Month in Review: March

I have made several key changes in direction and revisions for how I want to tell my story. And, perhaps most importantly, I've hit upon a title (which will remain secret for now). Looking around, I don't feel like I've accomplished much. I've been picking away at a few paintings and drawings, but nothing is finished. I've been sketching a bit as well.

I finished Richard White's history, one of the best books I've read all year. This one was quite a surprise. My initial reaction was very lukewarm, but once I reached the Gilded Age I was riveted. I knew very little of the period and so the book was very useful in filling in many gaps as well as showing me paths forward. Stepping away from the book I was curious about what came after. I realized I knew about as little about the Progressive Age as I did about the Gilded Age. I may get to Daniel Rodgers' Atlantic Crossings later this year.

A book very different than White, but compelling was David Graeber's "Debt: The First 5000 Years." I had been looking for an answer to a question libertarians kept posing, or rather, not a question, but rather a questionable assertion: would life be better without government? Graeber's book is full of surprising and interesting observations, many of them culled from archaeology research that has been known about for years, but never integrated into current understandings of economics.

Lastly, per the suggestion of Philip Nikolayev, I read Plato's Republic. Actually I read it twice and will most definitely read it a few more times. I don't feel like this was at all a diversion from my reading plan, since my topic is Economics and Utopia. There was a lot I found useful in reading the Republic. The cycles of government was particularly important for me. Perhaps, the second most valuable aspect of the book was its beauty. The rhythm of the language expresses a way of thinking and being in the world that I have been adapting to my day to day life.

Books Read:

Richard White, The Republic for Which it Stands
Erik Loomis, A History of America in Ten Strikes
Plato, Apology, Crito, Charmides, Laches, Lysis, Menexenus, Ion, Gorgias, Protagoras, Meno, Euthydemus, Lesser Hippias, Greater Hippias, The Republic
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years
Paul Cartledge, Democracy: A Life

April Reading:

Chris Hedges, America: The Farewell Tour
Ada Palmer, Terra Ignota v.3
Finish Graeber's Debt
Flannery and Marcus, The Creation of Inequality
Gilbert Ryle, Plato's Progress
William Flesch, Comeuppance

Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea (Part 2--Review)

I finished reading The Sea, The Sea last night. My first observation is that Murdoch deliberately avoids isolating a center or central theme for the book. The character James does become a focal point near the end, but in such an exaggerated way that we almost question his centrality. James is portrayed as being beyond saintly and is almost a transcendent magical being, like the Buddha statues that line his London apartment. He is a sharp contrast to his cousin Charles. Charles is very much of this world. Is it safe to say that James is the character in this novel who most approaches Murdoch's Platonic ideal of "the Good?"

What is Murdoch's Platonism? At the risk of oversimplifying Plato, I will approach Murdoch's philosophy in The Sea, The Sea through Plato's allegory of the cave. Murdoch's theater group, lead by Charles, live in the world of shadows. James discovered the means of separating himself from this world to perceive a world beyond. James' transcendent reality, what Plato called the world of ideal forms, is grounded in love. Murdoch has argued that the idea of love is not adequately addressed in most of contemporary philosophy. Her work then seeks to address this omission. I remember once describing to a friend the love triangle at the heart of a Thomas Hardy novel I was reading. My friend responded, I thought you read only serious books, when did you start reading romance novels? Well, of course, Thomas Hardy is a serious author and romance is a serious subject, if done well.

Historical Romanticism (capital R) came shortly after the two great democratic revolutions in America and France. Romanticism is thus intertwined with the history of democracy. One central concern of Romanticism was to explore our desires and see if they could not be brought into harmony with the betterment of society. Rousseau famously believed all human desires were good and that it was society that corrupted them. This tension between desire and society is at the core of the Romantic argument.

One thing this novel does is to illustrate how a person such as Charles can so deceive himself that he is almost incapable of seeing the good. The novel is rich in the various ways in which Charles deceives himself, to the point that the book is almost a lexicon of self-deception. One purpose of the Pre-History is to give Charles a fair chance to present himself as fully and accurately as he can. This sets the stage for the unmasking that will occur in the History section. Charles is not a deceiving character, he wishes to be honest, however self-deceived he may be. He believes himself to be egotistical and at times dictatorial, but is personally convinced that, at heart, he is generous and humane. One example is how throughout the novel Charles continuously reflects on his depictions of other characters, usually feeling that he has not presented them as fully or as accurately as he would like. His desire to see the world truthfully and honestly is what made him the famous director that he was. Yet, nonetheless, even a well intentioned and driven man such as himself is capable of extreme self-deception.

