Good letters made good men. Why should we kick against the Pricks, when we can walk on Roses?

some impassioned thoughts about (not) justifying the arts

the irritable searching after reasons

There are days when I feel so sick of trying to justify literature that I no longer want to try. What need do we have of reasons and arguments in the face of poetry? Art justifies itself. Like the growing of a great tree or a bird song heard on the breeze, art finds its place in the world.

It is the “state of the humanities”, and the state of the “discourse”, which make this issue all rather vexed and vexing. Why so much debate about Great Books programs?

Not only am I far more alarmed about the fertility crisis, I just don’t see how this all hinges on undergraduate education—too often, an undergraduate education that involves very little writing. When I was at Oxford we wrote between two and six thousand words of essay every week. I cannot find the necessary sense of alarm that some of America’s future lawyers and engineers might miss the chance to go to two dozen seminars and write two essays in total. There are literature PhDs who haven’t even read Chaucer for God’s sake. If we can’t do it, why should they?¹

If they need this learning so badly for instrumental reasons, why can’t they do it at school, at the library, at their grandmother’s knee? Yes, yes, I know, our grandmothers no longer read Dickens aloud as it was read to them. But that is rather my point. Literature has already gone out with the tide as a central part of culture. Shakespeare’s audience had the choice of a brothel, an inn, or a bear-baiting pit when they left the Globe. There was no Netflix, no radio, no Twitter. That was then, this is now. Go to the pub with a group of highly educated people. One thing they will all have in common is a working knowledge of the sitcoms of their youth. Friends, or The Simpsons. A few charts about the decline of reading won’t make it 1852 again.

I sound confused because I feel confused. We don’t need arguments for the humanities. No-one argues that we need bees or flowers or summer rain. Obviously it is good and necessary to have the academic humanities.

If you don’t understand that, you don’t need me to make you another numbered list or to find the right form of words to make it all clear.

You don’t need The Closing of the American Mind. Or the Wokening of the American Mind. Or the Ensloppification of the American Mind… or whatever comes next.

You need to read Tolstoy. You need to look at the new complete works of Francis Bacon. I don’t know if liberal democracy and the modern economy were helped or hindered by the English BA, but I do know that the thirty-three volume complete works of J.S. Mill edited by John Robson can’t have been a bad thing.

---

not a dispute but a disquisition

None of this is in response to Brad DeLong whose comments on a recent podcast I recorded were both interesting and accurate.

For one thing, I think nothing is more essential to the university than having flourishing and educationally excellent history, English, and drama departments (not rhetoric: rhetoric as a discipline looks to me increasingly like a lost cause). We need to teach students the broad sweep of the human culture and civilization they as intellectual workers will draw on, how to present their conclusions and ideas in English prose, and how to argue for their conclusions ideas in personal presentations. Nothing is more important. (Pre-professional education—primarily engineering/data science, biochemistry and finance/management—comes second).

And you cannot have flourishing and educationally excellent history, English, and drama departments that lack a strong and confident sense of what they are for.

Still, I think Oliver, Lawrence and Werlin have the wrong end of the stick here: they talk about the need for justification over and above simply saying “literature is great”, without ever taking a real stab at providing it.

The sense of what literature departments are for isn’t my business—quite literally, I have not been in one since I was an undergraduate, and never as a professional. But I am spending a lot of my time working on this question right now and the way I feel is best described as petulant.

---

the excellence of every Art is its intensity

The humanities are not necessary because they make us better thinkers, writers, people, or workers. Sure, they can do all that, for people who take them seriously enough.

The best art directors I worked with in advertising were the ones who weren’t philistines. There’s a long history of that in advertising. All the worst advertising is the result of a culture that has no sense of greatness: it comes from the shallow collective mind of people who don’t take art seriously. Every time I gave a presentation which quoted Seneca or used a story from mythology, someone in a suit rolled their eyes. And someone else in sales or creative got an idea.

But that is not why we need the formal study of literature. Literature is why we need the formal study of literature. We live by words. Without the right way of saying something, it cannot be real. Everything else is reductive noise. Alfred North Whitehead: “Moral education is impossible apart from the habitual vision of greatness.”

But we oughtn’t to take this too seriously either. There are characters in Shakespeare who set themselves up as great humanists and they end up getting a lesson from what my father would call the school of life. Don Quixote and all that. I, myself, would all too easily fritter my life away in imaginative reveries. But it is in those reveries that we most understand why art matters.

---

content with half knowledge

When I was sixteen, I read these lines, and realised instantly that they were what I believed.

Balk logic with acquaintance that you have
And practise rhetoric in your common talk;
Music and poesy use to quicken you;
The mathematics and the metaphysics,
Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you;
No profit grows where is no pleasure ta’en:
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.

