The Meaning of Fuzzy Dice

 

 

 

     George Orwell’s memorable essay “The Art of Donald McGill” proved to me that the most vulgar of visions repays sympathetic interpretation. 

 

     Americans identify with their cars.  For some it is a matter of wealth: to drive a Cadillac or a Lexus or a Tesla may be a sign of having succeeded.  Many a pickup truck driver never has need to haul anything heavier than a bit of machismo.  For some an electric vehicle demonstrates a commitment to sustainability, while a sports car suggests youth and élan to others.  VW vans and even Beetles bore such an insistent meaning in the late ‘sixties that drivers often saluted each other in passing. 

     I fancy, though, that one sees far fewer symbolic doodads on today’s cars.  Political bumper stickers, maybe, on some vehicles and product logos like STP on others, a few vestigial pine air fresheners poison or sweeten the air, but many decorations and accessories common in my childhood have become rare birds today.  Yet each represented a kind of defiant populist symbolic magic, generally signifying traditionally masculine traits, much like tattoos once did before they became sufficiently universal as to be meaningless. 

     Car ownership is now close to universal in America, but there was a time when possession of wheels was a distinguishing sign both of economic well-being and of a certain sense of youth and adventure.  Drivers wished to call attention to themselves.  The old klaxon horns with their loud and distinctive sound, served this purpose well.  Invented in the early twentieth century as a safety improvement over quieter squeeze bulbs, by the 1920s they had become standard on many American cars.  When, in the ‘thirties, less abrasive electric horns were substituted, the klaxon became a style choice, characteristic of hot rodders and teens with jalopies more broken down than souped up until its sound finally filtered down to 1950s elementary school students calling out ah-oo-gah in the schoolyard in an effort to seem mildly disruptive.  Their fathers may as teenagers have summoned a date from the street outside her house with a horn so satisfying in assertiveness that it was guaranteed to annoy her father.  Old rattletraps that ought by rights be hiding in a shed instead called attention to themselves viva voce, for irrepressible is the spirit of youth and many adolescent males have no hesitation at calling attention to themselves by whatever means may be available.

     The Brodie knob, a doorknob-shaped handle attached to the steering wheel, was perhaps of some utility in the days before power steering – indeed, it is still functional on semi-trailer trucks, earth-moving equipment, and tractors.   Brodie knobs were symbolic as well, and, like the klaxon, they have survived in ornamental usage.  Invented in the ‘thirties, the name derived from Steve Brodie, a practitioner of daredevil stunts like jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge who had no connection to automobiles, and its symbolic use today suggests a thrill-seeking driver.  The knob’s association with tempting fate lingers, as examples on sale now feature imagery such as dice, skulls, eight balls, and spiders as well as aggressively patriotic imagery such as the line “don’t tread on me.”  This accessory had a further significance.  Known sometimes as a “necker,” it allowed the driver to steer with one hand while enwrapping his date with another.  

     Likewise implying a risky and exhibitionist driver are the familiar amulet of the oversize fuzzy dice hanging from the rear-view mirror.  The lineage of this fetish originated among WWII pilots and their crews whose odds of dying were greater than of surviving and who, not surprisingly, welcomed magic charms.  These aviators often hung dice above their instruments for luck or simply to acknowledge their helplessness before a capricious fate.  Upon the war’s end, some continued courting danger by racing and driving stunts.  They sometimes retained the dice that had served them during combat and, as their ornamental value was foregrounded, the dice grew in size, blossomed with bright colors, and, of all things, grew furry.  Whether a car were a hot rod or not, the dice conveyed a sense of dash and adventure washed with a vague sense of heroism.

     The practice of hanging a raccoon tail on the radio antenna clearly began with rural youth stopping and taking the ornament from an animal that had been hit by a car.  While raccoon was most common, a fox tail was more highly prized and a squirrel tail considered juvenile.  Before radio antennas were standard, such tails were sometimes hung from the radiator cap.  This decoration had the double value of seeming somewhat gross to susceptible sensibilities while appealing to an exceedingly archaic sense of the male driver’s self-image as a hunter, displaying a trophy he had killed, rather like the residents of Çatalhöyük had featured interior decoration with ox heads nine thousand years ago. 

     But even the bold young hunter may become a husband and father, proud less of risk-taking than of supporting a family, providing not just necessities but also such luxuries as leisure travel.  Among the goods sold at souvenir shops travelers might visit on long road trips in the past were cups and ash trays featuring the destination, pennants, and snow globes, but the most commonly offered merchandise was probably postcards and decals, each a simple boast that one had indeed made the trip, like a snapshot in front of the state capitol.  Electronic communication has brought obsolescence to the trade in postcards, but the tourism decals had faded even earlier.  One used sometimes to see a car with a back side window magnificently crowded with decals of the Statue of Liberty, Grand Canyon, Coit Tower, the Black Hills, and a variety of other scenes, testifying to the owner’s at least modest affluence and sophistication (though, like the other items considered here, such decals were decidedly vulgar and would seem out of place on expensive cars).  The decals were yet another way for working class people to assert the richness of their lives under the leadership of an indefatigable pater familias who could drive for hours over the nation’s meandering two-lane roads and the new superhighways.

     Since the accessories noted here, other trends have supervened.  “Gas, grass, or ass” bumper stickers appeared in the late sixties, truck testicles about twenty years later, followed closely by the representations of Bill Watterson’s Calvin pissing, unauthorized, of course, because the whole idea is to project a playfully transgressive outlaw sensibility.  The human mind is adept at symbolic manipulation.  Like all codes, the language of such symbolic accessories is always changing, and what seems emphatically “the lastest” tends always to become passé fastest.  The bird of paradise will continue its ever-effective old courtship dances, and the prairie dog will assume outlandish postures to impress potential mates, while every generation of people devises new and whimsical representations of its erotic boasts to accompany the old repertory of significant tones, tender glances, and posturing.  We humans have a weakness for art, and daily perform for each other, using a semiotic vocabulary in part inherited and in part devised.  For Americans the passenger car is a vehicle not only for transportation, but for self-expression as well.  

Around the World in Eighty Days as Popular Literature

 

 

   Jules Verne has long been identified as an exceedingly successful popular genre author, the writer of entertaining and adventurous fast reads.  To many his work, like that of Robert Lewis Stevenson, is primarily appropriate for children.  Even in his own time his immense sales led some critics to suspect that his work lacked qualities required to gain admission to Parnassus.   A counter-tendency has emerged in our own time in which ingenious contrarian critics find in Verne a writer who anticipated surrealism and practiced postmodernism avant la lettre [1].