Another theme is the futility of trying to escape the world. Charles runs away to his seaside home, expecting to leave behind his theater world entirely, but of course, he lasts little more than a few weeks before he is once again engaged in it. Charles never escapes the world. Late in the novel he refers to himself as being impotent, to have lost his sex drive. This is as close as he gets to removing himself from the world. He does not take himself out, but is rather taken out.

There is much that could be said about the novel, but I am tempted to digress from a direct confrontation and instead travel further along Bloom's direction of reading Murdoch's novels as romances. In romances characters represent not real people but states of mind. What states of mind do the characters in The Sea, The Sea represent? Let's look at some of the key figures:

• Charles Arrowy: the elderly, self-deceived, ego-maniac. He is Prospero, orchestrating his closest friends like players on a stage.
• James: the mystical, saint figure.
• Hartley (Mary Finch): the idealized object of love.
• Lizzie and George: Servants and slaves to Charles.
• Perry and Rosina: Violent lovers; extreme versions of Charles.
• Charles's father, Clement, and Titus: absent figures

Bloom has generated his own patterning of romances in a schema that he borrowed from Freud and then applied to Blake, Shelley, Yeats, and later David Lindsay. In the Freudian pattern the states of being are Narcissistic Libido, Achieved Ego, Id, Super-Ego, and Imago.

Freud                Narcissistic Libido            Id                           Super-Ego                Achieved-Ego                  Imago
Blake                Orc                                    Tharmas                 Urizen                      Los                                   Emanation
Shelley             Prometheus Bound            Demogorgon         Jupiter                      Prometheus Unbound       Asia
Yeats                Mask                                  Body of Fate         Will                          Creative Mind                   Daimon
Lindsay            Maskul                               Krag (Surtur)        Crystal-Man             Nightspore                       ...

Murdoch          Charles and Friends          Sea Monster           The House               James                                Hartley

Freud's unconscious is usually depicted as an iceberg. The ego is the visible tip of the iceberg. The ego is how we view ourselves. I've listed Charles and his entire circle of theater friends under narcissistic libido because I see all of them as being stuck in variations of the ego cycle. They are all tied to the vicious wheel of desire (something Blake very powerfully depicted in his poem The Mental Traveler). The Romantics extended desire to apply to political aspirations, such as a desire for freedom. Blake divided the psyche into what he called his "Giant Forms." Freud's narcissistic libido is roughly equivalent with Blake's Orc. A revolutionary figure, Orc is someone who wishes to change the world through force. Likewise, Shelley's Prometheus wished to forcefully overthrow Jupiter. Blake has a phrase that is equally applicable to Shelley, "All Orcs age into Urizen." That is, all would be revolutionaries turn into the tyrants that had sought to overthrow.

For Freud the id composed our most basic drives and desires. Bloom argued that all the Romantics were united in their shared striving for unity with their id. Perhaps the figure that most clearly represents the id is Blake's Tharmas. As Bloom says, "Tharmas being the Zoa or Giant Form in Blake's mythology who was the unfilled human potential for realizing instinctual desires, and so was the regent of Innocence. Tharmas is a shepherd-figure."

In all of these patterns the ego as narcissistic libido is forced to mediate between id and super-ego. The imago is a vision of ideal love for the ego. The work of the Romantics and Freud was to show how one can cease this endless see-saw between the id and super-ego and achieved a renewed innocence as one had in childhood where one's desires were good and pure. Except this is not the naive innocence of a child, but a knowing innocence.

I hope to write one more post on The Sea, The Sea after I have further thought out how and to what degree Murdoch's characters fit into a Romantic or Freudian map of the unconscious. On a closing note, I should add that Murdoch herself was critical of Romanticism. In fact, she hoped that her work would function as a kind of antidote to Romanticism. As she said:

"Through literature we can rediscover a sense of the density of our lives. Literature can arm us against consolation and fantasy and can help us recover from the ailments of Romanticism. If it can be said to have a task, that surely is its task. But if it is to perform it, prose must recover its former glory, eloquence and discourse must return."

