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Atticus Finch: Still a Hero?

In America, American History, American Literature, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Books, Fiction, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Scholarship, Southern Literature, The Novel, The South, Writing on October 21, 2015 at 8:45 am

Allen 2

Despite blots on his character after Harper Lee’s publication of Go Set a Watchman, Atticus Finch can and probably should remain a hero, though not without qualification. He can no longer represent the impossible standard of perfection that no actual person or compelling fictional character could meet.

If it wasn’t clear before, it is now: Atticus is a flawed man who despite his depravity found the courage and wisdom to do the right thing under perilous circumstances.

Consider what Uncle Jack says to Jean Louise Finch in the final pages of Watchman: “As you grew up, when you were grown, totally unknown to yourself, you confused your father with God. You never saw him as a man with a man’s heart, and a man’s failings – I’ll grant you it may have been hard to see, he makes so few mistakes, but he makes ‘em like all of us.”

These words are aimed at adoring readers as much as at Jean Louise. They’re not just about the Atticus of To Kill a Mockingbird; they are about any Atticuses we might have known and loved in our lives: our fathers, grandfathers, teachers, coaches, and mentors. Lee may have had her own father, A. C. Lee, in mind. After all, he was, according to Lee’s biographer Charles Shields, “no saint, no prophet crying in the wilderness with regard to racial matters. In many ways, he was typical of his generation, especially about issues involving integration. Like most of his generation, he believed that the current social order, segregation, was natural and created harmony between the races.”

Yet A. C. Lee defended two black men charged with murder, just as Atticus defended Tom Robinson.

The above text is an excerpt from my essay “Children Once, Not Forever: Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman and Growing Up,” published in the Indiana Law Journal Supplement, Vol. 91, No. 6 (2015). To view the full essay, you may download it here at SSRN or visit the website of the Indiana Law Journal.

 

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“A Selected Bibliography on the Political and Legal Thought of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.,” by Seth Vannatta

In Academia, American History, Arts & Letters, Books, Conservatism, History, Humanities, Jurisprudence, Law, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Politics, Pragmatism, Scholarship on October 7, 2015 at 8:45 am

Seth Vannatta

Seth Vannatta is an Associate Professor and Interim Department Head in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Morgan State University. He earned a PhD in Philosophy at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (2010), where he lived from 2006-2010. Before attending SIUC, Seth taught grades 5 through 12 in the History, English, and Religion Departments at Casady School. He served as head varsity volleyball coach for ten years and head varsity soccer coach for three years. He also served as chair of the history department for two years. He has a BA from Colorado College in History (1995) and a Master’s in Liberal Arts from Oklahoma City University (2002). His wife, Rachel, has a BA from Northwestern University (2006), an Master’s in Counselor Education from Southern Illinois University (2010) and is a doctoral candidate in Counselor Education at George Washington University.

Alexander, Tom. “John Dewey and the Moral Imagination: Beyond Putnam and Rorty toward a Postmodern Ethics.” Transactions of the Charles Sanders Peirce Society. Vol. XXIX. No. 3. (Summer,1993), 369-400.

Alschuler, Albert. Law without Values. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Anderson, Douglas. “Peirce’s Agape and the Generality of Concern.” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion. (Summer,1995), 103-112.

Anderson, Douglas. “Peirce and the Art of Reasoning.” Studies in Philosophy and Education.  No. 24. (2005), 277-289.

Austin, John. The Province of Jurisprudence Determined. New Dehli: Universal Law Publishing Printers, 2008.

Auxier, Randall. “Dewey on Religion and History.” Southwest Philosophy Review. Vo. 6. No. 1. January, (1990), 45-58.

_____________. “Religion and Theology.” for The Philosophy of Law: An Encyclopedia. Ed. Christopher B. Gray (Garland Publishing Co., 1999), 735-738.

_____________. “Foucault, Dewey, and the History of the Present.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Vol. 16. No. 2. (2002), 75-102.

_____________. “The Decline of Evolutionary Naturalism in Later Pragmatism,” Pragmatism: From Progressivism to Postmodernism. Ed. Hollinger, Robert. (Westport: Praeger, 1995), 135-150.

Baltimore and Ohio Railroad v. Goodman, 275 U.S. 66 (1927).

Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. London: Penguin Books, 1986.

 The Commentaries of Sir William Blackstone, Knt. On the Laws and Constitution of England.  Ed. William Curry. London: Elibron Classics, Adamant Media Corporation, 2005.

Plato Complete Works. Edited by John Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997.

Dailey, Anne C. “Holmes and the Romantic Mind.” Duke Law Journal. Vol. 48. No. 3 (Dec., 1998), 429-510.

Dewey, John. Human Nature and Conduct. Middle Works, Volume 14, 1922. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990.

____________. Experience and Nature. Later Works, Volume 1. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston.  Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990.

____________. “Justice Holmes and the Liberal Mind.” Later Works. Volume 3. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990.

____________. “Three Independent Factors in Morals.” Later Works. Volume 14. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990.

____________. “Qualitative Thought.” Later Works, Volume 5. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston.  Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990.

____________. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. Later Works, Volume 12, 1938. Edited by Jo Ann     Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990.

____________. “My Philosophy of Law.” Later Works. Volume 14. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990.

____________. “Time and Individuality.” Later Works, Volume 14. Edited by Jo Ann Boydston.   Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967-1990.

Fisch, Max. “Justice Holmes, the Prediction Theory of Law, and Pragmatism.” The Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 34. No. 4. (February 12, 1942) 85-97.

Gadamer, Hans Georg. Truth and Method. London: Continuum, 2006.

Gouinlock, James. “Dewey,” in Ethics in the History of Western Philosophy. Edited by James  Gouinlock. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

­­­­­­­­­______________. John Dewey’s Philosophy of Value. New York: Humanities Press, 1972.

Grey, Thomas C. “Holmes and Legal Pragmatism.” 41 Stanford Law Review 787 (April 1989), 787-856.

_____________. “Freestanding Legal Pragmatism.”18 Cardozo Law Review 21. (September, 1996), 21-42.

Hantzis, Catharine Wells, “Legal Theory: Legal Innovation within the Wider Intellectual   Tradition: The Pragmatism of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.” 82 Northwestern University Law Review. 541. (Spring, 1988), 543-587

Hickman, Larry A. Pragmatism as Post-postmodernism Lessons from John Dewey. New York:    Fordham University Press, 2007.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by C. B. Macpherson. London: Penguin Books, 1985.

Holmes-Einstein Letters. Edited by James Bishop Peabody. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964.

“Holmes, Peirce, and Legal Pragmatism.” The Yale Law Journal. Vol. 84. No. 5. (Apr. 1975), 1123-1140.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell. Dissent in ABRAMS ET AL. v. UNITED STATES. SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES 250 U.S. 616. November 10, 1919.

250 U.S. 616 (1919) Espionage Act (§ 3, Title I, of Act approved June 15, 1917, as amended May 16, 1918, 40 Stat. 553).

Hume, David. A Treatise Concerning Human Nature. NuVision Publications, 2007.

