A Year Without Summer

As you may have noticed (if you pulled yourself away from your work at all during daylight hours), we’ve been treated to one of the wettest summers in New York history. And for those of us who react to Vitamin D deficiency with extreme depression, lethargy, and feelings of isolation, it could be good to recall another Year Without Summer: 1816.

Following the largest volcanic eruption in 1,600 years, dust prevented sunlight from reaching the earth, lowering temperatures globally. The season’s uncharitable weather (frost killed crops across the northern hemisphere, leading to widespread starvation; Quebec City got a foot of snow in June) is associated with contemporary events and movements including the formation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and the dusty tinge of the sky in Turner’s paintings.

More relevant to us literary folks, however, is the doom-and-gloom writing associated with the year, including Byron’s “Darkness” and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (begun in 1816). Is it possible that Romanticism is just the 19th century’s grunge period, a meteorological depression affecting a generation? Have I just traded one Seattle for another?

I will leave you with the Rogue Poem of the Week:

Darkness

I had a dream, which was not all a dream. 
The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars 
Did wander darkling in the eternal space, 
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth 
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; 
Morn came and went–and came, and brought no day, 
And men forgot their passions in the dread 
Of this their desolation; and all hearts 
Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light: 
And they did live by watchfires–and the thrones, 
The palaces of crowned kings–the huts, 
The habitations of all things which dwell, 
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed, 
And men were gathered round their blazing homes 
To look once more into each other’s face; 
Happy were those who dwelt within the eye 
Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch: 
A fearful hope was all the world contain’d; 
Forests were set on fire–but hour by hour 
They fell and faded–and the crackling trunks 
Extinguish’d with a crash–and all was black. 
The brows of men by the despairing light 
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits 
The flashes fell upon them; some lay down 
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest 
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled; 
And others hurried to and fro, and fed 
Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up 
With mad disquietude on the dull sky, 
The pall of a past world; and then again 
With curses cast them down upon the dust, 
And gnash’d their teeth and howl’d: the wild birds shriek’d, 
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground, 
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes 
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl’d 
And twined themselves among the multitude, 
Hissing, but stingless–they were slain for food. 
And War, which for a moment was no more, 
Did glut himself again;–a meal was bought 
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart 
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left; 
All earth was but one thought–and that was death, 
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang 
Of famine fed upon all entrails–men 
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh; 
The meagre by the meagre were devoured, 
Even dogs assail’d their masters, all save one, 
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept 
The birds and beasts and famish’d men at bay, 
Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead 
Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food, 
But with a piteous and perpetual moan, 
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand 
Which answered not with a caress–he died. 
The crowd was famish’d by degrees; but two 
Of an enormous city did survive, 
And they were enemies: they met beside 
The dying embers of an altar-place 
Where had been heap’d a mass of holy things 
For an unholy usage; they raked up, 
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands 
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath 
Blew for a little life, and made a flame 
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up 
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld 
Each other’s aspects–saw, and shriek’d, and died– 
Even of their mutual hideousness they died, 
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow 
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void, 
The populous and the powerful–was a lump, 
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless– 
A lump of death–a chaos of hard clay. 
The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still, 
And nothing stirred within their silent depths; 
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp’d 
They slept on the abyss without a surge– 
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave, 
The moon their mistress had expir’d before; 
The winds were withered in the stagnant air, 
And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need 
Of aid from them–She was the Universe.

 

The Poem of the Week celebrates Independence Day by lying back and thinking of England

…in honor of the upcoming July 4 holiday, the Poem of the Week takes a quick, spasmodic step backwards in the Oxford Book of Victorian Verse.

304. Sonnets. America by Sydney Dobell (1824-1874)

i.

Men say, Columbia, we shall hear thy guns.

But in what tongue shall be thy battle-cry?

Not that our sires did love in years gone by,

When all the Pilgrim Fathers were little sons

In merry homes of England? Back, and see

Thy satchell’d ancestor! Behold, he runs

To mine, and, clasp’d, they tread the equal lea

To the same village school, where side by side

They spell ‘Our Father.’ Hard by, the twin pride

Of that grey hall whose ancient oriel gleams

Thro’ yon baronial pines, with looks of light

Our sister-mothers sit beneath one tree.

Meanwhile our Shakespeare wanders past and dreams

His Helena and Hermia. Shall we fight?

ii.

Nor force nor fraud shall sunder us! O ye

Who north or south, on east or western land,

Native to noble sounds, say truth for truth,

Freedom for freedom, love for love, and God

For God; Oh ye who in eternal youth

Speak with a living and creative flood

This universal English, and do stand

Its breathing book; live worthy of that grand

Heroic utterance–parted, yet a whole,

Far, yet unsever’d,–children brave and free

Of the great Mother-tongue, and ye shall be

Lords of an Empire wide as Shakespeare’s soul,

Sublime as Milton’s immemorial theme,

And rich as Chaucer’s speech, and fair as Spenser’s dream.