Year in Books 2015; "Emerson and The Central Man"

I know that I have been posting on this blog very sporadically (to the point of posting barely at all, the road to hell being paved with what it is) nonetheless, I set out now once again to write regularly and share my thoughts--we'll see how long that lasts. I love coming up with reading lists. Last year I set myself the goal of rereading John Crowley's Aegypt quartet along with reading Samuel Delany's Neveryon quartet. I considered writing on them but felt my reactions still too unformed, perhaps in a few years when I reread them I will have something more definitive to say. This past year I read quite a bit of American literature--beginning with David McCullough's biography of John Adams, then Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, Emerson's Journals, David S. Reynold's biography of Whitman, McCarthy's Blood Meridian, Faulkner's Light in August, Conrad's Nostromo (I read Conrad because he seems part of a line of influence from Melville to McCarthy that I was interested in tracing backwards) and Melville's Moby Dick, and finishing the year with David McCullough's biography of Truman. I read and skimmed through quite a few histories and reread quite a bit of David Bromwich. I hope to post again before the year is out giving a full summary of my reading. For now I'd like to share these reflections on Emerson.

Division and Unity

I have spent the year thinking about America’s literary heritage, which for me means I’ve been thinking about Emerson. At the heart of my reading were the journals (in the abridged Library of America edition). Emerson prophesied a figure he called “the central man.” It is easy to reduce this to merely one more iteration of the great man theory. Carlyle, at his worst, succumbs to this, but Emerson is more elusive. One example of Emerson’s elusiveness can be seen in his consideration of Amos Bronson Alcott. After several pages of general praise Emerson concludes:

Alcott sees the law of man truer & farther than any one ever did. Unhappily, his conversation never loses sight of his own personality. He never quotes; he never refers; his only illustration is his own biography. His topic yesterday is Alcott on the 17 October; today, Alcott on the 18 October; tomorrow, on the 19th. So will it be always. The poet rapt into future times or into deeps of nature admired for themselves, lost in their law, cheers us with a lively charm; but this noble genius discredits genius to me. I do not want any more such persons to exist. Part of this egotism in him is a certain comparing eye which seems to sour his view of persons prosperously placed, & to make his conversation often accusing & minatory. He is not selfsufficing & serene.

It is little fault on Alcott if he falls short, no individual met Emerson’s strict criteria. And yet, as Steven Whicher observed in Freedom and Fate, Emerson is not very clear either on the specific qualities that constitute this figure. He often speaks of “the erect position,” but what precisely is that? 

Emerson is suggestive in his negative response to Shelley. Is it merely Emerson’s native New England Puritanism that rebels against Shelley’s atheism and sexual liberty? I rather suspect it is the Lucretian and Epicurean element in Shelley that bothered him. Ralph Richardson’s biography of Emerson recounts his anxiety over the theodicy problem he encountered in Hume and Epicurus—that if there is a God he cannot be both all powerful and good otherwise how can we account for evil. Emerson famously expressed this anxiety in his remark, “A believer in Unity, a seer of Unity, I yet behold two.” 

Writing in his journals on November 27, 1839, Emerson considers the sense of division in himself which leads him, in turn, to his attack on Shelley:

Shelley is never a poet. His mind is uniformly imitative; all his poems composite. A fine English scholar he is, with taste, ear, and memory; but imagination, the original authentic fire of the bard, he has not. He is clearly modern, and shares with Wordsworth and Coleridge, Byron, and Hemans the feeling of the Infinite, which so labors for expression in their different genius. But all his lines are arbitrary, not necessary,' and therefore, though evidently a devout and brave man, I can never read his verses.

Emerson will mention Shelley a few more times in the journals, but his opinion never changed. He is always circumspect in his praise and ultimately dismissive. This is puzzling for me considering Emerson’s unabashed early enthusiasm for Whitman, himself deeply influenced by Shelley. It is possible that Whitman’s Lucretianism did not block Emerson’s admiration because it was mediated by Whitman’s strong personality. Shelley’s poetry is indeed wracked with division. Whitman accepts everything, multitudes, contradictions, and finds unity in his acceptance.