Kant, Immanuel. “What is Enlightenment?” in The Philosophy of Kant Immanuel Kant’s Moral    and Political Writings. Edited by Carl Friedrich. New York: The Modern Library, 1949.

_____________. “Of the Relation of Theory to Practice in Constitutional Law” in The Philosophy of Kant Immanuel Kant’s Moral and Political Writings. Edited by Carl Friedrich. New York: The Modern Library, 1949.

Kellogg, Frederic R. “Legal Scholarship in the Temple of Doom: Pragmatism’s Response to Critical Legal Studies.” 65 Tulane Law Review 15 (November, 1990), 16-56.

________________. “Holistic Pragmatism and Law: Morton White on Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.” Transactions of the Charles Peirce Society. Vol. XL. No. 4. (Fall, 2004), 559-567.

________________. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Legal Theory, and Judicial Restraint, Cambridge: University Press, 2007.

Kronman, Anthony T. “Alexander Bickel’s Philosophy of Jurisprudence.” 94 Yale Law Journal.   (June, 1985), 1567-1616.

Locke, John. Second Treatise on Civil Government. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1986.

Luban, David. “The Posner Variations (Twenty-Seven Variations on a Theme by Holmes).” Stanford Law Review. Vol. 48. No. 4 (Apr. 1996), 1001-1036.

___________. “Justice Holmes and the Metaphysics of Judicial Restraint. Duke Law Journal. Vol. 44. No. 3. (December, 1994), 449-523.

___________. Legal Modernism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Maine, Sir Henry James. Ancient Law. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd.; New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1917.

McDermott, John. Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy. March 17, 2008, East Lansing, Michigan.

Menand, Louis. The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001.

Pragmatism A Reader. Ed. Louis Menand. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.

Mill, John Stuart. Utilitarianism On Liberty Essay on Bentham together with selected writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Austin. Edited by Mary Warnock. New York: New American      Library, 1974. 

The Essential Writings of Charles S. Peirce. Ed. Edward Moore. New York: Prometheus Books, 1998.

Nietzsche, Friedrich . “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life.” in Untimely Meditations. Translated by R. Hollingdale, 1983. 

The Collected Works of Justice Holmes. Vol. I. Edited by Sheldon Novick. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 

The Collected Works of Justice Holmes, Vol. 3, ed. Sheldon M. Novick. Chicago: University of  Chicago Press, 1995.

Nussbaum, Martha. “The Use and Abuse of Philosophy in Legal Education.” 45 Stanford Law Review 1627 (1993), 1627-1645.

Peirce, Charles S. “The Fixation of Belief.” in The Essential Peirce. Edited by Edward C. Moore. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1998.

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­______________. “Questions Concerning Certain Capacities Claimed for Man.” in The Essential  Peirce. Edited by Edward C. Moore. Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1998.

______________. “Philosophy and the Conduct of Life.” in Reasoning and the Logic of   Things.  Edited by Kenneth Lane Ketner. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

______________. “Evolutionary Love,” The Essential Peirce, Volume I (1867-1893). Ed.  Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.

Posner, Richard A. The Economics of Justice. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1981. 

_______________. Frontiers of Legal Theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

_______________. The Problems of Jurisprudence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990.

_______________. Overcoming Law. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.

_______________. Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

_______________. The Problematics of Moral and Legal Theory. Cambridge: Harvard     University Press, 1999.

_______________. How Judges Think. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.

The Essential Holmes. ed. Richard Posner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Revised Edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

von Savigny, Fredrich Carl. Of the Vocation of Our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence.  North Stratford: Ayer Company Publishers, 2000.

Schedler, George. “Hobbes on the Basis of Political Obligation.” Journal of the History of Philosophy. April (1977), 165-170.

Sullivan, Michael and Solove, Daniel J. “Can Pragmatism Be Radical? Richard Posner and Legal Pragmatism.” Yale Law Journal. Vol. 113. No. 3. (Dec. 2003), 687-741.

Sullivan, Michael. Legal Pragmatism Community, Rights, and Democracy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007.

______________. “Pragmatism and Precedent: A Response to Dworkin,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy, Vol. 26. No. 2. (Spring 1990), 225-248.

Thomson, Judith Jarvis “A Defense of Abortion,” in Contemporary Moral Problems. Edited by James E. White. Eighth Edition. United States: Thomson Wadsworth, 2006.

Part II

Alexander, Tom. John Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience, and Nature The Horizons of Feeling.   Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.

Anderson, Douglas. Strands of System The Philosophy of Charles Peirce. Purdue University  Press, 1995.

Cardozo, Benjamin. The Nature of the Judicial Process. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961.

Dworkin, Ronald. Law’s Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Fisch, Max. “Was there a Metaphysical Club in Cambridge?—Postscript.” Transactions of the       Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy. 17 (Spring    1981), 128-130.

Hart, H.L.A. The Concept of Law. Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

 The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory. Ed. Golding and Edmundson.   Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

Black’s Law Dictionary. Ed. Bryan A. Garner. St. Paul: West Publishing Company, 1996.

The Holmes-Laski Letters. The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski. Ed.    Felix Frankfurter. Vol. I and II. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953.

The Holmes-Pollock Letters The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock 1874-1932. Ed. Mark DeWolfe Howe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press,  1942.

Howe, Mark DeWolfe. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes II: The Proving Years, 1870-1882 (1963).

Johnson, Michael. “Posner on the Uses and Disadvantages of Precedents for Law.” 23 Review of Litigation. 144 (2003), 143-156.

Kant, Immanuel. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. Lewis White Beck. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1997.

Kellogg, Frederic R. “Holmes, Common Law Theory, and Judicial Restraint.” 36 Marshal Law Review 457 (Winter, 2003).

Luban, David. “The Bad Man and the Good Lawyer: A Centennial Essay on Holmes’s The Path of the Law.” NYU Law Review. Vol. 72. No. 6, (1997), 1547-83.

___________. “What’s Pragmatic About Legal Pragmatism?” Cardozo Law Review. Vol. 18. No. 1 (1996), 43-73.

Modak-Truran, Mark C. “A Pragmatic Justification of the Judicial Hunch.” 35 University of Richmond Law Review 55 (March, 2001).

Murphey, Murray G. Philosophical Foundations of Historical Knowledge. Albany: SUNY Press, 1994.

My Philosophy of Law Sixteen Credos of American Scholars. Boston: Boston Law Book Co., 1941.

Parker, Kunal. “The History of Experience: On the Historical Imagination of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.” PoLAR. Vol. 26. No 2.

Oakeshott, Michael. On History. Oxford: Liberty Fund, 1999.

________________. Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays. Oxford: Liberty Fund, 1991.

Posner, Richard A. Cardozo: a Study in Reputation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

_______________. The Economic Analysis of Law. Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1977.

_______________. “Symposium on the Renaissance of Pragmatism in American Legal Thought: What has Pragmatism to Offer Law?” 63 S. Cal. Law Review. 1653. September (1990).