(c. 1855)

Dobell will be familiar to some of you as one of the major poets and theorists of the Spasmodic school. The entry on Dobell in Cambridge History of English and American Literature in Eighteen Volumes describes him as the “best of this group” and lavishes such praise as the following: “…England in a Time of War contains a good deal of rubbish, with some things as different from rubbish as it is possible to conceive.” Ridiculed in their time and afterwards as practicing a kind of overly materialist, cut-rate version of what the Romantics had been doing, the Spasmodics have more recently been reclaimed by VP scholars–for example, the Winter 2004 issue of Victorian Poetry was dedicated to “Spasmodic Poetry and Poetics.” My own attitude has always been that I’ve found the theories of the Spasmodics more palpable than their poetry; in some circles this makes me a snob. On the other hand, some of the poems that I love most dearly, among them Maud and Aurora Leigh, were derided in their time as spasmodic productions. (The other one that always gets named here is Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna.) So I’m a snob but not a particularly discerning one. Or something.

At any rate, a good intro to Spasmodic theory is Dobell’s own “Nature of Poetry.” I read this for my orals last year and remember it as being an interesting mishmash of the material (trying to ground meter and poetic form in the pulsations of the human heart) and the idealist, a sort of interesting though often reductive distillation of Kant and Burke with a strong strain of Shelley. And if my notes from that period of my life are any indication, I saw at the time a couple of ideas that seem to anticipate the Austinian performative as well as reflect more quintessentially Victorian theories of language.

Now, as the poetic works of the Spasmodic school go (or so I have heard), these sonnets are pretty tame. It took a little while for their weirdness to sneak up on me.

But let’s start with a bit of context.

These poems are excerpted from a longer series of sonnets on the subject of the Crimean War. “That’s funny,” you say, “I don’t remember there being significant American involvement in the Crimean War.” However, if this website is to be believed (and, hey, when has the first hit on Google ever been wrong?), America did end up being fairly sympathetic to Russia in the whole thing, and that relationship paved the way for American expansion in Alaska and Hawaii. Which basically means that Barack Obama’s presidency is perhaps the best thing to have come out of what was by all accounts a huge disaster. (Remember “The Charge of the Light Brigade“…)

I digress. But I do think that the historical context, such as it is, is at least a little bit helpful for understanding Dobell’s otherwise sort of perplexing insistence on the English language as this sort of sacred bond between Britain and the United States that reduces the Revolutionary War, for instance, to the outgrowth of a spat between schoolboys, some of whom then took their “satchells” and their Shakespeare and, apparently, crossed the Atlantic in a huff. That first sonnet in particular is pretty insistent on this idyllic childhood in England–note especially the emphasis on parity between these two “ancestors” that tries to appropriate some of the discourses surrounding American democracy–the “equal lea” sounds a lot like “equality,” and we have the “same village-school” (no class disparity here!), the “twin-pride” in an architectural patrimony, and women who are also equally attractive.

Of course, I’m not really doing justice yet to the first question that Dobell’s poems pose: “in what tongue shall be thy battle cry?” It’s an interesting version of a kind of linguistic imperialism, but it also seems to be a version of that truism of high school political science classes about democracies not fighting each other. I assume that Dobell is overstating the case for effect–though it’s interesting to think that in 1855 it could be seen as even a halfway plausible idea that the main language of America was still up for debate.

…but there’s the rub, isn’t it? I’m no Americanist, but I’m going to venture a guess that, by 1855, the majority of people who called themselves Americans were not, in fact, descended from those “Pilgrim Fathers” back in England–or *any* fathers back in England. Indeed, I’d even go out on a limb and say that many of these folk spoke English as a second or third language, if at all. (Americanists and/or people with more of an interest in Googling the above can feel free to correct me on this one.)

The developmemt of thought across the two sonnets suggest that Dobell himself knows that the “common national heritage” argument isn’t really going to carry the day. Something more complicated happens in the second sonnet–almost a kind of imagined community based on a common language–as in, you become American by speaking English (and who hasn’t heard versions of that one even now) but, in Dobell’s rendering, you also get the bonus of carrying on the “living and creative flood / This universal English”–you become the heir of Milton, Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Spenser. So in a single fell swoop, American literary production–which, you know, by 1855 was not all that insubstantial–is reduced to something of a symptom, the triumphant productions of wandering children.

(And, let’s face it. “Ye who in eternal youth” is rarely a compliment in these kinds of contexts.)

