Henry James and His Path to Individuation in 'The American'

I just read Henry James' novel, "The American".

I was inspired to read it by the Great Books suggested novels list. I looked it up on Amazon and it sounded fun and easier to read than the later James novels, and so it was. The style is wonderful, humorous, and vibrant. The prose is luxuriant and jewels up into a bon mot every few pages.

It starts with Christopher Newman, a charming character with a kind of flexible moral fibre that can take almost any kind of shock - except those shocks entailed by the plot of the novel.

Newman is very much a free American, and so he is attracted to the bondage of old European values as his path to individuality and wholeness. His attraction to Madame De Cintre has all the hallmarks of a shadow attraction - the inner feminine draws Newman into contact with his vengefulness, hatred, bitterness, narrowness, and evil side - in other words, his shadow. The solitude and loneliness of Newman's character at the end of the novel can be read as a kind of belated adolescence in him - he finally has come to grips with his shadow side as represented by the Bellegarde family.

The Jungian typology is quite convenient for explaining James' novel, because he plays the opposites of European and American with an open hand about his mixed feelings for both sides of the Atlantic. The charged polarities of emotion represent a sort of gateway for the reader into the authorial consciousness itself, which for me is the deepest and most satisfying experience of reading Henry James.

(James is just a wonderful man - the experience of his living consciousness through the text is ineffable. I do not feel I know him yet, but I should want to, and I intend to read "Daisy Miller", "What Maisie Knew", "Turn of the Screw" and "Portrait of a Lady" to discover more about him.)

But back to "The American".

It is as if by externalizing his European-ness and American-ness, Henry James becomes something larger than both. The effort at becoming aware is tangible by the number of times James reverted to the material of the novel in his long career.

Henry James sought perhaps that intoxicating liberty from culture that came from transcending experiencing itself, and instead, it seems, fell into entrapment in the gravity well of Great Britain's culture. Anglophilic became British. Plain-spoken became ornate. The image of the American unconsciously became something more universal through Henry James' conscious rejection of American moeurs.

What Prose Style Can Teach Us About Moral Character: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Macaulay.

I do not like F. Scott Fitzgerald. I find him an irritating sot, a malignerer, and a kind of prose poet whose sentimentality repulses me. But I get that Fitzgerald has made virtues out of his necessities, and even though his vices may repel they nevertheless glitter with the sprayed-on gloss of honest and vital emotion.

So I sat down to read 'The Diamond As Big As the Ritz' with little expectations of more than a pretty read a la the Great Gatsby. And so it was!

Macaulay's prose reminds me of Gibbon's, but Gibbon's is the purer style. They are very similar, so contiguous that the distinct quality of Macaulay's is obscure. Gibbon's style is nobler, less opinionated, and more just; Gibbon's fine way of applying multiple verbs to a single actor is so stylish and unique that it has no compare anywhere; I am so impressed by Gibbon's style that I can only find him a better writer - I was about to say a better man - than Macaulay.

I do not dislike Macaulay. I don't know him well enough from the one essay. But I receive an overall impression of journalistic quality in his work which leaves me cold.

Please let me clarify that view.

Macaulay's essay on Machiavelli goes to pains to contextualise Machiavelli in the social context of his times. When he compares the social context of his (Macaulay's) own time with Machiavelli's time, I became skeptical. Macaulay is trying to be an apologist for Machiavelli by shifting the blame for Machiavelli's 'evil' onto the entire Italian people in Machiavelli's time and place; and instead of making sense of Machiavelli's morality, by asserting that every age has its own morals he relativises moral considerations into nonexistence. Macaulay implies that every age has its own morals, which are incommensurate to another age's morality; if this is the case, why do we even bother to judge the morality of people and nations outside our own time and place? How can we learn moral lessons from history if morality is incommensurate from age to age? It is a nonsense argument.

And the review of Machiavelli's works, while interesting, seems a little irrelevant; we are only really interested in the political thought, and the moral questions around that. Macaulay rambles here.