Pound, Roscoe. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Law. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.

Rorty, Richard, “Dewey and Posner on Pragmatism and Moral Progress.” 74 University of Chicago Law Review 915 (2007).

Tushnet, Mark. “The Logic of Experience: Oliver Wendell Holmes on the Supreme Court.” 63 Virginia Law Review 975 (1977).

Vetter, Jan. “The Evolution of Holmes, Holmes and Evolution.” 72 California Law Review 343  (May, 1984).

Wacks, Raymond. Philosophy of Law A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Wells, Catherine Pierce. “Symposium Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. The Judging Years: Holmes on Legal Method: The Predictive Theory of Law as an Instance of Scientific Method.” 18 S.M.U. Law Review 329 (Winter, 1994).

White, Edward G. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Law and the Inner Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

 

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Paul H. Fry on “The Social Permeability of Reader and Text”

In Arts & Letters, Books, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Philosophy, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Teaching, The Academy, Western Philosophy on September 30, 2015 at 8:45 am

Below is the next installment in the lecture series on literary theory and criticism by Paul H. Fry.  The previous lectures are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

 

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Learning What We Don’t Know

In American Literature, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Books, British Literature, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Novels on September 9, 2015 at 8:45 am

Allen 2

This review originally appeared here in The University Bookman.

I begin with a trigger warning. The following review contains references that could evoke strong feelings about the nature and purpose of literature, a manifestly dangerous field of human creativity consisting of stories about, and representations of, highly sensitive and potentially upsetting subjects, including but not limited to racism, rape, classism, war, sex, violence, imperialism, colonialism, religious persecution, suicide, and death. Those who find discussions or descriptions of such demonstrably timeless elements of human experience unpalatable or offensive should consult medical professionals before reading this review or the book it promotes. Readers are encouraged not to engage any aspect of this review, or the book under review, that might provoke hurtful memories, grave discomfort, or existential angst.

Reading is precarious enough as it is, without having to introduce concepts or narratives about complex perennial themes, fictional renderings of plausible and fantastic events, or the contingencies of everyday life. Therefore, if you feel you must avoid material that elicits a passionate or emotional response derived from the inevitably discomforting features of both lived and imagined experience, then you must not only bypass Robert P. Waxler’s The Risk of Reading but also lock yourself in a closet, plug your ears with your fingers, and shout la la la la la until you’re no longer aware of your subjective self and the sometimes painful, sometimes joyous ubiquity of reality.

Enough of that. If you’re still reading, you agree to hold harmless this reviewer, Robert Waxler, and the editors and publishers of this journal for any claims or damages resulting from serious discussions of literature. You’re hereby warned: reading is risky—hence the title of Waxler’s book.

Not just reading, but deep reading, is risky, according to Waxler, because it teaches us “about who we are and where we are located in the midst of complexities in the world.” Deep reading disturbs the satisfying complacency of both ignorance and certitude. It can make you unhappy, challenge your most cherished presuppositions, and force you to think rigorously and laboriously about the nature of human relations and our place in the world. A life without reading isn’t so risky, at least for those who prefer not to be bothered with inconvenient narrative or exposed to different points of view. Knowing you’re right without working for understanding is easy. Why get distraught? Why not simply “know” without having to exert yourself in contemplation, without exercising your imaginative powers?

My generation, the millennials, will take shameless offense at Waxler’s notion that we are situated, temporal beings with definite bounds and limitations, little insignificant persons in a vast web of human history, near-nothings within a cosmic totality who are destined to suffer the fate of every living thing. This may be overstating, if not misrepresenting, Waxler’s presiding themes, but the anti-egoist premise is implicit in his chapters. It is an irrefutable premise at odds with my generation’s prized assumption that the knowing self is fluid and permeable, subject to the malleable constructions of choice and chance, always appropriable and appropriated—never fixed, never closed, never immutable, never assigned.

For my generation, the anything-goes-except-standards generation, slow reading—deep reading—is anathema, the kind of tedious exercise rendered unnecessary by hypertext and the rhyzomatic Internet. A studied appreciation for nuanced story and linguistic narrative has been replaced by an insatiable craving for instant gratification, by trite sound bites and fragmented data, by graspable bullet points and ready access to reduced testimony. We’ve got information at our hands, this generation of mine, but no wisdom or knowledge in our heads.

Although he does not come right out and say so explicitly, Waxler seems to have my generation in mind. He portrays himself as “someone who grew up with books but now finds himself surrounded by screens, consumer sensation, data streams, [and] the spectacle of electronic circuitry masquerading as public transparency.” A child today cannot avoid these technological distractions. Waxler’s not an old fogey intent on bemoaning new media for the sake of the cozy familiar or Luddite quixotism; rather, he’s worried about what is happening to reading as much as to readers when the rhetorical medium incentivizes rank inattentiveness and scattered interest.

Reading properly, in Waxler’s view, teaches us how much we do not know, not how much we know, about our mysterious universe and human interaction. Consequently and paradoxically, he maintains, reading improves and expands our tacit knowledge about the quotidian things that shape our lives and inform our decisions, the subtle things we might overlook or misapprehend if we aren’t attentive. And we’re not attentive, most of the time—at least that’s what Waxler appears to mean by his emphasis on “the distraction of each flickering instant” in which “information and data pull us away from ourselves, set themselves up as sovereign, as if they are all-knowing gods.”

Having paid homage to deep reading in his introductory chapter, Waxler puts his deep reading, or the fruits of his deep reading, on display. He examines nine texts in as many chapters: Genesis (the creation account), Frankenstein, Alice in Wonderland, Heart of Darkness, The Old Man and the Sea, Catcher in the Rye, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Fight Club, and The Sense of an Ending. Then there’s a brief concluding chapter on the future of linguistic narrative—not a prediction or prophecy but a call to pensive action. These books have it all—sex, violence, death, sin, rebellion. They are risky.

Waxler encourages us to face our vulnerabilities and insecurities by reading deeply and widely, ever mindful of the nuances and possibilities of language and story. His subjects proceed chronologically, Genesis being the oldest text and The Sense of Ending, which was published just four years ago, the most recent. These subjects have little in common save for the high regard in which they’re held by a critical mass of readers. It’s premature to say whether some of these books are canonical—as in classics—but all of them are difficult and stirring: candidates for canonicity if they can prove their fitness over time.

All you need to know about Waxler’s thesis resides in his title—and subtitle. He submits that his subjects are “risky” or “dangerous”—terms laced with sarcasm and irony—because they help us to make sense of other people and our surroundings, which together amount to culture and experience. Understanding our concrete phenomenal surroundings, via literature, enables us to make sense of what Whitman called the “Me Myself,” or the “I” that was, for Descartes, the starting-point of metaphysics and epistemology—or so Waxler would have us believe.