There is also, of course, the “we use the same words so we obviously mean the same things with those words” canard that’s going on in that second sonnet. However, I am nearing 1200 words on this puppy and will therefore let you imagine what I would say about that.

Just, um, happy upcoming Fourth of July holiday, y’all.

 

More on aesthetics and politics, plus a bitchy comment

I plugged Regenia Gagnier’s The Insatiability of Human Wants at our last meeting, and, Kiran, you really ought to check it out, maybe put it on a list? Here are some snippets from the Appendix, which I’m sure why it’s so called:

Taste–or class as culture–may disincline middle-class people to share anything but political solidarity and economic resources with the working class. Put differently, a good leftist will willingly share the pains of working people, willingly redistribute the wealth, but will she share in their pleasures? (238)

Objectively, one’s class is one’s position in the labor process, although one’s political identity and subjectivity may be in ambivalent relation to one’s class. One may perform a class identiy, but the performance is subject to material limits [....] The introduction of consumption models of taste and status draws together both class and gender, for consumption and leisure, the realms of pleasure for most wage laborers, are as significant in the formation of identity and subjectivity as production. (243)

Since I’m all about binary distinctions, I’ll just say that I’m a fan of the identity/subjectivity dialectic Gagnier uses, especially as a way to think about my own ambivalent relations to class. I’m probably a textbook case of the “good leftist” who’s really saddened by the stuff that passes for entertainment on the radio, on movie screens, hell, even on the internet. And that doesn’t make me a bad leftist (hopefully not!) identity-wise, but initiates a subjectivity worth thinking about critically?

As for my bitchy comment, it’s not really directed towards Gagnier (maybe towards the world in general). It’s when she compares gender and class performativity:

Eric Schocket [The essay G refers to, I'm guessing, has become this book chapter]has recently employed performance theory in general and Marjorie Garber’s work in particular in the development of what he calls “class transvestitism,” that is , when middle-class writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries showed their comradeship with the poor, the social body, by literally costuming themselves in the garb of poverty. Schocket shows how the comradeship was born of simulation and created a “culture of poverty.” Yet whereas Garber sees transvestite logic as working toward progressive ends by destabilizing gender, class transvestism occludes economic relations and reconstructs class as culture, but culture as voluntary rather more than, as in taste, a product of one’s particular history and environment. Then, Schocket shows, class culture can be read as difference and absorbed into “pluralism.” This is, of course, the problem of multiculturalism when it is treated as a mere celebration of diverse cultures rather than as cultures also embedded in political and economic inequalities. (242)

Why is it so hard for people to see that so-called progressive destabilizing through cross-dressing (using the term “transvestite” is frowned upon among trans people and allies), transgendering, or transitioning, is very much imbricated with social and economic privilege, and the celebration of it “occludes economic relations”? Transition is fucking expensive in all sorts of ways, and gender politics ought not to be reduced to a set of consumer choices. Grumble grumble grumble.

 

The Poem of the Week takes the red eye

Before I start, I should say that I had every intention of coming back from the woods to take on Coventry Patmore again (specifically, this gem [#290] from The Angel in the House), largely because Mia’s always after me to write about poems that I dislike. Alas, I am finding that my Victorian heart is not rising to such an occasion today. (The reasons for this can be roughly approximated by the sentiments expressed in Browning’s “Two in the Campagna” [not in the OBVV]) So I plunged again into the pages of the OBVV, through poems about dead brides and modest attractions and Christian consolations. You know, the usual–without anything in particular striking me as an appropriate site for kicking my Victorianist brain back into gear. And it seems self-indulgently biographical to leap right to the “Bride’s Song” from Christina Rossetti’s Prince’s Progress (#338 — “Too late for love, too late for joy! / Too late, too late!” — yeah, you know what I mean).

Instead, I offer the following sonnet from George Meredith (1828 – 1909), which should at least be a change of pace:

332. Lucifer in Starlight

On a starr’d night Prince Lucifer uprose.

Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend

Above the rolling ball in cloud part screen’d,

Where sinners hugg’d their spectre of repose.

Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.

And now upon his western wing he lean’d,

Now his huge bulk o’er Afric’s sands careen’d,

Now the black planet shadow’d Arctic snows.

Soaring through wider zones that prick’d his scars

With memory of the old revolt from Awe,

He reach’d a middle height, and at the stars,

Which are the brain of heaven, he look’d and sank.

Around the ancient track march’d, rank on rank,

The army of unalterable law.