So too the comparison of Machiavelli with Montesqieu. Macaulay reckons Montesqieu is popular because of the sentimental fads of his day, not because of the excellence of his book, the Spirit of Laws. But if this were true, then why is Montesqieu in the Great Books and Macaulay is introducing them? Macaulay accuses Montesqieu of matching a far-flung example to a principle, instead of finding principles to fit the proximate political circumstances. This is just to say that Montesqieu argues his case as best he can, and Machiavelli does too; to question the evidence is not to invalidate the theory's weight, and Macaulay does not broach the theory behind the Spirit of Laws.

So as you have read so far my impression of Macaulay is that he writes like a journalist. No doubt more will be revealed.

I don't mean to be censorious of these guys. I believe the character of a writer matters, and vices and errors in superb writers are even more obvious because of the overall excellence of their prose. Both Fitzgerald and Macaulay are urbane and erudite sophists, and fine stylists. If either man were a poor writer then their defects would not be so clear.

On Sainte-Beuve On Montaigne

Sainte-Beuve writes messily, but the fine feelings sweep you along quickly so you don't notice until the second read.

I have forced Sainte-Beuve to speak here of Montaigne in epigram, as I can only imagine he would have wished if he had a modern audience to communicate with.

Much as his work has been demolished for me by Proust's criticism, Sainte-Beuve's wonderful love and enthusiasm remains:

- "It may be said of Montaigne's style that it is a continual epigram, or an ever-renewed metaphor."

- "Montaigne is a writer naturally fertile in metaphors that are never detached from the thought, but that seize it in its very center."

- "If we desired to write with his severity, exact proportion, and diverse continuity of figures and turns - it is absolutely necessary to enlarge and extend the French language."

- "In imagining the expression and locution that is wanting, our prose should appear equally finished, inspired and emboldened, but not intoxicated, by the pure and direct spirit of ancient sources."

Some stray birds:

Can even a Frenchman still speak about enlarging the language? And now that English cannot be engrossed by any one human mind, can it even be called a single language, or is it rather a super-language or complex of languages?

I find in Montaigne's classicism the best possible kind: to treat the Roman and Greek authors as a matter for pleasure and wisdom alone, and to avoid all pretense of learning and unnatural composure.

The very same things said of Montaigne are also said of Dante by the critics. Can it be the sweet new style is anything other than a sweet fresh mind made intimate with the minds of the ancients?

Finally, how can we account for Dante in Italian, Montaigne in French, and Shakespeare in English? The mystery at least can be traced to the Roman writers. But that does not explain the light that entered the world through their work.

What Do You Think of These Four Dante English Translations?

It's customary to comment on parallel translations. Instead I will invite you to read and judge for yourself which is superior. I will say just that the great translations here seem to me a foregone conclusion.

Dante and Virgil are in the middle of the circle of the lustful, and Dante has just seen the damned and is describing them, so it's Canto V of Inferno, lines 40 to 51.

James Finn Cotter

And as the starlings are lifted on their wings
In icy weather to wide and serried flocks,
So does the gale lift up the wicked spirits,

Flinging them here and there and down and up:
No hope whatever can ever comfort them,
Neither of rest nor of less punishment.

And as the cranes fly over, chanting lays,
Forming one long line across the sky,
So I saw come, uttering their cries,

Shades wafted onward by these winds of strife,
To make me ask him, "Master, who are those
People whom the blackened air so punishes?"

XXXX XXXX XXXX

Longfellow:

And as the wings of starlings bear them on
In the cold season in large band and full,
So doth that blast the spirits maledict;

It hither, thither, downward, upward, drives them;
No hope doth comfort them for evermore,
Not of repose, but even of lesser pain.

And as the cranes go chanting forth their lays,
Making in air a long line of themselves,
So saw I coming, uttering lamentations,

Shadows borne onward by the aforesaid stress.
Whereupon said I: Master, who are those
People, whom the black air so castigates?

XXXX XXXX XXXX

Cary:

...As in large troops
And multitudinous, when winter reigns,
The starlings on their wings are borne abroad;

So bears the tyrannous gust those evil souls.
On this side and on that, above, below,
It drives them: hope of rest to solace them

Is none, nor e'en of milder pang. As cranes,
Chanting their dol'rous notes, traverse the sky,
Stretch'd out in long array: so I beheld

Spirits, who came loud wailing, hurried on
By their dire doom. Then I: Instructor! who
Are these, by the black air so scourg'd?