Waxler’s thesis may be right—who can deny such broad claims?—but it doesn’t always play out as agreeably as it might in his analyses. Too much summary and synopsis presupposes a reader who hasn’t undertaken the primary text. Waxler’s local points are more interesting than his general conclusions about the worth of reading well and wisely—conclusions that, it must be said, are sufficiently apparent to go without saying, although they form the only discernable through-line in this exposition of disparate authors, texts, and time periods, and thus serve a vital function.

Waxler is not attempting to imbue his readers with cultural literacy; rather, he’s trying to teach them how to read deliberately. He echoes Kenneth Burke by suggesting that literature is equipment for living. We shouldn’t fail to recognize the skill with which Waxler dissects texts. The problem is that such dissection removes the strangeness of the reading experience, deprives the unseasoned reader of his chance to luxuriate in the sublime power of language and story. Waxler’s critical commentary simply cannot do what the literary works themselves do: provoke, inspire, move, awe, stimulate, anger, shock, and hurt. Therefore, a sense of repetition and banality settles over Waxler’s arguments: the biblical account of creation teaches truths regardless of whether it “happened”; Mary Shelley raises unanswerable questions about restraints on human ambition; Lewis Carroll’s Alice finds meaning in a meaningless world; Joseph Conrad’s Marlow and Kurtz help us “locate our own ongoing journey that defines us, each in our own way”; Hemingway’s portrayal of Santiago at sea instills understanding about “the truth of the achievement, the accomplishment, and the loss”; and so on. You get the gist: readers are vicarious participants in the stories they read; thus, the stories are instructive about the self. Again, unoriginal—but also undeniable.

Conservatives will be surprised at the manner in which Waxler enlists men of the left to make some traditionalist-seeming points. He mentions Lacan and Foucault—known in conservative circles for French Theory, poststructuralism, jargon, pseudoscience, and psychobabble, among other things—for the proposition that literature transmits virtues and values that constructively guide human activity and orient moral learning. Such references implicitly warn about the risk and short-sightedness of closing individuals within ideological boxes that can be stored away without consequence—or perhaps they demonstrate how creative thinkers can use just about anyone to make the points they want to make.

By all means read Waxler’s book. But, sooth to sayne, if you really want a risk, if you really want to live dangerously, which is to say, as a self-aware, contemplative being, then you should—trigger warning, trigger warning!—read the books Waxler discusses rather than Waxler himself. I’m confident the risky Waxler would urge the same course. He’s just that dangerous.

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Boswell Gets His Due

In Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Books, British Literature, Christianity, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Scholarship, Western Civilization, Writing on August 19, 2015 at 8:45 am

Allen 2

This review originally appeared here in Liberty.

What is Enlightenment? The title of Immanuel Kant’s most famous essay asks that question. Kant suggests that the historical Enlightenment was mankind’s release from his self-incurred tutelage, an intellectual awakening that opened up new freedoms by challenging implanted prejudices and ingrained presuppositions. “Sapere aude!” Kant declared. “Dare to be wise!”

Tradition maintains that the Enlightenment was an 18th-century social and cultural phenomenon emanating from Paris salons, an Age of Reason that championed the primacy of the individual, the individual’s competence to pursue knowledge through rational and empirical methods, through skepticism and the scientific method. Discourse, debate, experimentation, and economic liberalism would liberate society from the shackles of superstition and dogma and enable unlimited progress and technological innovation, offering fresh insights into the universal laws that governed not only the natural world but also human relations. They would also enable individual people to attain fresh insights into themselves.

Boswell was a garrulous charmer with Bacchanalian tendencies, and a fussy hypochondriac raised Calvinist and forever anxious, perhaps obsessive, about the uncertain state of his eternal soul.

Robert Zaretsky, a history professor at the University of Houston and the author of Boswell’s Enlightenment, spares us tiresome critiques or defenses of the Enlightenment by Foucault and Habermas and their progeny. He begins his biography of James Boswell, the great 18th-century biographer, with a historiographical essay on the trends and trajectories of the pertinent scholarship. He points out that the Enlightenment may have begun earlier than people once believed, and in England rather than France. He mentions Jonathan Israel’s suggestion that we look to Spinoza and company, not Voltaire and company, to understand the Enlightenment, and that too much work has focused on the influence of affluent thinkers, excluding lower-class proselytizers who spread the message of liberty with a fearsome frankness and fervor. And he maintains that Scotland was the ideational epicenter of Enlightenment. Boswell was a Scot.

All of this is academic backdrop and illustrative posturing, a setting of the stage for Zaretsky’s subject, Boswell, a lawyer and man of letters with an impressive pedigree and a nervous disposition, a garrulous charmer with Bacchanalian tendencies, and a fussy hypochondriac raised Calvinist and forever anxious, perhaps obsessive, about the uncertain state of his eternal soul. He marveled at public executions, which he attended regularly. He also had daddy issues, always trying to please his unpleased father, Lord Auchinleck, who instructed his son to pursue the law rather than the theater and thespians. When word arrived that his son had been sharing his private journals with the public, Lord Auchinleck threatened to disown the young James.

Astounded by the beauty and splendor of Rome and entranced by Catholicism, Boswell was never able to untangle the disparate religious influences (all of them Christian) that he picked up during his travels. He was equally unable to suppress eros and consequently caught sexual diseases as a frog catches flies.

Although the Life of Johnson is always considered one of the most important books in the language, Boswell himself has been relegated to the second or third tier of the British literary canon.

Geography and culture shaped Boswell’s ideas and personality and frame Zaretsky’s narrative. “With the European continent to one side, Edinburgh to the other,” Zaretsky intones, “James Boswell stood above what seemed the one and the same phenomenon: the Enlightenment.” This remark is both figurative and literal, concluding Zaretsky’s account of Boswell’s climbing of Arthur’s Seat, a summit overlooking Edinburgh, and his triumphant shout, “Voltaire, Rousseau, immortal names!”

Immortal names indeed. But would Boswell himself achieve immortality? Boswell achieved fame for his biography of Samuel Johnson, the poet, critic, essayist, and wit — who except for one chapter is oddly ancillary to Zaretsky’s narrative. Although the Life of Johnson is always considered one of the most important books in the language, Boswell himself has been relegated to the second or third tier of the British literary canon and treated, poor chap, as a celebrity-seeking minor figure who specialized in the life of a major figure. If Dr. Johnson is Batman, Boswell is a hobnobbing, flattering Robin.

Boswell’s friends have fared better — countrymen and mentors such as Adam Smith and David Hume, for instance, and the continental luminaries Voltaire and Rousseau. But there are many interesting relationships here. To cite only one: Thérèse Levasseur, Rousseau’s wife or mistress (a topic of debate), became Boswell’s lover as he accompanied her from Paris to England. The unsuspecting Rousseau, exiled in England, waited eagerly for her arrival, while a more astute Hume, who was Rousseau’s host, recognized matters for what they were.