(1883)

This is a particularly masterful sonnet, in my humble opinion, in both its content and the use of its form. I was particularly struck in the transcription of it by the number of end-stopped lines–especially the ones where a single line is also a single sentence–this, for me, helps convey the sense of disenchantment so powerfully present in the language. It verges almost upon the boring, the desultory. Everything is contained and measured, and “unalterable law” is as much a matter of meter and structure as it is of those epic geological forces that come to replace God’s providence in our narrative of Victorian thought. It’s not so much that the struggle naught availeth, contra Clough, but more that the struggle itself was just one manifestation of a different time, something to be looked back upon from an almost Hegelian historical distance, memories of Milton and Romanticism, and how quaint indeed these echoed questions of being of the devil’s party. Lucifer, in the old mythologies, was a star himself once. Now even his fans don’t do much for him.

Reading this, I’m reminded of that thing that Kant says about the two things that fill him with wonder: “the starry sky above us and the moral law within us.” “Awe” (as in “the memory of the old revolt from”) is sometimes used as a figure for the sublime as well as for God himself. Is it possible, then, that the memory here is not simply that of the epic battles of good and evil (decided in advance, though only according to another set of laws) but also of awe itself, of the sublime, of wonder? For Meredith writes of the stars as the “brain of heaven”–a jarring, striking, clinical-seeming image. Something vast but mappable: a game of connect the dots that is infinite only because we’re better at spurious connections than intrinsic ones. Ever-expanding, but also ever dying.

Yes, these are reflections of the “middle height”: a mediocrity that passes, in these times (though I’m not speaking historically here, necessarily) for an apex, a zenith. In the old days–or so it seemed, we thought–he flew much higher, burned much more brightly before he sank.

And it’s possible, of course, that I’m projecting too much of my own world-weariness onto these fourteen lines. We could see this all, certainly, as simply another iteration of a detente between rationalism and religion–in a world where the hand of God has become more difficult to see, we still need not worry about the old demons–they are here, but the laws that bind them to defeat are more stable, more unalterable, than the myths by which we used to contain them. “Brain” will triumph, even if we no longer call it Providence or Love. It’s not so bad. It’s just that–it’s this formalist itch again–something about doing this in a mostly end-stopped sonnet that makes me feel like it’s not just projection. What still moves in all of this is the dark shadow, the “huge bulk” of Lucifer himself–and it moves more fleetingly, more powerfully, than the forced march below or the intelligent pulses above. Yet, in this movement, it doesn’t seem entirely malignant anymore, possibly because Lucifer, in leaving the sleeping sinners alone, has perhaps learned to pick his battles more carefully–no longer subject to this one “hot fit of pride,” now itself passed on?

…but what does it mean for us if the Awe (revolted against and otherwise) is a memory that only Lucifer has?

 

In Which the Long Nineteenth Century Stretches Its Legs, Part II

I’ve been meaning to read up on Adorno over the past, oh, year or two, but I’ve really not succeeded so far, so I might be misrepresenting what he says. My idea in sticking the encyclopedia block quote in the last post was that Adorno’s position on art is pretty relevant to how we might think of literary criticism today. At our last meeting, before margaritas, we talked about how much it’s our responsibility to do something actively political with our criticism, or whether it’s even  possible at all. Shouldn’t we be doing something in the real world instead of just talking about Victorian novels? Perhaps Adorno’s answer to this question would be that literary criticism becomes politically effective precisely through its autonomy, its separation from the “real” world.

Or, when it makes such autonomy more generally viable, livible, visible, inhabitable.

If you’re weird enough to read a lot of reviews and blogs and articles about dance music, every once in a while you’ll hear descriptors like “pure” and “uncompromising” to describe techno. What this means is that there’s no hint of those things that most people look for in songs–vocals, melodic lines, harmonic progressions. The language of techno at its purest consists of repetitions of short snippets of sounds for five, ten, fifteen minutes, with long, subtle, gradual shifts in timbre, introducing or taking away an element every so often–with potentially devastating effects. The tracks from the “M-series” of Maurizio (Moritz von Oswald) are giants in the canon of techno. This is my personal favorite, M5:

In Part I of this post, I linked to Steve Reich’s Music as a Gradual Process, the last point of which describes perfectly the aesthetic experience of this music:

While performing and listening to gradual musical processes one can participate in a particular liberating and impersonal kind of ritual. Focusing in on the musical process makes possible that shift of attention away from he and she and you and me outwards towards it.

It was this it I was thinking about when I block quoted the bit on Adorno.

So I think I’ve cleared up, at least for myself, of the kind of aesthetic experience I’m after, of the kinds of aesthetic judgments that I not only make, but that I, in a sense, need to make. Of course, I’m not saying that everybody else in the world has to adhere to these pseudo-Adornian principles. I certainly don’t read and enjoy Victorian literature in this way, although I’m sure it’s possible. Maybe my takeaway point is that instead of dividing lit crit into aesthetics-based and politics-based camps, we could think of the multiple aesthetico-political registers which are available to our reading practices.