XXXXX XXXX XXXX

Mandelbaum:

And as, in the cold season, starlings' wings
bear them along in broad and crowded ranks
so does that blast bear on the guilty spirits:

now here, now there, now down, now up, it drives them.
There is no hope that ever comforts them
no hope for rest and none for lesser pain.

And just as cranes in flight will chant their lays,
arraying their long file across the air,
so did the shades I saw approaching, borne

by that assailing wind, lament and moan;
so that I asked him: Master, who are those
who suffer punishment in this dark air?

XXXX

What do you think?

Saint Augustine... Sex Addict, Shock Artist, Zen Master

Last night I downloaded Saint Augustine's Enchiridon and Confessions.

As I may have mentioned before, Augustine is far and away history's most famous sex addict, and honored for having recorded his recovery from the illness of sex addiction in the Confessions. His illness and recovery are his defining story. The fact that he is a spiritual and intellectual giant impresses me less than the astonishing personal transformation.

Good translations are important. As you know from reading my blog, it gives me great pleasure to seek and find a vigorous English rendering. Last night I quickly found very fine translations of Confessions and Enchiridon from the superb online library, Ethereal Christian Classics. New, classy font; verrry nice. I compared with the Pusey translation from Project Gutenberg and within two paragraphs preferred the Ethereal Christian Classics version of Confessions.

The opening paragraphs of the Confessions were fascinating - a series of emotionally charged questions that you couldn't have answered - at least I couldn't answer them. Maybe you can.

Confessions is a shock. Confrontational. You sit down to read Saint Augustine, guessing his life story will be a nice little drama for an evening's amusement, little expecting to be body tackled by the saint himself in full moral flight and dragged along the pitch, a human football kicked at the goal of a spiritual awakening. Somehow you don't expect Saint Augustine to be so... unsaintly.

But on starting the Enchiridon I instantly noticed how beautiful the ideas were (beautiful ideas make for beautiful prose), and decided to read the latter work first. The form is smooth but obscure and rich as pure butter - you would be familiar with the kind of writing from modern Zen writing. Augustine is like a Zen master pointing out the utterly simple fact of his experience for you to ponder. Again the saint surprises: Augustine as Zen master. In the darkness of the humbled mind and heart, a Mystery.

From the translator of Confessions I learnt two more fun facts about Augustine:

1, that Saint Augustine (in his magnum opus 'The City of God') invented our idea of a society. I was surprised when I learnt last year that Aristotle invented the notion of energy, so pervasive the concept is, but after a few instances of hearing some basic idea was invented by so-and-so, you get used to the shock of the old.

2, that a confession cuts both ways. First and obviously a confession is a record of false thoughts, feelings, and actions; tossing out stock-in-trade thoughts and feelings which have caused nothing but pain; and noting your responsibility for having created it; thus the sign of a successful confession is a sense of gratitude. Second, and more mysteriously, confession is an act of recognition of a Higher Power. When you or someone you know, then, embarks on a course of deep therapy, a spiritual inventory, a searching memoir, a period of directed journaling or a similar type of inner investigation, it is worth remembering that the ultimate motive of our mucking about in negative and painful memories is a more joyful connection with a Higher Power.

One more thing: Augustine's mature writing in Enchiridon is a striking, basso profundo voice, like Prospero in The Tempest. Augustine's is a listening prose, and the audiobook of Enchiridon must have quite an impress. Augustine's style really reminds me of the late Rvd Billy Graham's - a voice not to be blinked at.

That's my dish on hanging with Augustine last night, August 22. I find him fascinating. I think you might also find him fascinating.

PS - I must add that Augustine also invented the genre of the memoir with his Confessions. Knowing the rash of 'mislit' or misery literature on the shelves of Borders, this is one of the few books that actually scratches the itch.

A Lost Classic - Aeschylus' Proteus - Reimagined From Homer

I spent the night reading Aeschylus' Eumenides, Oresteia part 3. What a letdown. I guess the lost 4th play Proteus was the thing to catch the king.

I googled "Aeschylus Proteus" yesterday afternoon, but for once Homer's Odyssey is a better bet than the world wide web. Menelaus tells Telemachus the story directly, and I can easily imagine how Aeschylus would change it.