Early Shakespeare, from a play not thought among his best, but splendid, splendid stuff. Music and poesy use to quicken you. That’s it, that’s the reason.

You think there must be more to it than that? Well, sure. There’s so much more. There’s all of life, of imagination, of culture. But it is largely tacit knowledge. That is, knowledge we don’t quite know we know. Some philosophers will balk at this, but it is true. Tacit knowledge cannot be turned into a rubric. It cannot be taught; it must be experienced. (“Practice rhetoric in your common talk” is a method of tacit understanding.) There is a certain moment when we read or hear great literature and we think ah, I know what they mean, I never knew that I knew that, but right now, here, I really do, and it is only in that moment that we fully understand it. Afterwards, we can never quite give it the right words. All we can do is quote the thing or write literary criticism. Literature is something we learn by doing, like cookery or carpentry.

---

surprise by a fine excess

Recently, I wrote this on Substack Notes

One of my best readers, Seth, responded like this.

Seth and I now share some tacit knowledge. I communicated with Seth more through temperament—the essential feature of literary work—than argument or reasoning. If we want to preserve literature, we need to treat it as a form of tacit knowledge. Literature not only communicates tacitly, but the study and discussion of literature is tacit. We can say that many successful Silicon Valley founders read the humanities, or that Girardian Mimesis was a theory derived from novels, or that art teaches us about evil, or whatever. But really, we are talking at the foundational level about something that cannot quite be said. The best way to appreciate a poem is to memorise it. Either you wish to experience the strange new visions of the world literature provides or you do not. Trying to argue for the place of the humanities in the university is hard because you cannot always take something tacit and put it in explicit, instrumental language.

---

admire me I am a violet!

What’s more persuasive, an argument made of accepted forms of logic or an argument well-stated? The long history of the emergence of the modern world is the history of medieval theology, which was made out of towering logical arguments (or syllogisms) giving way to the humanist scholarship of the Renaissance, which prioritised language and rhetoric as the way to find truth.

Before the Renaissance, theologians were Aristotelian and made complicated cathedrals of logic about the nature of God and Heaven, inventing concepts like Purgatory by finding hints and gaps and scripture which they inflated with syllogisms into dogma. Then humanism discovered Latin and Greek and Hebrew. The original words of the gospels could be known. Better translations made available. Suddenly, there was less reliance on long complicated arguments and more reliance on language, expression, and meaning.

Here’s Patrick Collinson, historian of the Reformation:

…we must investigate the near-paradox that the Reformation, which released and energised the vernacular, was made possible by the movement we call Renaissance humanism, which was a Latin thing. Humanism was more than a desire to clean up the Latin language, to restore it to the excellence of its classical exemplars, although it was that. It carried the conviction that eloquence of expression, essentially the art of rhetoric, was more likely to convey those precious commodities, truth and virtue, than syllogistic logic, which was the basis of scholastic theology. Good men expressed themselves in good letters. Good letters made good men.

What is needed now is an apology for the imagination.

---

a thing which enters into one’s soul

At the start of Fanny and Alexander, Ingmar Bergman’s 1983 television movie about two Edwardian Swedish children in the upper-middle-class Ekdahl family, Alexander is playing with his toy theatre. His face appears behind the cardboard proscenium arch. At the end, he lies in his grandmother’s lap, while she reads aloud from a Strindberg play.

In between, Alexander witnesses death and bullying, he is caned by an evil stepfather, is visited like Hamlet by his father’s ghost, and meets an androgynous lunatic, who acts as a symbol of puberty and nihilism. Alexander’s imagination is strong and he is able to see more of the terror and beauty of life than the adults around him, who are locked into the petty concerns of their mediocrity, religion, and sybaritic pleasures.

Alexander moves between two worlds, the plain reality of bourgeois life and the ineffable mystery of the world beyond. Ghosts, memories, lunatic, and God all haunt Alexander at some point. He sees what others cannot. He sees that all life is a theatre, that all art is an attempt to access the larger, more inexplicable part of our world, to seek the truth.

Near the start of the film, Alexander’s father Oscar Ekdahl gives a speech to the players in the family theatre, which he calls a little world, a place of retreat and entertainment, away from the bigger world of reality, difficulty and disappointment. This is a flat, naive view of art, a middle-class escapism. Oscar lives in the little world, sees no deeper connection to the big world. His brother Gustav is able to revel entirely in the pleasures of a little world—his restaurant, his mistress, his wife, his food and drink, and his lack of bigger life is of no concern at all; but Oscar is unhappy with his little world and his bigger world. As such people often are in literature, he becomes trapped after death as a ghost.

