Author: Caleb Crain

What is Enlightenment? (The France mix)

Lytton Strachey describes the Philosophes of late-eighteenth-century France:

So far as the actual content of their thought was concerned, they were not great originators. The germs of their most fruitful theories they found elsewhere—chiefly among the thinkers of England; and, when they attempted original thinking on their own account, though they were bold and ingenious, they were apt also to be crude. In some sciences—political economy, for instance, and psychology—they led the way, but attained to no lasting achievement. . . . In their love of pure reason, they relied too often on the swift processes of argument for the solution of difficult problems, and omitted that patient investigation of premises upon which the validity of all argument depends. They were too fond of systems, and those neatly constructed logical theories into which everything may be fitted admirably—except the facts. In addition, the lack of psychological insight which was so common in the eighteenth century tended to narrow their sympathies; and in particular they failed to realize the beauty and significance of religious and mystical states of mind. These defects eventually produced a reaction against their teaching—a reaction during which the true value of their work was for a time obscured. For that value is not to be looked for in the enunciation of certain definite doctrines, but in something much wider and more profound. The Philosophes were important not so much for the answers which they gave as for the questions which they asked; their real originality lay not in their thought, but in their spirit. They were the first great popularizers. Other men before them had thought more accurately and more deeply; they were the first to fling the light of thought wide through the world, to appeal, not to the scholar and the specialist, but to the ordinary man and woman, and to proclaim the glories of civilization as the heritage of all humanity. Above all, they instilled a new spirit into the speculations of men—the spirit of hope.

From Landmarks in French Literature, 1912.

Come back to the mall, Huck honey

I haven’t yet read James Wood’s How Fiction Works, but it isn’t necessary to, in order to see the bankruptcy of Walter Kirn’s review of it in the 17 August 2008 New York Times Book Review. Kirn begins by declaring himself a philistine. He is appalled that Wood is on familiar terms with Homer, Auden, and Ian McEwan. He litters his review with ad hominem mockery, calling Wood “vicarish” and quipping that Wood “flashes the Burberry lining of his jacket whenever he rises from his armchair to fetch another Harvard Classic.” I happen to be in favor of intermittent viciousness in book reviews, but let’s be serious here for a moment: Kirn is making fun of Wood for being the sort of person who reads a lot of books. Perhaps Kirn has misjudged the audience for a review of a work of literary criticism?

Little matter is mixed with this impertinency. In an attempt to indict Wood’s method, Kirn writes:

Take his disquisition on detail, which comes down first to asserting its importance, then to questioning its all-importance, and then, after serving up a list of some of his very favorite fictional details, to defining the apt, exquisite detail much as a judge once defined obscenity: as something he knows when he sees it.

This indeed sounds like a clincher, except that Kirn has just described E. M. Forster’s method in Aspects of the Novel (unwittingly, no doubt—no such lumber in his study), and that book remains a classic. If the same method falters in Wood’s hands, we need to be told why. By this point, few of Kirn’s readers will trust his mere assertions.

Perhaps the review’s only substantive claim is Kirn’s complaint that Wood neglects “story, plot and setting, as well as the powerful drive of certain authors to expand or alter perception by exalting the vernacular, absorbing the anarchic and ennobling the vulgar that has impelled such messy master­works as Huckleberry Finn, On the Road, and Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son.” I haven’t read Johnson’s novel, so I’ll set it to one side. But I’m not a fan of Kerouac, and I think it could be argued that what makes Huckleberry Finn great is not Twain’s phonetic rendering of dialect but rather the sort of thing Wood prizes: the chance to follow a mind as it works out what it thinks of a social world. I think it could be argued, in fact, that the phonetic rendering of dialect is something that Twain’s modern readers agree to endure.

There is an issue here worth debating: If one praises a novel for “absorbing the anarchic,” ought the emphasis to be on the absorption or on the anarchy? My inclination is for the former. After all, we hardly need resort to novels to experience anarchy. Still, all things being equal, one probably prefers to read novelists who have managed to absorb a little more anarchy than others. In a recent review of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland in the London Review of Books, Benjamin Kunkel praised O’Neill’s description of a Google Earth tour, writing that “The passage is exciting simply because it represents new territory, or at least new subject matter, claimed for fiction.” But it’s important to keep in mind that in practice all things rarely are equal. The flotsam of life sometimes appears in a novel not because the writer’s consciousness has made a new sense of it, but because he hasn’t. It’s then merely a distraction.

