What is Poetry? (And should we care?)

 

In his 1821 essay "A Defence of Poetry," Percy Shelley says that "poetry is connate with the origin of man." This is an easy claim with which to sympathize. After all, language seems to have been a central element in human evolution. And language is inherently referential and, therefore always seems to hold the promise of poetry in it. Of course, these issues raise the perennial, seemingly unsolvable problem, of how one defines poetry.  Shelley wanted to defend poetry so he had to, at some level define it. But by telling us that "poetry is connate" with our origins, he is really just telling us that poetry is an unavoidable element of language, we cannot avoid it even if we wanted to. But because of the referential nature of language, the continual metaphorical element on which it seems to operate, it seems almost pointless to attempt to distinguish poetry from any other part of language use. In other words, if language in the many ways that we use it, is continually relying on metaphor, or to say it another way if metaphor is at the heart of language, then it seems to be a purely academic matter to attempt to distinguish between poetry and prose. At a wider level, the problem was defined by Derrida when he reminded us that there is no 'transcendental signified." This is just another way of saying that, while language seems to refer to things in the world, it can only, at best, reach out  toward the world, it cannot provide us with certitude. 

I think, at some level, many people feel the uncertainty of the world (and language's ability to pin it down) instinctively. At a practical level, we hope that, say, a set of written instructions will be clear enough and be a useful aid to performing whatever task we are setting out to perform. But many of our linguistic experiences are fraught with imprecision, and certainly our so-called literary ones. We accept it. In fact we usually relish in it. If we were searching for certitude, we surely wouldn't be reading Henry James or Emily Dickinson. And though many wearisome English teachers might insist to their students that James' Golden Bowl or Dickinson's "I felt a Funeral, in my Brain," express certain meanings, such claims are contrary to the nature of literature if not language.  In other words, I think that we read not in a search for certitude, but precisely because life is uncertain. 

But to return to Shelley's Defence of Poetry," I am sure that Shelley would have been comfortable with pushing aside any distinctions concerning poetry and other forms of literature. Shelley was using the term poetry not to indicate a type of literature so much as he was using it as a word for the act of human dreaming. That is why Shelley says that poetry may be defined as "the expression of the Imagination." And in a remarkable foreshadowing of 20th century discourse, Shelley goes on to tell us that "language is virtually metaphorical; that is, it marks the before unapprehended relations of things, and perpetuates their apprehension, until the words which represent them become through time signs for portions or classes of thoughts, instead of pictures of integral thoughts." 

Dreamers express their dreams, and prophets are only prophets to the degree that they express their visions. And like most poets, Shelley was a dreamer,  and certainly a prophet of sorts. 

 But what does it matter if we dispense with literary distinctions? Other than certain conveniences stemming from taxonomy, there seems to be few, if any reasons to advocate for such distinctions. And there seems to be plenty of reasons to argue against them, the dangers of elitism being amongst the most important. And it is no surprise that Shelley's essay contains the reminder that "the principle of equality had been discovered and applied by Plato in his Republic." If political and social equality is supposed to be of such importance to us, why not apply it here, to literary endeavours? Even when we apply rather nebulous categorical boarders to literature types, we run risks of exclusion and devaluation. I have seen this first hand on many occasions. It is a strange phenomenon to listen to a supposed literary authority struggle to defend syllabus choices based on some abstract and painfully woolly categorical argument that ends up with them inadvertently defending an elitist or sexist, if longstanding, structural convention. And so, interesting work is conveniently marginalized and excluded from the very people who should see it. Such exclusion often targets women or other marginalized voices out of hand, but can also exclude groups of work that don't fit into the standard categories. This is true of, for example, essays or just works that don't fit clearly into regular conventions such as Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, Thoreau's Walden,  or Leigh Hunt's The Honey Jar. And for more modern examples just think of most of Andre Breton's work like The Lost Steps, Mad Love, and Nadja. (Incidentally, this is also true of a number of other surrealist authors as well as some of the writers from whom they drew inspiration like the Comte de Lautréamont.)

Anyone who has taken a university English course, and has any sense of natural skepticism or a previous interest in some marginalized literary work, knows with what fervour professors can muster a categorical defence. Few phenomena have done more to alienate people from literary enjoyment or study. 

To return to the subject of Shelley's Defence, it is interesting to me that he wraps it up with the now famous declaration that "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," because if it is true, it is remarkable how many impediments are thrown in the way of us garnering the insights of that legislation. 

Here's a thought - next time someone asks you "what is poetry?" step on their foot and when they cry out in pain say, "That! That is poetry."

Can Poetry Save Your Soul?

 There is little doubt that contemporary literature and philosophy can be an alienating exercise in cynicism and apparent detachment. I think most of us have experienced it. I sometimes think of Milan Kundera's book The Unbearable Lightness of Being as the representative post-modern novel, and few books have given me a more overwhelming sense of emptiness. In the opening sequence of that novel, Kundera writes "in this world everything is pardoned in advance and therefore everything cynically permitted." Looking around today at the bizarre culture war of the rightwing which is reminiscent of the ethnic purity tropes of the 1930s, Kundera's words, written now nearly forty years ago, are chilling. They are frightening because the permissiveness that Kundera seems to be talking about here is the forgetfulness of history. He makes this remark in the context of taking up a book about Hitler and the way in which, for many, our perverse past is a whitewash, a phantom that never returns. But, of course, Kundera knows, as many of us do, that the past does return, almost as though on a zoetrope loop, and we are compelled to live through what others have lived through before, only with a greater sense of history and, therefore, a greater sense of failure and shame.  

Literature was, once upon a time, one of the great sanctuaries from this sense of failure and shame. And I am not just talking here about novels and poetry - but about the whole gamut of literary work from philosophy to the occasional essay. This is not to imply that literature was, of should be, simply an exercise of escape. Rather, it means it can be a realm not only of honesty and pain, but of aspiration and hope, and that it can satisfy a deep existential need for connection. It can, of course, still be exactly this. But I think its status is now on much shakier ground than it once was. I cannot provide a rigorous statistical argument that proves this cultural shift. Such arguments, when in the midst of the tornado of history, are only reflections of one's sense of what is really going on. Future historians and commentators will make more straightforward arguments with the advantage of distance and evidence. 

Another book that has meant a lot to me is Peter Sloterdijk's 1983 study - Critique of Cynical Reason. In this remarkable book, Sloterdijk traces the rise of modern cynical reason which has gradually reduced everything to a level of pure transactionalism. He adapts the Marxist notion of 'false consciousness' to its modern manifestation - 'enlightened false consciousness,' a state in which people are increasingly aware of the injustice and exploitation of which they are a victim, but they have so little faith that it can change that they just don't bother to do anything about it. 

It is with all of these issues in mind that I find myself continually returning to the great poets of Romanticism and philosophers like Emerson. This is because, despite being part of the cynicism of my age, I, like many people, hunger for a sense of universal connection, but one that doesn't rely on the deep problems of revealed religion. In the face of the isolation of bourgeois individualism and the profound opportunity of a society of transactionalism, it is no surprise that the poems of Shelley and Blake and Dickinson and Whitman, or the essays of Emerson and Thoreau can be a source of genuine edification. 

In his now famous 1838 Divinity College Address, Emerson talks of poets occupying a "holy office" and likens them to priests in their ability to offer revelation, teach, and give. In Emerson's version of transcendentalism, the poet is a kind of priest, only better than most because she is in touch with something more direct. "The true preacher can be known by this," Emerson writes, "that he deals out to the people his life, - life passed through the fire of thought." And what better preacher, therefore, than the poet? Being an advocate for natural rather than revealed religion, Emerson seemed to be much more interested in the revelation of poets than priests. "For the experience of each new age," Emerson tells us in his essay "The Poet, "requires a new confession, and the world seems always waiting for its poet." And indeed, this idea of poet as revealer of our world and expresser of our experience, is one that I think many of us look for, particularly in an age when the zoetrope loop of dangerous history seems to be circling back to a terrible moment. The waters of art are so deep, Emerson reminds us, "that we hover over them with religious regard." 