     While the revisionists seeking to elevate Verne’s status among writers can justly argue that his reputation has suffered from a combination of hasty or incompetent translations, abridgements, and countless editions designed to appeal to children, he has always been a demonstrably popular author among both young and old, not only in his sales but in his style as well.  While Verne’s early work was applauded by littérateurs such as George Sand and Théophile Gautier, his immense popularity overwhelmed this initial critical receptivity.  

     Around the World in Eighty Days originally appeared in installments in Le Temps.  While appearance in a popular journal itself indicates a mass audience, serial publication has not similarly impacted the critical reputation of other Victorian novelists such as Thackery, George Eliot, Dickens, and Trollope.  When it came out in book form, Around the World in Eighty Days did prove an immediate bestseller and was soon translated into the major European languages (Verne is the very most translated of authors after Agatha Christie [2]).  The author collaborated with Adolphe d'Ennery on a staged version which was a hit for decades.  Verne’s fiction, his "romans de la science" [3] often based on technological innovation or scientific discoveries he had studied in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France [4], had an immense readership, but this very success in the marketplace led many critics to think him imperfectly literary. 

     Whether Verne deserves a place on the pantheon of French greats is a matter of judgement, of course, and the general notion that elite art, often indecipherable to hoi polloi, deserves more praise than best-sellers is not as universally accepted as it once was.  The popular character of his work is undeniable, proven as much by the formal characteristics of the novel as by its sales.  Though he is often placed among the Realists, Around the World in Eighty Days has significant unrealistic, even metafictional elements.  Many think of him as the father of science fiction, no small title in literary history, and the genre’s very name embodies a contradiction, since science deals with observed reality and fiction with fantasies.  Thus, “science fiction” is concerned with imaginative possibilities that do  not currently exist yet are described as though they were factual. 

     Around the World in Eighty Days is, like The Mysterious Island or Five Weeks in a Balloon,  more a tale of adventure than science fiction, though it does take advantage of public awareness and excitement about new feats of engineering in the years just preceding the novel’s publication: the Suez Canal and the construction of rail lines across the United States and India.  The popular interest in the practicality of a trip like Phileas Fogg’s is indicated by the Thomas Cook travel agency marketing for the first time an around the world tour (taking not eighty days but rather seven months) a short time after the book had appeared.  That the theme retained its appeal is evident from Nelly Bly’s account of a seventy-two-day circumnavigation on which she embarked in 1889 for the New York World.

     Though the greatest works can  rely heavily on plot, that element is virtually always foregrounded in popular works to the disadvantage of psychology, description, and theme, and, indeed, Verne’s characters are simple and transparent.  While Fogg is somewhat enigmatic, he seems at the same time shallow.  His reserve, quiet confidence, and conformity to gentlemanly behavior do sketch a personality, but hardly a complex or profound one.  Other characters are no more convincing.  Not only does Passepartout behave predictably; his very name (“Passport”) indicates that he is not to be considered a person with a fully-developed psyche [5].  Finn and Aouda are simpler yet.

     Readers’ interest in the story is sustained by the wager, a rather artificial device, and then satisfied by the twist at the end, when Fogg thinks he has failed to make the deadline until he realizes the day had changed in the middle of the Pacific, today’s International Date Line.  Such a lapse, of course, is not what one would expect of a man so often called methodical and meticulous.  Inevitably less satisfying at second reading, suspense and a surprise in the denouement are characteristic of genre stories, though used by some prominent writers such as de Maupassant and O. Henry.  The theme of a trip around the globe could have been the occasion for a series of colorful vignettes and picturesque delineations of landscape, but, since Fogg is said to have no interest in his surroundings, only the most minimal descriptions are included [5].  This must have been a convenience for Verne as, though his works spanned the globe, the author never traveled outside Europe [6]. 

     The appearance of Finn generates added interest by suggesting that Fogg, who seems a proper gentleman, is in fact a bank robber, a suspicion that turns out to be groundless.   Finn is thus adventitious, a red herring of the sort familiar from detective mysteries that imply a likely suspect only to distract from the real culprit.  This uncertainty about Fogg’s character is another element that, effective upon an initial reading, would lose its effect thereafter. 

     Though Around the World in Eighty Days lacks the fantasy elements of Journey to the Center of the Earth or From the Earth to the Moon several of the chief episodes are contrived.  The Indian attack, though not altogether impossible, is surely designed to satisfy the European audience with a taste of the Wild West [7].  The rescue of Aouda from death on her husband’s funeral pyre is an important element in the story, itself most improbable and rendered impossible by the identification of Aouda as a “Parsi,” a sect that condemned the sacrifice of widows [8]. 

     Verne conforms as well to the expectation  that popular literature must be unadventurous in theme, accepting received ideas without challenge.  Thus the only female in the story, Aouda, is entirely passive, the foreigners are often barbaric, and Fogg’s “gentlemanliness” constitutes his virtue [9].    

    None of this will matter, of course, to the casual reader seeking a few hours entertainment.  The book is a pleasant read, well-suited to pass the time in an airport or under a beach umbrella.  Verne has a certain dash of his own to which his enduring popularity is a convincing testament.  He was (like Kurt Vonnegut more recently) certainly galled by being relegated to a sub-literary category.  It is little wonder that he felt mistreated by characterizations like that of Zola who called him “un aimable vulgarisateur” [10] reacting in interview with the complaint that, though he considered himself "a man of letters and an artist, living in the pursuit of the ideal," he felt that “the great regret of my life is that I have never taken any place in French literature." [11] 

     The author’s disappointment was a reaction to the habitual disparagement of popular genres by many savants; in fact, Verne’s work admirably fulfils the conventions of first-class popular fiction.  In Journey to the Center of the Earth M. Fridriksson sensibly observes, “We are of opinion that instead of letting books grow moldy behind an iron grating, far from the vulgar gaze, it is better to let them wear out by being read.”  Rather than feeling chagrin at the reaction of those who found his works wanting, the author might have gloried in their general appeal.  More than a hundred years later, despite the judgement of some literati, his novels seem far more likely to be worn out from use than to grow moldy from being ignored.

 

 

1.  A useful survey of critical opinion, both positive and negative on Verne’s literary qualities is provided by Arthur B. Evans in “Jules Verne and the French Literary Canon” (in Jules Verne: Narratives of Modernity, edited by Edmund J. Smyth (2000).  See also Marc Angenot, "Jules Verne and French Literary Criticism," Science Fiction Studies I (Spring 1973).

2.  "Statistics: 'Top 50' Author," Index Translationum, UNESCO Culture Sector, 2013.

3.  Some critics have thought his work should be called “scientific fiction” rather than “science fiction” because of his use of scientific facts. 

4.  See Quentin R. Skrabec. “Jules Verne’s Use of Victorian Scientific Models,” Journal of Science Fiction and Philosophy, VIII (2025).