Zaretsky believes Boswell was an exceptional talent, notwithstanding his weaknesses, and certainly worthy of our attention. Glossing several periods of Boswell’s life but closely examining his grand tour of the Continent (1763–1765), Zaretsky elevates Boswell’s station, repairs Boswell’s literary reputation, and corrects a longstanding underestimation, calling attention to his complicated and curious relationship to the Enlightenment, a movement or milieu that engulfed him without necessarily defining him.

The title of the book assumes plural meaning: Boswell attained a self-enlightenment that reflected the ethos and ethic of his era.

Zaretsky’s large claims for his subject might seem belied by the author’s professedly modest goal: “to place Boswell’s tour of the Continent, and situate the churn of his mind, against the intellectual and political backdrop of the Enlightenment.” To this end, Zaretsky remarks, “James Boswell and the Enlightenment are as complex as the coils of wynds and streets forming the old town of Edinburgh.” And so they are, as Zaretsky makes manifest in ten digestible chapters bristling with the animated, ambulatory prose of the old style of literary and historical criticism, the kind that English professors disdain but educated readers enjoy and appreciate.

Zaretsky marshals his evidence from Boswell’s meticulously detailed missives and journals, piecing together a fluid tale of adventure (meetings with the exiled libertine John Wilkes, evenings with prostitutes, debauchery across Europe, and lots of drinking) and resultant misadventure (aimlessness, dishonor, bouts of gonorrhea and depression, and religious angst). Zaretsky portrays Boswell as a habitual performer, a genteel, polite, and proud socialite who judged himself as he imagined others to have judged him. He suffered from melancholy and the clap, among other things, but he also cultivated a gentlemanly air and pursued knowledge for its own sake. The title of the book, Boswell’s Enlightenment, assumes plural meaning: Boswell attained a self-enlightenment that reflected the ethos and ethic of his era.

Zaretsky’s book matters because Boswell matters, and, in Zaretsky’s words, “Boswell matters not because his mind was as original or creative as the men and women he pursued, but because his struggle to make sense of his life, to bend his person to certain philosophical ends, appeals to our own needs and sensibilities.” We see ourselves in Boswell, in his alternating states of faith and doubt, devotion and reason. He, like so many of us, sought to improve himself daily but could never live up to his own expectations. He’s likeable because he’s fallible, a pious sinner who did right in the name of wrong and wrong in the name of right, but without any ill intent. A neurotic, rotten mess, he couldn’t control his libido and didn’t learn from his mistakes. But he could write like the wind, and we’re better off because he did. He knew all of us, strangely, without having known us. God help us, we’re all like him in some way.

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Harold Bloom’s American Sublime

In Academia, America, American Literature, Art, Artist, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Books, Creativity, Emerson, Fiction, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Nineteenth-Century America, Novels, Philosophy, Poetry, Rhetoric, Scholarship, The Novel, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy, Writing on August 12, 2015 at 8:45 am

Allen 2

This review originally appeared here in the American Conservative.

What can be said about Harold Bloom that hasn’t been said already? The Yale professor is a controversial visionary, a polarizing seer who has been recycling and reformulating parallel theories of creativity and influence, with slightly different foci and inflections, for his entire career, never seeming tiresome or repetitive. He demonstrates what is manifestly true about the best literary critics: they are as much artists as the subjects they undertake.

Bloom’s criticism is characterized by sonorous, cadenced, almost haunting prose, by an exacting judgment and expansive imagination, and by a painful, sagacious sensitivity to the complexities of human behavior and psychology. He is a discerning Romantic in an age of banality and distraction, in a culture of proud illiteracy and historical unawareness. Bloom reminds us that to be faithful to tradition is to rework it, to keep it alive, and that tradition and innovation are yoked pairs, necessarily dependent on one another.

Bloom has been cultivating the image and reputation of a prophet or mystic for decades. His stalwart defense of the Western canon is well known but widely misunderstood. His descriptive account is that the canon is fluid, not fixed—open, not closed. It might be stable, but it’s not unchangeable. The literary canon is the product of evolution, a collection of the fittest works that have been selectively retained, surviving the onslaught of relentless competition.

Bloom’s prescriptive position is that, because human agency is a controllable factor in this agnostic filtering process, serious readers can and should ensure that masterpieces, those stirring products of original, even genius minds, are retained, and that the latest works are held to the highest aesthetic standards, which are themselves established and proven by revisionary struggle. The merit of a work is not found in the identity of its author—his or her race, gender, or sexuality—but in the text proper, in the forms and qualities of the work itself.

Bloom’s latest book, The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime, examines ambitious and representative American authors, its chapters organized by curious pairings: Whitman with Melville (the “Giant Forms” of American literature), Emerson with Dickinson (the Sage of Concord is Dickinson’s “closest imaginative father”), Hawthorne with Henry James (a relation “of direct influence”), Twain with Frost (“our only great masters with popular audiences”), Stevens with Eliot (“an intricate interlocking” developed through antithetical competition), and Faulkner with Crane (“each forces the American language to its limits”). This mostly male cast, a dozen progenitors of the American sublime, is not meant to constitute a national canon. For that, Bloom avers in his introduction, he envisions alternative selections, including more women: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Marianne Moore, and Flannery O’Connor. Bloom’s chosen 12 represent, instead, “our incessant effort to transcend the human without forsaking humanism.” These writers have in common a “receptivity to daemonic influx.” “What lies beyond the human for nearly all of these writers,” Bloom explains, “is the daemon.”

What is this daemon, you ask. As always, Bloom is short on definition, embracing the constructive obscurity—the aesthetic vagueness—that Richard Poirier celebrated in Emerson and William James and Robert Frost, Bloom’s predecessors. Bloom implies that calling the “daemon” an idea is too limiting; the word defies ready explanation or summation.

The daemon, as I read it, is an amorphous and spiritual source of quasi-divine inspiration and influence, the spark of transitional creative powers; it’s akin to shamanism, and endeavors to transcend, move beyond, and surpass. Its opposite is stasis, repose. “Daemons divide up divine power and are in perpetual movement from their supernal heights to us,” Bloom remarks in one of his more superlative moments. “They bring down messages,” he intones, “each day’s news of the metamorphic meanings of the division between our mundane shell and the upper world.”

What, you might ask in follow up, is the American sublime that it should stand in marked contrast to the European tradition, rupturing the great chain of influence, revealing troublesome textual discontinuities and making gaps of influence that even two poets can pass abreast? “Simplistically,” Bloom submits, “the sublime in literature has been associated with peak experiences that render a secular version of a theophany: a sense of something interfused that transforms a natural moment, landscape, action, or countenance.” This isn’t quite Edmund Burke’s definition, but it does evoke the numinous, what Bloom calls, following Burke, “an excursion into the psychological origins of aesthetic magnificence.”

The Daemon Knows is part memoir, a recounting of a lifetime spent with books. There are accounts of Robert Penn Warren, Leslie Fiedler, and Cleanth Brooks. Bloom’s former students and mentors also make brief appearances: Kenneth Burke, for instance, and Camille Paglia. And Bloom doesn’t just analyze, say, Moby Dick—he narrates about his first encounter with that book back in the summer of 1940. He later asserts, “I began reading Hart Crane in the library on my tenth birthday.” That he remembers these experiences at all speaks volumes to Melville’s and Crane’s bewitching facility and to Bloom’s remarkable receptivity.

