Quare Me Repulisti, et Quare Tristis Incedo

If you’re looking for the first American masterpiece of the Modernist era, look no further than Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 short-story collection (really a loose novel more than anything), Winesburg, Ohio. A mentor to both Hemingway and Faulkner, Anderson manages to maintain a connection to the realist traditions of the preceding decades and bring them into the Modernist world, breaking his characters down into the “grotesques” he uses to make a philosophical point but never allowing them to lose their efficacy as human beings. Winesburg manages to do something that most of the fiction of the era can’t—which is to say that it’s both interesting and moving.

And the most moving story in the collection is the first (or second, depending on whether you count the anecdote about the writer and the carpenter before the title page. The story is titled “Hands” and deals with a strawberry picker with the improbable name of Wing Biddlebaum. Wing serves as Anderson’s depiction of the otherwise unremarkable man with an incredible and uncontrollable power, one that separates him from those around him and leads him to a life of utter loneliness.

Wing Biddlebaum, at the beginning of his story, is one of the clearest images of alienation in American literature. We see this from the opening paragraph, in which he stands “Upon the half decayed veranda” and looks “Across a long field that had been seeded for clover but that had produced only a dense crop of yellow mustard weeds” at a group of children whom he longs to embrace but cannot. This field is an image of broken dreams, the broken dreams that separate him from the rest of the town.

Indeed, Anderson tells us outright that “forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts, [he] did not think of himself as in any way a part of the life of the town where he had lived for twenty years.” The townsfolk don’t hate or mock him—rather, they are amazed at his ability to harvest strawberries and are “proud of the hands of Wing Biddlebaum in the same spirit in which [they are] proud of Banker White’s new stone house and Wesley Moyer’s bay stallion, Tony Tip, that had won the two-fifteen trot at the fall races in Cleveland.” He is an object among objects—or at the very best an animal, but never a human being.

He is an outsider, nearly purely alienated—except for his relationship with a teenager named George Willard, which allows him to “lo[se] something of his timidity, and his shadowy personality, submerged in a sea of doubts, came forth to look at the world.” In other words, he becomes human through this act of communion. When he touches George Willard and sends him away in horror, the town has lost its last opportunity to learn Wing’s story.

We get it, though. Wing was once named Adolph Myers, a Pennsylvania schoolteacher who had a peculiar sort of religious power which manifested itself chiefly through his hands: “By the caress that was in his fingers he expressed himself. He was one of those men in whom the force that creates life is diffused, not centralized. Under the caress of his hands doubt and disbelief went out of the minds of the boys and they began also to dream.” He is a priest, mostly unconsciously, who can heal people by merely touching them.

The predictable happens, however, and Wing is accused of child molestation, at which point “Hidden, shadowy doubts that had been in men’s minds concerning Adolph Myers were galvanized into beliefs.” He has been made into a grotesque by the truths of others—not even by adopting his own truth. (I should note here that Sherwood’s big philosophical theme in the novel is that the process of accepting a truth as one’s own converts one into something less than human and makes that truth into a “falsehood.”) Once he flees Pennsylvania for Winesburg, he can no longer trust his religious power: “Although he did not understand what had happened he felt that the hands must be to blame.”

And yet, and yet. Wing cannot control the power that lives in his hands. It is for this reason that he isolates himself from the other Winesburgians, for this reason that he warns George Willard that “You are destroying yourself . . . You have the inclination to be alone and to dream and you are afraid of dreams. You want to be like others in this town here. You hear them talk and you try to imitate them.” Unlike George, Wing cannot imitate them—his hands are uncontrollable, and the end of the story finds him enacting religious rituals alone and unconsciously:

A few stray white bread crumbs lay on the cleanly washed floor by the table; putting the lamp upon a low stool he began to pick up the crumbs, carrying them to his mouth one by one with unbelievable rapidity. In the dense blotch of light beneath the table, the kneeling figure looked like a priest engaged in some service of his church. The nervous expressive fingers, flashing in and out of the light, might well have been mistaken for the fingers of the devotee going swiftly through decade after decade of his rosary.

The message is clear: The sort of religious power Wing Biddlebaum/Adolph Myers possesses can only be misunderstood by the society in which priests must live, but they cannot get rid of it, it being a curse as much as a blessing. The only solution is to retreat behind a dusty field of broken dreams and sever the human connections one so sorely needs. The dispensation of grace comes only rarely and at great personal cost. Such is the role of the undogmatic priest in a world hungry for doctrine—he can communicate only subconsciously, an action which will always be viewed suspiciously by outsiders.

Someone must have written about Anderson’s influence on John Updike—the description I’ve given of Wing Biddlebaum in this post echoes Updike’s portrayal of Harry Angstrom, particularly in Rabbit, Run. (Updike’s essay for the New Yorker, “Twisted Apples” serves as the introduction to the Modern Library edition of Winesburg, Ohio.) The difference, of course, is that Rabbit is instinctively loved by most of the people in his society, even as his religious impulses destroy lives. This must say something about the difference between 1919 and 1959—but I’m not ready to tease that out yet.

Femme-Tropy

I’ve liked Ernest Hemingway’s work ever since 10th grade, where I first encountered A Farewell to Arms and lost myself in its quiet horror. My affection for that novel, however, never really translated into full-scale obsession the way it did, at the time, for T.S. Eliot or William Blake; more than a decade later, I haven’t read much more of Hemingway than I had at the time, and the one time I did read The Sun Also Rises, I did it in three hours one cold Sunday morning—and I didn’t pay much attention to it.