5.  Even his own country is barely described.  In the story of Fogg’s setting out; for instance, there is no mention of the calamity of the recently concluded Franco-Prussian War.

6.  Much of his excitement about exotic realms was inspired by his friendship with Jacques Arago, a writer, artist, and explorer who continued his world travels even after becoming blind.  

6.  Phileas Fogg may be a more subtle sprechende Name.  Fogg certainly conveys a sense of mystery.  The Greek-derived Phileas, odd enough to draw attention in either French or English, seems slyly ironic since he is described as anything but a “lover” or “lovable.”  He does, of course ultimately make a match with Aouda, so the name proves true in the end.

7.  Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show was highly popular in Europe after their first tour in 1887.  This taste has not vanished.  In the souvenir shops of International terminal of JFK one will yet today  find considerable merchandise associated with cowboys and Indians. 

8.  Verne lays enough emphasis on her “Parsi” identity that I suspect it may be to remove her, as a sort of Persian closer to civilization than the Hindus who are perceived as more barbaric

9.  Contrast with Flaubert’s ridicule of the bourgeoisie, most pointedly, perhaps, in Bouvard et Péchuchet and in Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues.

11.  Émile Zola in “Adolphe d'Ennery,” Œuvres complètes, p. 271.

12.  R.H. Sherard, “Jules Verne at Home,” McClure’s Magazine, January 1894.

Snobbery

 

“Sketch in the Lobby of the House of Commons” 1881

     I do not doubt that I have been, out of my hearing, called a snob.  I would much rather attend the Metropolitan Opera than the Superbowl, and, in fact, I have never in my adult life watched any sporting event.  I could not name a single tune of Beyoncé or Taylor Swift, yet I could easily distinguish Mozart from Brahms.  I have read three dozen books by Trollope and none by Stephen King.  I have visited Kathmandu yet never mean to set foot in Epcot Center.  Am I here strutting or simply stating facts?  Do these preferences make me a snob?

     Perhaps the court of my gentle readers could use more evidence.  If I am to be deemed a snob, I must have achieved that status as early as my teen-age years.  In my freshman year of high school we read Great Expectations, but our class was given a shortened version, which I spurned.  For several weeks I, probably with a degree of ostentation, carried a fat unabridged edition.  During my junior year, the literature textbook [1] contained a photo essay on Richard Wilbur, whom I have always admired as a virtuoso poet and a skilled translator, but I saw that the editor’s goal in featuring him was quite clearly to demystify his arcane profession by depicting a fairly young, rather good-looking, casually dressed writer in a cardigan sweater  who would not put off the young.  Does my feeling patronized by this appeal constitute snobbery?

     Art museums at one time displayed the visual art of the past with considerable dignified reserve, only labeling works with title, artist’s name, and perhaps a date.  Once these institutions conceived the ambition of increasing their appeal to the general public, they began adding further information, historical, biographical, and interpretive.  Like textbook introductions to poems, such editorial additions may have aided some, but at the cost of substituting the predigested views of accepted experts for the viewer’s or reader’s direct and spontaneous responses.  Then, perhaps with the 1972 show The Treasures of Tutankhamen in the British Museum which reached the Metropolitan in New York in 1976, was born the blockbuster show with its greatly expanded publicity expenditures followed by even greater revenues. King Tut’s free publicity even reached Saturday Night Live where it inspired Steve Martin’s amusing song about “the boy king.”  Those with a genuine interest in ancient art noticed that a new profit-oriented, business-based model had replaced the earlier aims of education and scholarship.

     According to the New York Times eighty percent of visitors to the Louvre come to see the Mona Lisa [2].  I can personally report that once they have entered the room these tourists do not even study the painting. Instead, standing shoulder to shoulder, they take selfies of themselves trying to capture Leonardo’s work in the background, presumably to prove to their skeptical friends that they actually made the trip.  Is it snobbish to think that these people are getting no experience of art whatsoever and would have a better time at Disneyland Paris?

     Turning to music, for the past week and a half I have been attending the Bravo!Vail music festival. The program includes celebrated performers, a good admixture of old and new music, and an admirable inclusion of non-white musicians and composers.  Yet, in pursuit of larger audiences, the organizers have also included such programs as a showing of The Princess Bride with the Dallas Symphony playing the soundtrack, then another evening devoted to movie music, and, far worse, an entire program in which a reduced corps of orchestral musicians aided by rock performers sang pop songs of the ‘80s.  Such programs scarcely display the classical performers’ skills. The semi-orchestral arrangements of top forty songs are surely no improvement over the original versions.  I do concede that the music of movie composers like John Williams at least potentially deserves a place in the concert hall, but I suspect their place in the program was motivated less by the value of their work than by the artistic director’s ambition to sell tickets to people who liked Stars Wars and Jurassic Park.  The kids in the audience who were waving their light sabers are not, I think, more likely to ask their parents to bring them back to hear Mozart.  Does my distaste for the replacement of aesthetic values with financial ones make me a snob?

     As a teen, I was fiercely loyal to “Chicago’s fine arts station” WFMT, often listening with friends and sometimes taping broadcasts of operas or symphonies.  The station allowed the inimitable Studs Terkel his Wax Museum, and relaxed its braces for Leadbelly and Tom Lehrer on the Midnight Special every Saturday evening, but concert hall music was central.  Now, with classical an ever-declining share of recorded music sales, the far fewer surviving stations playing Bach and Brahms tend to program only single movements while the music occupies ever-decreasing segments of the day.  Their standards and their respect for the audience has deteriorated.  And in my youth my taste was not so peculiar.   A 1955 study of the Minneapolis Symphony (now the Minnesota Orchestra) revealed that the median age of its ticket-buyers was 33, very close that of the nation as a whole, with students making up nearly a quarter of attendees [3].  Now game shows and interviews with pop singers and comedians and endless discussion of the news have supplanted the original cultural role of NPR outlets.  One hears virtually no poetry at all on even the best community-supported stations.  In spite of radio’s being an ideal medium for the art it has, I suppose, too few enthusiasts to merit inclusion in regular programming when public stations as well as commercial ones are courting numbers.

     Something comparable is seen with public television.  Early PBS shows had been largely those which could not survive in the marketplace and yet were considered worthy: lessons for GED or language-learning, music, plays, both classic and modern.  Yet these so-called “educational” stations began to play for a mass audience with soap opera-like features like BBC’s Forsyte Saga in 1967 which, due to the actors’ accents alone, seemed somewhat classy.  While aiming for a mainstream viewership doubtless increased their revenues, the gain came at the cost of diluting the role of such stations, making them more like all the money-oriented outlets to which they had once been a real alternative. 