Bloom has not shied away from his signature and grandiose ahistorical pronouncements, perhaps because they’re right. Melville, for instance, is “the most Shakespearean of our authors,” an “American High Romantic, a Shelleyan divided between head and heart, who held against Emerson the sage’s supposed deficiency in the region of the heart.” Or, “Emersonian idealism was rejected by Whitman in favor of Lucretian materialism, itself not compatible with Indian speculations.” Or, “Stevens received from Whitman the Emersonian conviction that poetry imparts wisdom as well as pleasure.” These generalizations would seem to service hagiography, but even if they’re overstatement, are they wrong?

My professors in graduate school, many of them anyway, chastised Bloom and dubbed him variously a reactionary, a racist, a misogynist, a bigot, or a simpleton; they discouraged his presence in my essays and papers, laughing him out of classroom conversation and dismissing his theories out-of-hand. Or else, stubbornly refusing to assess his theories on their own terms, they judged the theories in the light of their results: the theories were bad because certain authors, the allegedly privileged ones, came out on top, as they always have. This left little room for newcomers, for egalitarian fads and fashions, and discredited (or at least undermined) the supposedly noble project of literary affirmative action.

They will be forgotten, these dismissive pedants of the academy, having contributed nothing of lasting value to the economy of letters, while Bloom will live on, continuing to shock and upset his readers, forcing them to second-guess their judgments and tastes, their criteria for aesthetic value, challenging their received assumptions and thumping them over the head with inconvenient facts and radical common sense. The school of resentment and amateurish cultural studies, appropriate targets of Bloom’s learned animus, will die an inglorious death, as dogmatic political hermeneutics cannot withstand the test of time.

Bloom, on the other hand, like his subjects, taps his inner daemon, invokes it and rides it where it travels, struggles against the anxiety of influence and displays all of the rhetorical power and play of the strong poets he worships. Dr. Samuel Johnson and Northrop Frye reverberate throughout his capacious tome, and for that matter his entire oeuvre. Bloom’s psychic brooding becomes our own, if we read him pensively, and we are better off for it.

Those who view literary study as a profession requiring specialized and technical training, who chase tenure and peer approval, publishing in academic journals and gaining no wider audience than groveling colleagues, do not possess the originality, the foresight, or the brute imagination necessary to achieve enduring appeal. Reading, done right, is a profoundly personal activity, an exercise in solitary contemplation and possible revelation; writing, done right, is transference: the redirection of complex states of consciousness and knowing from one person to another. A few sentences of Bloom’s contemplative questioning, such as the following, are worth the weight of whole academic articles: “At eighty-four I wonder why poems in particular obsessed me from childhood onward. Because I had an overemotional sensibility, I tended to need more affection from my parents and sisters than even they could sustain. From the age of ten on, I sought from Moyshe-Leyb Halpern and Hart Crane, from Shakespeare and Shelley, the strong affect I seemed to need from answering voices.” Here Bloom invites Freudian investigation of himself, summoning the psychoanalytic models he uses on others.

Bloom is now 85. He claims to have another book left in him, making this one his penultimate. His awesome and dedicated engagement with the best that has been thought and known in the world appears to have left him unafraid of the finish, of what comes next, as though literary intimacy and understanding have prepared him, equipped him, for the ultimate. It seems fitting, then, to quote him on this score and to end with a musing on the end: “We are at least bequeathed to an earthly shore and seek memorial inscriptions, fragments heaped against our ruins: an interval and then we are gone. High literature endeavors to augment that span: My twelve authors center, for me, that proliferation of consciousness by which we go on living and finding our own sense of being.”

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Interview with Hubert Crouch

In Arts & Letters, Books, Creative Writing, Fiction, Humanities, Justice, Law, Literature, News and Current Events, Novels, Southern Literary Review, Southern Literature, The South on July 29, 2015 at 8:45 am

This interview originally appeared in Southern Literary Review.

Hubert Crouch

Hubert Crouch

AM: Thanks for taking the time to talk to Southern Literary Review about The Word, your second novel. Jace Forman, the protagonist of your first novel, Cried For No One, is back in this novel. How has your experience as a trial lawyer shaped Jace’s character, if at all? Is it even possible to identify where your legal background has shaped your character development?

HC: I leaned heavily on my experiences as a trial lawyer while creating Jace Forman. I actually know how it feels to try “high-stakes” lawsuits – the intense pressure, the sleepless nights, the perpetual gnawing in your stomach – because I have lived through them. What a trial lawyer goes through in his professional life has a profound impact on his personal life – again, I felt I was able to portray that realistically with Jace because personal experience was a good teacher. I am not saying Jace is autobiographical – he’s not. That being said, my ability to create his character was, in large part, the result of having been a trial lawyer myself.

AM: I’m not out­-of­-bounds in supposing that readers of Cried For No One will, like me, associate Ezekiel Shaw and the Brimstone Bible Church with Fred Phelps and the Westboro Baptist Church, which is featured in the book. Is there a deliberate connection?

HC: I taught Free Speech and the First Amendment to SMU undergraduates. One of the cases we discussed in class was Snyder v. Phelps. There were some lively exchanges between students over whether the Supreme Court got it right when they threw out the multi-million dollar judgment awarded to the Snyders. Had the Court gone too far in protecting free speech? Had the Court allowed a zealous sect to trample upon the rights of a family to bury their loved one in peace? Our classroom debate inspired me to change the factual scenario, inject a different religious issue and pit the conflicting positions against one another in a fictitious lawsuit.

AM: What made you decide to incorporate Leah Rosen and Cal Connors into the plot? Did you envision them at the outset, or did they come later, after you had already begun writing?

HC: Cal and Leah were characters from my first novel, Cried for No One. Leah continues her investigation into Cal’s legal misdeeds in the stand-alone sequel.

AM: As someone who has never attempted to write a thriller, I’m curious about how the intricate thriller plot falls into place. How much mapping or outlining do you do before beginning the writing process, and how often is the writing process interrupted by the need to adjust or revise?

HC: Before I wrote a word of the manuscript, I drafted a detailed, chapter-by-chapter outline, which went through a number of revisions. Once the outline was finished, I began writing the novel. Some might argue that having an outline is too confining. I get that. But for me, it is important to know where I’m ultimately going to end up before I start the journey. I find there is plenty of opportunity for creativity along the way.

AM: Texas. It’s big on the map and big in your book. You’ve been practicing law there for some time. How far back does your connection go?

HC: A long way. I graduated from Vanderbilt in 1973 and then attended SMU Law School. After receiving my law degree from SMU, I began practicing trial law in Dallas and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. Although I grew up in Tennessee, I felt right at home in Texas. As the old adage goes, when you prick a Texan, he bleeds Tennessee blood.