I’m reading Sun again for my comprehensive exams, which of course forces me to slow down and pay more attention this time, and as I go through it I remember the things I liked about Hemingway in high school and the things I learned that I should probably hate about him—the ridiculous “hard-boiled-ness” of his protagonists, for example, wears thin after awhile for any reader who’s safely made it through puberty.

(Funny story: I had to reread A Farewell to Arms for a class in college. I’d just seen the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There, a pastiche of film noir and existentialism, and I couldn’t make it through Hemingway’s novel without cracking up, imagining Frederic Henry’s monosyllabic responses coming from Billy Bob Thornton’s laconic barber. Okay, I guess that story's not that funny, but it makes me laugh, anyway.)

Probably the first thing you learn in any classroom scenario critical of Hemingway’s work is the feminist objection to him. There’s a group of scholars now who are desperately trying to “reclaim” A Farewell to Arms, saying that Catherine Barkley is a strong character and perhaps even some sort of role model. These people are insane. Hemingway seems incapable of writing a female character with any kind of depth or verisimilitude to her; women are, for him, either mannish sexual aggressors or submissive and docile objects of masculine sexual aggression.

But that’s not even the biggest problem with Hemingway’s portrayal of women. A long passage from The Sun Also Rises demonstrates:

Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a basis of friendship. I had been having Brett for a friend. I had not been thinking about her side of it. I had been getting something from nothing. That only delayed the presentation of the bill. The bill always came. That was one of the swell things you could count on.

I thought I had paid for everything. Not like the woman pays and pays and pays. No idea of retribution or punishment. Just exchange of values. You gave up something and got something else. Or you worked for something. You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time. Either you paid by learning about them, or by experience, or by taking chances, or by money. Enjoying living was learning to get your money’s worth and knowing when you had it. You could get your money’s worth.

Obviously, masculinity’s a big deal for Hemingway. His protagonists may be cerebral and literate, but they always have a connection to the body; they’re always fishing or boxing or bull-fighting. Masculinity—even mere male-ness—is a restorative condition in Hemingway’s work. Feeling down? Play tennis for four hours, and you’ll get your soul back.

Accordingly, male-to-male (or “homosocial,” to use Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s famous term for it) relationships are generally positive in his fiction. Think of the male relationships in Hemingway’s novels—think of how much more vivid, for example, Frederic Henry’s relationship with Rinaldo is than his romance with Catherine. Men are able to achieve Heideggerian being-with-one-another only with other men—the entrance of women into the equation creates an economy of relationships in which no one gets anything for free and in which even gifts have huge and heavy strings attached to them.

Furthermore, women move homosocial relationships from the realm of the being-with-one-another into the realm of the being-against-one-another. Jake and Robert Cohn, for example, have their falling-out over their conflicting relationships with Brett. Women, in Hemingway’s novels, are poisonous and contagious, infecting everything and everyone they touch. And yet they’re unavoidable; even Jake Barnes, who’s unable even to have a sexual relationship, can’t stay away from Brett Ashley.

Hemingway’s feminist critics are right, in other words. The problem with his novels from a gender standpoint is not that he doesn’t know how to write a believable woman without making her into a man; it’s that his women are, to paraphrase the Hollies, King Midases in reverse, destroying everything they touch.

Not that Hemingway was alone in this, of course—The Great Gatsby’s Daisy Buchanan, for example, seems to exist mostly as a way to take Nick's model of masculinity away from him. Nor is he a mere product of his time, one that we can look back on in innocent disgust, as Judd Apatow’s “bro-romance” comedies demonstrate. (Seth Rogan’s friendship with Paul Rudd in Knocked Up is far more compelling than his sexual relationship with Katherine Heigl.)

I’ve written about the kinks in male-female relationships elsewhere, and I wonder to what extent those who take Genesis 1-3 seriously as mythology can blame this phenomenon on the Fall. Male-female relationships are obviously more complicated than male-male or female-female relationships, since there’s an entirely new brain system to deal with in the latter.

As I (jokingly) tell my wife, I don’t read women authors, so I’m wondering if we see a similar structure in fiction by women. Are men mere agents of entropy and destruction? I’m not sure, but I suspect not: Women are for the most part capable of greater nuance and complication than are men, a product of the superiority of the X chromosome to the small and decaying Y.

This went a long way off track from The Sun Also Rises, but you’ll have to forgive me—I haven’t written one of these in quite some time.

The Fire Next Time

Most of the time, William Faulkner’s characters don’t ring true; they feel for the most part less like real human beings existing in an actual world than like elaborate metaphors existing in a world of elaborate metaphors. There are a few exceptions, of course; Quentin Compson, for example, comes off as a real person despite or perhaps because of his total lack of a stable identity, as do most of his cohorts in 1936’s Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner’s finest novel.

Absalom deals with the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a self-made demon of a man who comes storming into Jefferson, Mississippi, in the middle of the 19th century, destroying lives left and right and eventually losing his own to the grandfather of the 15-year-old girl he’s impregnated. It’s a vision of the collapse of the South, depending on who you ask, even though Quentin memorably denies such a reading at the end of the novel.

Among all the Shakespearean drama of the Sutpen clan, however, it’s easy to lose track of the man who brings it all to an end, the indigent squatter Wash Jones. To get the whole story on him, you have to turn to the fifteen-page story “Wash.” I’ve read only a few of Faulkner’s short stories—the big ones mostly, “A Rose for Emily” and “Barn Burning” and “Dry September” and “Red Leaves” and “Mountain Victory”—but I’m not sure how he could top this one. It’s a beautiful and heartbreaking character study, exactly the type of thing you don’t expect from an aloof Modernist like Faulkner.

