Melville and Powell?

In chapter 3 of Moby-Dick, Melville describes the painting hanging in the Spouter-Inn as "...a Hyperborean winter scene.—It's the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time." There is a clear resemblance here to the last paragraphs of A Dance to the Music of Time--I am inclined to take this more seriously because the Melville quote was in response to a painting which might well have betokened Powell's interest. I think I recall a copy of Moby-Dick being on the Chantry shelves. 

My Trollope society lecture on the 21st

Trollope Society Annual Winter Reception
Thursday February 21st, 2013
The Grolier Club
47 East 60th Street
New York, NY 10022
La Vendée: Trollope’s Early Novel of Counterrevolution and Reform
Speaker: Nicholas Birns, New School
Prof. Birns teaches courses in the history of the novel and related literature
in both the United States and Britain as well as on literary criticism and theory.
“I believe thinking about literature is a critical enterprise that calls
 upon our deepest intellectual reflection and discernment”
Drinks: 6:30     Talk: 7:00
$20  ($10 students or faculty)

RSVP: Midge Fitzgerald
trollopesocietynewyork@gmail.com
6 Pier Pointe, New Bern NC 28562
212-683-4023

Ambassador Barzun and multi-generation intellectuals

The news that former Ambassador to Sweden Matthew Barzun is likely to be appointed the next Ambassador to the UK by President Obama inspired various thoughts. Barzun is well-known as the grandson of the late Jacques Barzun, a distinguished (and long-lived) scholar and intellectual who, though not exactly aligned with me on many polemical issues, nonetheless was an exemplary homme de lettres. His grandson had a successful career in the tech industry before receiving his first diplomatic appointment. As admirable as that is, this stirred a soupçon of regret in me that Matthew had not gone into his grandfather's business. I thought of multi-generational baseball families like the Boones or the Hairstons; why can't there be multi-generation intellectual families? Wouldn't it be great if Matthew had written books in some way in a lineage with his grandfather? There are many families--like my own--where the child goes into academia as his/her parents had--but I cannot think of a single three-generation academic family. Maybe in the sciences...

Part of this, of course, is because academia, even at its most lucrative and rewarding, pays so little. My parents were able to enter academia, and to live lives as, respectively, a bohemian artist and a left-wing activist, because their parents had, for their time, a good deal of money, and this is indeed the sine qua non for many bohemian artists and left-wing activists. Equally, if your parents are such, the asceticism contingent on even the most laureled intellectual's life is no doubt seen as confining, and you want to go into business, make some serious money. One can see one generation sacrificing this urge, but less likely two...

In any event I wish Ambassador Barzun well on his likely next appointment, to the Court of St. James. 

The New York Society Library

My blog post on this wonderful library. 

Bain or McBane?

Here is my take on the Presidential election--I think the phenomenon of people not voting their class interests, talked about in detail in Thomas Frank's What's The Matter With Kansas (and then parodied by people who pointed out, correctly, that millionaires on the Upper West Side also did not vote their class interests, has faded. Among people I talk to in New York, people in some way among the cognoscenti or the intellectual class, there has been a huge shift to Romney. In other words, people who one suspected of talking a left-wing game because it was socially au fait in new York while living their life in a much more, as it were, right wing way are now being fairly open about realigning their actual lifestyles and express political principles. And I think that, on the other hand, the sort of working-class whites who were the core of Hillary's support in 2008 and were at the most only reluctantly persuaded to vote for Obama are now much more firmly and enthusiastically in the Obama camp. That so much of the working class is now Latino has accelerated this renewed bonding with the Democrats, but just as I have seen some upper-crust demi-leftists shift to Romney, so I have seen those who perceive themselves as working stiffs lean towards Obama.  Whatever else the President has or has not achieved, he has made the Democratic Party the party, once again, of those who it ostensibly stands for. Whether this will be politically beneficial to him, we will see (I suspect, and hope, it will) but it is a clear break from the paradigm of the past thirty-forty years.