I still haven’t talked about Gas, the ambient music project that got me thinking about my own aesthetic judgments. The stuff on autonomy (i.e. from late capitalism) and shifting attention away from “he and she and you and me outwards towards it” might seem most at home in the twentieth century (and maybe C21 too), but Wolfgang Voigt’s use of Wagner and Mahler suggests that the (highly autonomous) aesthetic of electronic music with its samplers, synthesizers, laptops, mixers, turntables, and assorted gear might be thought of as the (similarly autonomous) aesthetic of Romanticism with its emphasis on organicism and Nature, but above all an individual’s experience of Nature. (Voigt has described his work in Gas as an attempt to recreate his feelings as a child walking in the Black Forest.) I guess what I’m saying is that both electronic music and Romantic art are both machines for producing feelings, and that those feelings are self-consciously distanced from the society which produces them.

 

Blogging Fail

So I told myself that I would do Part II of “In Which the Long Nineteenth Century Stretches its Legs,” but I didn’t. Here is, instead, a little snippet from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philsophy page on Adorno:

Because of the shift in capitalism’s structure, and because of Adorno’s own complex emphasis on (modern) art’s autonomy, he doubts both the effectiveness and the legitimacy of tendentious, agitative, or deliberately consciousness-raising art. Yet he does see politically engaged art as a partial corrective to the bankrupt aestheticism of much mainstream art. Under the conditions of late capitalism, the best art, and politically the most effective, so thoroughly works out its own internal contradictions that the hidden contradictions in society can no longer be ignored. The plays of Samuel Beckett, to whom Adorno had intended to dedicateAesthetic Theory, are emblematic in that regard. Adorno finds them more true than many other artworks.

Seems relevant to the things I’ve been thinking of.

 

Mia: Drive-by Racism for the Chinese

I’m reading Lata Mani’s Contentious Tradition: The Debates Around Sati, wherein she quotes a missionary, William Ward, who talks about the caste system in India by analogy with Chinese shoes: “like all other attempts to cramp the human intellect, and forcibly to restrain men within the bonds that nature scorns to keep, this [caste] system, however specious in theory, has operated like the Chinese national shoe, it has rendered the whole nation cripples” (Qtd. in Mani 133)

 

The Poem of the Week can’t believe you’re gone

288. “Heraclitus” by William (Johnson) Cory (1823-1892)

They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead,

They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.

I wept as I remember’d how often you and I

Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

—

And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,

A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest

Still thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake;

For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

(written 1850?ish, published 1891)

There’s a moment in the “Fair Ship” sequence of In Memoriam where the poet imagines himself meeting the ship that bears the corpse of Arthur Hallam and for just one moment finds that he expects his friend to simply walk off the ship instead. Absence is a funny thing, something we can get used to as long as it meets our expectations and conforms to our timetables. Temporary if somewhat open-ended absences are bittersweet, though they often don’t change our routines so much; when more definitive, traumatic partings take place…well, it’s also sometimes striking how quickly their effects fade. This is all, to some extent, par for the course in a world of constant flux–a world, perhaps, as understood by Heraclitus–though that very sense of flux, perhaps akin to a kind perpetual Paterian weaving and unweaving of ourselves. How can you register absence when the river you step into isn’t even really the same river, or when you can still hear the nightingales?

There is, of course, a fairly obvious “trick” going on in the first line of this poem (which, according to its Representative Poetry Online page, is a translation of “an epigram of Callimachus”–though if you read that epigram, you’ll see that the repetitions and the tricks, as it were, belong to Cory). “They told me you were dead” suggests the kind of misinformation that one recalls years later while having a good laugh with Heraclitus himself–who may, if we read line 5 too quickly (the one about “thou art lying”), have faked his own death. But Heraclitus is dead–so far as we know, for the poem’s speaker still seems somewhat divided on this point. Sure, his friend’s ashes are not just at rest but “long, long ago at rest” (”Cinders there are”? Anyone?), but so much of the rest of this short poem seems to be conspiring to make the speaker’s hold on this bit of knowledge somewhat tenuous. He knows it in his head but not, perhaps, in his senses, in his body.

Aside from all their overdeterminedness as poetic symbol* the nightingale voices strike me as interesting here because they’re used to invoke a kind of permanence that is actually produced through a kind of endless replaceability. Death “cannot take” the nightingales away because there is nothing to take–unlike Heraclitus himself, they are not individuated (since this isn’t an Oscar Wilde fairytale–see “The Nightingale and the Rose”) and in fact are kind of expendable–it’s not death, exactly, but a kind of mindlessness in advance thereof.