I was surprised to discover that the story was published before Absalom, Absalom!, in 1934. It seems like such a clear attempt to vindicate an unattractive and relatively minor character from the novel that I assumed it must have come later. Its chronological position has the effect of casting all of Absalom into doubt; it makes that novel the story of Wash Jones instead of Thomas Sutpen. That’s just as well—in his way, Wash is a far more interesting character than Sutpen, or at least more human. If Sutpen is the devil, as he’s repeatedly called in the novel, Wash is the herd of pigs he possesses and runs off a cliff.

Faulkner here presents Wash as the dregs of the earth, a man who lives in the abandoned fishing camp that Sutpen “wouldn’t let none of” his slaves live in. But at the same time, “the fact remained that the two of them would spend whole afternoons in the scuppernong arbor, Sutpen in the hammock and Wash squatting against a post, a pail of cistern water between them, taking drink for drink from the same demijohn.” If you read the story through the lens of the novel, it’s easy to read this statement as an indication of Sutpen’s decline—if you take the story on its own terms, it seems more a portrait of Wash’s ascent.

But even as he ascends, Sutpen keeps him in his place. He makes Wash lean against a post while he lays in the hammock, and he treats him as a sort of caretaker—or perhaps even as a dog:

Then it would become dark, and after a while he would lie down on the floor beside the bed, though not to sleep, because after a time—sometimes before midnight—the man on the bed would stir and groan and then speak. “Wash?”
“Hyer I am, Kernel. You go back to sleep. We ain’t whupped yit, air we? Me and you kin do hit.”

So Wash, fiercely loyal and heartbreakingly alone, is a much more sympathetic character here than the novel, even if he has a racist personal revelation or two. (“The Bible told him” that blacks “had been created and cursed by God to be brute and vassal to all men of white skin.”) He has a vague sense that the world is corrupt, not as it should be, that in fact “all men were created in the image of God and hence all men made the same image in God’s eyes at least” and that he should not be left in his own squalor in the fish camp.

Public opinion—and probably my own before I read this story—holds that Wash kills Sutpen because “He thought he had Kernel where he would have to marry the gal [Milly] or pay up. And Kernel refused.” But public opinion, as throughout Absalom, proves wrong. Wash kills Sutpen out of a real sense of justice, of getting what is owed not to him but to his defenseless granddaughter, to whom Sutpen said for no good reason, “too bad you’re not a mare. Then I could give you a decent stall in the stable.” That, as you might imagine, don’t fly.

After he kills Sutpen, however, his vague sense of the world’s injustice flowers into a crushing darkness. He hears the police approach and considers running:

It seemed to him that he had no more to run from than he had to run to. If he ran, he would merely be fleeing one set of bragging and evil shadows for another just like them, since they were all of a kind throughout all the earth which he knew, and he was old, too old to flee far even if he were to flee. He could never escape them, no matter how much or how far he ran: a man going on sixty could not run that far. Not far enough to escape beyond the boundaries of earth where such men lived, set the order and the rule of living.

And so Wash becomes a broken and defeated Cain. He kills the closest thing he's ever had to a friend, perhaps for better reasons than those for which Cain killed his brother—at least it was for the sake of someone else rather than out of pure selfishness and jealousy—but there’s no God in the story to give him a mark of protection, no one to look out for him; there’s only the cold, dark world of injustice, and he knows that he will never get a fair hearing, never get what’s coming to him.

Wash is left with what I suppose he sees as a Sophie’s choice (many readers would disagree): he can either go to prison, likely living better than he did on the fish camp but leaving Milly and her child to fend for themselves in the cruel world that planted them on Sutpen’s Hundred; or he can put a stop to the injustice by destroying the oppressed. And in the story’s horrifying final scene, he opts for the latter, setting the building on fire and leaving his granddaughter to burn to death inside, and throwing his body toward the police swinging the same scythe he’d used to kill the man with whom he used to share pails of whiskey.

I suspect Faulkner gave Wash his name because of its connotations with moonshining—wash is the liquid produced by the fermentation process, something not quite water and not quite whiskey. But the word also carries an obvious cleansing echo, and that echo rings and rings through the final paragraphs of the story bearing his name. Jones, who probably never had a proper bath, attempts to cleanse the world of its evil taint the only way he can think to do so, by a fire reminiscent of the one the Bible no doubt told him would destroy the world.

And something else interesting happens at the end. Wash knows that public opinion about him has already formed and has no hope whatsoever of reforming; he knows when he kills himself and his family that he will go down in the annals of Jefferson history as violent white trash and nothing else. But Faulkner uses the story bearing his name to turn public opinion on its head. Were Jefferson a real place, even it would have forgotten by 2009 the desperate deeds done just outside of town 140 years ago—but Faulkner has put Wash’s version of the story down for the ages, finally providing the justice he never received during his own fictional lifetime.

Nothing More Than the Traveling Hands of Time

V. and I went on Friday night to see the UGA Theater production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, a play I loved in high school but have not really looked at since I read it for my master's comps in 2005. It's an odd play, in that you remember it as Main Street U.S.A. when it's actually The Sound and the Fury. I remembered it as sweet and a little corny--a traditional play if there ever was one--but that's a great disservice. It was as Modernist as anything Eliot or Faulkner or Joyce ever wrote, what with the whole "Stage Manager" conceit breaking the fourth wall and stopping the play every 15 seconds to trot out another "expert." (Those experts, I suppose, are a bit like Eliot's footnotes to The Waste Land, obfuscating rather than elucidating the thing in itself.)