One can find this transcendental spirit in a great deal of 19th century poetry. One of my very favorite of Shelley's poems is his 1816 "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty." In that poem Shelley tells us that "some unseen Power // Floats tho' unseen among us." And it is this mysterious power to which the sages and poets respond, as well as Shelley himself. "I vowed that I would dedicate my powers," Shelley tells us, "to thee and thine." And indeed this unseen power (we can call it beauty or poetry or aesthetic experience) was, indeed, the thing to which Shelley devoted himself. Shelley tells us that in his childhood he looked for spirits as well as God, but it wasn't until the shadow of this mysterious power fell on him that he "shrieked & clasped" his "hands in extasy." [sic] Though I still struggle with the cynicism of our age, I admire Shelley's experience and faith here. And though this is one of Shelley's more explicit poems concerning this subject, you can find such sentiments throughout his work where he looks to a better world, informed by beauty, where reason and passion are no longer enemies. 

In one of his greatest poems, Queen Mab, Shelley described the world's pain - 

All things are sold: the very light of heaven

Is venal; earth's unsparing gifts of love, 

The smallest and most despicable things

That lurk in the abysses of the deep, 

All objects of our life, even life itself,

And the poor pittance which the law allow

Of liberty, the fellowship of man, 

Those duties which his heart of human love

Should urge him to perform instinctively, 

Are bought and sold as in a public mart.

But for Shelley, as for Emerson, our secret weapon is poetry, the activity that steps beyond the venal world that Shelley describes in Queen Mab, and looks toward and "indestructible order" beneath. Can we escape the eternal reoccurrence of  violence and hate that Milan Kundera talks about through a poetic accesses to an indestructible order?  I cannot be sure, but I have continued all my adult life in such a pursuit. 

Arminianism and the Opening of Aesthetic Horizons....

 The history of protestant theology is complex and difficult for a non-specialist to effectively conceptualize. Many of the central conflicts of Protestantism were between Calvinism and numerous other views which fundamentally opposed the determinism of the Calvinist view. One such theological movement that was in opposition to Calvinism was Arminianism, a movement based on the teachings of the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius. Arminius influenced a great deal of Protestantism, including John Wesley and the rather vague and dynamic movement referred to as Methodism. In America, Arminianism had a significant influence on Unitarianism and the loosely defined, but important movement we know as transcendentalism. 

Arminius

 

Unitarianism split from orthodoxy not just in theological terms but in its whole outlook on human experience. Dissenters in England were pushed into political radicalism both by their exclusion from the political life of the nation (an exclusion that applied to anyone who refused to sign the 39 articles), and by their view that humans were responsible for their own relationship with God and their own views of the world. This was a naturally radical outlook because it relied on a fundamental attitude of equality rather than the hierarchical outlook that grew out of the Church of England and its traditional support of social stratification. In America, where much of the traditional hierarchies had already been torn asunder, Arminianism, through its effect on Unitarianism, was embracing a melioristic world view, a view that pictured humans are improvable, perhaps infinitely so. 

This view is important not only to one's outlook on religion and politics, but also on the arts, because one who is not encumbered by Calvinist inevitability and dour piety, and is at the same time full of the promise of an unbridled human future, is likely to embrace an exploratory attitude towards the arts. Lawrence Buell writes, in his book on literary transcendentalism, that "the main impetus behind the Unitarian departure from Orthodoxy - the shift from a Calvinist view of human nature as depraved to an Arminian view of man as improvable - also helped to produce a climate of opinion more favourable to the arts." 

In America, this expanding attitude arguably led directly to the flowering of transcendentalism in the work of various Unitarians (like Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, Elizabeth Peabody, and James Clarke) who wrote everything from literary essays to poetry, and to bigger names in American literature like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. But it also had a knock-on influence on writers like Nathanial Hawthorn, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. In England, Arminianism and the Methodism that grew from it, undoubtedly inspired much of the radicalism of the 1790s as well as to the growth of English Romanticism. Though the first generation of English Romantics eventually returned, opportunistically, to the fold of the Church of England, the second generation, especially Percy and Mary Shelley, were considerably more philosophically adventurous. 

Emerson 

I think a major aspect of both transcendentalist and Romantic literature was the idea of exploring the possibilities of human experience and potential, which had both been extremely limited in Catholic and Calvinist ideologies. And it was dissenters and those who opposed orthodoxy that were the first to advocate for the literary endeavours that were not simply and straightforwardly edifying.  As late as 1808 the religious magazine the Panopolist condemned nine-hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand novels as "positively seductive and corrupting" at best, and "a contemptibly frivolous...criminal waste of time" at worst. This reflected the view among the orthodox that literature should, at its heart, be morally instructive. But the dissenting generations like the Romantics and the transcendentalists were explorers, and literature often became a map of their travels. And these explorations were not prohibited to some Calvinist, preconceived and limited idea of what people could be. 

The shift in outlook toward the arts during the 19th century in the US (and I think it applies to the late 18th century in England), was described by Willam Charvat as a shift from "the negative principles of religious restraint, " to "the positive principle of moral idealism," This idealism was embodied in much of the work of Emerson or Whitman in the US, and in Blake and Shelley in England.

Mary and Percy Shelley

The rise of Methodism and Unitarianism and their effects on literature is complex subject that could be, and probably is, the subject of a long and interesting book. Thinking about it makes me wonder what kinds of effect the general decline in religious consciousness might be having on our cultural products in contemporary society. I think that Methodism and Unitarianism opened up horizons for aesthetic explorations of the human soul. Are the horizons now so open that we are simply wandering aimlessly with little sense of a goal in mind, like a flâneur in an empty city?  

Jane Eyre and 12th Grade English

 My youngest daughter is in her final semester of high school and is taking grade 12 English. Despite my efforts, she doesn't enjoy reading and isn't into books at all. That's ok, she's from a different generation, a digital generation, and I shouldn't expect her to like all the same things that I do. Books offer all sorts of learning possibilities, but I know that there are other ways to learn. The world is always changing and we have to trust the younger generations to sort things out for themselves. 

I have been helping her with her English work so that she can get through her final semester of school and move on. She has no plans to go to university, but at least if she graduates, her options will remain open. They are reading Jane Eyre in her class, two chapters a week and then answering some questions about the text. Jane Eyre is, of course, a Victorian Novel, and my interests are more centred on the Romantic era.  But I enjoy the Brontë sisters and Jane Eyre is a fine novel. I am a little disappointed, however,  that of all the novels by women from the 18th and 19th centuries, Jane Eyre is the one that these students are compelled to read. However, my disappointment is not a result of the quality of Charlotte Brontë's novel.  Rather, it strikes me as a pity that she is having to read a novel that is so imbued with traditional romantic troupes. Don't get me wrong, there is much to be admired in the character of Jane Eyre, both from the literary and the feminist point of view. Jane is a strong, independent woman who doesn't simply accept the abuse doled out to her. She understands the injustices done to her while still appreciating the positive aspects of her life. And her final triumph is a result of her strength, her integrity, and her unwillingness to simply do what is expected of her as a woman, especially as a woman of minimal means. And perhaps the thing I like best about Jane Eyre is that it is her who is, ultimately, a saviour, and not a man that just comes in to sweep her off her feet and protect her. But as a novel it is the romantic element that sticks with many readers, especially, I think, young readers. 

As fine as Jane Eyre is, there are so many interesting novels by women in the 18th and 19th century. And if young people are going to read only a couple of novels from the past by women, I would really like them to be ones that reject some of the romantic conventions and give the reader a more rounded view. For example, I would love to see them read Mary Wollstonecraft's novel Mary. Though this novel, like most, contains elements of romance, it is not "romantic" in the traditional sense, it is more a novel of the strength of love in friendship than anything else. In that novel, Mary educates herself and only enters into a loveless marriage because of a death-bed promise to her mother. The character then goes on to form a very strong bond with her friend Ann that is really the central relationship of the story. Mary takes Ann to Portugal and nurses her through her consumptive decline and eventual death. Mary also forms an attachment to a man Henry who is also consumptive and she eventually nurses him also as he succumbs to the disease. Mary eventually ends up living unhappily with her husband and the novel ends with the feeling that Mary herself will soon die. 