Indeed, in complaining that Wood overlooks “the powerful drive of certain authors to expand or alter perception by exalting the vernacular,” etc., Kirn may be guilty of special pleading. In a review of Kirn’s novel The Unbinding in the New York Times Book Review of 11 February 2007, Matt Weiland wrote:

This is what Kirn does best—keen observation of American social fissures and class dynamics along with an ear for the jaunty rhythms of contemporary talk. . . . But this sort of thing, however well done, risks descending into a torrent of timely references, the sort of rage for information that James Wood has criticized as substituting for character in some contemporary fiction. Want to know what kind of car the characters drive? The Unbinding has a Ford Galaxy, a Cadillac, a Ranger, a Jetta, a Hyundai, a Dodge, a Civic and an Acura. Where they spend their time? There are mentions of Applebee’s, Costco, Fuddruckers, Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, Old Navy, Saks, Starbucks and Taco Bell. What they watch or listen to? Blue Man Group, Drew Carey, Tom Cruise, Neil Diamond, Madonna, Oprah, .38 Special and Bo Bice all make appearances. This may chime with Kirn’s aim . . . and it certainly fits with his theme. But it makes a short book feel like a long walk at the mall.

The teal-and-mustard candidate

“I thought this might be a hoax,” an email now circulating on the internet begins. “Actually hoped it was, but snopes.com verifies the following info. . . . Obama The Patriot – Removes American Flag From His Plane.” And thousands of indignant Americans are now emailing this news widely, including to my relatives. “Please forward this if you’re not ashamed of our country and our flag,” the email suggests. And also: “If you do not forward this to everyone you know nothing will happen.”

To someone like me, the charge seems silly. Is it too silly to answer? Well, in the last election, people like me often thought themselves above responding to such charges, and it didn’t end well. And this particular accusation is awfully easy to answer, so . . .

Obama has indeed lowered the number of American flags on his campaign airplane, by trading in the flag-heavy corporate logos of North American Airlines for a design by his own campaign. But if you’re going to judge a candidate by his colors, it’s only fair to take a look at McCain’s plane for comparison. Have you seen it? Obama’s plane is red, white, and blue. What color is McCain’s? Teal and mustard.

There is an American flag on McCain’s plane, but it’s small, low to the ground, and hidden behind the jets. You can’t see it in most of the photos of the plane online. And if you take a second look at Obama’s campaign symbol, what do you really see? Red stripes, white stripes, blue. His symbol is the American flag, in a lot of ways. His symbol is saying that he’s so close to the flag that he’s at one with it.

For the record, of course I don’t seriously think that McCain’s choice of teal and mustard signals a lack of patriotism on his part. My point is that he’s just as vulnerable as Obama to such an attack—and maybe a little more so.

1968 and not 1968

The other day, speaking of Russia’s incursion into Georgia, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, “This is not 1968 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia where Russia can threaten a neighbor, occupy a capital, overthrow a government and get away with it. Things have changed.”

May she be right, and may South Ossetia prove not to be the Sudetenland, either. In the meantime, it so happens that next week, on August 21, it will be forty years since Russian tanks rolled into Prague by cover of night to crush the Prague Spring. In commemoration, there’s been a recent outpouring of photographic documentary. The photographer Josef Koudelka has released Invasion 68 (also available through Amazon), a collection of roughly 250 pictures that Koudelka took on Prague’s streets during the occupation. At the time some were published by Magnum anonymously, but most are published now for the first time. There will be an exhibition of the photos in New York starting September 4, and you can look at thumbnails of them on Magnum’s website.

On its website, the Czech newspaper Lidové noviny is showing in seven daily installments the 1968 film Seven Days to Remember, which was made with footage smuggled out of Czechoslovakia. The film was originally narrated in English by Jiří Voskovec, and that narration is still faintly audible, though for the LN readership it has been overdubbed in Czech. More problematic, the files are in Windows Media format, which seems to crash every browser it touches. Still, it’s amazing footage, and on Youtube you can see the first ten minutes of the movie in the original English, courtesy of the film’s current distributor.

If you’re willing to let go of the umbilical cord of English altogether, Youtube also has the Czechoslovak Film Weekly #35 of 1968 (divided, because of Youtube’s 11-minute time limit, into a part one and a part two), which shows motion pictures of some of the same scenes that Koudelka photographed, such as the battle outside Czechoslovak Radio. It’s pretty amazing. Also on Youtube are film images shot by cameraman František Procházka during the invasion, accompanied by recordings of transmissions from besieged-but-still-loyal radio stations in Prague, Pilsen, and elsewhere.