Utopia

Historians of Utopia usually begin first with Plato before turning to Thomas More as the origin proper. The same historians are usually free to admit the porous nature of their subject, confessing that the idea of a better world has existed since the dawn of history. Auden phrased these conceptions of an ideal world as Edens and Jerusalems. Edens are pastoral paradises whereas Jerusalems are urban perfect societies and so are utopias proper. 

Emerson was interested in utopian thought, particularly Fourier, but seemed uninterested in its real world manifestations, like Brook Farm. Instead, he sought a kind of utopian figure, a person who could hold all things together. Often this interest presented itself as a concern for the unification of the arts and sciences. Many figures were exemplary for Emerson but principle amongst them were Goethe and Swedenborg. Emerson ultimately turned from both. For Goethe: 

I dare not say that Goethe ascended to the highest grounds from which genius has spoken. He has not worshipped the highest unity; he is incapable of a self-surrender to the moral sentiment…He is fragmentary; a writer of occasional poems and of an encyclopaedia of sentences. When he sits down to write a drama or a tale, he collects and sorts his observations from a hundred sides, and combines them into the body as fitly as he can. A great deal refuses to incorporate: this he adds loosely as letters of the parties, leaves from their journals, or the like. A great deal still is left that will not find any place. This the bookbinder alone can give any cohesion to; and hence, notwithstanding the looseness of many of his works, we have volumes of detached paragraphs, aphorisms, Xenien,*(33) etc.

One might take issue with Emerson’s assessment of Goethe. The Renaissance scholar, Michael Martin, in his book on Sophiology titled The Submerged Reality, sees Rudolph Steiner as both the fulfillment of Goethe’s promise and the answer to Romanticisms failed quest for unity. Steiner was both a poet, a theologian, and a practical innovator in many spheres of life. 

Regarding Emerson’s ultimate verdict on Swedenborg, Sam McGuire Worely writes in Emerson, Thoreau, and the Role of the Cultural Critic, “In placing a fixed moral identity in the external world Swedenborg betrays the centrality of human will that Emerson had at first hoped to find there. Instead of being a matter of human will and understanding, Swedenborg’s moral universe becomes closed and determinate (40).”

Plato comes closer. Plato is both the scientist and the poet. He is able to focus on particulars as well as view the whole. In his essay on Plato in “Representative Men” Emerson says, “Each student adheres, by temperament and by habit, to the first or to the second of these gods of the mind. By religion, he tends to unity; by intellect, or by the senses, to the many. A too rapid unification, and an excessive appliance to parts and particulars, are the twin dangers of speculation.” There is a passage in Shelley's Defense of Poetry that comes to mind, “The cultivation of those sciences which have enlarged the limits of the empire of man over the external world, has, for want of the poetical faculty, proportionally circumscribed those of the internal world; and man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave.” The ideal figure, then, should command a mastery over both these faculties of the intellect.

It is likely that Emerson’s focus on the individual over society has excluded him from classification among great utopian thinkers. John Crowley, himself an exceptional author of utopian novels, wrote in an essay titled “The Labyrinth of the World, the Paradise of the Heart” that all utopias are ultimately centered around this dual concern of the individual and society. Crowley concludes his essay with the argument that the value of utopias is not as practical instruction manuals but rather as rich visions of possible worlds. Few would argue this point, the history of applied utopian thought and its utility for totalitarian regimes is all too well known. If Emerson’s utopianism receives a fuller consideration it may prove his evasiveness to be a boon. 

My book list for 2016:

Winter
Dream of the Red Chamber Vol. 1 and 2
Buddhism Naturalized
The Magic Mountain
Tintin

Spring
Dream of the Red Chamber Vol. 3
Everything Flows
I Am China
Three Body Problem
Rome and China

Summer
Dream of the Red Chamber Vol. 4
Tale of the Genji
Japan and the Shackles of the Past
Nagarjuna and the Middle Way
Sound of Two Hands Clapping
Hunger Mountain

Fall
Dream of the Red Chamber Vol. 5
The Sea, the Sea
Wuthering Heights