The great themes of Mary as a novel are concerned with a woman's ability, even in the face of Georgian oppression, to become self-educated and to form strong friendships of equality with both men and women. Though Jane Eyre also takes up some of these same themes, what stands out about Mary is that romance will not come to save the main character, there are no fairy tale endings for Mary, just the realization of the struggles with which we all, particularly women like her, are forced to contend. 

To be honest, there are not that many novels from the 18th and 19th centuries that don't overly trade on traditional romantic tropes. One interesting angle would be to look to the darker novels like those of Charlotte Dacre,  like Zofloya. We can also look to some of  Maria Edgeworth's novels like Belinda and Castle Rackrent as novels by 19th century women that don't rely on typical romantic tropes for their plot. And later in the century the novels of Elizabeth Caskell and George Eliot offer much more complex worlds which, though they contain romantic elements, are not simplistic in their presentation.  

I have never seen any of these novels taught in a high school English class, and I find it unfortunate that they rely on standard fare like Jane Eyre. My daughter is generally repelled by traditional heteronormative love stories and I am sure that the choice of a novel a little out of the mainstream would be much more interesting for her and many young people.  

The Exclusivity of Scholarship. . . .

Though it is difficult to believe today, there was a time when people were ridiculed by the so-called intelligentsia if they were unable to read and write Greek. It seems almost comical to think that the gate-keepers of high culture once used literacy of Greek as a wall to hold back the swinish multitude of average people. On the other hand, I suppose it is as good a standard as any by which to keep people in their place and marginalize their accomplishments or ability. After all, Western intellectuals have had a long history of idolizing Greek culture, as though a militaristic, slave-owning group of people from over two thousand years ago had some special insight into the mysteries of the universe that the rest of us lack. This is not to say that the ancient Greeks, for all their horrible moral failings, aren't due a certain respect for their positive accomplishments, they certainly are. Greek insights into mathematics, natural science, and philosophy are remarkable - particularly given their place in history. If for nothing else, the ancient Greeks deserve an immense amount of credit for their use of reflective reasoning about themselves and their society. (Though it is often forgotten by Westerners that, for example, Confucius and Buddha both predate Socrates by over a hundred years.)

However, it is one thing to give credit where credit is due, and it is an entirely different matter to idealize ancient Greek culture as Western intellectuals seem to have so often done. I actually enjoy, for example, the stories of Greek mythology, Homer, and I even have enjoyed some Greek poetry in my time. And sometimes I wonder if it is not that intellectuals have idealized the Greeks so much as they have used them as a kind of exclusive club to which you had to gain access in order to be considered cultured and important. Traditionally in Europe, only the rich and powerful had any hope of gaining access to an education that would include Greek studies, and only if you were literate in Greek could you hope to be taken seriously by the cultural elite. Greek literacy was often your 'club card' that allowed you to rub shoulders with the rich and powerful and meant that your ideas and opinions could be taken seriously.

Take John Thelwall as a case in point. Thelwall (1764-1834) was an English radical writer, activist, lecturer, and ground-breaking speech therapist. He was a member of the great London Corresponding Society and was famously tied for treason along with Horne Tooke and Thomas Hardy in 1794. Thelwall argued against the monarchy and for a radical expansion of voting rights. He was eloquent, committed, and fearless in his pursuit of justice and equality. And of course, writing in the 1790s, a period of turmoil following the Revolution in France, Thelwall engaged with establishment's premier conservative spokesman, Edmund Burke. One of Thelwall's most famous works was entitled The Rights of Nature in which he addressed Burke's defence of the establishment head on. Because Thelwall tried, to a degree, to emulate Burke's rather grandiose literary style, The Rights of Nature is not an easy book to read and seems rather antiquated today, particularly when read beside, say, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. And, interestingly, it was partly the book's style that drew the attention of some critics (even among reformers) who thought that Thelwall was attempting to speak above his "station." Thelwall tried to invoke Socrates as a symbol of the people's philosopher who addressed regular people and symbolized long-standing principles of egalitarianism and justice. But, unlike Burke, Thelwall couldn't read and write Greek and he was ridiculed for having to rely on translations for his reflections on Socrates. In The Rights of Nature and other works Thelwall makes references to Greek culture that are essentially laughed off because they are not grounded in his own direct reading but are somehow sullied or delegitimized by the fact that they arrive from translations. This, in part, is what critics focused on rather the substance of what Thelwall wrote, and so they portrayed him as an upstart who didn't have the authority to criticize Burke because he hadn't earned his status as a proper scholar.

Of course, Thelwall was also routinely attacked (sometimes physically) for his radical political opinions. But the very fact that his status (or lack of one) as a Greek Scholar could be seen as a legitimate criticism of his thoughts and ideas about politics, is remarkable today. And Thelwall was not the only victim of this kind of bias. Keats, didn't have a classical education and the fact that he wrote classically themed poetry without having read classical works in their original language was seen by many as a perfectly legitimate reason to marginalize his poetical works. There are, of course, still cases wherein you must read works in their original language to be taken seriously. But this is generally only if you are trying to portray yourself as an expert on the works themselves. You would probably wouldn't try, for example, to write a book about Kant's Critique without being able to read German. But it would surely be perfectly acceptable to invoke, say, German Romanticism in relation to the Lake Poets without being literate in German.

But it would serve us well to remember the degree to which people are often marginalized based on their perceived weaknesses in formal education. It is surely no surprise that a white man with almost no education can become president of the United States and be taken seriously by millions of people concerning his thoughts on culture, but a black woman (even with an excellent education) is has to scream and fight to even be heard.

A few thoughts on Grammar. . .

Grammar, as we often think of it, as a set of fairly strict definitions and rules that must be followed if we are to obtain legitimacy as “educated” and “erudite” people, has a fairly short history in the English language. Before about 250 years ago, few people thought of grammar as a distinct set of rules. Rather, syntax was people’s primary concern. That is to say, there were certain conventional ways of speaking and writing that were learned through reading and discourse. And, strangely, the people who first started to talk about and write about English grammar were often Latinists who, having spent a tedious chunk of their lives learning the complexities of Latin grammar began to impose similar ideas onto English. This is why for generations students of English were plied with odd, seemingly arbitrary, rules of grammar. If you are over forty, you were likely told many times in your schooldays that it was a terrible no-no to split an infinitive. And how many old-school English teachers were horrified when they first saw the title sequence to the original Star Trek in which Captain Kirk had the gall to split an infinitive when he said “to boldly go”? The irony, of course, is that the restriction against splitting an infinitive is not a result of the fact that it is frowned on in Latin (or Latin-based languages), but because you can’t actually do it. While in English infinitives are two words (such as “to go”), in Latin (and Romance languages in general) the infinitive is a single word (such as “ire”) so you cannot split the infinitive even if you wanted to. So, just because the early gate-keepers of “proper” English were Latinists and Classicists, generations of English speakers imagined that there was some real reason that they should be restricted from saying “to boldly go.”

Early English grammar primers began to appear in the 18^th century as more and more “middle-class” members of society began to spend years becoming educated. Though I haven’t spent a lot of times attempting to collect these early primers, I have only read about and seen a couple in all my years of book collecting and education. I am sure that before such grammar primers were being properly printed, there were mocked up versions created by private educators, of which there were many in England in the late 18^th century, for their own personal students. I have never seen one of these because I am sure only a handful have survived, but I have read about them in various books about the Georgian Era. I recently got a reminder of how rare technical discourse on grammar was even in the early 19^th century when I was reading a 1809 letter by the legendary political theorist William Godwin in which he was talking about a Grammar Primer written by great essayist William Hazlitt. Godwin writes – “I never saw the parts of speech so well defined (I could almost say at all defined) before.” In other words, Godwin, who was already an accomplished writer and had written one of the most important books in English on political theory, had scarcely even seen the parts of speech defined before. To put it another way, Godwin had never really seen technical grammar, and yet he was a famous and accomplished author.