     Higher education has been similarly degraded.  The ignorant used to complain about professors being evaluated on research rather than on teaching, but this objection is based on a misconception of the role of colleges which in fact represent the only place in modern society where scholars and scientists may pursue new knowledge for its own sake, without regard to financial considerations.  Universities have turned into vocational schools, with their administrators often welcoming the change in hopes that it might bring both new tuition-paying students as well as funding from commercial enterprises, while “impractical” majors like Classics fall to the wayside and the idea of a liberal education is quite forgotten.  My wife accuses me of pretending to aristocratic values by maintaining that no one should have to be bothered by the obligation to earn a living through work for wages.  I prefer to think that aesthetic and intellectual pursuits, which are, after all, ubiquitous in human society, are not elitist, but rather profoundly popular.  The manipulation of symbols, cognitive exercise in general, is the most characteristically human of occupations and one of the most pleasurable.    Pursuit of knowledge, like art, is a self-justifying activity.  One knows it is good because it is so achingly beautiful, and one knows beauty through pleasure, whether contemplating Euclid or Homer, Max Planck or James Joyce.   Yet the fact remains that many people who are surely in no way less human do not care to engage with thinkers and artists and might consider those who do pretentious. 

     Surely the worst sort of snob is a long-winded one, and I fear my evidence, whether tending toward guilt or innocence, has accumulated to a great enough heap, but for any meaningful verdict to be rendered one must first define the offense.  Snobs have been spoken of for only a few hundred years and the current usage is considerably more recent.  Some authors maintain that the word arose from the expression “sine nobilitate,” abbreviated “s. nob.,” which, without evidence, they claim appeared in university records and lists of ship passengers to indicate people who might be addressed without the use of a title.  Though this ingenious origin has been disproven, it is not entirely wide of the mark. 

     Those who were first called snobs could scarcely have been taken for noble even at first glance.  Francis Grose’s A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in 1785 contains this entry: “Snob, a nick name for a shoemaker.”  Quite likely the  prior and underlying meaning is simply a person of the lower classes of whom the cobbler was merely representative, though this can only be speculation about speech unrecorded in print.  A bit of doggerel titled “Epitaph on a Cobler” from 1790 begins “Here lies poor Bob/ An honest snob.”  Cambridge undergraduates around the same time called the townspeople snobs (while at Oxford the term was cads), rather as if I and my fellow students at the University of Illinois had referred to the locals as farmers, whatever their occupation.

     Thus from the start the term was associated with class, though ironically, today it is the Cambridge students who would be called snobs.  The term was popularized and its meaning altered by Thackery’s Book of Snobs the title page of which announced that its author was “One of Themselves,” that is, a snob.  Thackery provided a succinct definition: “He who meanly admires mean things is a Snob—perhaps that is a safe definition of the character.”  In practice, however, he used the term in several senses.  Some of his examples conform to the early meaning of vulgar or plebeian, for instance the man who eats peas on a knife or picks his teeth with a fork.  Again, to contemporaries it is the diner who feels superior due to practicing more genteel table etiquette who would be the snob.  Still the enduring comedy of the practice is suggested by the anonymous verse, variously attributed to Edward Lear, Spike Milligan, Ogden Nash or Shel Silverstein:

 

I eat my peas with honey,

I’ve done it all my life;

It makes the peas taste funny,

But it keeps them on the knife.

 

     Yet Thackery extended the word’s meaning from working class people to those of the middle class who, usually incompetently, ape a fashionable lifestyle.   Major Ponto and his wife bankrupt themselves by imitating their “betters.” The author is subjected to their daughters’ incompetent piano-playing. The Pontos relish the company of the disagreeable Lord Gules because of his aristocratic birth and the family us financially ruined by their son’s expenditures to maintaining an upper-class facade.         

     There remained only one further twist to bring the current sense of the word.  Today one may properly be called a snob if one feels that one’s possessions, material, intellectual, or even spiritual, make one superior to those less gifted.  Looking down on others is an error of taste, it is unseemly, and constitutes the real heart of true snobbery.  The Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest example of this barbed sort of snobbery has to do not with financial or aesthetic but rather religious one-upmanship, citing Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma (1911): “All her childish affectations of conscientious scruple and religious impulse have been applauded and deferred to until she has become an ethical snob of the first water.”

     The sense of sharpness that soon accumulated around this sort of disdain is exemplified by Orwell’s relentless experience of his wealthier classmates’ contempt as scholarship boy in a prestigious school.  “I suppose,” he comments, “there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school.” [4]  Yet he noted a sort of snobbery as well among waiters who identify with their genteel clientele and even  among tramps who wish to let everyone know that they had “come down in the world.” [5]  

     I might defend myself by claiming my fondness for the films of Chaplin and the Marx brothers, the cartoons of Winsor McKay and of George Herriman, and the music of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, but all of these are artists who, though they worked in popular genres, are applauded by intellectuals.  My cousin compiles evidence on the considerable role of people with my surname in Scottish history, but a coat of arms has no significance for me.  I curse neckties and find my wardrobe in  the Salvation Army, but I am afraid I might here approach a form of inverted snobbery which has surely a different meaning entirely.

     I must fall back in then end on my insistence that I feel no shadow of superiority to those of differing tastes.  Unfortunately, the best support for this claim is subjective.  I can only depend on what I may hope is a reputation for broad sympathies, extending to all those who have found a way to agreeably pass the day on this black earth, whether it be among those who relish Taylor Swift or Stravinsky, Hamburger Helper or bouillabaisse, Star Trek or Wallace Stevens.  If I have failed to convey my appreciation for the myriad sorts of sensibilities that flourish in our species, my readers may be assured that I embrace those who fancy professional wrestling no less than those with a taste for Noh drama.  Perhaps we potential snobs not only cultivate special tastes; we may be a special taste as well and attract only those who will be amused by our affectations.  Let each enjoy what is found to be enjoyable, whether it be playing at being a snob or laughing at those who do.

 

 

 

1.  New York Times, Jan. 28, 2025, “Mona Lisa to Get Her Own Room as the Overcrowded Louvre Expands.” 

2.  I think it may have been Norman Foerster’s American Poetry and Prose, but I am uncertain.

3.   Greg Sandow, “Age of the Audience, Once More,” Arts Journal Blog for December 18, 2007, at artsjournal.com.

4.  The Road to Wigan Pier (1958), p. 169.

5.  Down and Out in  P:aris and London (1933), p. 89.

Para-aesthetic Experiences

 toward a definition of art

 

     The definition of art has always been unstable and conflicted.  To some the label implies excellence, excluding doggerel of poetasters or the films of Ed Wood and Herschel Lewis.  Yet, apart from the fact that aesthetic value cannot be proven, it cannot be part of the definition or the expression “good art” would be redundant.  For much of the past many critics used a nearly class-based standard, admitting works of “high art,” while excluding folk art, popular, and mass forms.  Since the Romantics discovered folksong, however, this notion has withered, until now public media and such once august organs as the New York Times devote a good deal of their coverage to topics like Taylor Swift and new series from Netflix. 