I have just been teaching Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, where it is the old white of a fading patrician family. Mr. Delamere, who is the only Southern white to see the good points of an African American, whereas the worst offender in this regard is the non-elite Captain McBane. This was a common pattern--it was often the patrician whites who were the least racist, whereas the working-class whites, seeing people of color as potential rivals, were all the more fierce. I wonder if this historic pattern is changing, that the days of the benign if perhaps slightly hypocritical aristocratic white are over, and if in consequence there just might be genuine solidarity among the middle class,, and working class, of both races. If so it will take another fifty years to jell. But in this election Obama might well lose some of the votes from the better-off he won last time, and you perhaps are seeing that in the diminution of his lead in Connecticut as compared to last time, and so on.

Szentkuthy's Marginalia on Casanova

Today, ambition lacks nuance. Perhaps influenced by Americanization, world literary discourse traffics in gross superlatives, announces the next big thing, the cathartic breakthrough, in a declarative way that, as Paul de Man warned us in “Literary History and Literary Modernity, violates the way any true sense of innovation must exist in tense dialogue with the tradition it steps beyond. 

Even when rediscovering works from the past, there is often a frenetic, insistent quality on the greatness of these works, that they will alter the canon, that just as, fifteen years or so ago, it was proposed that Lake Champlain be considered the sixth Great Lake, so Proust, Joyce, Musil, Faulkner, Woolf will have to welcome somebody else to the club. This language, seeming to speak in the tones of aesthetics and culture, is merely hype and marketing veiled with a velvet glove. 

So I want to avoid this kind of hype when talking about the publication by Contra Mundum Press of Tim Wilkinson’s translation of the first volume of Miklós Szentkuthy’s  St. Orpheus Breviary, Marginalia on Casanova. But I think this is truly a seminal work, both because of the breadth of its range and the nuance and slyness whitch which it traverses this breadth. Szentkuthy reminds us that to be intellectually omnivorous is a wasted asset without a sense of irony; he is, in a sense, Arnold Toynbee as written by Henry James. He writes of the rise and fall of civilizations as if they were extended drawing-room conversations—that is to say in what James would consider a civilized way. Szentkuthy will unquestionably enter and alter the canon of twentieth-century literature as we know it. 

Szentkuthy--often known by his fans as SzM, bearing in mind that, as in Japanese, in Hungarian the last name precedes the first and his name was in fact Szentkuthy Miklós--was one of the youngest of the successive generations of Hungarian modernists that flourished between the wars. This period was no utopia—no one would confuse the regime of Admiral Miklós Horthy with anything resembling democracy or tolerance—but it was a time of true independence for Hungary, no longer in the uneasy condominium with Austria as it had been in the prewar years and infinitely more benign than the nearly half century of rigid Communist control that succeeded the second war and also was laden with the trauma of the Holocaust and its aftermath, which, as chronicled in the works of writers such as Imre Kertész, nearly annihilated and irretrievably dispersed the once-vibrant Hungarian Jewish community. In this era, Hungarian writers were genuinely modernist, much as was the case in Czechoslovakia—fully conversant with the Western European avant-garde and perhaps even exceeding them in self-conscious experimentation. In a sense, that the best-known cultural figures of this era from Hungary are composers like Bartók or Kodály who, albeit in a very intellectual way, used folk-motifs in their music. Although some Hungarian writers like Gyula Illyés were roughly analogous in their refracted populism, there were also figures like Szentkuthy who were rigorously intellectual, and highbrow even to the point of, as in the manner of Wallace Stevens, risking dandyism.  In his lifetime, Szentkuthy was best known for his 1934 Prae, still perhaps one of the most experimental works in the century, described by Zéno Bianu, in his introduction to the Contra Mundum edition, as a “completely fragmented narrative.” St. Orpheus Breviary was Szentkuthy’s epic riposte to this initial deconstruction, but as with all the truly worthwhile writers these epic assertions were questioned, called into doubt by Szentkuthy’s cognitive astute clowning, his deliberate refusal of his text’s overwhelming aspirations. Another factor came in here, though: Communism, whose iron grip prevented Szentkuthy from pursuing, or at least publishing, a work so obviously aesthetic and inutile in any banal sense. After doing five volumes of the Breviary in quick sequence, Szektkuthy paused. Instead, Szentkuthy wrote what seemed to be novelistic biographies, mainly of composers, but also of writers and artists. It is interesting that this was also the recourse of the Russian Formalist critic Boris Eikhenbaum who presumably under Stalinist pressure renounced his linguistically provocative aesthetics and turned to a traditional biographical project on Tolstoy. Communism on the one hand would seem an unlikely correlate for the biographer, with its denial of individual agency in favor of the mass. But Eikhenbaum and Szentkuthy both turned to the form in order to delude and thwart their censors. Is there something Communist about biography?