I have recently thought about this issue a fair amount because of a few rather heated internet discussions. I believe, and there is plenty of academic research to support such a position, that attempting to teach young students grammar doesn’t really make them better writers, and can actually harm their attempts to write. Teaching students grammar not only makes language more antiseptic, but it can make students leery of even trying to write because they become paranoid that they will get something wrong. The best way to make better writers is through a kind of anticipatory socialization process of reading and writing. You don’t need to actually know what a dangling participle is to know not to use one, you simply have to have read a lot. And perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t really matter what a dangling participle is, what matters is that you can use language efficiently and effectively for what, and with whom, you are trying to communicate. Very few people will ever achieve the stylistic competence of, say, Henry James. But then, very few people are trying to communicate the way James was trying to communicate. What matters, nine out of ten times, is simply that writing is straightforward, not confusing, and easy to understand. I am continually amazed when people complain, for example, about young people using a particular word order or syntax, when there is no question about what is being communicated. Of course, when we are accustomed to certain word orders or grammatical structures, certain things can sound strange to our ears. But much of the time basic exchanges of information are what are really at stake, and there is seldom any confusion about that. You can spend a lot of time trying to understand the “correct” usage of “lay” and “lie,” but how often will the “incorrect” usage cause any actual confusion? Are any of us really confused when Eric Clapton told “Sally” to lay down, even though “technically” he should have told her to lie down? And doesn’t it even sound a little odd when we correctly use the “lie” in the past tense, such as if we said “I lay down on my new couch yesterday” ? Most people would think it sounds more correct to say “I laid down on my couch yesterday” even if it is technically incorrect. Of course, if you are writing your PhD thesis, or addressing some professional group of people, you are going to need (for the most part) to conform to their standards or risk rejection. But by the time you go to write a thesis or address a professional body, you have usually already been socialized to such expectations anyway. And most of the time, people are using language with a fairly straightforward goal of being understood in the moment, so lay down or lie down, whichever you prefer, I don’t mind.

Encyclopedic Fiction and Gravity's Rainbow. . . .

I have made some effort (though certainly not an exhaustive one) to read a fair degree of contemporary fiction. However, I don't really read such fiction randomly. I have little interest in many of the popular books, the ones that win the Booker Prize or that local book clubs seem to enjoy. I prefer to read weird books, books that have some quirky or strange element. I like writers like Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, and David Foster Wallace.

I particularly find the so-called idea of Encyclopedic Fiction interesting. This was an idea coined by Edward Mendelson in the 1970s and refers to books that attempt to render an exhaustive picture of a cultural milieu. These are books like The Divine Comedy, Ulysses, Infinite Jest, and Gravity's Rainbow. The thing about such books is that they are hard to make sense of; there is so much in them that as readers we are often overwhelmed. Most readers, even ones who consider themselves well read or avid readers, have fairly traditional narrative proclivities. We like stories, and we like them to be well ordered and relatively easy to follow. But encyclopedic books are not just narrative in nature (though they may contain one or a number of fairly well structured narratives at their core). Rather, I think it helps to think of these books as more thematic in nature. Most of us remember high school English classes in which we learned about literature's themes; like "man against nature" or "man against man" etc. But when I say thematic I am not necessarily referring to these basic themes. I simply mean that it is easier to make sense out of one of these difficult books if you read the events they contain as related to a theme rather than simply looking at how they might reflect the narrative.

I know that this might seem like a basic idea but apparently it isn't. I realized this when I read an article I found on-line called "The 50 Best One-Star Amazon Reviews of Gravity's Rainbow." The Reviews contained in this article are all authored by angry readers who couldn't make sense of Thomas Pynchon's novel, and many of whom seem to think that the whole thing was little more than a huge ego exercise on Pynchon's part. Well, I've read Gravity's Rainbow, and though it is a difficult book, it is written so much skill and style that I find it very difficult to believe that it is simply gibberish, or even an ego trip.

The fact is that a book like Gravity's Rainbow could easily appear almost nonsensical. But if you read Gravity's Rainbow through a thematic prism (and there are a number of such prisms you could choose from), you can easily make sense out of it. Someone may say that this approach to reading is disingenuous or overly wilful. However, our readings are almost always our own products in a sense. Whether you are reading a Fairy tale by Grimm or a novel by Henry James, you generally take from it based upon what you bring to it. Our readings are formed by our personal and cultural baggage, and though our reading might be influenced by, say, professional, critical, or educational discourse, it always amazes me the degree to which people formulate their own ideas and readings of even complex material. When presented with a work that seems particularly enigmatic or even nonsensical, it seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable approach to wilfully make sense out of it for ourselves. If a book is hard to make sense out of but not particularly complex or turgid, and especially if it is amusing, like, say, Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, people don't usually seem too bothered by the fact that it doesn't fit into a traditional narrative structure. But a book like Gravity's Rainbow seems to get on many people's nerves, perhaps because they struggle through it and expect a big payoff at the end. But if one looks at the events through some thematic prism such a book can seem considerably less complex and the reading becomes a lot easier. For example, if Gravity's Rainbow is read as an account of 20th Century paranoia in various forms, most of the apparently unconnected events and ideas come into focus. Pirate's relationship with Jessica, the professional efforts to understand Slothrop's apparently supernatural powers, Slothrop's reaction to his racial nightmares, most of the characters' reactions to the War, etc.: all of these are stories about the strange, schizophrenic, paranoid reactions that people have or have had to our twisted and troubled culture. This idea makes Gravity's Rainbow not so much a maze of vaguely connected events but a kind of monologue of our social relations and personal demons. It's not important to me if this is what Pynchon "wanted us to think." Given Pynchon's reclusiveness, we will probably never have any clear ideas about what he thought about his own work anyway. What interests me is whether we can make sense out of a book like Gravity's Rainbow in ways that are interesting an fulfilling.

Instead of difficult, books like Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest are interesting because they pictures not just of individuals, but of important aspects of culture with which we all struggle.

Some thought on Shakespeare, Universalism, and Literary Education . . .

I recently listened to part of a discussion on the CBC concerning the use of Shakespeare text in high school education. Now, for a number of reasons, I don't usually pay attention to such discussions. One of the reasons that I avoid such issues is that I believe that there are so many rationally incoherent ideas peddled by so-called experts on the subject of literature, that I just find it aggravating listening to people propagate these notions, particularly when they are holding themselves up as specialists. I actually believe that with the exception of certain issues such as complex structures of symbolism or technical issues in traditional poetry, one doesn't need specialized knowledge to talk insightfully about literature, though I have met dozens of English teachers and professors who are desperate to maintain their specialist and professional status. Another reason that I avoid such discussions is that despite the fact that there are many ways to talk about and/or understand literature, the vast majority of people promote the idea that there is basically one way and they essentially represent that exclusive methodology. One particularly egregious example of this tendency is the near universal habit of talking about literature in relation to "what the author meant." People hold on to this strategy despite the fact that over sixty years ago, W.K. Wimsatt Jr. and Monroe Beardsley successfully undermined the notion of authorial intent as an exclusively meaningful interpretation of a work or text. What they called the "intentional fallacy" continues to be the primary methodology of literary criticism and theory despite the fact that this notion has been undermined not only by Wimsatt and Beardsley but by more than half a century of Continental Philosophy and literary theory which has made it clear that not only can the author's intent be dispensed with if you so choose but there is no objective or authoritative way to understand what literature is, let alone a correct way to talk about it. The quite simple fact is that you can define literature how you choose and, more importantly, you can talk about it and analyze it however you want. One thing I have learned is that if someone tells you that there is one "correct" way to think about and analyze literature, this methodology is most likely hiding an ideological agenda.

In relation to the CBC segment on Shakespeare, I particularly avoid discussions about this subject because of the widespread phenomenon called Bardolatry. Bardolatry is, exactly what it sounds like, the tendency to idealize Shakespeare (aka, the Bard). Its hard to talk about Shakespeare because admiration of him is so deep and widespread that any discourse about him often begins with the assumptions that he is infallible and his status and brilliance cannot be questioned. The most egregious example of Bardolatry I have ever found comes from Samuel Taylor Coleridge who once suggested that you couldn't criticize Shakespeare unless you a priori accept that he is the greatest writer ever. Such claims would be amusing if their weren't so bizarre and elitist. I actually have nothing against Shakespeare in the classroom. His work can be a remarkable font of interest and entertainment. But the phenomenon of Bardolatry actually inhibits students' ability to talk about and enjoy Shakespeare's work because in classic top-down teaching strategies, students are not allowed to explore Shakespeare, but rather they are told what to think.