The other thing I just want to observe about this poem is the overall difficulty of talking about the issues of death–and survival. I’ve been beginning to think about this as an angle on Browning’s “Epistle,” since one usually doesn’t get the chance to be both the dead guy and the dead guy’s survivor at the same time. But even when they are (as per usual) different people, the lines get blurred a bit.

William (Johnson) Cory, in case you were wondering, was a famed tutor at Eton and, as Wikipedia puts it, “the ‘coach’ of the cult of Victorian pederasty,” in actions as well as in literature, which seems to be related to his eventual resignation from his post. He was also an influence on Pater, Symonds, and perhaps Wilde. You can see the 1891 edition of his Ionica (from which “Heraclitus” was taken) here. He also said, according to an unsourced quote on the Wiki page, that “Above all, you go to a great school for self-knowledge,” which seems quite lovely and true indeed.

*Really, can you think of a bird more overdetermined in Western poetry/literature than the nightingale? I’m not sure even the albatross holds a candle to this. (I think Google’s going to back me up. 4.2 million hits for albatross, 7.9 million for nightingale.)

—-

A brief programming note. By this time next week I will have winged my way to the woods of Northern Wisconsin and a cabin remote enough from the rest of the world to be served only by a dial-up connection that runs somewhat slower than a Victorian-era telegraph. So there will be no new Poem of the Week until June 22 or thereabouts. Try not to miss me too much while I’m gone.

 

In Which the Long 19th Century Stretches its Legs, Part I

It’s been a long time since I’ve showed up around these parts. Thanks, Anne for holding up the fort during my ignominious absence.

This current post is going to be even more tangentially related to all things properly Victorian, so consider yourself forewarned. 

Longtime readers of Anne’s POTW series, should any of you exist, may know that I occasionally show up in Anne’s posts as the wet blanket who hangs dripping over any comment she makes that smells of aesthetic appreciation. In Anne’s last post, one might imagine me to be less piqued when reading of her aesthetic condemnation:

 [T]his poem bothers me in ways that “Dover Beach” and “The Buried Life” don’t. A rather forecful interior voice calls out, “It’s so whiny!”–hence, I’m sure, the Dover Bitch thing. The scientific language of the third stanza, coupled with the image of a severing God in the fourth, takes this mounting sense of helplessness over the top–it’s a kind of geological version of Tennyson’s “Lotos-Eaters,” where the self-administered narcotic lethargy has become a matter of mindless plate tectonics–a situation in which we not only cannot intervene, but we are never asked nor expected to. This seems like kind of a troubling model for thinking human relations.

I agree with everything Anne’s saying here, but… is this an aesthetic judgment? an ethical judgment? a political judgment? I suppose it’s somewhere along the faultline where the three meet, but it’s clear where I would like to stand and where I would like Anne not to stand. So yeah, its “a troubling model for thinking human relations” for political reasons, I’d emphasize. I’ve really got nothing more than party-line marxian doctrine to say: Arnold’s claiming alienation is metaphysical, or a product of secularism, which thereby obscures socioeconomic alienation, class struggle, yada yada yada.

I could probably make a more exciting Radical answer to Arnold’s complacent Torydom (and parrying Whiggish reformism as well), but I’ve realized recently just how much aesthetic appreciation actually does matter to me, except it’s far more likely to matter for me through music, rather than through literature.

I’m in Montreal right now, my homest of towns for my homeless self, but I’m here primarily because it’s Mutek, which is one of the biggest electronic music festivals worldwide, and, I think, the only one this side of Europe that really shows the high-art, avant, experimental Appolinian aspect of electronic music while providing ample opportunity for Dionysian, not necessarily drugged-up but not necessarily not drugged-up bootyshaking. When I tell people, especially Americans (elec. music is much bigger in Canada, especially in Montreal, in large part due to Mutek), that I like techno (I’m actually obsessed), I usually get a bit embarrassed. It’s not a guilty pleasure kind of thing–I really believe in this music, but I never know exactly how to explain that I’m really snobby about it, that I really hate the stuff that most people who don’t know much about electronic music think techno is. The techno that I’m into is actually about the most deeply introverted (but collectively so) kind of music that I know of, and it’s not the stuff that obnoxious people blast out of the cars they want to show off. I used to specify that I’m into minimal techno, but then I’d have to explain what that was, and now, the whole minimal sound has become a bit dated, and nobody quite knows what to call the stuff that’s coming out of Berghain in Berlin. In short, the techno that I’m into is un peu recherché–but I don’t like to defend the music I believe in in elitist terms by saying it’s high-brow, musically sophisticated stuff that someone with loads and loads of “classical” music training and education would be into. (I’ll not go into why classical music is such a misnomer in many cases.)