     One way to approach a definition is to distinguish art from similar phenomena occupying neighboring semantic territory, what might be termed “para-aesthetic phenomena.”  Surveying all the arts, through the centuries and around the globe, the qualities that are generally considered to contribute to the definition of art often include the following.

 

1.  Art is a form of play involving manipulated symbols arranged and generally preserved for repeated consumption. 

2.  Art is beautiful.  Qua art, it has no other function, though it may be incidentally susceptible to other uses. 

3.  In part the beauty of art is achieved through formal or structural patterns.

4.  Art refracts lived reality, intentionally shaping the raw material of experience into significant fictions.

 

     Among the non-aesthetic forms of play are sports and games, as well as child’s play and make-believe.  Yet the footballer or the broad-jumper are dealing in physical challenges and not symbols, and the child, whether solitary or in a group, plays for the moment without a thought of preserving the fantasy for later visits.  The chief distinguishing characteristic of our species is the ability to manipulate symbols, and humans enjoy exercising this skill just as the lion relishes the pounce.  Verbal repartee may be artful, but, if not transcribed, would not be art.  The player of video games is constantly making decisions simply for the fun  of it, but the drama vanishes as soon as the play ends.  The maker of such a game game would have a stronger claim on the title of artist, though most critics would find such work too trivial to allow the maker entrance to Parnassus.  Certain works, such as true “happenings” or the sand paintings made by both Navajos and Tibetans, are likewise ephemeral, but in such cases the violation of the usual convention calls perhaps even greater attention to it.  A more precise formulation of the nature of art is required to define the frontiers of the aesthetic, but one may begin by thinking of objets d’art as artifacts of preserved play.

     Art is universally, though only in part, defined by the quality of beauty.  For a definition of beauty, Santayana’s formulation will do: beauty is “pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing.”  Yet many things can give us pleasure.  Good news, a gourmet meal, or a fulfilling sexual encounter may bring considerable pleasure and yet would not usually be considered art.  Still, some non-aesthetic pleasures include characteristics of art.  Cuisine is often considered a sort of minor art as the cook must make many decisions based on taste and the whole meal is presented to the diner as a coherent progression, an experience to some extent unified.  Sexual activity likewise may well present a series of actions, a sort of play, designed to make a designed effect, but they are scarcely designed for the consumption of anyone other than the participants.  Other attributes of art must be taken into account to sharpen the focus more tightly. 

     Much of the beauty of art is based of structural or formal patterns.  The simplest and most commonly invoked are unity and symmetry, but disunity and asymmetry may find an equally important place in certain circumstances.  Formal qualities are always present, but they are most obvious in genres like music and abstract visual art.  A fugue by Bach or a Rothko canvas derive their power largely from their consumers’ apprehension of such abstract patterns.  Yet abstraction is virtually never absolute.  The mind strives to make sense of written lines and visual forms like a child looking for shapes in the clouds.  Even a totally random arrangement will be read as having meaning.  In addition this formal standard is not unique to works of art.  People also judge how pleasant it is to gaze at non-aesthetic objects, the faces of others, for instance, based on similar criteria.  While formal beauty may be found in a variety of phenomena where its presence is a matter of chance, it is intentionally created by artistic design 

     Art typically conveys a theme, that is, it suggests certain aspects of lived experience.  Vulgarly, this is the familiar “moral of the story,” often the focus of classroom investigations through secondary school and beyond.  Though technically the work of art asserts no more than the proposition that “at one time the world may have some seemed like this to someone,” such themes are often (sometimes doubtless with justice) taken to represent the opinions of the author.  In contrast to the ancient trope claiming that art “imitates” reality, most contemporary critics would prefer to acknowledge that art always alters the raw material of which it is made, making such terms as “transforming” or “refracting” more accurate.  Of course, dreams, news stories and familiar letters also relate versions of lived experience without pretensions to artistic value. 

     Since each of the defining characteristics of art present in non-aesthetic experiences as well, the judgement of whether a given object is or is not art becomes probabilistic, likelier as the evidence mounts.  A further complication arises since art may be used in non-aesthetic ways.  For instance, a philologist may in the texts of Homer find evidence for linguistic development or a historian data for the study of ancient religion, but such researches are incidental and unrelated to the artistic value of the Iliad.  Likewise, non-art may be received as though it were aesthetic experience by the appreciator of photographs from the Webb telescope or of fractal patterns.

     Art does not exist without humans; it is socially constructed, not natural.  The very concept of art has not existed in  all cultures.  For those who recognize the category, there will always remain disputed boundaries.  While most work that pretends to the status of art must probably be admitted, regardless of value, most of the questions pertain to semi-art knocking on the door from outside.  An essay on flowers or fiddlesticks will scarcely be questioned by the gatekeepers of the club of art, while an essay about that essay will be relegated to mere criticism, though it may be as beautifully written, as indeed in theory might an essay on electrical engineering.  If one admits Maxfield Parrish and Normal Rockwell to museum status, is all illustration art?  Do the journalistic war reports of Hemingway and Ernie Pyle hold aesthetic value?  How about A. J. Liebling and Red Smith’s sports stories?  Style in dress may sometimes suggest a refraction of reality.   Journal entries and sketchbook improvisations are not usually intended to outlast the day of their creation, yet, once preserved, may, like the jottings of Pepys and Picasso, be highly valued.  Religious myth and liturgy, while clearly composed of narrative and drama, claim other primary uses.  Art’s definition is worth pursuing even if it cannot be precisely and finally formulated.  Art is, as well, dynamic, and will evolve even under study. 

The Golden Age of Paperbacks

     Surely the nineteen-fifties, when I was setting out with the ambition of reading everything, was the golden age of paperback books, when most of the world’s classics were available for pocket change.  The first books I acquired, toward the latter end of elementary school, were all in soft covers: Walt Kelly’s Pogo collections, The Pocket Trashery of Ogden Nashery, Subways are for Sleeping which appealed to my taste for eccentricity, as did Auntie Mame.  I loved Čapek’s War with the Newts long before I knew who the author was, and read On the Beach before seeing Stanley Kramer’s movie.  I was a devotee of Judith Merrill’s annual collections of well-written science fiction.  By sixth grade my shelf held Hendrik Willem van Loon’s History of Mankind, an exemplary book for children which offers distinctive style, amusing drawings, and (in memory at least) no condescension whatever.  Fledgling literary interests were emerging, and I read and reread my volume of Poe’s stories and poems, or a little collection of American short stories, or one of the Untermeyer poetry anthologies --  each of these sold for 25 or 35 cents.  I had been entranced by my parent’s purchase of the Life book of The World’s Great Religions and considered my Mentor copy of The Way of Life: Lao Tzu translated by R. B. Blakney a revelation.  (Its rhythms run still in my mind, doubtless to my benefit.)