I was particularly struck in the CBC discussion of Shakespeare with the hackneyed claim made by a man who I believe is a high school English teacher that what makes Shakespeare so good is the degree of "universalism" in his stories. This claim is so common and widespread that I can't believe that there is anyone who has been to high school (at least in English) who hasn't heard it at one time or another. It is a belief that I think, though widespread, is basically nonsense. Looking for a cognitive bias that this claim exposes, the closest one I could come up with is the "illusory truth effect." This effect is the tendency to believe something because it is easy to process or because it is so widely believed and repeated that its actual veracity is never brought into question. But here's the thing - it takes a whole linguistic, cultural, and educational structure to even vaguely understand what Shakespeare's works are about, let alone to have any deeper comprehension of the content and meaning. Shakespeare, in fact, fails even the most basic test of what the word universal means let alone any more rigorous notion of universal understanding. Anyone making such claims about Shakespeare's work (or any literary work) is actually a priori assuming a whole structure of indoctrination before Shakespeare's so-called universalism can be understood. When someone is making such a claim about the universalism of a work of art, what they are really saying is that if you can read the original work or the work of a translator (and keep in mind that learning to read is itself a complex sociopolitical act which implies a whole structure of ideological and cultural indoctrination), then you can access a set of universal implications in the work. But, of course, not only are the acts of learning to read and understand the concepts involved ideologically loaded, but any analyzes of the issues talked about after that process of learning takes place will be unable to escape ideological and cultural biases.

A typical counterargument to what I have said here is that this is a misinterpretation of the word "universal" and what is really meant when we talk about Shakespeare's universalism is that the themes found in his work, such as love, jealousy, hate, fear, etc., are universal in nature and that they can be appreciated by anyone. The primary problem with this claim should be fairly obvious, though people seem to miss it all the time. If this were true, then there is nothing more universal about Shakespeare's work than the work of anyone else. Since the work of Harold Robbins or Jackie Collins also deal with all of these themes then we are forced to give the same status to these works as we are to Shakespeare. I am certain that if we taught the novels of Harold Robbins to high school students and we held Robbins in the same high regard as we do Shakespeare, those students would not only have an easier time understanding Robbins (making him, by the normal standard and by definition, more universal) but those students would hold the reputation of Robbins in the same high standard as we now hold Shakespeare. Another problem is this, one might rationally argue that certain human emotions are universal, but that does not mean that they are experienced or understood in the same way. A good, if melancholy, example of this is when we think about love. It is absurd to think, for example, that our highly personalized notions of love and marriage are experienced in the same way as, say, they are by people in an ancient farming society of arranged marriages undertaken largely for familial advantage. Shakespeare's notion of love as portrayed in Romeo and Juliette is, in fact, not only highly stylized and elitist but particularly Eurocentric.

The truth is that anyone who has been initiated into a certain kind of education and knowledge can easily get the impression that Shakespeare's work is uniquely "good" and universal. And though one can make an argument that everyone throughout time has experienced love, hate, jealousy, etc., how we process and understand those emotions and experiences is unique and related to our cultural and class worldviews. This is not to say that you can't read and interpret the works of Shakespeare in a particularly "universalist" way. The real problem is that such interpretive structures are imposed on students as the only coherent and meaningful way to think about Shakespeare or literature in general. Literary education is, at least at the high school level in North America, stuck in a kind of time warp of elitism and close-mindedness. And until we start opening our minds and attitude about what literature is and how we talk about it, students will continue to be alienated by the education system which relies on arbitrary and authoritarian views of education and literature.

"A Confederacy of Dunces," Sam Jordison, and what its all "About."

Sam Jordison of the Guardian recently wrote a brief but interesting article on John Kennedy Toole's remarkable book "A Confederacy of Dunces" and its rejection by the almost legendary editor Robert Gottlieb. I believe Gottlieb was an editor for Simon and Schuster at the time (though Jordison doesn't mention this and I may be misremembering this fact), and though he liked Toole's book and encouraged him, in the end Gottlieb rejected it because it "wasn't really about anything." To most readers today this seems like an irrelevant criticism for a book which not only went on to win a Pulitzer prize but which is one of the most readable and funny books of the 20th century.

Gottlieb was shrewd enough to later admit that his rejection of "A Confederacy of Dunces" was his most "conspicuous failure" as an editor, though he continued to have reservations about the book even after it went on to enjoy the great success that it did - a success that the author was unable to share in since he had committed suicide not long after Gottlieb's final rejection. Though Jordison of the Guardian has mostly unqualified praise for Toole's book, he says that he often hears Gottlieb's criticisms of the novel echoed in contemporary readers. "I've lost count," he tells us, "of the number of times that people have complained that the book doesn't add up to much and that Ignatius J. Reilly doesn't develop as a character." Jordison goes on to assure us that there are "many excellent editors and readers out there who would make the same decisions as Gottlieb."

Jordison's defence of the book is straightforward and timely. He suggests that the book has value on the basis that it is very funny. This is surely true. "A Confederacy of Dunces" is one of the books that stand in my life of reading as notably hysterical, along with Catch 22, Three Men in a Boat, and a number of books by Kurt Vonnegut. But Jordison also mentions that the book is, in fact, about quite a lot. There is a great deal of profundity in Toole's portrayal of the changing values of the 1960s; racism, politics, philosophy are all subjects that Toole deals with in a witting and wise way. I actually think that a good case could be made that "A Confederacy of Dunces" was ultimately rejected not because it was about nothing but because it dealt with the things that it was about in rather raw and provocative ways, ways that probably made Gottlieb uncomfortable and continues to be rather disconcerting to readers today.

And this is the point that I think that Jordison's article, as interesting as it is, misses. The real issue in my mind concerning Gottlieb's rejection of Toole's masterpiece is that it doesn't adhere to certain novelistic standards that were formed largely in the Victorian Era and continue to shape our notion of a "good" novel even today. My argument is this: because the novel as it came to be practiced as an art form grew largely out of the internal landscape of Romanticism and was then injected with a degree of Victoria self-absorption, most successful novels today are stuck in an aesthetic rut. This rut is an image of the novel as a psychological landscape of a character or small group of characters who are expected to psychologically grow (in rather orthodox ways) through the hardship of some social or personal experience. There are, of course, counter examples to this formula, but overall it seems that his has been the MO of the novel as an art form, an art form that I believe is now dying because of the grand social and technological changes facing society. Because of this psychological formula, we have a rather basic Aristotelian view of what a novel should do, how it should proceed in terms of plot and character, and where it should end up to form a proper climax and denouement. "A Confederacy of Dunces" actually fits into this model a great deal more that Gottlieb seemed to think, but it also pushed that boundary in important ways. The main character of the novel Ignatius doesn't grow at all. He doesn't use his hardships as life lessons, but rather as demonstrations and affirmations of all that he thinks is wrong with society in the first place. The other characters in the novel just sort of skirt through life haphazardly the way most of us actually do. There is not much of a lesson or moral in "A Confederacy of Dunces." Rather, it is a more like a French movie than an Anglophone novel, it is a slice of life that gives us a snapshot in time of a twisted degenerate egoist against a backdrop of a racist decaying society which seems to have largely lost its way.

Today we have many writers who have broken the mold of traditional Aristotelian narratives in spectacular ways, not least of who are G.W. Seabald, John Foster Wallace, and Thomas Pynchon. I believe authors like these are, for want of a better expression, the pallbearers of the novel as an art form. The novel grew out of the entertainment needs of the bourgeoise, and society and its entertainment demands are changing in ways that the novel simply is unable to account for. There is no shame in this. Art forms arise and fall as society changes. We no longer mourn the death of the illuminated manuscript as a living art form. We've moved on. Literature will undoubtably survive in new and vital ways. But the demands that society put into an art form, whether it's painting, the novel, or architecture, creates collateral damage. Toole was one of its victims. He wrote a brilliant book that pushed boundaries that many in positions of privilege and authority didn't want pushed, and he eventually committed suicide over it. The important lesson of Toole's book is that when someone says that a work of art isn't "about" anything, its a pretty good bet that it is just "about" the wrong things.

