God’s forgiveness is shockingly, startlingly, expressed in that lonely figure stubbornly holding the door open, revoking no dispositions made in our favour.  Powerless to enforce love or justice, and yet indestructibly, even extravagantly, offering the only kind of love that is appropriate – the extravagant and excessive nature of human beings.  An utterly unreasonable compassion, which because of its utter unreasonableness can change everything.

G.K. Chesterton on Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens, David Foldvari (2011)

No man was more filled with the sense of this bellicose basis of all cheerfulness than Dickens. He knew very well the essential truth, that the true optimist can only continue an optimist so long as he is discontented. For the full value of this life can only be got by fighting; the violent take it by storm. And if we have accepted everything, we have missed something -- war. This life of ours is a very enjoyable fight, but a very miserable truce. And it appears strange to me that so few critics of Dickens or of other romantic writers have noticed this philosophical meaning in the undiluted villain. The villain is not in the story to be a character; he is there to be a danger -- a ceaseless, ruthless, and uncompromising menace, like that of wild beasts or the sea. For the full satisfaction of the sense of combat, which everywhere and always involves a sense of equality, it is necessary to make the evil thing a man; but it is not always necessary, it is not even always artistic, to make him a mixed and probable man. In any tale, the tone of which is at all symbolic, he may quite legitimately be made an aboriginal and infernal energy. He must be a man only in the sense that he must have a wit and will to be matched with the wit and will of the man chiefly fighting. The evil may be inhuman, but it must not be impersonal, which is almost exactly the position occupied by Satan in the theological scheme.

But when all is said, as I have remarked before, the chief fountain in Dickens of what I have called cheerfulness, and some prefer to call optimism, is something deeper than a verbal philosophy. It is, after all, an incomparable hunger and pleasure for the vitality and the variety, for the infinite eccentricity of existence. And this word "eccentricity" brings us, perhaps, nearer to the matter than any other. It is, perhaps, the strongest mark of the divinity of man that he talks of this world as "a strange world," though he has seen no other. We feel that all there is is eccentric, though we do not know what is the centre. This sentiment of the grotesqueness of the universe ran through Dickens's brain and body like the mad blood of the elves. He saw all his streets in fantastic perspectives, he saw all his cockney villas as top heavy and wild, he saw every man's nose twice as big as it was, and very man's eyes like saucers. And this was the basis of his gaiety -- the only real basis of any philosophical gaiety. This world is not to be justified as it is justified by the mechanical optimists; it is not to be justified as the best of all possible worlds. Its merit is not that it is orderly and explicable; its merit is that it is wild and utterly unexplained. Its merit is precisely that none of us could have conceived such a thing, that we should have rejected the bare idea of it as miracle and unreason. It is the best of all impossible worlds.

--from G.K. Chesterton's Charles Dickens (1906)

Milton contra Hobbes

His widow assures me that Mr. T Hobbes was not one of his acquaintance, that her husband did not like him at all, but he would acknowledge him to be a man of great parts, and a learned man. Their interests and tenets did run counter to each other vide Mr. Hobbes' Behemoth.
       -Minutes of the Life of Mr. John Milton by John Aubrey 

Well after the Authorized version of the Bible became standard issue in churches and the translation of choice for private reading, Thomas Hobbes drew a clear connection between what he described as an “anarchy of interpretations” and the political unrest that characterized the 1640s and 1650s (documented and analyzed in his Behemoth, written at behest of King Charles II in 1668), insisting that the king authorize a singular reading of Scripture, or at least install official interpreters of Scripture to monitor its meaning. Hobbes’ anxiety over competing interpretations of Scripture and the proliferation of disparate sects in mid-seventeenth century England was common among royalists. This diffuse outcome of the Reformation’s elevation of individualized authority provided conservative commentators with a clear cause behind the civil war and revolution.

At issue for Hobbes was not the availability of the vernacular Bible, but interpretation itself, which, as an outward activity, must be ordered and regulated so as not to contradict the established order of the state. As Hobbes puts it in his Leviathan, “the question [of Biblical interpretation] is not of obedience to God, but of when, and what God hath said; which to Subjects that have no supernaturall revelation, cannot be known, but by that natural reason, which guided them, for the obtaining of Peace and Justice, to obey the authority of their severall Comonwealths; that is to say, of their lawful Soveraigns.” Because he understands faith as a gift of God that “never follow[s] men’s commands,” Hobbes distinguishes it from the activity of interpretation, instead arguing that it can only be made visible through subordination to power, in accord with natural law. 