If you read my post on Meet the Robinsons, you probably picked up on my recent interest in time. The party line--repeated nearly ad nauseum in the brutal third act of Our Town--is that we should live in the moment, appreciate each second for what it is, let go of the past, and not fixate on the future, which is of course imaginary. This clashes with the Southern Agrarians I've been reading this semester. Andrew Lytle specifically condemns the Wilder system, calling the human results of it "momentary man":

that man who no longer has location, who is forever on his way, speeding from one inn to another, to the same bed that is not the same bed, to poor cuisines served in the same false ornament of supposedly foreign architecture.

Lytle demands allegiance to the past, and in fact, out of the twelve I'll Take My Stand guys, he's the only one who could have a reasonable claim of actually living in the past, living on a farm and whatnot.

And then there's Faulkner, whose The Sound and the Fury posits three systems. Quentin Compson, the world's most famous suicidal neurotic, can live only in the past, both personal (watching his sister get her underpants dirty) and corporate (the antebellum chivalric system he can't let go); his brother Jason lives in the future, and is a monster for it. Only Benjy Compson lives in the present--and he's an idiot man-child, certainly no role model.

Faulkner's solution is to present us with Dilsey, the Compsons' black servant. Dilsey receives the final section of the novel, and her chapter is marked by its third-person narrator and its more or less coherent voice. There's no wild shifting back and forth between present-day and thirty years previous in Dilsey's section--we see things as God must see them, from above them. And so Dilsey comes off stable, happy, dependable--three words no one would ever use to describe Quentin, Jason, or Benjy.

And so I submit that Faulkner wants us to follow Dilsey's lead. In a book about the way the past, present, and future conspire to destroy your mind, only Dilsey escapes. I'm sure you could blame that on Faulkner's racism if you wanted to--perhaps Dilsey escapes because she lacks the mental capabilities to analyze time. But I don't think so. He has a real and obvious affection for her, and he gives her section the weight of the novel's structure (it closes the whole ugly story) and its themes (she receives Easter Sunday and the resurrection that day implies).

And Dilsey's secret is that she's too busy to think about time at all. She works non-stop taking care of Benjy, Jason, and Miss Quentin Compson--not to mention her own children and grandchildren--and has no time for the type of poisonous self-reflection that wrecks the Compson family. She's no idiot, but she's no intellectual, which is to say that she lives neither and simultaneously in the past, present, and future.

Wilder might agree, whatever Emily Webb screams from her grave at the end of Our Town. After all, his play--whatever else it does--collapses and twists time. First it invents an era that may never have really existed (at least the way he portrays it); further, he does so in a blatantly nostalgic move, writing the play on the cusp of World War II and setting it before World War I. But then he destroys that era. Death is all around his characters, and the Stage Manager alerts us to the eventual deaths of the people we meet nearly as soon as we meet them. So past and future have been collapsed into an amorphous blob.

And as far as the present goes, Wilder subverts himself. If the important thing is for us to live in the present, then why present a nostalgized past? And why bother talking about material progress (which is going to make us look ahead, even when the progress takes place in the past--that's what the Carousel of Progress is all about)? No, the present is not as simple as Emily Webb wants it to be, and Wilder is well aware of it. The present is important but not distinct--Our Town makes the audience into Dilsey; it collapses and combines past, present, and future and hands it to us in a ball.

Do whatever you can with it.

The Hoax That Ate Itself

When T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land was first published in the October 1922 issue of The Criterion, it appeared without one of its most distinctive features: the author’s footnotes, which complicate and obfuscate--but only occasionally elucidate--the poem. Two months later, the poem was published in book form in the United States, this time with the footnotes attached. Eliot himself took a sly attitude toward the notes, saying famously in “The Frontiers of Criticism” that “I am, on one conspicuous occasion, not guiltless of having led critics into temptation”--a statement that suggests that the addendum to his most famous work is a type of scam or hoax.

Eliot's footnote scam was not without precedent. Edmund Spenser’s 1587 Shepheardes Calender features, amended to the main text, a series of introductions and footnotes by one “E.K.,” often considered to be a pseudonym for Spenser himself. E.K.’s gloss is inconsistent--sometimes it is insightful, sometimes ironic--but, as Theodore L. Steinberg points out, “the reader of the Calender can--and should--regard E.K.’s introductions and glosses as an integral part of the Calender, helping Spenser to develop his themes.”

As Steinberg points out, E.K. draws ironic attention toward Spenser’s ideas; when, for example, he disclaims the influence of John Skelton upon the name Colin Clout--an influence which Steinberg claims as “obvious"--the reader recognizes how far off the glosser must be and clings all the more strongly to Skeltonic influence. F.O. Matthiessen notes an additional motivation for the existence of E.K., Spenser’s “desire to have his poems rival the works of classical antiquity even to their appearance in a volume with annotations” by a third party, even if he had to invent that third party himself. The gloss on The Shepheardes Calender, therefore, ends up being ironic and fraudulent but still in the service of an important task.

Eliot was, of course, intimately acquainted with Spenser, as he appeared to be intimately acquainted with nearly every English poet. In his essay “What Is a Classic?” for example, he refers to “the genius of Spenser,” even if that genius seems to consist chiefly in preparing a way for John Milton. More to the point, Eliot quotes Spenser’s Prothalamion in line 176 of The Waste Land (“Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song”).

This awareness does not, of course, prove that Eliot was thinking specifically of the E.K. gloss when he was composing his notes for The Waste Land, but, in composing a semi-ironic commentary on his own text, The Shepheardes Calender must have at least crossed his mind. But that is not to say that he modeled his own footnotes on Spenser’s. Indeed, Matthiessen says that, since Eliot’s notes appear under his own name, they cannot be a cultivation of antiquity. Rather, Eliot’s notes “are simply a consequence of his desire to strip the form of his poem to its barest essentials in order to secure his concentrated effect.” In other words, the footnotes are an earnest attempt to nail down meaning, to direct readers to the sources for Eliot’s quotations and paraphrases.