Reading as Aesthetic therapy. . .

For reasons that I am unable to articulate, I stopped painting a couple of months ago. I wish I could explain why, but I don't even understand it myself. Suffice to say that after 35 years for continually working as an artist, I ran out of steam, faith, and inspiration. It has been a significantly depressing and stressful process. In order to deal with it I started writing about life and art. And, of course, reading is always an essential concomitant of writing. Most of my fiction reading for the past twenty years or so has been 19th century and early 20th century work, but I recently started reading contemporary fiction again. After years of reading mostly older fiction, it is quite interesting to read newer books for a while.

The first book I picked up was one that I had read twice before - Robert Persig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Since it was published in the 1970s, this book has become a kind of modern classic, I think in large because it expressed the immense crisis in the Western psyche that was occurring in the lead up to the 70s. Though it doesn't specifically address these issues in any kind of systematic ways, Motorcycle Maintenance was written against the backdrop of the breakdown of traditional rationality, the linguistic turn in philosophy, the abandonment of so-called meta-theories, and rise of contemporary philosophical pragmatism. I read this book in the 1980s, in the 90s, and now again. Thought parts of it seem dated, an inevitability with any philosophical/fictionary work, it holds up well overall and it is an enjoyable read. Persig really illustrates the way that approaches to rationality were breaking down in someone's everyday consciousness. And of course, because he deals in detail with the question of "quality," a question always central to me as an artists, I find it fascinating.

The next novel I read was David Foster Wallace's last (and posthumously published) book The Pale King. I must admit that, though it is on my list, I have never read Infinite Jest, and I cannot comment on Wallace's work in general. But The Pale King is, I am fairly certain, one of the most boring books I have ever read. Though Wallace's prose style is fluid and interesting in itself to a degree, I just don't know how anyone (particularly an editor) ever thought this could be an interesting book. It is ostensibly a 600 page book about people who work for the IRS, and is precisely as boring as that sounds. It is profoundly difficult to imagine how Wallace could ever have gotten this book published if he hadn't been dead or famous or both. What made the book seem both more tragic and ridiculous is the way the publisher put a little 'guide for reading groups' in the back of the book. In this section you will find sophomoric questions meant to stimulate discussion for reading groups such as "Discuss the different ways in which the characters in The Pale King search for, and perhaps find, happiness." Since corporate publishers have no sense of humour and are notoriously irony-impaired, I am fairly sure these high school-like questions are not meant as a joke. And if they are meant seriously they are absurd, insulting, and belittle not only this book but I suspect Wallace's entire literary project.

Then I read a book I have been meaning to read for years; Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. This is one of those books that people often put on lists of so-called 'post-modern' novels, like Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being, or Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. It is a book in which the narrator is always present and continually addresses the reader, a technique that some people find gimmicky and aggravating. It is essentially a story of a guy who tries to purchase Italo Calvino's latest novel but due to a printing mistake he gets the wrong book, and an incomplete one as well. He goes back and receives the wrong book again, and then the whole novel becomes a story of the reader encountering a series of fragments of different novels that he can never complete. Through the book, the reader is drawn closer to a mysterious and enigmatic woman whom, depending on how you read it, he marries. Calvino is always an entertaining writer and the fragments that he writes are all, in themselves, very compelling. Because Calvino seems like a natural story-teller, you find yourself, like the reader in the novel, wishing you could finish most of the fragments. It is well worth the read for both entertainment value as well as being an interesting literary experiment.

For my next book I went back to North America and read Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Foer. The only thing I knew about Foer before I picked up this book was what I had seen in the movie version of his first book Everything is Illuminated. Apparently this book has also been made into a film, and upon reading it I can see why - it is pure Hollywood. This book deeply offends my sensibilities, not because it is poorly written, but because it is gratuitously sentimental. The book revolves around a young boy essentially trying to come to terms with the death of this father in the Twin Towers. This subject matter, in itself, is dangerously evocative and could be made sentimental even by the best, most circumspect author. But in Foer's hands every page drips with saccharin-like sentiment; and it is not just sentiment, but it boarders on melodrama. What I find particularly offensive about it, is that with all this sentimentality the whole book becomes a kind of trickery, like advertising that uses babies or puppies. To me Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a little bit like literary cheating because Foer has taken 9/11, which is a subject that is already very explosive and emotion laden, and then he has infused it with a story of a young boy who has lost his father and is close to a mental breakdown; and he has done all of this without offering any kind of distance or counterpoint whatsoever. It has the makings of the kind of Hollywood film that I most despise, one that intends to pull at the heartstrings (both patriotic and familial) with the aim of selling tickets and little more.

After reading that book I went back to Italy and read Umberto Eco's Novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana. This is a story of a mad who has had a stroke and attempts to rebuild a vision of his life by looking through all the books, magazines, and comics in his childhood home. Eco is a very good prose writer (at least his translator makes him so) and I always enjoy his work. Part if the theme here is the issue of the narrator's childhood in fascist Italy where even the comic books and children's' songs were promoting fascist ideology.  If you have an interest in comics and other popular culture from the 30s to the 50s, this book is excellent. But most readers will simply miss most of Eco's references and fail to connect with the narrator. I found this book among my father's things and, though I don't know if he ever had a chance to read it, I am sure the subject matter would have been of great interest to him. I liked it but found some of the long descriptions of various comic books and other popular culture artifacts got a bit tedious after a while.

I am not sure if any of these books will be helpful in my own writing which is very much geared toward sorting about where my conceptual and artistic life will go from here but so far it has been interesting. When you have lost your inspiration, at least the inspiration of others can be stimulating.

The Absentee: Rediscovering Maria Edgeworth. . .

I recently read another 19^th century novel in my life-long, completely unreasonable, endeavor to read all the novels of the first half of the century. There is something interesting, I suppose, about having an unattainable goal. This novel was The Absentee by Maria Edgeworth. The Absentee was written in the first decade of the 1800s and was first published in Edgeworth’s Tales of Fashionable Life in 1809. Though she is little known today outside of those with a particular interest in 19^th century literature, Edgeworth wrote around 15 novels throughout her career, as well as interesting educational and political works.

Maria Edgeworth was a remarkable woman from a remarkable family. Maria’s father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, was a brilliant inventor who worked with some of the great scientific minds of the era including James Watt and Erasmus Darwin. Maria was sister in law to the famous physician Dr. Thomas Beddoes, and her brothers included engineer William Edgeworth and Michael Pakenham Edgeworth the botanist. One of her nephews became a well-known economist, Francis Ysidro Edgeworth, and one of her nieces married the astronomer Thomas Romney Robinson. All in all, not bad family credentials.

One of the difficulties in reading or studying Maria Edgeworth’s work is the fact that her father was actively involved in most of her literary efforts and it is therefore difficult to tell where his work ends and hers begins. And since this authorial problem is more or less intractable, as far as I can tell, when you look at Maria’s entire oeuvre you have to assume to some degree that many of the ideas expressed there are joint efforts.

Edgeworth was, arguably, the most successful woman writer in England up until that time, and her works are indicative of the transition from pre-modern to modern novels. Though she wrote a number of stories before the 19^th century began, her first novel was published in the year 1800 and she is therefore, in a sense, the first important British woman novelist of the century. When you read Edgeworth’s works you can distinctly see the modern novel evolving. Maria’s predecessors in Briton, like Oliver Goldsmith, Jonathan Swift, and Daniel Defoe, for example, were inheritors of traditional story-telling, and as such their novels are often narratives – that is to say a story distinctly told by a narrator. Large parts of most early novels are told directly through narration; the writer describes events and actions, sometimes over long periods, and then breaks in with dramatic scenes. Through the efforts of novelists like Fanny Burney and Samuel Richardson, this tradition began to change and dramatic scenes began to play a bigger role. Over time, more of the novel’s actions were understood through the interactions between the characters. One of the problems with novels that were predominantly narration is the tendency for them to become didactic or moral tales. On the other hand, dramatic novels allow the reader to decide for herself what the characters are thinking or what actions might be good or bad. Now, Maria Edgeworth’s novel exist squarely between these two traditions, she used dramatic scenes very effectively but still fell back on and relied on narration a great deal. It was in the generation after Edgeworth, with writers like Jane Austin, that we really see the full formation of the modern novel.