My basic point is that the aesthetic project that I ruthlessly attack Anne for bringing to the reading of poetry is more or less exactly the affect with which I approach techno.

I was thinking about all of this while I was watching Wolfgang Voigt’s performance on Wednesday night. He’s one of the most important figures in the history of techno for all kinds of reasons, but his performance wasn’t techno at all–it was his ambient Gas project. Hmmm, how to explain what ambient music is? Well, if techno is repetitive electronic music set to a four-on-the-floor beat, then ambient is repetitive electronic music without beats, more or less. Both forms are intensely concerned with questions of time and duration and change, following more or less the blueprint laid by minimalist godfather Steve Reich in “Music as a Gradual Process.” I’m sure there’s a lot–well, a fair deal–of academic work out there on the aesthetic of techno and ambient with which I’m not familiar, but I’m guessing that a lot of it would link it to post-modern or post-structural stuff: the manipulation of recorded or synthesized sounds rather than the production of “natural” sounds, the rhizomatic shifts that determine the “structure” of an individual track or a DJ’s transitions between tracks, the blurring of boundaries between woman and machine.

Maybe, though, there’s a nineteenth-century connection? The best description I’ve found of the Gas sound is from Resident Advisor’s review of the mini-box set rerelease of the Gas albums last summer:

 Distinct from the dance tracks is Voigt’s Gas project, which had a more ambitious agenda: the aim was to produce ambient/experimental tracks by running German cultural history – from Schlager to Wagner – through a sampler. This same process defines the sound of all Gas releases: Voigt creates loops of crackly brass and woodwind phrases, and then obscures this source material with dense layers of processing, smearing the sound into a hazy, bloated wash that shimmers like the blurred contours of a Rothko painting. Underneath all of this is often an unwavering bass drum, the pulse which gives the clouds focus.

If that description mystifies you, here’s a recording of probably my favorite track:

I’ve heard this described as looped snippets of German classical music, but really it’s pure German Romanticism, late Romanticism in particular. Zauberberg VII, at least, for me isn’t about “all of German cultural history”–its the lush, rich colors found in the music of Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss. And this is where the long 19th century connection comes in. Quite long: I’m thinking specifically of R. Strauss’s last of the Four Last Songs:

 

This post is getting kinda long, and I don’t quite what I’m talking about anymore, so maybe I’ll end here, and finish up some other time.

In Part II, I’ll speculate on this strange nexus between late C19 organic romanticism and late C20 cyber-minimalism and what, if anything, this has to do with my own aesthetic sensibility and what I get out of Victorian lit.

 

The Poem of the Week has a chat with Matthew Arnold. It was somewhat one-sided.

Something about gray weather near the end of May puts me in a quasi-canonical mood. Kind of. Also, in the interest of at least partial disclosure, I spent most of my afternoon reading Melanie Klein and various Kleinians. This seems at least obscurely relevant to what I’m about to inflict on you, and stands in for all those other things I can’t say in this semi-professional space.

270. “Isolation” by Matthew Arnold ( 1822-1888 )

Yes: in the sea of life enisled,

With echoing straits between us thrown,

Dotting the shoreless watery wild,

We mortal millions live alone.

The islands feel the enclasping flow,

And then their endless bounds they know.

–

But when the moon their hollows lights,

And they are swept by balms of spring,

And in their glens, on starry nights,

The nightingales divinely sing;

And lovely notes, from shore to shore,

Across the sounds and channels pour;

–

O then a longing like despair

Is to their farthest caverns sent!

For surely once, they feel, we were

Parts of a single continent.

Now round us spreads the watery plain–

O might our marges meet again!

–

Who order’d that their longing’s fire

Should be, as soon as kindl’d, cool’d?

A God, a God their severance rul’d;

And bade betwixt their shores to be

The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.

(1852, 1857)

Oh, Matthew Arnold. You have a way of making me feel like the Dover Bitch (”To have been brought / All the way down from London, and then be addressed / As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort / Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty”)–even when I’m in the mood to be much more serious, liable to feel guilty about how I never really believed in the “object as in itself it really is” and I may have kind of used Tennyson to poke fun at your whole “Buried Life” troping–even though I think it’s a much better poem than its omission from the Oxford Book of Victorian Verse suggests.

But the thing about this poem–yeah, I get it. Believe me. You thought nineteenth century society was all estranging, try living among Facebook and Twitter and Gchat and *still* feeling enisled and isolated–yes, there’s something about these fictions of connectedness that are always throwing the gaps in intimacy into stark relief, at least for a certain kind of personality…I think part of what you and I share–what allows, for instance, a poem like “Dover Beach” to stop me in my tracks as if I am encountering it for the first time every time I read it–is a genuine wish for things to be better than in themselves they really are–things, of course, beginning with ourselves as we really are.