Matthiessen’s explanation, however, ignores both Eliot’s wry sense of humor and the circumstances surrounding the creation of the notes. As Russell Elliott Murphy describes it, the monograph of The Waste Land would have had to include sixteen blank pages, due to the peculiarities of printing processes. So “Eliot was prevailed upon to provide some additional poetry to complete the volume. He opted, however, to provide the notes instead.” He thus--to some extent, anyway--included the notes under duress.

However, Jo Ellen Green Kaiser suggests that this story is at best only partially true (and perhaps a complete fiction), that in fact “Eliot had the notes in mind before he began serious negotiations with his eventual publisher . . . and that he had finished composing them several months before the poem first appeared in The Dial.” If Kaiser is correct, then the footnotes move from the earnest interpretation aid suggested by Matthiessen into a joke or hoax that “deflect[s] the cultural crisis represented in the poem onto the act of reading, suggesting that the disorder seemingly so evident in the poem is in fact the fault of the reader.” The notes, then, are meant to suggest a concrete meaning--or at least a structural order--that does not, strictly speaking, exist in the poem.

At any rate, the footnotes have to some extent benefited readers over the years, beginning with the Modernist critical powerhouse Edmund Wilson, who had access to the notes before their printing. Kaiser reports that “Before reading the notes . . . Wilson found the structurally fragmented poem representative of the ‘chaotic, irregular, fragmentary’ experiences that Eliot . . . had used to describe the ‘disassociated’ modern mind.”

But in a September 1922 letter to John Peale Bishop, Wilson says,

I am much excited about Eliot’s The Waste Land, which I have just read . . . it is certainly his masterpiece so far. He supplements it with a set of notes almost as long as the poem itself, explaining the literary, historic, anthropological, metaphysical, and religious significances to be found in it; but the poem, as it appears to me from two or three cursory readings, is nothing more or less than a most distressingly moving account of Eliot’s own agonized state of mind during the years which preceded his nervous breakdown.

The footnotes to the poem thus allow Edmund Wilson--and the thousands of readers who followed in his wake once the notes were published with the monograph--to transform something disturbing and chaotic into something understandable, something with structure and meaning. Further, the notes--contra, perhaps, to Matthiessen--make the poem something historical, as opposed to the modernist whirlwind, unconnected with history—that “dissociated” sensibility Wilson initially detected in the poem.

All of this sounds very fine and good, as though the notes do exactly what Eliot intended for them to--that is, they make sense of a poem that is at times nonsensical. But Eliot himself disdained and dismissed the notes in his “The Frontiers of Criticism,” calling them a “remarkable exposition of bogus scholarship.” Eliot is penitent in this essay. “My notes stimulated the wrong kind of interest among the seekers of sources,” he says. “I regret having sent so many enquirers off on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail.”

Eliot’s disavowal and repudiation of the notes thus makes any definitive remark on them difficult if not impossible, particularly since he propagates the old story that they were included because the poem was too short, which Kaiser disproves. But we can, perhaps, suggest that the notes were intended more or less as a hoax, but that they were received earnestly. And even after Eliot’s disavowal of them--even after the hoax was revealed as a hoax--the vast majority of readers (Kaiser and a few others excepted) continued to read them as an earnest and helpful addition to the poem. Eliot’s hoax on his readers, by the end of his lifetime, had been turned around and warped until it was a hoax on the poet himself, who is now destined to be (in his opinion) misread, his readers conducting “bogus scholarship” based on “the wrong kind of interest.” In the end, the footnotes to The Waste Land may be at their best a cautionary tale to authors who wish to pull a fast one on their readers.

You've Been on This Shift Too Long

(You may have to live without part two of "The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet"; I'm not sure I'll ever get around to it.)

While doing research for a paper on R.E.M. and the New South a few years ago, I became interested in the relationship between the Old South, the New South, and the railroads, and reading Faulkner's third novel, Flags in the Dust (later edited and retitled Sartoris), has brought that concept back into my mind. Flags in the Dust, as you may have guessed, concerns the Sartoris clan, one of Faulkner's many Southern families who thrived before the war and is now dusty and rotting. John Sartoris, the paterfamalias, had a dream that the railroad would one day run through Jefferson, Mississippi, and bring a new prosperity to the area. It must have worked because his son runs a bank.

But prosperity and technology, as Faulkner fans know, are always double-edged swords. John Sartoris' dream does come true, but it comes more true than I suspect he'd hoped:

John Sartoris had once sat on this veranda and watched two trains emerge from the hills and traverse the valley into the hills again, with lights and smoke and bells and a noisy simulation of speed. But now his railway belonged to a syndicate and there were more than two trains on it, and they ran from Chicago to the Gulf, completing his dream, though John Sartoris himself slept these many years unawares.

That line to Chicago brings the accoutrements of modern life to Jefferson, it is true--and when the line goes into Alabama, it allows Birmingham (the birthplace of the modern South) to ship its coal and steel northward--but it also takes some piece of Mississippi back north, and when enough of these pieces are shipped away, Mississippi no longer exists the way it did for John and Bayard Sartoris. Such is modern life. I can't see a difference between I-85 in Georgia and I-95 in New Jersey--medians look the same the world over.