Homer brings Menelaus home for a tragic grief scene. In the satire play, Aeschyus would make Menelaus visit Athens. Menelaus, deluded by Proteus to imagine Athens to be his native Argos, shows how absurdly pompous Athenian leaders are in comparison with the returning hero. Then he meets Orestes his nephew, still living in Athens, now a sophist and teacher of youth, who tells him the tragic tale, and ends the four plays on a bizarre note of Menelaus realizing that he has got everything wrong. The home coming hero returns to the wrong home.

On Authentic Aesthetic Pleasure

The sure sign of authentic aesthetic pleasure is that we forget where we are, lose awareness of what amount of time passed in the enjoyment of the pleasure, and for a blessed moment shuck off the isolated ego. This happened to me four nights ago while reading Chekhov's short story 'The Grasshopper'.

Chekhov set out to write a story about a secular saint. In a way, the hero of this story is the bastard child of Dostyevsky's Idiot of the enopymous novel.

I resisted buying the cheap edition of Chekhov's stories because they featured "short, humorous sketches". Instead, I brought the second of the attractive and unobtrusive three volume Penguin edition, which chronologically arranges his stories around stylistic periods, entitled 'Ward No. 6 & Other Stories'.

I began to read 'Grasshopper' in the vaulted Adelaide Railway Station as Mozart's Jupiter Symphony played over the loudspeakers - it was Saturday night and Mozart has been found to sooth the violence of the drunkards and drug-addicts passing through the turnstiles. It is profoundly reassuring to me that in Australia even the most vulgar can find some useful end satisfied by Mozart.

But in combination with Chekhov the music of Mozart produced a sort of exalted absent-mindedness, a condition which reminds me of nothing so much as the ecstatic fugue preceding an epileptic fit so amazingly evoked by Dostoyevsky in the Idiot - the clear mild euphoria that precedes the aesthetic experience, subtle and pure like life-giving water, the original mind of zen in which insight becomes if not possible then potential.

I don't remember getting on the train. As the train streamed express to Goodwood through the downpour and darkness I finished the story and closed the book and looked around.

Where I am? I wondered. Had the train stopped already? Had I passed my home station? For all I knew at that moment, the train had been moving forever in accordance with the fixed stars.

The next day I tracked down Chekhov's literary child and grand-child in the University library. I could not hold back my eagerness. I read Babel's 'Crossing Into Poland'. I read Cheever's 'Goodbye, My Brother'. A cloud of mozartian grandeur spilled over from divine zimzum, chilled me into reverent silence.That day I got two Cheever books secondhand. It was a day before I spoke about it.

Yesterday to Dan then I showed him Babel's 'Crossing Into Poland'. I asked him to read it, then I explained the aesthetics of trauma - that is, how profound shock in literature will alienate the reader unless it is couched in a kind of ecstatic lyricism. Then we examined the words themselves of the opening two pars. I asked him to listen while I picked out the violent words from the apparently innocent description of the Polish landscape.

"Stop," he said. "It's positively morbid."

Dan's comment was a relief to me. Thank goodness somebody else could see it. I suppose I wanted to reality test the words to make sure the effect was in them and not simply in my imagination alone.

As we went out to dinner I popped into the secondhand bookstore and discovered the very rare Morison translation of Babel's Collected Stories, for only eight dollars. What a treasure!

I feel so blessed.

Taosim and Quantum Physics in Plato’s Timaeus

In my last post I blogged about the Platonic version of the Tao. Here then are two versions of the same passage that are subtly different, representing for me the yang and yin, the hard and the soft, of Plato's classicism.

Here is the particular Jowett 1871 translation, which captures all the logic and none of the theurgy:

First then, in my judgment, we must make a distinction and ask, What is that which always is and has no becoming; and what is that which is always becoming and never is? That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is. Now everything that becomes or is created must of necessity be created by some cause, for without a cause nothing can be created. The work of the creator, whenever he looks to the unchangeable and fashions the form and nature of his work after an unchangeable pattern, must necessarily be made fair and perfect; but when he looks to the created only, and uses a created pattern, it is not fair or perfect.