Except that this poem bothers me in ways that “Dover Beach” and “The Buried Life” don’t. A rather forecful interior voice calls out, “It’s so whiny!”–hence, I’m sure, the Dover Bitch thing. The scientific language of the third stanza, coupled with the image of a severing God in the fourth, takes this mounting sense of helplessness over the top–it’s a kind of geological version of Tennyson’s “Lotos-Eaters,” where the self-administered narcotic lethargy has become a matter of mindless plate tectonics–a situation in which we not only cannot intervene, but we are never asked nor expected to. This seems like kind of a troubling model for thinking human relations. Not that I haven’t been guilty of this myself. And it’s also not like you invented the trope exactly…it’s just–maybe it’s that first line. “Yes” as in response to something, a gesture that necessarily opens and connects this poem to something–as in, it is not itself an island (more on this anon)–but it’s followed by this very disconnected non-image image of being “in the sea of life enisled”–we don’t even know what’s “enisled” until the “we” of line 4. (Thanks, GRE reading sections!) It’s meant to be oppressive, I know, meant to make us feel boxed in–and, again, the limitedness of these human/islands is thrown up against the limitlessness of whatever it is that estranges us, which is given a kind of absolute power of separation and force and movement and expansion. This isn’t your sea of faith.

But it still is the *sea*–which I think is why this metaphor seems so frustratingly partial to me. The sea separates but it also connects and moves and allows–for instance, the “lovely notes” of the nightingales to travel across great distances. Instead of longing for the time when we were all one big supercontinent (yawner), why can’t there be another way of understanding the archipelago, as it were?

Yes, Matthew Arnold, I know it’s your poem. But the answer may have more to do with the title that Arthur Quiller-Couch chose to attach to this particular set of stanzas in the OBVV. To call this poem “Isolation,” as you did in the 1857 edition of your Poems and as AQC does here, rather reinforces that whole enislement, forcing us to see ourselves as fixed in our estrangement, about which we can do nothing.

On the other hand, if we were going to approach this poem as, “To Marguerite, in returning a volume of the Letters of Ortis” (as we would do if we were reading this poem in 1852 or thereabouts), things change a bit. Personally, I might have just let you keep that copy of the Letters of Ortis, even though I can’t get it on Google Books. And what makes this all more confusing, of course, is that “To Marguerite” in the 1857 edition is a different poem and this one also appears as “To Marguerite: Continued.”

My point in going through all of this (and I’m sure someone’s untangled this somewhere) is only to highlight this very obvious tension, wherein a poem that seems to be about the fixity of isolation is itself part of a conversation with another person (even an imaginatively projected one) and with other texts, real or not. And on the one hand this makes me even more annoyed by this poem–not only is it positing an entire lack of agency, it’s doing so while making use of agency that it isn’t supposed to have. And that’s the kind of thing that Coleridge is always going to do better.

But then again. The act of responding to this poem has helped shake me out of some of my own despair, at least temporarily. Nothing you say here is anything that doesn’t cross my mind on a regular basis, that I wasn’t thinking about tonight. I came to the OBVV looking to have my own sense of something articulated and reinforced in a way that would help me gain some comfort. In this, you failed miserably, taking all those thoughts that I was hoping to cherish a little longer and taking them to such an extreme that it’s making me intervene to say, “No–this isn’t how it has to be”–and to look for possibilities within the poem of thinking these relations differently.

Because maybe we’re not the islands–maybe we’re just on the islands. And if that’s the case, then there doesn’t have to be this absolutely estranging space between us–if the longing is already there as a connection, that’s something. Sure, we can’t turn back the tide of divine severance. But we can teach ourselves how to build boats, right?

Yes, that’s right. I’m On A Boat.

Also, a quick follow up on one of the recent Poems of the Week. When I was consulting the Penguin Book of Victorian Verse (a collection of rather more recent vintage) to see what its stance on the Marguerite poems were, I noticed that Emily Bronte’s “Stanzas”–which I wrote about here–made it into this anthology as well, with a few changes. The poem does contain the final stanza that Mia mentioned in her editor’s note, but–perhaps more intriguingly–the poem is attributed to either Emily or Charlotte. Daniel Karlin’s editor’s notes mention that this poem was originally published in a memorial edition of Wuthering Heights (edited by Charlotte) in 1850–but apparently there’s some debate about the authorship. Karlin’s source is Janet Gezari’s edition of Emily Bronte’s Complete Poems (Penguin, 1992)–but, sadly, GoogleBooks is giving me only a snippet view. Alas.