    But when I became somewhat older and able to go to Chicago by myself, my middle-class parents, though frugal about nearly everything else, let me buy paperbacks freely in the interest of education.  I could indulge myself with reckless intemperance and my paperback library mushroomed.  When I would visit the Loop over sixty years ago, I had several regular routes.  One of them culminated in a visit to “the world’s largest bookstore,” Kroch’s and Brentano’s.  But I would not go there directly.  First I would stop by the Rose Discount Record store on South Wabash to pick up classical sides and then proceed a few blocks further south to Seymour’s Record store  where Seymour Schwartz sold jazz and blues from a decidedly unglamorous (and thereby hip) shop.  He had heaps of old 78s in the back for maybe 25 cents each.   I would then stop by a few favorite dusty old used bookshops and, I confess, toward the end, I would also patronize also the Iwan Ries tobacconist (conveniently on Wabash as well) to pick up a pack of smokes from some exotic and thus sophisticated country, transforming me instantly from a callow youth to a cosmopolite.  Though the tobacco was foolish, in the books lay the very foundations of my education.  Through my teen-age years I was never without a pile of paperbacks on the floor by the head of the WWII army surplus cot on which I slept. (The stack persists all these years later, though now, as I share my bed, it rests on the table by the parlor sofa.).

     Most had been purchased at the climactic stop on my urban excursion when I entered the precincts of Kroch's, also on Wabash.  It was there that I spent by far the largest sums I spent anywhere in those days (modest as they were).  With the exception of a few volumes in German, I never bought books on the main floor.  Passing the carefully curated record selection at the top of the stairs, mainly folk music and blues but offering the old Caedmon spoken word albums as well, I would head down to the basement where the paperbacks were kept, arranged in shelves by publisher. 

     What a glorious new-found-land it was in which every region offered substantial rewards. From every side authors beckoned: Dante, Camus, Ben Jonson, Lady Murasaki, among hundreds of other worthies, a magnificent company! To this day I recall in which corner I would find the austere Penguins without cover art featuring reliable translations from a variety of languages, the cheap little Mentors and often rather ugly Signets for the general run of classics, the Doubleday Anchor books with their marvelous designs by the likes of Edward Gorey and Leo Lionni, the larger format grey-jacketed Scribner’s books for Hemingway and Fitzgerald, the wondrous old reprints in hardy well-bound Dover editions (including many of Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East), the New Directions with their black and white covers and avant-garde edge, even the Catholic Image books for Aquinas and Cardinal Newman.

     The bookstore staff seemed mostly composed of young men, perhaps working a while between undergraduate and graduate school or else ABDs too educated to find any other employment. At any rate, they seemed very knowledgeable about the arts, and were rather intriguing to an adolescent shopper from the suburbs, still living with his parents.  They had opinions.  I recall when my brother bought a copy of Naked Lunch against the advice of the clerk, who told him, “Don’t waste your money. For ten minutes you’ll be shocked, but it’ll be nothing but boredom after that.”

     It was surely due to the influence of these young workers that Kroch’s had a decent selection of small press books, not just City Lights, but Piet Hein’s Grooks and Botteghe Oscura, and many more obscure titles.  For years it seems they were trying to move the plain black copies of Norman Mailer’s Deaths for the Ladies, which, though I was an enthusiastic admirer of the author, struck me as aggressively off-hand.

     I may have lived in an insular little haut bourgeois suburb, but here was an entrance to a far greater realm, providing access to people of all times and places.  What could be more exhilarating than to read one’s way through the world’s greatest texts for the first time? I was quite serious, making systematic surveys or movement and periods, noting marginal comments, sometimes in German once I started learning the language. My granddaughter hears such things and affectionately says, “You were such a nerd,” but to me it was the epitome of cool. I wanted to read everything, though, of course, I had my favorites.

     Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry 1945-1960 was a revelation and a delight. I wrote to many of the small presses listed in the back to obtain books Kroch’s didn’t offer. During high school I ostentatiously carried the book around — I did the same with Spenser’s The Faerie Queene because I had read that he was “a poet’s poet” — and got my reward when some prankster put chewing gum in my anthology when I was away from my seat.  I became a missionary for Gary Snyder’s Cold Mountain Poems, translations of Han Shan, which I photocopied and gave to friends.  Apart from the Beats I tried to keep up with contemporary poetry, picking up paperbound volumes of Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, John Berryman, and John Ashbery. 

     In fat Mentor editions I worked my way through the turgid Russians – Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, though I preferred Gogol’s Evenings Near the Village of Dikanka published by political refugee Frederick Ungar whose company was strong in German translations (I had Lessing’s Nathan the Wise and Goethe’s Werther from them) but also included such odd works as Gladkov’s socialist realist novel with the dramatically uncompromising title of Cement.  Kleist’s stories fascinated me with their precise exacting weirdness in a Signet book.  I read Ovid’s Metamorphoses from Collier translated by Sir John Harington, the Elizabethan inventor of the water closet, and it never occurred to me to wonder how such a book could possibly be issued in a popular edition.  My Washington Square Press copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Songs, and Poems is dated 1960, cost thirty-five cents, and is yet today in serviceable condition.  I very nearly wore out my Muse’s Library edition of Thomas Wyatt’s poems while the Everyman’s paperback of Silver Poets of the Sixteenth Century added Surrey, Ralegh, and Davies.  I had, of course, Howl and Kaddish (as well as Ferlinghetti, Corso, and Jack Hirschman’s Artaud Anthology) from City Lights, while among my New Directions volumes from my high school days were a half shelf of Henry Miller, Pound’s Selected Poems, Williams’ Paterson and Pictures from Breughel, and novels by Louis Fernand Céline.  And, of course, I had Evergreens from Grove Press  as well.  I just reread Melville’s The Confidence Man (their first title), Lorca, Beckett, Aphra Behn and Crashaw as well as essays by D. T. Suzuki.  When I set out from home for university, I brought my Modern Library College edition paperback of Plato as a talisman.

*          *          *          *          *

     If the golden age I am celebrating has passed, the change may be due less to changes in the publishing industry than to a decay in the public’s taste.  In my youth not only the professoriate but people in general (especially, but not exclusively, those with some bit of education), recognized the value of the liberal arts.  To many it was obvious that to glimpse the world through Plato’s eyes, even briefly, must surely broaden and enrich even a banker’s view of the present day.  Nor was this belief entirely a class attitude.  The Little Blue Books (an essay on the Blue Book phenomenon will soon be posted to this site) indicate that the American autodidact, exemplified by figures from Benjamin Franklin through Jack London and Malcom X, was a sociological fact in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties when workingmen might read Shelley’s poems or Will Durant on Aristotle in little booklets costing a nickel or a dime.  Meanwhile in the United Kingdom Penguin began selling quality books for two and a half (old) pence, advertised as “the price of ten cigarettes.”