Alexander sees much more than his father. He knows that art is not mere fantasy, that the barrier between dreaming and waking, art and reality, the little world and the big, is permeable, uncertain, liable to surprise us. What we imagine often becomes reality. Art is not a fantasy or escapism, but the exercise of the imagination in creating versions of the world, some of which are accurate reflections of life, others of which become predictions, or self-fulfilling prophecies. The more you see art, like Oscar, as a little world of retreat, the less able you are to imagine the largess of the truth about life. As Iris Murdoch said, “fantasy is the strong cunning enemy of the discerning intelligent more truly inventive power of the imagination.”

By fantasy, Murdoch means the use of fiction as a predictable, happy-ending, escapism. Oscar is a bad actor because that’s what he thinks art is, a little world we run to as consolation from our disappointments. By contrast, Alexander is all imagination, he sees art as a way of accessing and expressing the bigger world. When Oscar dies, he collapses while rehearsing the part of the ghost in Hamlet, and then becomes a ghost himself. He is twice trapped, as actor and soul. Death forces him to see that art is not an escape from reality, but a way of conceiving of the bigger world.

Bergman shows us that the little world of art is not a safe space: that is a timorous view of art’s potential. We are left uncertain at the end whether the ghosts Alexander sees are real or illusory, whether the frights he has are largely in his imagination. But we know other mystical characters feel some of his terror too. We know that, even if he is hallucinating, he sees something real about human existence, something beyond the chintz and the furnishings.

The first third of Fanny and Alexander is set at Christmas, which is, with its rituals, games, performances, and rites, a form of art, a little world, a festive theatre. This little world of domestic ritual is seen again in the bishop’s austere practices and in the celebration of the christening. Whether middle-class indulgence or ascetic piety is the cause, life is full of little worlds. Some people are trapped by them, trapped in the drink and dance, or in the chilly restraint, allowing themselves to be narrowed, eroded. Others live for the performance. In the bishop’s house, this is tragic and oppressive; with the Ekdahls, it is festive and celebratory.

But in neither case is art a consolation. Both families have music; Alexander reads books in both houses. Some of the most thwarted characters, who suffer the most, have plenty of access to art. It is, for the Ekdahls, literally all around them on the walls. For the Bishop’s family, there is no visual art, but there is a powerful imaginative force at work. The Puritan’s inner life is strong, sometimes too strong. Ghosts haunt both houses, literally and psychologically. Death cannot be conquered by art. Misery, madness, ostracism, romantic disillusion, failure—none of these things are made better by art at any point.

Art cannot save you, but it can help you to understand. Alexander is one of the only characters intent on seeing the world, knowing the truth. Rather than creating little worlds of merriment or puritanism, he uses his imagination to see all sides of life. Neither the bishop, with his cruel religious certainties, nor the Ekdahls with their happy bourgeois values, interrogate life. Only Alexander does that. Only he is the artist of the little and the bigger world.

---

Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

In Iris Murdoch’s novel The Good Apprentice, a character opens a copy of Proust at random and reads the following sentence:

S’il pleuvait, bien que le mauvais temps n’effrayât pas Albertine, qu’on voyait parfois, dans son caoutchouc, filer en bicyclette sous les averses, nous passions la journée dans le casino où il m’eût paru ces jours-là impossible de ne pas aller.

Which Google translates like this:

If it rained, although the bad weather did not frighten Albertine, who was sometimes seen, in her rubber, spinning on her bicycle in the downpours, we spent the day in the casino where it seemed to me those days impossible not to go.

Although this is, as the narrator or Murdoch’s novel says, a perfectly ordinary sentence describing an ordinary day, it strikes the character reading it with great force, as if it were a holy text or a great poem. Murdoch writes:

The French sentence came to him with an extraordinary freshness, like a breath of clean air to a man just out of prison, like a sudden sound of a musical instrument. Intimations of other places, of elsewhere—of freedom. He felt as he read it a kind of invigorating self-reproach and a new sort of power. There too he lived, he himself. He was there.

This is, in literary terms, a description of escapism. The character reading the words is trapped in a strange and intimidating house, full of unusual people, and the idea of escaping into the ordinariness of Proust is liberating to him. He wants to escape from the house he is trapped in and the Proust awakens him to that realisation.

But when we experience escapism in literary writing, like that of Murdoch or Proust, we either approve or hardly call it escapism at all. When we find escapism in genre fiction, like fantasy novels, it becomes a term of partisanship. You either approve or disapprove.

What’s the difference?