Edgeworth’s novel The Absentee is an excellent example of this problem. The dramatic scenes are very effective and quite modern, but Edgeworth regresses into narration for long periods of the story’s action and during these periods she overstates the clear political motivation of her story.

The Absentee is essentially about a family of the Irish landed gentry that has left their homeland to take up fashionable residence in the English capital. As absentee landlords they have put their estates in the hands of an unscrupulous agent whose greed has left the estates and their tenants in decline and poverty. As a result of being so distant from the source of their income, the family has become unaware of how neglected their properties have become, and they have overspent, and gone heavily into debt. Through the efforts of their son who is also inheriting a large estate and title, they see the error of their ways and eventually return to their lands and commit once again to be responsible landlords working in the interest of their own property, the lives of their tenants, as well as for the nation of Ireland. Through this moral/political tale Edgeworth weaves a love story between the son and a cousin, and the story climaxes in typical 19^th century fashion when it is discovered that the cousin is not, in fact, a blood relation and is heir to her own great fortune, thus leaving the path free for the lovers to wed.

The historical ground of this story was a subject with which Edgeworth had personal knowledge. Maria was born in England and for the first sixteen years of her life, her father was an absentee landlord from their family estates in Edgeworthtown in County Longford. Around the time that Maria finished with her formal education, her father took his large family back to Ireland and, with the help of Maria, who was a very capable and resourceful young woman, he returned the estates to prosperity, improving the estate-house, reclaiming marsh land with the aid his own moveable railroad (one of the very first functioning railways ever built), and returning the arable land to appropriate usage. Besides being an ingenious inventor, Richard Edgeworth was also a very liberally minded man who, for the era in which he lived, went to great lengths to improve the lives of his tenants, improving their homes and supporting the education of their children. Richard Edgeworth was also an avid supporter of religious freedom, gaining a great deal of loyalty from his various catholic tenants who were still suffering under the yolk of English prosecution. And though it was still be over a hundred years until Ireland gained its independence from England, Edgeworth took an active part in the first steps toward the struggle for Irish freedom.

Again, it is unclear the extent to which the political/social message of Maria Edgeworth’s novel was the result of her own work or the result of her father’s support and, some might say, interference in the literary process. Either way, at times The Absentee is sometimes heavy-handed with overt statements about the evils of absenteeism, such as when Lord Colambre, the liberal and inquisitive son of the story, observes upon his visit to the family estates “what I have just seen is the picture only of that to which an Irish estate and Irish tenantry may be degraded in the absence of those whose duty and interest it is to reside in Ireland, to uphold justice by example and authority; but who, neglecting this duty, commit power to bad hands and bad hearts – abandon their tenantry to oppression and their property to ruin.”

This didacticism by no means ruined the novel for me, and when I read Maria Edgeworth I am continually amazed that while Jane Austin is nearly a household name, the name Edgeworth languishes even among highly literate, novel-reading people. It is, in part, the political messaging of Edgeworth’s novels that has subjected them to relative obscurity. Besides the fact that modern readers have, across the board, eschewed any form of overt didacticism in ‘literature,’ they are not generally fond of too much political messaging in the books they read. It is by no means surprising that writers like Austin and the Bronte sisters continue to be so popular while writers like Edgeworth, Gaskell, Martineau, Eliot, and others languish. Even with the contemporary feminist effort to reestablish the work and reputations of women writers, the vast majority of readers continue to gravitate toward writers who are overtly romantic and commercial in the most tedious sense that those words convey. However, though Edgeworth’s novels are not as ‘modern-sounding’ as Austin’s, they are expertly written, intensely interesting, and not without their own Romantic charm.

My Promise to Read Pickwick Papers. . . .

During my father’s last year of life we discussed many things. Of course, art and literature were always high on the list of our favorite topics, and we returned again and again to the issues of paintings and books. Roy (my father) was perhaps the most widely read person I ever knew. He read every genre of fiction and non-fiction and relished in every kind of literature. Among Roy’s favourite authors was, not surprisingly, Charles Dickens. I believe that he felt a kinship to Dickens because of that writer’s early experiences of English poverty and his honest portrayal of working-class characters. Roy was particularly fond of David Copperfield because he identified with the autobiographical story in which Copperfield was gradually raised out of poverty to relative comfort but never lost his sense of identity and his connection to ‘regular’ people.

The one Dickens novel that Roy could never seem to get on with was Pickwick Papers. This was Dickens first novel and though it is still masterful in many ways, it certainly lacks some of the polish of his most renowned works. Many modern readers don’t realize that Dickens’ major novels, from Pickwick Papers onward, appeared first in the form of serials, chapters being regularly published in a magazine. The serial form of the novel has advantages and disadvantages for the author. On the one hand, the author of a serial novel is able to adapt his or her story and characters as s/he goes according to feedback received from readers. On the other hand, the author is unable to go back to an earlier chapter and change events or characters in order to create a better story. Thus for most serial authors in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, planning was essential, one had to have the basic story worked out ahead of time so that there was no chance of writing yourself into a corner, so to speak. It is fairly clear when you read Pickwick Papers and compare it to one of Dickens’ later and more effective novels, he didn’t work out a complex storyline in advance. Instead, Pickwick Papers reads a bit like Don Quixote, a series of events connected by character but not by a plot per se. And Pickwick Papers also lacks the kind of unifying theme and remarkable humor that a great novel like Don Quixote has. However, the prose of Dickens’ first novel cannot, generally speaking, be faulted. Even in his twenties, Dickens had already perfected his skills as a constructor of effective syntax and flowing prose. And one can, in Pickwick Papers, already observe the skill of characterization that would become the hallmark of Dickens novels. However, in terms of plot and depth of character interest, Pickwick Papers is a youthful work when we compare it to Dickens’ later novels. I am sure like many artists, in his later years Dickens probably looked back on his early work and was struck by how many things he could have done differently and more effectively.

But despite these kinds of criticisms (and they are by no means controversial), Pickwick Papers is still an enjoyable read, and even though it was Dickens’ first major work, it still stands above many of his contemporaries in its light-hearted, humorous style and endearing humanity of its characterizations. If you take a list of Dickens contemporaries who are still widely read and well-known like Austin, Gaskell, Eliot, Ainsworth, the Bronte sisters, Thackeray, etc, Dickens stands out as unique because of his cast of colorful characters and the humorous ways in which they seem to come alive.

Before Roy passed away we spoke of Pickwick Papers while I was reading to him from David Copperfield. He regretted never having read Dickens’ first novel and I idly promised him that I would read it at some point. Having now fulfilled that promise, I think I know why Roy was never able to get through Pickwick Papers. I believe now that it was the rather stuffy, formal, slightly righteous attitude of the primary character that put Roy off. Many of Dickens’ title characters or primary characters, from Nicholas Nickleby to Barnaby Rudge to Pip in Great Expectations, are working-class or, at the very least, flawed and human in their nature. Samuel Pickwick, on the other hand is a wealthy and rather stuffy character who also lacks the dynamic narrative nature of most of Dickens’ other main characters. Pickwick is more of a caricature than a character and it was, I think, this aspect of the novel that prevented my father from reading and enjoying the novel.

But to be honest, my dad had something of a chip on his shoulder about being working-class and he despised the middle and upper-classes of British society. Though I understand my father’s feelings in this regard, I was not raised in England and was not forced to endure derision from people who thought that they were, simply by luck of birth, superior to me. Due to my own politics and experience, I still find many of the sensibilities of the English middle and upper-classes nauseating and offensive, but it was never a personal thing for me like it was for my dad. So I think I know where Roy was coming from when he failed to enjoy Pickwick Papers, but I could look past Samuel Pickwick’s formality in a way that he probably couldn’t.