AM: Why did you dedicate this book to your female law school classmates?

HC: One of my close friends and study partners in law school was female. She was brilliant, graduating number one in our class. And yet she received few offers from the top law firms in Dallas. There could be only one explanation – she was a woman. She, along with several other of my female classmates who had encountered a similar fate, took bold action and sued some of the major firms in Dallas. A settlement was reached which opened the door to countless female law school graduates afterwards.

AM: When did you start writing fiction?

HC: Over twenty-five years ago. I wrote a manuscript that has still not been published, although I consider pulling it out of the banker’s box it’s been in for years and giving it a read to see if it’s salvageable. After I shelved it, I was inspired to write my first novel, Cried for No One, by an actual lawsuit I handled involving a macabre grave robbery. I got up early each morning and wrote before going to work. The process took me years before I had a finished manuscript.

AM: Do you know what the future holds for Jace Forman? Can readers expect to see him again?

HC: I have enjoyed creating and getting to know Jace. Based upon the reviews, readers seem to like him and, if that sentiment continues, I will likely keep him around for a while.

AM: Last question, but two parts. How much research into the First Amendment went into this book? And how interested were you in First Amendment issues before you started into this book?

HC: I have studied the First Amendment, and the cases interpreting it, extensively. As mentioned above, I actually taught a course about it to SMU undergraduates. The drafters were so brilliant and far-sighted to come up with such an important enactment. We will forever be in their debt.

AM: Thank you again.

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Review of Adam Zamoyski’s Phantom Terror

In Arts & Letters, Books, Historicism, History, Humanities, Law, Libertarianism, Literary Theory & Criticism, Philosophy, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on July 22, 2015 at 8:45 am

Allen 2

This review first appeared here in Taki’s Magazine.

Born in America and raised in Britain, Adam Zamoyski is not a tenured university professor devoted to obscure subjects that appeal only to audiences of academic guilds. Nor does he write for a small readership. That’s why his books sell and his prose excites; he can narrate a compelling account while carrying an insightful thesis. His latest book, Phantom Terror, bears a subtitle that will cause libertarian ears to perk up: “Political Paranoia and the Creation of the Modern State, 1789-1848.”

Challenging the validity of modern states and their various arms and agencies is the daily diet of committed libertarians, but Zamoyski is not, to my knowledge, a libertarian of any stripe. Yet he challenges the modern State and its various arms and agencies, whatever his intentions or beliefs, and he refuses to shut his eyes to the predatory behavior of government. To appreciate the goals of his book, one must first understand how he came to his subject.

The story is simple: While researching, Zamoyski uncovered data suggesting that governments in the decades following the French Revolution deliberately incited panic among their citizens to validate increasingly restrictive policies. The more governments regulated and circumscribed individual freedoms, the more they took on the shape of nation states: geopolitical entities that had their roots in 16th- and 17th- century Europe but had not fully centralized.

If there’s a main character here, it’s Napoleon Bonaparte. Zamoyski has written about Napoleon in previous books, including 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow (2005) and Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna (2008). Having escaped from exile in Elba in February 1815 and suffered defeat at the Battle of Waterloo later that year, Napoleon, once the Emperor of the French, had been reduced to the status of a prisoner, stripped of his dignity and rendered militarily ineffective, his health quickly declining.

Tsar Alexander of Russia, seeing the great Napoleon neutralized, called for a holy covenant with Emperor Francis I of Austria and King Frederick William III of Prussia. For Alexander, who envisioned the State as the realization of a divine idea, the three united rulers reflected the trinitarian Christian God from whom their autocratic, quasi-sacred powers derived. Alexander believed that the unsettling of tradition and order during the French Revolution could be counteracted or cured by the systematic institutionalization of despotic government. First, though, the masses needed to be instructed in the manifest nature of revolutionary threats lurking behind every corner, in every neighborhood, among friends and family, in unexpected places.

And then came the police, a new body of official agents vested with administrative powers and decorated with the symbols and insignias of authority.  Until then the term “police,” or its rough equivalent in other European languages, designated minor officials with localized duties over small public spaces. European states lacked the administrative machinery of a centralized enforcement network besides the military, whose function was to conquer foreign territory or defend the homeland, not to guard the comfort, health, and morals of communities in disparate towns and villages. The latter task was for parochial institutions, custom, churches, nobility, and other configurations of local leadership.

In the wake of the French Revolution, with its ritualistic brutality, mass hysteria, and spectacular regicide, sovereigns and subjects began to accept and support the power of centralized governments to deploy political agents, including spies and informers.  According to Zamoyski, the growing police force—secret agents and all—was less interested in basic hygiene, sanitation, and safety and more interested in subverting the political clout and conspiratorial tendencies of local nobility.

To maximize their power, emperors and government ministers gave color to grand falsehoods about their weakness. Only in their exaggerated vulnerability, catalyzed by true and imagined Jacobins, Freemasons, Illuminati, and other such bugaboos, could they exercise their strength.  Seizing upon anxieties about civil unrest, rulers cultivated in their subjects a desire for police protection, supervision, and surveillance. Conspiracy theories worked in their favor. Francis ordered his police to be vigilant about the spread of Enlightenment ideas; he enacted censorship measures by which people disciplined themselves into obedience, leaving the police to serve, often, as mere symbols of control.

Zamoyski does not focus on any one state but moves from city to city, leader to leader, depicting how European governments staged rebellion for their own benefit.  Several individuals figure prominently for their different roles during this turbulent time: Edmund Burke; Empress Catharine II of Russia; William Pitt; Klemens von Metternich; King Ferdinand VII of Spain; King Louis Philippe; Arthur Wellesley, the First Duke of Wellington; Charles Maurice de Talleyrand; Robert Steward, Viscount Castlereagh; Joseph Fouché, and marginal characters both stupid and intelligent, of high and low station.

Eventually repression and tyranny backfired. The State apparatus and its leaders across Europe adopted the very tactics and practices they feared in their opposition; they became the kind of terrorists they had attempted to crush. By transforming into their own worst nightmare, they brought about the revolutions (e.g., the Revolutions of 1848) they meant to avoid and inspired the movements they intended to eradicate.

Entrapment, espionage, propaganda, tyranny, sedition, secrecy, conspiracy, treachery, reaction, regime—it’s all here, and it reveals that the operations of power are counterintuitive and complex, even if they’re logical. Hesitant to draw parallels with our present managerial nation states and their version of authoritarian rule, Zamoyski nevertheless marshals enough evidence and insinuation to make speculation about the current order inevitable.

There’s the shadow of Foucault in the background: Zamoyski portrays power as dependent on its lack, exploring how those with authority allow certain freedoms to then suppress them. There’s no power that’s not power over something. Permitting only such personal autonomy and agency as could be subdued enabled European governments to put their authority on display. States manufacture resistance to exercise—indeed show off—their muscle.