But let's not forget how important the railroad was for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Atlanta is the capitol of Georgia chiefly because it was a railroad hub during the 1850s and 1860s, and when General Sherman made his March to the Sea, his men were sure to pull up the rails. The railroads, then, so instrumental in the southern attempt to maintain an antebellum way of life, ended up killing off the Old South for good.

Of course, the railroad as an abstract idea was not long for this world, either, as R.E.M. makes clear in their classic single "Driver 8":

The walls are built up stone by stone
The fields, divided one by one
And the train conductor says, "Take a break, driver 8
Driver 8, take a break
We've been on this shift too long

And the train conductor says
"Take a break, driver 8
Driver 8, take a break
We can reach our destination
It's still a ways away"

I saw a treehouse on the outskirts of the farm
The power lines have floaters so the airplanes won't get snagged
The bells are ringing through the town again
The children look up
All they hear is sky-blue bells ringing

And the train conductor says
"Take a break, driver 8
Driver 8, take a break
We can reach our destination
It's still a ways away"

A way to shield the hated heat
A way to put myself to sleep
A way to shield the hated heat
A way to put myself, my children sleep

He piloted this song in a plane like that one
She is selling faith on the Go Tell Crusade
Locomotive 8
Southern Crescent
Hear the bells ring again
The field to weed is looking thin

And the train conductor says
"Take a break, driver 8
Driver 8, take a break
We can reach our destination
It's still a ways away"

"Driver 8" is obtuse in the way that only early R.E.M. can be, but it also marks the point at which Michael Stipe moved from the sheer poststructural nonsense of Murmur and Reckoning into a genuine attempt at storytelling and social commentary. The song makes a point that I've not heard any scholar make--the railroad is a tragic hero, paving the path for its own destruction.

The song opens with a vision of the industrializing New South of the Reconstruction, with buildings popping up and even rural areas gaining more modern farming techniques. Our hero is the noble engineer of Locomotive 8, who flies through the landscape at what seem like impossible speeds, noticing only brief and hazy images of the world around him. (Driver 8's speed accounts for the opacity of Stipe's lyrics, and presumably also for the singer's opaque delivery, best demonstrated in the hysterical Hootie and the Blowfish cover, in which Darius Rucker gets nearly half of the lyrics wrong.) The engineer has a goal in mind, presumably (given the images of progress around him) the emergence of the South as an economic powerhouse and as a modern region, and he flies toward this goal at breakneck speed.

The images become more modern in the second verse. The engineer sees high-rise apartments in major metropolitan areas (treehouses, as it were, on the outskirts of town) and electric power running through every stop on his route. He even sees, in the bridge, air-conditioning, "a way to shield the hated heat." (And if you've ever lived without central air in Georgia in the summer, you understand exactly what "a way to put myself to sleep" means.)

So in this college-radio single from 1985, we've got an antiquated image of speeding modernity, the engineer trying desperately to bring his homeland into the modern age. But the conductor knows better. "Take a break, Driver 8," he says. "We can reach our destination, but it's still a ways away." Perhaps he means that the future is decades away chronologically, or (more likely, in my opinion) he means that it's a world away spiritually, psychologically. The new world, the world that Driver 8 tries so hard to create, is of a wholly different character--it is the world so despised by Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and all the other Southern Agrarians. It is a world of airplanes, of country clubs and high finance, of a Charlotte that might as well be Boston. It is what I term the "New New South, and it is a place wholly inhospitable to the age of the locomotive. Driver 8, in helping to create this world, plants the seeds of his own destruction, and in this he is another figure of the Old South, which after all created the New South to stay alive and ended up dying.

I wonder, then, when the New New South (and the homogeneous superstructure around it in the rest of the country) will destroy itself and make way for whatever comes next (for good or for evil). I wonder, in fact, if the recent Wall Street collapse isn't evidence of that. And I wonder if the Old South laughed when the railroads died the way the Southern neo-Luddites I know are chuckling under their breath about AIG and Lehman Brothers.

Good morning, America. How are you?

Robinson Jeffers Takes Us All On

I hate the planet. Call me antinomian, but I've finally had it with society's recent shift toward self-righteous environmentalism, and when I heard the neologism "green collar"--meaning someone who works in the alternative energy business--I knew I'd had it. Of course, it was around this time that I was made to read Robinson Jeffers, environmentalist poet extraordinaire. To make matters worse, I had to read him for a close reading class, which means I had to read him over and over again until his words fall apart.

I don't like camping or hiking or sitting quietly under a tree in the woods or any other activity one might associate with environmentalists. All my positive feelings about so-called "nature" involve civilization, whether it's driving at night with the wind flying through my car windows or sitting on my back porch reading in the cool fall air. But I don't understand the people who risk their lives to save some tree or another, and I don't believe that Mother Earth is crying. I don't mind the Alaskan oil pipeline, and I'd love to build what the Athens hippie contingent has termed a "bioterror lab." (In reality, it's a nuclear power plant that could drastically lower our dependence on that foreign oil that's kind of a big deal right now.) I think that whatever members of the unwashed masses came up with the Davis Toad Tunnel need to be imprisoned.

And yet I like Jeffers. His poem "Salmon Fishing" has the potential to annoy me the way that most environmentalist writing does, but any disgust I might have felt is for the most part subsumed by the sheer beauty of his expression. He seems determined not to use any language of civilization, and the poem opens a scene freed of humanity:

The days shorten, the south blows wide for showers now,
The south wind shouts to the rivers,
The rivers open their mouths and the salt salmon
Race up into the freshet. (ll. 1-4)

Humanity does not encroach upon this scene--or at least Jeffers would have us believe that it doesn't--but the natural world still manages to choose and to perform actions. (Derrida, I suspect, would call all this into question--can a river have a mouth without having the word mouth?) And the scene is absent of humanity except for Jeffers' loud voice echoing through the canyon, describing it for us.