Because it was his first novel, Pickwick Papers will always enjoy a unique status in the Dickens oeuvre. And it is obviously an important 19^th century work of English literature. More importantly, the flaws of the novel only really come to light when you compare it to Dickens’ later novels. Regardless of the literary issues (or in my father’s case personal issues) I encourage people to take some time to read it, for it still offers hours of enjoyment.

Keats and Friendships. . . . . . .

After my reading of Sidney Colvin’s book on Keats, I took up Amy Lowell’s book and read it with great interest and pleasure. And despite the fact that it is over eleven-hundred pages in two volumes, it seldom flagged and was always interesting. Amy Lowell was, of course, a poet in her own right and was a cousin of the poet James Russell Lowell. The wealth of the Lowell family gave Amy exceptional opportunities in research because she was able to purchase a great deal of Keats material that other researchers would have had a difficult time obtaining. However, her efforts in compiling the Keats story were not all successful. Unfortunately, a great deal of Keats material, including a number of important letters, were in the hands of the great American photographer Fred Holland Day and, for reasons that remains obscure to me, he would not share all of these materials with Lowell.

However, despite any challenges that Amy Lowell may have faced in her bibliographic work, her massive two-volume book on Keats is still a magnificent monument of work and, arguably, her greatest legacy.

The story of the life of Keats is a strange and terribly sad one. Despite the numerous close and loyal friendships that John Keats enjoyed during his tragically short life, I always think of him as a loner. I am not certain what has given me this impression, but if I ever imagine a lonely Romantic poet ruminating on the beauty of the world (a beauty that is miraculously found despite the pain all around us), while standing in a sunny spot of greenery or meandering with a mazy motion along a river’s quiet path, it is Keats who appears in my mind’s eye. I suppose it is the nature of his poetry that fosters this notion for me. Or perhaps, and conceptually much more likely, it is what I bring to his particular style that paints this picture in my head. Either way, the moments in his poetry that usually stand out during my reading are those that speak to my sense of loneliness.

The thing that gave me a particularly poignant moment of reflection on the issue of loneliness was something that Lowell quotes from Keats’ early poem written to his bother George. The lines are these –

At times, ‘tis true, I’ve felt relief from pain

When some bright thought has darted through my brain:

Through all that day I’ve felt a greater pleasure

Than if I’d brought to light a hidden treasure.

As to my sonnets, though none else should heed them,

I feel delighted, still, that you should read them.

Most critics would probably say that these are by no means among Keats’ best lines of poetry. They are, indeed, very sentimental and, for the tastes of many, somewhat simplistic (what Blackwood’s Magazine would have probably said that these lines were too much in the Cockney school of poetry). But regardless of the poetic “quality” of the quote, there is, it seems to be, something deeply lonely about these lines. Keats tells us that “at times” he has felt relief from pain; as though these are only happy moments snatched from an otherwise difficult and lonely life. And he cherishes these moments, as he tells us, like they are hidden treasures. Then, giving us another picture of a lonely artist working in isolation, he tells us that no one heeds his sonnets; but he is glad to at least have his brother with whom to share his work.

I think this passage is particularly poignant to me because of the close working relationship I had with my father. My dad and I practiced art together for nearly thirty-five years and through many years of my doing my artwork he was the only one who really understood what I was doing and what it meant to me. So I really know what Keats means when he writes about the delight that he experiences in the knowledge that he can share his Sonnets with George. But, of course, now that I have lost my father I feel a pang of loneliness where Keats felt a moment of delight. (Later, he would know this loneliness again when George Keats moved to America) But I also appreciate those times that are like a “relief from pain” when I have a moment of appreciative memorial affection for my dad with whom I was able to share so many years of remarkable closeness. Unfortunately these moments are all too brief because they are overwhelmed by the darker melancholy that comes with the realization that I can never regain the delight of sharing my work with my father.

Anyway, putting aside those rather maudlin thoughts, let’s return to my overly Byronic vision of John Keats. The Byronic Hero is a lonely, melancholic individual who is cynical, dark, and isolated from his or her fellow humans. But, despite the image that always seems to rise in my mind, Keats was not really Byronic in this sense at all. On the contrary, Keats was widely known to be affable, warm-hearted, and decidedly un-cynical. But, perhaps more importantly, Keats had many genuine friends. Amy Lowell tells us this – “Taken as a whole, Keats’s life was painful. The bereavements of his earlier, and the griefs of his later, life must have made it so. But we should never forget that in these few years of his growing poetic talent he was supremely happy, as happy as his passionate temperament allowed him to be.”(Lowell Vol.1 – 49) Keats, then, was not a gloomy, Byronic Hero, but a happy, and passionate visionary whose poetry grew out of something other than a brooding spirit. Lowell goes on to tell us another important thing about Keats, and that is that “he had a genius for friendship.” (ibid.) And this is important, because thought Keats may have lonely, he was not a loner. People were attracted to Keats because he had a “saving and joyous sense of humour, and a fund of animal spirits.” (ibid) Despite my own impressions, Keats was a social man who enjoyed the company of others.

 But, of course, given the historical impressions of Romanticism and Modernism, this vision of broodiness is a simple mistake to make because it is easy, I think, as an artist (particularly a Romantic one) to fall into a spiral of self-absorption. This tendency is not necessarily a result of selfishness but can be simply the result of intense self-exploration. Those familiar with literary history will recall the remarkable essays of Michel de Montaigne. This 16^th century French writer and statesman practically invented the modern notion of the occasional essay. Though few of his contemporaries understood the importance of what Montaigne was doing we know in retrospect that he was helping to create a modern notion of art. Montaigne famously claimed that “I am the subject of my book,” and it was precisely this notion of self-exploration in art that made him so modern. In an idea that was quite ahead of its time, Montaigne thought that he could use his inner-life and his own experience as a primary way of understanding the human condition. This idea became, of course, a central motivation for the so-called Romantic authors who, in the absence of a more traditional religious framework, turned their artistic eyes inward to the most human landscape they could know – their own.

On the other hand, one may well argue that one of the primary motives of all of poetry is the fear of being alone. Think of Odysseus’ powerful thirst to return to Ithica, or Rama’s search to bring home his beloved Sita. Despite our image of the lone Romantic Poets, it seems clear that much of our poetic spirit is motivated by a fear of loneliness. Such an idea reminds me of the Ubi Sunt passage of the Anglo Saxon poem “The Wanderer.”

Often (or always) I had alone

to speak of my trouble

each morning before dawn.

There is none now living

to whom I dare

clearly speak

of my innermost thoughts.

 Or perhaps the passage from Coleridge’s Fourth Part of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner –

Alone, alone, all, all alone,

Alone on a wide wide sea!

And never a saint took pity on

My soul in agony.

Now, bringing this back to Keats, one gets the impression upon reading his life story that while he used his inner life as a source of philosophy and poetry, he also dreaded the loneliness that is, perhaps, integral to the life of the artist. But as you read the events of his life you realize that, though we are all in sense alone, Keats was blessed with great friendships. We need only think of the painter Joseph Severn, the young painter who agreed to accompany the dying poet to Italy in his final days in the vain hope that the change of climate would stem the disease. Severn has sometimes been criticized for having a clear idea of how sick Keats really was and for going with him to Italy for his own selfish reasons of furthering his own career in painting. But when you read his journal of the final weeks of Keats’ life you realize the sacrifices he made and the lengths to which he went to comfort and care for his dying friend.

The slow decline and death of young Keats through the body-ravishing disease of tuberculosis is a very difficult thing to read about. Anyone who has nursed a dying loved-one has a sense of how devastating and debilitating this process can be on both the ailing and the one who nurses him. It was not that long ago that I was called upon to fulfill this role of nursemaid to my father and it pained me beyond anything I can ever describe to have to see him slowly slip from this life. But as I read of Keats’ final months I was deeply impressed by the devotion of those who cared for him. He was obviously a man who inspired great love and loyalty from those who came to know him. Keats was, by most people’s standards, a very great poet and his work stands as a great legacy of a man who died before the age of twenty-five. But Keats was certainly no lonely, Byronic hero. He was a passionate, loving, humorous man who inspired great respect and a tender sense of affection from those who knew him.