The lead persona of the Breviary, St. Orpheus, (who presumably emerges more in the subsequent volumes)  is so obviously a non-traditional object of biography—a phantom, a composite, an untenable hybrid of classicism and Christianity, hagiography and sensual song. The fact that St. Orpheus is a concept as much as a person makes the Breviary different from the other twentieth century examples of the roman fleuve with which it might be compared—Proust,  Robert Musil, Anthony Powell (who was also interested in Casanova, Venice, and voyeurism). All of these,  despite their intense intellectuality, tell the life story of one person. Szentkuthy’s more essayistic approach uses different eras and motifs to illustrate fundamental, constitutive tensions in his work and in European identity—between classicism and Christianity, between Eastern and Western, European and Asian identities, between narcissism and altruism,  Enlightenment and romanticism, between a civilization and a barbarism that not only, as Walter Benjamin intuited, potentially co-author documents but also share virtues and flaws alike.

The entire series does not focus on Casanova; only this first volume. As such, it is difficult to tell the reader just what they might be getting. Casanova is associated with sexuality, with promiscuity, even if in a very intellectual mode. But this book is not at all titillating or prurient. Indeed, Szentkuthy’s intellectual is, as a Venetian, somewhat like Mann’s Gustav von Aschenbach without the sex; a dilettante speculating on himself. And yet, we miss a huge part of this book if we do not realize that, even if Casanova puts the experience of sexuality several levels away from his persona, it is always there, always a reservoir underneath or noumenon above, the persona’s garrulous musings. He is (91) "life, not literature”. He is just out of touch with reality. He is "aware of the essence of love” but does not exemplify or embody it. He is “vegetative instinct” and “curious about variants in female personality", a curiosity as probing, inquisitive, as it is merely voyeuristic. Poised liminally between instinct and intellect, in Venice Casanova is also poised between land and sea, continent and island. Rome and Byzantium. (”'Venice in Byzantium’, that is as colorful a tautology as Venice in Venice”, 166). If to stand between pure sensuality and pure intellect is “the unluckiest spot in the world” (252), especially in a twentieth century that insists on annihilating all such independent stances that defy its insensate intellectual currents—it is at the very least a productive one for author, character and reader.

In this handsomely produced edition, the odd numbers are on the left side, the even-numbered pages on the right. The book begins with zero, as if to say, in the spirit of de Man, every beginning must try to be a new beginning even if it knows it ultimately cannot, that encrusted expectations must be jettisoned with each new read.  Without zero, nothing can exist. This can stand for how genuinely innovative—without, again, merely participating in the rhetoric of the large,  the ambitious, or even the revived classic—that this remarkable book is, and will be again and again on the many rereadings it merits. 

Eastwood series

Given his recent prominence at the Republican convention, I should mention I am doing a three-part series on the films of Clint Eastwood at Grace Church, 802 Broadway, starting at 6:30 PM on September 13, 20, 27. The movies to be shown and then discussed afterwards are, in order, Pale Rider, Unforgiven, and Gran Torino. We will talk about them in terms of faith, spirituality, American identity (and deconstructions thereof) and gender issues. Famed legal and feminist scholar Drucilla Cornell will be joining me for at least one of the discussions (on the 27th). Admission is $10 and includes wine and popcorn.