But I am not sure Jeffers' presence in a humanity-free world qualifies as contradiction in his mind. All through the poem, he sets himself up as an intermediary between humanity and nature, as a sort of environmental Christ. Thus, he includes images of suffering and of sacrifice:

In Christmas month against the smoulder and menace
Of a long angry sundown,
Red ash of the dark solstice, you see the anglers,
Pitiful, cruel, primeval,
Like the priests of the people who built Stonehenge. (ll. 5-9)

Jeffers somehow floats above this scene and inhabits the two sides of it. He feels nature's pain and is privy to its nonhuman activity, and yet he speaks human language--he translates, in fact, nature's illiterate groanings into human language.

The fishermen, meanwhile, are Druid priests at winter solstice, a mystical and holy time at Stonehenge. It's important that Jeffers doesn't hate humanity--his distaste for homo sapiens is tempered by his pity; he sounds like the Christ of "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." This sacrifice of the salmon may or may not be necessary, but it allows the fishermen to lose their humanity (a good thing here) and to become "primeval," like the rest of the scene.

After all, Jeffers was not, as far as I can tell, a vegetarian. Humans have to eat, and if the anglers weren't standing in the stream pulling the salmon out of it, brown bears would almost certainly be there in their place--and no one blames them. My first reading of "Salmon Fishing" demonized the fishermen, cruelly pulling innocent fish out of their homes, but Jeffers' language suggests I was wrong; he says that they are

Dark silent forms, performing
Remote solemnities in the red shallows
Of the river's mouth at the year's turn,
Drawing landward their live bullion, the bloody mouths
And scales full of the sunset. (ll. 10-14)

There's something sinister about the fishermen, perhaps, and Jeffers certainly does not make the mistake supermarket city boys like me make--that of divorcing the dead fish from the live one--but these fishermen are not wicked, and the death of the fish, made holy by the sunset in their gills, allows humanity to continue to live on.

I say that Jeffers makes himself into one of the fish because of his ability to see their future; they "Twitch on the rocks, no more to wander at will / The wild Pacific pasture nor wanton and spawning / Race up into fresh water" (ll. 15-17). The narrative voice, tied to nature at the opening of the poem, dies on the same hook as the fish he describes.

Jeffers' poetry trafficks in this ambiguity. We see it just as strongly in his poem "Haunted Country":

Here the human past is dim and feeble and alien to us
Our ghosts draw from the crowded future.
Fixed as the past how could it fail to drop weird shadows
And make strange murmurs about twilight? (ll. 1-4)

Jeffers appears to criticize the modern city-dweller for his lack of connection to the past--symbolized here by nature--which he must then fill with his dystopian expectations of the future. But the grammar's out of joint here. There's no punctuation mark between the first and second lines, which means that we're missing either a period there (making the first two lines distinct) or the words the and that (as in "alien to the us / That our ghosts draw"). The split is significant, the difference between a monolithic cultural identity and one that dissociates when faced with problems.

Likewise, "Fixed as the past" has no mechanical markers, and the clause could mean at least two things: (a) The past and the future are equally dependent (or equally static); and (b) The future is a square peg that modern man attempts to "fix as the past," that is, to shove into a round hole. This ambiguity, however, subverts Jeffers' presumed point. It becomes clear that it is not clear that modern man has no connection to the past or that that is a bad thing. Holding onto the future, Jeffers may suggest, is as dependable as holding onto the past. We may be faced with another set of salmon fishers here, people who we assume Jeffers dislikes while he actually admires them.

This ambiguity allows Jeffers to transcend the didactic and transitory nature of most environmentalist writers--he seems to hear every point of view and to treat them all equally. His conclusions are perhaps not conclusions at all, but further questions. He is, in other words, a first-rate Modernist poet, up there with Eliot and Frost and whoever else you include at the top.

Eliot and the Five Types of Criticism

Here's the speech I gave my Comp II students at the top of this semester. I'm not sure if these ideas are totally viable or not--I worked them out on my own.

There are essentially five reasons that people call a particular work of art "great," the end result of which is that there are essentially five types of critics.

1) Aesthetic. "This is beautiful." In this category I class the 1890s Aesthetes (Wilde, Pater, et al), the New Critics (Wimsatt, Beardsley, Ransom), and what I term the Neo-Aesthetes (the Blooms, Frederick Crews, and Roger Kimball). In these latter, you tend to get a neo-Arnoldian streak of "preserving the best that Western civilization has to offer." I still call this Aesthetic.
2) Impressionist. "This moves me." I think this is the reason that most people start their love of literature. I am not aware of a major critic who primarily utilizes this method, however.
3) Moral. "This speaks the truth." I include in this category both the Christian critics and the Marxist critics, as well as the Black Arts folks from the 1970s. Moral critics tend to see art primarily as propaganda, as a political/social/religious vehicle for the Truth.
4) Social. Either "This changed things" or "This perfectly represents a given viewpoint."It is by means of social criticism that something like The Jungle--otherwise a poorly written book--ends up canonized or semi-canonized. Note that social criticism almost always has an element of moral criticism to it. There can be little argument that The Clansman perfectly represents a given viewpoint, but I do not think Paul Lauter is interested in putting it on one of his many canons.
5) Hermeneutic. "This is open for endless discussion." I used to call this the "deconstructive" school until Don Williams suggested that that particular term is too narrow and too polarizing. These critics value a work of art for its depth and the number of its possible interpretations.

If anyone would like to add a school of criticism to my schema, if anyone has found one that I've left off, please let me know.