And here is the version I examined in the previous entry, the wave-like, lucid and poetic 1965 translation of Desmond Lee:

We must in my opinion begin by distinguishing between that which always is and never becomes from that which is always becoming and never is. The one is apprehensible by intelligence with the aid of reasoning, being eternally the same, the other is the object of opinion and irrational sensation, coming to be and ceasing to be, but never fully real. In addition, everything that becomes or changes must do so owning to some cause; for nothing can come to be without a cause. Whenever, therefore, the maker of anything keeps his eye on the eternally unchanging and uses it as his pattern for the form and function of his product the result must be good; whenever he looks to something that come to be and uses a model that has come to be, the result is not good.

On the Timaeus of Plato

I love how Plato uses multiple frames of introductory ideas in his work.

The Timaeus is framed first by the fanciful gossip of Solon’s story of Atlantis, and second by the superb verbal-magical invocation of Timaeus himself, which is what I wish to quote here (segment three: prelude). Plato’s third frame in the Timaeus, introducing chance and free-will, alters this second frame significantly and is the subject for another post.

So here is the second frame, Timaeus’ invocation of the creation of the cosmos:

“We must in my opinion begin by distinguishing between that which always is and never becomes from that whichis always becoming and never is.”

This is the basis for the physical world for Timaeus, for the macrocosm. But it is important to note that Timaeus is coming out with substantially the same idea as Lao Tze, on the other side of Eurasia at roughly the same period. He here invokes the Tao with these words and those to come. Timaeus, fully aware that speech is a magical act, prefaces this quoted statement with an invocation both to the gods and to his own powers – that is, he wisely invokes the macrocosm and the microcosm before beginning to talk of first and last things.

“The one is apprehensible by intelligence with the aid of reasoning, being eternally the same, the other is the object of opinion and irrational sensation, coming to be and ceasing to be, but never fully real.”

This is a startling description of the quality of Yang and Yin, or Shiva and Shakti. The most modern concept of this is the particular and the wave. The wave is potential particulars, or a conceptual carrier for particulars, or in some way a not-quite-real concept which fills in all the explanatory gaps which the particle concept does not.

But Timaeus goes further, describing the subjective response to these macrocosmic forces. The basis of physical reality is implied to be the source of subjective activity: that is to say, our (microcosmic) awareness of changeless evokes reason and intellect, and the awareness of the always-changing evokes opinion, obscurity, sensation and irrationality. Thus the perrenial wisdom of getting our focus of changeable things, and putting attention of the changeless: by focusing on the changeless we submerge into quiescience our irrational and sensational qualities. The process of self-enquiry suggested by Ramana Maharshi recommends that as the classical direct path to truth.


But listen to what Timaeus says next:

“In addition, everything that becomes or changes must do so owning to some cause; for nothing can come to be without a cause.”

We can infer then that the unchanging, reasonable, and intellectual is self-caused or uncaused, arising from its own nature directly.

What follows next is THE key statement of classical thinking:

“Whenever, therefore, the maker of anything keeps his eye on the eternally unchanging and uses it as his pattern for the form and function of his product the result must be good; whenever he looks to something that come to be and uses a model that has come to be, the result is not good.”

If that sentence doesn’t move you then how do you know you are still alive?

In one sentence Timaeus transmits the essence of classicism as method and means to the creation of art. The esoteric meaning of what Timaeus is saying is that the creation of a thing along classical lines is a recreation of the cosmos, and at the same time an emotional and energetic participation in the original creation. Each and every creative act invokes God into the person of the creator. Creative work is theurgy, and creation brings the reason into alignment with the Reason of the cosmos.

Think about that one for a while!

The Top Top Ten List

THE TOP TOP TEN LIST

1. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy.
2. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.
3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
6. Hamlet by William Shakespeare.
7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
8. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.
9. The stories of Anton Chekhov.
10. Middlemarch by George Eliot.

I have tried to read all of these. I found these four hard going and retreated to try another day: Madame Bovary, Middlemarch, Chekhov. I am in the process of reading the Proust, obviously enough.

Which ones haven't you read yet?

This list comes from a wonderful and amusing book which asks hundreds of writers to list their top ten books, then counted recommendations as if they were votes to create the above list.

What is most striking but not at all apparent about the top top ten list is that they are all canonical classic works. The reason a classic is a classic is because it is universally recognised as being excellent, not simply because of the social conditions or such rubbish. This list re-validates the reality of the core of classic Wetern civilization.