     During World War II when the American government printed over a hundred million Armed Services Edition books to distribute to troops, a project headed by former Pocket Books executive Philip Van Doren Stern, the titles included bestsellers like Anthony Adverse and the Hornblower novels, but Shelley, Poe, Conrad, Maugham, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald as well.  By the nineteen-fifties there were plenty of trashy exploitation titles like those from Gold Medal on the racks in bus stations and drugstores, the descendants of the pulp magazine of the ‘thirties, but they were often accompanied by a few classier titles.  (Sometimes a French classic, Zola, say, or D. H. Lawrence, received a cover as though it were a potboiler, resulting, perhaps, in a mix of disappointed and delighted purchasers.) 

     What has become of these books, at once so good and so cheap?  Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, one of the first Pocket Books in the, now sells for over thirty times its ‘fifties price, and inflation accounts for only a third of the increase.  Wilder’s The Bridge at San Luis Rey, which had been a good seller in its Pocket Book form is presently available in editions costing between thirty and sixty times that price.  The price growth reflects the fact that these books are today bought almost entirely by students to whom they are a classroom assignment.  The casual purchaser has all but vanished; very little remains of what had been a cherished common cultural patrimony.  The allusions of filmmakers, poets, and composers alike are lost to those unfamiliar with the artists’ predecessors.     

     I fancy that there was then a lesser gap between low and high art, that the two could rub shoulders in the marketplace, but the mass base for the classics, such as it ever was, has largely evanesced as even most university students, even the cleverer ones, choose to focus solely on vocational training rather than the general intellectual practice – absorbing information, analyzing it, and generating new ideas – that provided the center of the old curriculum in which literature was essential and central.  The change has affected more than just reading.  A glance over a symphony audience will show a sea of white hair, and the classical percentage of recorded music sales has been declining for decades (as has the share of jazz).  Even theater attracts elders for the most part.  What was once a shared body of cultural information has become a territory visited primarily by specialist academics. 

     The younger generations has not, however, abandoned art by any means.  They listen to hours of mostly digitalized music, watch great amounts of television and a good number of movies and never feel as though confining themselves to popular forms is any constriction at all.  Critics will discuss a new pop album or Netflix series, on NPR and PBS, mind you, as though the potential of art had any scope in such productions, virtually none of which have proven other than forgettable.  The decline of the paperback, which played an important role in the democratization of learning, inevitably accompanies the abandonment of the liberal arts.

     When he founded Penguin in 1935 Sir Allen Lane declared that he “believed in the existence of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it.”  His intuition proved true (and profitable) both in the United Kingdom and the United States, but decades, now, of devotion to iPhones and iPads, to Roku and Hulu, Spotify and Apple Music, has eroded that market to insignificance.  People today can be educated through the graduate level while never acquiring cultural literacy and never, indeed, missing it. 

     If I rue the end of such cheap books of the very highest quality, still that loss is trivial compared to the loss of the readership that once welcomed those old paperbacks and with them came to take possession of their own literature, including poetry so beautiful as to make the reader weak in the knees, drama so sublime as to refresh the soul, and stories truer than the truth of everyday lived reality.  People who settle for an episode of Breaking Bad or a tune from Taylor Swift will never, I am afraid, know what they are missing.   

Paradise Lost as Popular Culture

 

 

     One hardly thinks of Milton as a popular choice for recreational reading.  Yet his majestic Christian epic Paradise Lost has characteristics akin to those that bring mass audiences to today’s action films.  While even English majors may find the poem’s theology irrelevant and its learned and Latinate language artificial in the present day, to a receptive sensibility, the poem has sensational drama and an extraordinary pictorial, even cinematic, imagination.  The special effects of contemporary popular films, cars lurching through the air, people tossed through windows, buildings collapsing, while superheroes and the most vicious of villains work out the world’s destiny are paralleled on every page of Milton’s poem.

     The taste for Milton’s high-flying rhetoric, the greatest obstacle to modern enjoyment of the poem, is as old as language and only very recently decayed.  One may imagine Shakespeare’s audience brought to a pitch of excitement, cheering and applauding, when a purple passage was declaimed on stage.  Until a few generations ago both the educated and the illiterate regularly relished the oratory of politicians and the pulpit, and schoolchildren studied great speeches of the past and practiced debate and declamation.  At home people enjoyed the sonority of reading verse out loud in parlor poetry sessions.  Now and then a writer points out that Edward Everett spoke for over two hours at Gettysburg and Lincoln for less than two minutes.  Usually the point is that the president’s succinctness was an indicator of his greatness.  Rarely does anyone consider the fact that fifteen thousand people stood listening to such a lengthy previous oration and doubtless considered it a great pleasure to hear a celebrated speaker, an artist in words.  

     Indeed, the very artificiality of Milton’s rhetoric that puts off contemporary was just the sort of thing earlier readers had relished.  His distance from the ordinary spoken vernacular that today is the base of most poetry, created a general feel for the poem, a special grandeur, just as the art director creates a consistent overall tone for a film.  Similarly, Homeric Greek was composed of a dialect never spoken, making the reader immediately aware of inhabiting a world of the imagination, more portentous and beautiful than that of everyday transactions.  In the stately suspension of his iambic pentameters, gently rocking but endlessly varied, each line elongated slightly beyond the colloquial duration, the phrases follow one after another with no end stop in sight, the syntax branching and rebranching like a living thing.  This is a consistent pleasure, like a particularly mighty organ under the control of E. Power Biggs, quite independent of the qualities of the music being performed. 

     The opening sentence of Book IX which runs to forty-one lines (appended) is an admittedly extreme example enabled by numerous colons and semicolons.  The first five lines detail what Milton does not mean to describe: casual and cordial intercourse with heavenly beings.   The poet’s topic, he says, surpasses the themes of ancient epic, though he is pleased to pause for about a dozen lines for Homeric references (studding six lines with nine proper names from antiquity).  Then the final fourteen lines of the passage continue the exposition of what is not to be included, this time ordinary war stories, but detailed with such enthusiasm that it seems less an apology for what is left out than a miniature side-show exhibit, a model of generic war in a few tumultuous words.