At the same time, Hobbes maintained an important distinction between internal and external behavior—shared by other Reformers including Milton— which led him to argue that internal belief cannot and should not be regulated (Rosendale 164). The difference between the positions of more radical English Reformers and that of Hobbes is that the latter privileges outward actions as the only means by which the state can ensure its peaceful conformity. Indeed, Leviathan is itself an attempt to show how the collective will of state subjects are brought into outward unity through the “artificial” representation of the sovereign ruler. Milton, by contrast, cannot easily accept this contradiction between private belief and political subjectivity, just as he cannot accept such an appeal to an ultimately allegorical model of social life. 

Terry Eagleton on Milton, Paradise Lost and Revolution

From Terry Eagleton. "The God that Failed." Re-membering Milton, eds. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson. New York: Methuen, Inc., 1987. 345, 349.

Throwing history into reverse, the left wing retreats to an origin in order to keep alive a future beyond the shabby sell-outs of the bourgeoisie. Their mythologies glean the trace of the revolution within the revolution, a submerged subtext within the dispiriting narratives of official bourgeois history, whether this subtext is, as with Milton, the salvific history of the godly remnant or, as with Walter Benjamin, the tradition of the oppressed that haunts ruling-class history as its silenced underside. Blake knew that only a revolution which penetrated to the body itself could finally be victorious; Milton, as Christopher Hill remarks, believed that “the desire for reformation did not sink deeply enough into the consciences of supporters of the Revolution, did not transform their lives.” Thus Hill reads Paradise Lost not as the expression of political defeat but as the urging of a new political phase: “the foundations must be dug deeper, into the hearts of individual believers, in order to build more securely.”

[…]

To blame Marxism for [the conditions of Stalinism] is then somewhat akin to blaming God for the failure of seventeenth-century revolutionary hopes. To blame God in this way, Milton sees, can only mean one thing: that the Puritan bureaucrats, opportunists and careerists are then let comfortably off the moral and political hook. It was destiny after all; nothing to feel guilty about. But the failure of revolutionary hopes was not of course predestined and neither was Stalinism. . . . There are always those who, like the Koestlers and the Orwells, find it convenient and persuasive to blame the God that failed; but if we wanted a more accurate analogue of Paradise Lost in the twentieth century, we might do worse than looking at Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed.

courses I should be taking

Although I'm sure that writing my thesis will be totally exhilarating, I can't help feeling the sting of bereavement as I look over the graduate course calendar for the coming school year and realize what I'll be missing. I can't be too bitter. If I end up doing a PhD, I'll have another chance to feel jaded and overwhelmed by reading lists and intimidated by the precious competition of colossal egos attempting to out-radical one another. There's also a slight chance I'll be able to sit in on one or two of them.

Cultural Forms and Social Circulation

How do we understand how the relationships between literary and cultural forms (both old and new) and their efficacy for generating new modes of sociability? To address this question, this seminar will focus on theories of cultural production and circulation as well as case studies from both earlier historical periods and contemporary culture.

Every historical period has its examples of the ways literature has generated new forms or modes of sociability and transformed old ones: literary debates generated new modes of cultural engagement in Enlightenment-era coffee houses; out of Restoration theatre culture inspired controversy about the relationship between women and prostitution; 1830s New York City saw publics coalesce around racial performance and textual “blackface” in newspapers. For more recent examples, we can turn to the ways second-wave feminists made poetry-reading central to their consciousness-raising groups, the uses anti-globalization activists make of global technologies to organize alternative cultural resistance, or the emergence of transgender identities in the wake of Leslie Feinberg’s book Transgender Warriors. But how exactly should we understand the relationship between cultural forms and the audience forms and the publics they produce? What, in short, are the possibilities—as well as the limits—of what literature can do in the world?

In recent years, it has been common for literary and cultural critics to focus on the politics of literature and culture in terms of the (usually narrative) content of a cultural object. This course aims to augment this approach to reading politically by focusing less on what texts mean and more on how they mean and what they can be said to do: the forms they take, the media and objects through which they circulate, the affects they generate, and the social constituencies they help consolidate. This course thus invites students to consider theories of texts’ social effects in terms of their cultural circulation: how they produce audiences, take unpredicted paths through the world, consolidate social groups, and even generate identity categories.