In his essay “On Fairy Stories”, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about the escapist nature of fantasy, stating that the Secondary World an author devises must be consistent. What happens in the story must all make sense according to the rules of this world. “You therefore believe it, when you are, as it were, inside.” Getting this “inner consistency” is hard work, and Tolkien disliked the “frivolous” use of fantasy which is only done half-seriously. He didn’t want “fanciful” fiction but genuinely imagined fantasy. (This is why he disliked Narnia; he thought it lacked inner consistency.)

Literary or realistic fiction aspires to the same thing as fantasy. What Tolkien calls enchantment, Murdoch describes more like believability. It is strange to find someone overwhelmed by such a mundane description as the Proust we started with, but makes complete sense according to the inner consistency of her novel. Just as Proust’s novel seems incomprehensible to some early readers but makes its own sense through inner consistency. The novel teaches you how to read it.

Good literary or realistic fiction requires the same thing as good fantasy fiction. What Tolkien called mere mimicry isn’t enough. All great novelists have to make their fictions so internally consistent that you believe whatever happens without having to query it or resort to “suspending disbelief”—you should be there as Murdoch says. It must make as much sense as if it were life, even if what happens is often weird or unusual. Indeed, if the novelist has done a good job, the weird and unusual will be quite expected.

---

We are in a Mist—

We are stuck here in the big world, and sometimes we can make it into the little world. We walk to work and feel, really feel, that “We all walk in mysteries. We are surrounded by an atmosphere about which we still know nothing at all.” We succumb to fantasy as a result. But sometimes, sometimes, we imagine. We find ourselves at the mercy of a word, a line, a page. The little world and the bigger world become one in our imagination.

---

it is easier to think what Poetry should be than to write it

I don’t expect any of this to make any difference to the universities. I am a free voice on the internet. They are lost in bureaucracy. It is easy for me to follow my libertarian ideals about the canon. Academics have their own problems.

Universities must recognize that their experiment with centralized planning has had unintended consequences that have damaged the institution’s status and pose serious political risks. They must support their own faculty voices and devolve power to departments, not in deference to quaint traditions but as an essential mechanism for maintaining academic standards and intellectual diversity. Only by addressing the vacuum that enabled polarization can we universities claim their proper role as centers of reasoned debate and scholarly inquiry.

I don’t know how to solve this. It isn’t my place to say. But I can tell you that the cold dead hand of nanny is earnestly clutching at the humanities—and they are winning. I can be a purist. The scholars standing up to their waists in shit don’t have that privilege.

---

why should we kick against the Pricks, when we can walk on Roses?

In Elijah the “still small voice of calm” was taken as a typology of the Pentecostal winds of the Holy Spirit. Just as Jonah was a pre-figure of Christ, a Christ type, so was the still small voice of the spirit. In the nineteenth century, inspired by Wordsworth’s sublime view of nature’s awesome power (what Carlyle called the “Natural Supernatural”) John Keble used the image in a hymn,

The rag­ing fire, the roar­ing wind,
Thy bound­less pow­er dis­play,
But in the gent­ler breeze we find
The Spir­it’s view­less way.

The words “wind” and “spirit” had shared roots and worked like a pun. In Words and the Word, Stephen Prickett calls this making the implicit typology explicit. Jonah was not Christ, but a Christ type. The still small voice was not the Holy Spirit, but a spirit type. Now, though, they are integrated. The spirit is literally in the wind for Keble. It is no longer a type but a symbol.

In similar manner, the pre-Romantic understanding was that a word was an index to an idea: it referred to something in reality. Whereas the post-Kantian Romantics thought language shaped ideas. Reality existed not out there in the real world but only as you perceived it. Meaning became cultural, local, personal, contingent, not permanent, ready to be found by the appropriate word or correct method. We were not excavating the truth of the world but erecting it.

We live in an age of interpretation. Everything has to mean something. Whether this is a residual Freudianism, or some lesser folk psychology, in which everything points to some deeper secret of the mind, or a sub-hermeneutic casts of mind in which the deferral of meaning and the exposure of power structures is the whole aim of thought, the effect is the same. Everything must be analysed and its proper meaning revealed. We are Platonically insistent that we can unfold the lie.

Literature teaches us that it is not so. The human mind is not a place of secrets, lies, deferred meanings, but a means of creating meaning through imagination. It works not like a hermeneutic process, but lives like a tree. It resists too much explanation, because it largely works tacitly. The sense of walking in mystery remains, after every scientific advance in understanding. What is left to us then is art.

Théâtre Français (French Theater), in or after 1756, Charles Germain de Saint-Aubin, https://www.nga.gov/artworks/45778-theatre-francais-french-theater

1. Imagine a state of things in which there were only a few universities offering literature degrees. Would this be so bad? Would that be when democracy ends, or whatever is supposed to happen? There was a time when very few English universities taught English literature, simply because there were very few English universities. English democracy did just fine.