     A generous use of what the rhetoricians call amplificatio, in Greek αὔξησις and in plain English redundancy, enriches the texture of the passage.  The Fall is said to be due to “foul distrust,” “breach Disloyal.” “revolt,” “And disobedience,” though a single term would have satisfied the sense.  Like the overelaboration of baroque decoration characteristic of a Mexican cathedral, more ornaments are considered superior to fewer.  This tendency affects the use of Classical references as well as they tumble over each other: nine proper names in only six lines (Achilles, Hector, Troy, Turnus, Lavinia Neptune, Juno, Eros, and a Muse in IX, 15-21).  

     Thus the very characteristics – lengthy periods, Latinate lexical choices and syntactic structures, numerous Classical allusions --  that many moderns might find irksome are those that would have given earlier readers delight.  The shift from ordinary experience accompanying the heightened language of art might be likened to that experienced by a movie-goer who enters a darkened hall and turns to face the enormous scintillating screen animated by larger-than-life characters.  One is transported to a different world.

     This parallel in mood or tone between the great Puritan epic and a superhero action movie suggested by style is true for the narrative as well.  For Jehovah like Superman is the good protagonist against the evil enemy.  In Milton each cosmic army has their legions, allowing epic scenes that resemble nothing so much as crowded Cinemascope war scenes.  (Uccello’s Battle of San Romano delivers similar thrills in two dimensions.)     

 

. . . whereat Michael bid sound

Th' Arch-Angel trumpet; through the vast of Heaven

It sounded, and the faithful Armies rung

Hosanna to the Highest: nor stood at gaze                        

The adverse Legions, nor less hideous joyn'd

The horrid shock: now storming furie rose,

And clamour such as heard in Heav'n till now

Was never, Arms on Armour clashing bray'd

Horrible discord, and the madding Wheeles                    

Of brazen Chariots rag'd; dire was the noise

Of conflict; over head the dismal hiss

Of fiery Darts in flaming volies flew,

And flying vaulted either Host with fire.

So under fierie Cope together rush'd                                

Both Battels maine, with ruinous assault

And inextinguishable rage; all Heav'n

Resounded, and had Earth bin then, all Earth

Had to her Center shook. What wonder? when

Millions of fierce encountring Angels fought                  

                                                                           (VI, 202-220)

 

As in a Western movie or a novel by Sir Walter Scott, all leading men are valorous, though some are outstanding.  Even on the side of the rebel angels, according to Raphael, there was never committed an “unbecoming deed” (VI, 237).

     The catalogue of fallen angels alone is a dazzling sequence, studded with exotic proper names that generates a portentous mood of wonder more significant than any particular meaning.

 

The pleasant Vally of Hinnom, Tophet thence

And black Gehenna call'd, the Type of Hell.

Next Chemos, th' obscene dread of Moabs Sons,

From Aroar to Nebo, and the wild

Of Southmost Abarim; in Hesebon

And Horonaim, Seons Realm, beyond

The flowry Dale of Sibma clad with Vines,

And Eleale to th' Asphaltick Pool.

                                                                           (I, 404-411)

 

The list proceeds like a horror movie montage: Moloch, Baal, Ashtaroth, Thammuz, Adom, Dagon, one succeeds another as though the successive monsters of nineteen-fifties Japanese popular movies all met in a sinister alliance. 

     The war scenes are filled with grand theatrical action as in this episode featuring giant flame-throwers. 

 

A triple mounted row of Pillars laid

On Wheels (for like to Pillars most they seem'd

Or hollow'd bodies made of Oak or Firr

With branches lopt, in Wood or Mountain fell'd)

Brass, Iron, Stonie mould, had not thir mouthes

With hideous orifice gap't on us wide,

Portending hollow truce; at each behind

A Seraph stood, and in his hand a Reed

Stood waving tipt with fire; while we suspense,

Collected stood within our thoughts amus'd,

Not long, for sudden all at once thir Reeds

Put forth, and to a narrow vent appli'd

With nicest touch. Immediate in a flame,

But soon obscur'd with smoak, all Heav'n appeerd,

From those deep throated Engins belcht, whose roar

Emboweld with outragious noise the Air,

And all her entrails tore, disgorging foule

Thir devilish glut, chaind Thunderbolts and Hail

Of Iron Globes, which on the Victor Host

Level'd, with such impetuous furie smote,

That whom they hit, none on thir feet might stand,

Though standing else as Rocks, but down they fell

By thousands, Angel on Arch-Angel rowl'd;

(VI, 572-594)

 

When combatants from either side traverse the celestial realms, the descriptions allow readers to imagine space travel. 

 

som times

He scours the right hand coast, som times the left,

Now shaves with level wing the Deep, then soares

Up to the fiery Concave touring high.

As when farr off at Sea a Fleet descri'd

Hangs in the Clouds, by Æquinoctial Winds

Close sailing from Bengala, or the Iles

Of Ternate and Tidore, whence Merchants bring

Thir spicie Drugs: they on the Trading Flood

Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape

Ply stemming nightly toward the Pole

                                                            (II, 632-642)

 

Instead of pursuing direct description, Milton conveys its overwhelming power by introducing a Homeric simile as a sign that non-figurative language would be inadequate.  Like the earlier clots of mythological references, the geographical names come thick and fast: Bengala, Ternate, Tidore, Ethiopia, Cape of Good Hope, and the South Pole in five lines.  Just as the poem’s first readers did not need to recognize the place names, today’s reader can skip the footnotes.  The specific places mentioned mean little, the passage derives its impact from the recitation of a storm of mysterious words of power, rather like the invented technical jargon of a science fiction spaceship or a magic charm in a story of wizards and dragons.

      The affinities of Milton’s poem with Homeric epic are intentional, explicit, and well-studied.  Less obvious, but present nonetheless, are characteristics associated with science fiction and monster movies, and with superhero action films.  Though these genres did not exist in the seventeenth century, similar popular taste had long been served by romances, saints’ lives, and tales of unknown regions of the earth.  The Christian story of the Fall proved for Milton a rich source of action on a cosmically magnificent scale, including weird unearthly monsters, and a literally perfect hero, ultimately more undefeatable than Superman.  His readers were able to enjoy a rich feast of cheap thrills, all the while acquiring merit for studying Christ’s story.  Not even the films of The Ten Commandments or Ben-Hur could equal the appeal of Puritan poet’s version of scripture which combined the attractions of Dracula, Batman, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Samson and Delilah.  After the thrills of space travel, the horrors of confrontation with demonic fiends, and a hero with the mission not merely to save the world, but to save the reader as well along the way, righteousness is finally rewarded.  The bedazzled spectator knew it would happen all along but became nonetheless enfolded in the poem’s action.  Since every soul is in play until judgement, the reader is on the stage among the cast of larger-than-life characters and may well feel a bit of satisfaction in the thought that virtuous engagement with the poem has done no harm to one’s own likelihood of a happy ending.  Surely, though, the primary motive had to be the fun of the ride.