With their sprightliness these chapters win for themselves a certain charm. Zamoyski has not just recounted the sequence of events during a fascinating era but exposited an exciting theory about them and the forces driving them. It’s too soon to understand the logic behind the rumors, and the disinformation, we know world powers spread today. Zamoyski provides no direction to this end. He does, however, use history to awaken our imagination to the workings of global power structures, forcing us to ask questions and seek answers about the phantoms of terror that continue to haunt us.

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Review of “A Late Encounter With the Civil War,” by Michael Kreyling

In American History, Arts & Letters, Book Reviews, Books, Historicism, History, Humanities, Nineteenth-Century America, Scholarship, Southern History, Southern Literary Review, The South on July 1, 2015 at 8:45 am

Allen 2

This review originally appeared here in Southern Literary Review.

Now that it’s 2015, the sesquicentennial of the Civil War has come to a close. Those who don’t follow such anniversaries may not have noticed it was ever here, but it was, although without the fanfare or nostalgia that marked the commemorations at the semi-centennial and the centennial.

Michael Kreyling, a professor of English at Vanderbilt University with an endowed chair and several books to his credit, brings a literary touch to his brief history of the Civil War—not of its battles and heroes and victims and villains but of the manner in which Americans have recalled those things over time. A history about history, conceived as a series of lectures, A Late Encounter With the Civil War bears a title that seems to apply as aptly to Kreyling (he’s had a long and distinguished career in literature but hasn’t worked extensively in the field of Civil War studies) as it does to the current era’s strained connection with the bloodiest conflict the nation has ever experienced.

Kreyling focuses on “collective memory,” a concept he purports to borrow from Maurice Halbwachs and Emile Durkheim and the premise of which is “that humans assemble or construct memory in the context of social life: we remember what our social groups require us to remember in order to maintain historical continuity over time and to claim our membership in them.” Collective memory is participatory rather than commanded, evolutionary rather than fixed, fluctuating rather than static; it emerges out of the conversations people within a given territory have regarding a particular event.

Kreyling is, of course, concerned with our collective memory of the Civil War. It is unclear which individuals enforce or control the regime of collective memory according to his paradigm, but presumably he means to suggest that all members of the community are at least partially complicit in the narrative perpetuation that becomes collective memory.

From the premise of collective memory Kreyling sets out to establish the constructedness of Southern narratives about the war and thereby to refute the assumption of Pierre Nova, who once claimed that “[d]ifferent versions of the Revolution or the Civil War do not threaten the American tradition because, in some sense, no such thing exists—or, if it does, it is not primarily a historical construction.” Kreyling submits, contra Nova, that historical memory is constructed because it involves both gradual initiation and exclusion: those who understand and promote the validated, official account are admitted into the group, members of which celebrate a shared past, whereas those who challenge the authorized narratives are marginalized or altogether excluded from the group. What the approved story of the Civil War is at the moment of the sesquicentennial remains unknown because, he says, only years after such a landmark can we objectively evaluate its cultural reception and narrative production.

Collective memory is not the same thing as personal memory. It is a “kind of complicated puppet theater” inasmuch as “we are the puller of strings” as well as “the figures pulled.” We not only “set dates for ceremonies of public memory and fill the ceremonies with choreographed activities” but also allow ourselves to be dragged along with such ceremonies; we resort to ritualistic commemoration to project the past onto our present, he explains, and to attempt to define ourselves both by and against our past.

Kreyling argues in his opening chapter that “the United States that formally remembered the Civil War at the semicentennial was different from the America of the centennial and sesquicentennial by one very powerful theme we can identify in retrospect: blood.” The subject of blood leads Kreyling into meandering discussions of The Great Gatsby and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This chapter becomes less about the memory of the Civil War and more about early 20th-century eugenicist fascinations with blood, an element of romanticized fiction that is “latent symbolic” or “cultural” because it “invades or pollutes the endangered citadel of whiteness.”

Theodore Roosevelt used the term “race suicide” to express a widely shared fear of racial degeneration, which was linked, Kreyling alleges, to a perceived collapse of civilization. Kreyling ties Roosevelt’s term to both the creation of and reaction to popular works by D. W. Griffith and Thomas Dixon Jr. He even implicates Woodrow Wilson in the rapid proliferation of racism—and not just by recalling Wilson’s oft-discussed response to the screening of The Birth of a Nation in the White House.

The second chapter maps the shift from memorialization to mass anxiety as race-relations in America forced the nation to reconsider the meaning and purpose of the Civil War. Here Kreyling considers an array of figures, from Bruce Catton and Robert Penn Warren to Edmund Wilson and Flannery O’Connor, to substantiate the proposition that public interest in the Civil War was on the wane and overshadowed by the Civil Rights Movement and the Cold War. All of this is very interesting, but we shouldn’t be surprised that most of the population at that time was more interested in its present moment than in a war that had occurred a century earlier.

The third and final chapter speculates about those “negotiations” that we have “between what did happen” during the Civil War and “what we would prefer to remember.” I say “speculates” because Kreyling is careful not to seem rash or conclusory about our own moment. Rather than giving an answer, for instance, he says that “we need to ask” the question “[w]here is the South now?” That we may ask that question at all shows how much different our generation is from those which came before, as Kreyling demonstrates by surveying recent literary scholarship on the matter.

Wherever the South is now, it seems to have traveled far from “pure ancestor worship.” That doesn’t mean our memory has become unproblematic. Kreyling sees in the historical fiction of Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen, for example, a disturbing turn to a counterfactual mode of ritual that distorts our understanding of past events. Kreyling rounds out his discussion of Gingrich and Forstchen (among other people and texts) with an upsetting observation: “we commemorate past wars with new ones.” Such a strong and ambiguous claim demands clarification, yet Kreyling doesn’t elaborate, perhaps because long explication would detract from the lasting force and profundity of the closing remark.

As smoothly as this book reads, one wonders what its chief contribution will be. It’s certainly unique and innovative to, as Kreyling does, compare vampire fiction with the racist notion of thoroughbred whiteness that was in circulation at the semicentennial. On the other hand, there might be a good reason why this approach hasn’t been tried, and it’s not because no one has thought of it.

When a book doesn’t move professional historiography in a direction that unearths obscure details, that adds to the sum of knowledge on a precise topic, or that sheds light on events by examining them from the unexplored perspective of cultural outsiders, it can rely too heavily on style and creativity and entertainment value. Kreyling’s book isn’t devoid of scholarship, but it does push the bounds of that genre. Perhaps its greatest achievement is its capacity to raise provocative questions about our present relationship to a conflict that in some ways seems so distant, but in others so familiar.

 

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Paul H. Fry on “The Postmodern Psyche”

In Arts & Letters, Books, History, Humanities, Literary Theory & Criticism, Literature, Pedagogy, Philosophy, Postmodernism, Scholarship, Teaching, The Academy, Western Civilization, Western Philosophy on April 1, 2015 at 8:45 am

Below is the next installment in the lecture series on literary theory and criticism by Paul H. Fry.  The previous lectures are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.