Most people do not fit squarely into one of these categories, but I suspect close to all readers have one that lords over the other ones. I, for example, am primarily hermeneutic (and secondarily impressionist), and I have little to no interest in social criticism. My theory about these schools is that they're all more or less valid, but if you're in an argument over a particular work (like those tiresome canon arguments in the 1990s), there's no sense in arguing a different school than your opponent.

Let's say, for example, that Roger Kimball and Paul Lauter are arguing over whether we should take Othello out of the canon. (I have no idea if Lauter wants to or not.) Kimball will say, "This is a perfectly constructed play." Lauter will say, "This play is racist, and besides, we should take it out to open up the canon for other viewpoints." That argument is never going anywhere. Either Kimball needs to argue against the play's racism, or else Lauter needs to argue that the play is a piece of garbage on an aesthetic level.

I bring all this up because I am reading T.S. Eliot's selected prose right now, and he seems to subscribe to all of the schools. Eliot is pretty much forgotten as a critic, which I'm sure is a consequence of his being so closely associated with the New Critics. The New Critics loved Eliot because his poems were ideal for the New Criticism--they were tightly constructed and could (supposedly) be viewed on their own, without recourse to the author's intentions. I've taken three Literary Criticism and Theory classes, and I've never been taught Eliot's work, aside from a few offhand references to his "objective correlative."

That objective correlative is a particularly ugly aspect of the Aesthetic School; it's the idea that an author can toss together a given sequence of events or words and demand a particular emotional reaction from his readers. It sounds cynical to me, and a little too close to the sentimental fiction of the 19th century, in which the author would attempt via rhetorical tricks and bizarre plot points to make the reader cry on every page. It simultaneously utilizes and minimalizes the Impressionist School as a means to an Aesthetic end.

But something funny happened. When Eliot converted to Anglicanism in 1928, both his poetry and his criticism changed dramatically. I'll post about the differences between his pre- and post-Anglican poetry some other time, but his criticism opened up to all sorts of other directions, ones that the New Critics who praise Eliot seem to disregard.

For example, he begins to value the Impressionist over the Aesthetic. Emotions become the big deal for Eliot--he says in "The Music of Poetry" that "If we are moved by a poem, it has meant something, perhaps something important, to us; if we are not moved, then it is, as poetry, meaningless." Emotion is not the sole judge of good poetry, but it's a major judge, and the post-1930 Eliot seems to think it is in many ways a better judge than pure Aesthetic criticism.

In an essay on Henry James, he even criticizes dry intellectual approaches to criticism:

Englishmen, with their uncritical admiration (in the present age for France, like to refer to France as the Home of Ideas . . . In England ideas run wild and pasture on the emotions; instead of thinking with our feelings (a very different thing) we corrupt our feelings with ideas; we produce the political, the emotional idea, evading sensation and thought.

It seems clear to me that it was Eliot's conversion that moved him from "corrupting his feelings" to "thinking with them"; Aesthetic intellectualism led him to the depths of despair in "The Waste-Land," despair that he was just beginning to escape in "The Hollow Men" and "Ash-Wednesday," but it's in his criticism that he really seems rescued, able to feel again.

Christianity also led to his establishment as a Moral critic supreme; at the top of "Religion and Literature," he claims that "Literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint." He makes his own viewpoint clear, but his readers are not exactly instructed to follow it--the important thing in this essay is to have a standpoint. He no longer believes in objectivity, clearly. He also takes another delightful shot at the Aesthetes, one that reminds me of Walker Percy's The Second Coming, in which one of Will Barrett's aggravating friends reads Dante for the meter:

The people who enjoy these writings [The Bible, Jeremy Taylor, Clarendon, and Gibbon, among others] solely because of their literary merit are essentially parasites; and we know that parasites, when they are become too numerous, are pests.

Eliot is, of course, taking aim at his past self in quotes like these; his post-1930 criticism comes off like it's the ascending spiral staircase in "Ash-Wednesday," a method of purging oneself for divine purity. If he can decimate his former views enough, he's saved.

Elsewhere, he sounds like a Social critic. His criteria for a text being a "classic" involve, among Aesthetic considerations, its representing a particular culture. Indeed, it is the culture moreso than the text that is classical. Groups of authors pool their resources and influences to produce the cultural aura of the classical, and it's out of this that an individual author creates a classic text: "What we find, in a period of classic prose, is not a mere common convention of writing, like the common style of newspaper leader writes, but a community of text." Culture is extremely important for the post-'30 Eliot; his last two books attempt to provide a definition of culture and then figure out how to create one based on Christianity.

Finally, the seeds of postmodern criticism are latent in Eliot. In addition to his privileging of the reader's emotions and interpretations over the author's ("The meaning of a poem may be something larger than its author's conscious purpose, and something remote from its origins"), he levels the playing field between High and Low Art based on the number and importance of interpretations:

I incline to come to the alarming conclusion that it is just the literature that we read for "amusement," or "purely for pleasure" that may have the greatest and least suspected influence upon us. It is the literature which we read with the least effort that can have the most insidious influence upon us. Hence it is that the influence of popular novelists, and of popular plays of contemporary life, requires to be scrutinized most closely.

Now, Eliot is of course horrified by popular fiction; even after his conversion, he's always a snob. But if not exactly a hermeneutic critic himself, he throws the doors wide open for it: All texts, he seems to say, need to be examined and parsed out, especially the ones we don't want to.

My conclusion from all this is that it's time for a re-evaluation of Eliot's nonfiction writing by critics of all stripes. I suspect that everyone is going to find something in his essays to love--and many other things to hate.