To do so, we will bring together concerns from a number of overlapping fields including reader response criticism, linguistic anthropology, history of the book, French and German cultural theory (from the Adorno to Bourdieu), public sphere theory, and literary criticism. Theoretical texts will include readings such as the following: Theodor Adorno “Lyric and Society”; Greg Urban from Metaphysical Community: The Interplay Between the Senses and the Intellect; Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey; Karl Marx The Grundrisse and from Capital; Lauren Berlant from The Female Complaint, Michael Warner Publics and Counterpublics; Benjamin Lee Talking Heads; Gerard Genette Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation; Nietzche “On The Utility and Liability of History for Life”; Frederic Jameson The Political Unconscious; Stanley Fish Is There a Text In This Class?; Janice Radway Reading the Romance; and Walter Benjamin The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and Pierre Bourdieu The Field of Cultural Production; D.F. McKenzie “The Sociology of a Text: Orality, Literacy, and Print in early New Zealand,” Martin Heidegger “The Age of the World Picture.”

Medieval Texts: Medieval Dissent: Plowmen, Lollards, and Outlaws

In 1381, Wat Tyler led an army of peasants into London in the first documented popular revolt in English history. Driven by agrarian unrest, encouraged by priests like John Ball, and calling for legal and social reform, they burned the palace of the Savoy, London home of John of Gaunt, and confronted the king himself on the plain of Smithfield. It is said that at the head of the peasants' procession was someone reciting a passage from The Vision of Piers the Plowman by William Langland. While this use of his text may have shocked Langland into a more conservative revision of the work, it was not inappropriate. The issues of social responsibility among the "estates," and of the failure of the religious to practice what they preach, were central to his work.

Piers refers disparagingly to those who recite ballads of Robin Hood, and this is the period of Robin Hood ballads, which, despite Langland's dismissal of them, are closely linked to the themes of Piers Plowman. The earliest stories of Robin Hood make him a representative of the yeoman class, the lower gentry, who, like the peasants, had grievances against the powerful, including the "lords" of religion. It is interesting that in our earliest known Robin Hood story, it is the Abbot of St. Mary's Abbey in York who is the principal villain; it is Robin, not the abbot, who proves to be the "true" Christian, practicing the virtue of charity and honouring St. Mary Magdalene, patron saint of the lowly.

This is also the period of calls for religious and social reform under John Wyclif, and his followers, the Lollards, raised another revolt in the early fifteenth century, seeking the violent overthrow of Henry IV. They were violently suppressed, outlawed and driven underground, but survived and continued to be a voice for reform until the period of the Protestant Reformation.

In this course, we will consider some of the literature produced by dissenting voices in late medieval England, including the letters of John Ball, the writings of the Lollards, works of anti-clerical satire, Langland's Piers Plowman and other "Piers" works which it inspired in subsequent generations, and various of the earliest tales of Robin Hood. Issues of social criticism and difference, of heresy and rebellion, of tolerance and intolerance will be considered within the literature and history of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England.

Literary Themes: On Violence

This course will provide an opportunity to compare philosophical, sociocultural, and literary conceptions of violence in order to evaluate how each portrays the interrelations between subject formation, witnessing, complicity, and resistance. The general aim is to introduce methods of critical discourse analysis (with an emphasis on modes of figuration) while familiarizing ourselves with the interdisciplinary intellectual histories that inform recent topics in literary and cultural studies. This term, we will begin in the 19th century with the master-slave dialectic from G.W.F. Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit as well as selections from his Philosophy of Right (week 1). Georges Sorel’s syndicalist theory of the state and revolution will prepare us for a close reading of Walter Benjamin’s grafting of Marxism onto Jewish Messianism in “The Critique of Violence,” which revises Sorelian figures (week 2). A close friend of Benjamin, Hannah Arendt shared his inclination to rethink the narrative form of historical writing as evinced in The Origins of Totalitarianism, which configures the histories of anti-Semitism and imperialism with the modes of persecution and terror deployed by the Third Reich and the USSR (weeks 3-5). Having reviewed Arendt’s prescient yet contested theses about imperialism from The Origins, we will subsequently look at Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (week 5) in order to reflect on the case for violence that contravenes against colonial and racist structures of domination. Following our evaluation of selected writings and lectures on governmentality, security, and biopower by Michel Foucault (weeks 6-7), Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (week 8) will bridge our reading of Arendt with both Foucault and Judith Butler’s Precarious Life, a collection of essays that draws on Agamben among others as she targets both the covert and explicit forms of violence that states have mobilized in the course of pursuing the so-called “war on terror” (week 9). Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others (week 10) and J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (week 11) will serve as departure points for our reflections on the power dynamics at stake in witnessing war and atrocities at different levels of proximity. The course will conclude with Talal Asad’s On Suicide Bombing (week 12) and Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (week 13), which will provide occasions to mark the 10th year anniversary of September 11th. Ultimately, then, Coetzee’s and DeLillo’s novels will also give us opportunities to reassess the explanatory value of the theories we have read up until this point as we explore examples of literature’s capacity to bear witness to cataclysmic histories and events.