Marxism’s Limits

 

     I place this is the Politics category of my Index since the central point concerns not so much writings by Marx, Trotsky, or Breton as the attitudes of political people who identify as socialist, both in and out of power.

     Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes, those in parentheses refer to pages in Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, University of Michigan, 1970.

 

 

     The Soviet Union stopped claiming to represent the triumph of socialism a few decades ago when the regime was reborn in a new form, the equal to any of its predecessors in tyranny and chauvinism.   While few outside Russia’s borders will today defend Stalin, many leftist intellectuals in the West cling to remnants of Soviet-style “Socialist Realism,” a theory far more innocuous when its proponents are out of power.  In the vulgarest notion of Marxist literature, the hero is working class, the villain is capitalist, and the denouement is flushed pink with hope in works that can hardly be called “realism” at all, nor are they definitively socialist.  Simple-minded and reductive, this was the formula likeliest to prove comprehensible to those with little or no cultural background.  Social factors entirely unrelated to aesthetic concerns have kept this concept alive, though it is indefensible on theoretical grounds.  It remains influential today among socialists who should know better.

     Marxist writers have often, quite without warrant, considered their theory to be universally applicable, and have wandered from their proper territory in matters of ethical philosophy, economics, and politics into the aesthetic field.  In artistic questions Marxism has very limited though admittedly useful significance in recognizing the ideological elements of art and the nature of the production of culture in specific historical conditions.  The pressure of polemics in capitalist countries and the desire to maintain control in those that have claimed to be socialist have encouraged the mistaken notion that poetry and fiction can be judged by political criteria.  Equally misguided attempts to define Marxist science must similarly fail, as the criteria and assumptions of scientific research, like those of art, have little to do with social analysis. 

     Prescriptive literary models are not, however, inevitable accompaniments to Marxist economic analysis.  Marx and Engels themselves had traditional notions about literary value.  They discounted the radical writers of their day, preferring the classics.  Marx was, after all, an intellectual who read Ancient Greek for relaxation [1] and, when asked his favorite poets named Shakespeare, Aeschylus, and Goethe [2].  Among modern novelists, Engels praised the royalist Balzac, saying that his pages managed to record more data about French society than “all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period.”  Engels flatly declares that “The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the work of art.” [3]  To him Balzac, in spite of his conscious political allegiances, encoded in his work a “revolutionary dialectic” [4] due to his insight and art, making his fiction more valuable (even to the revolutionary cause) than the well-intentioned novels of socialist partisans.

     Lenin likewise had an education that allowed him to read Latin poets and rhetoricians, as well as German classics like Goethe’s Faust.  Having little sympathy for his day’s avant-gardes, he wrote “I am a barbarian.  I cannot extol the products of expressionism, futurism, cubism, and other ‘isms.’”  To him there is “very little sense” in modern writing, “Why worship the new just because it is new?” [5]

     When he does address the question of the construction of a revolutionary culture, he recommends that modern artists begin with imitation, coopting “the best models, traditions and results of the existing culture.”  [6]  To him the individualistic and spiritual Tolstoy in a sense “the Mirror of Russian Revolution.” [7]

     Though Lenin repeatedly calls for a “free literature,” he at the same time he refers to art as no more than “’a cog and a screw’ of one single great Social-Democratic mechanism.” [8]  Lacking susceptibility to art on aesthetic grounds, Lenin laid the foundation for later repression.  His preferences for writers like Chernyshevsky and Nekrasov was based on no artistic criteria, but only their perceived sympathy for the people.  Lenin never felt moved to inquire more subtly into literature.

     During the ‘twenties, though, prior to Stalin’s taking power, a good deal of latitude was given cultural workers.  Under Lunacharsky’s tenure as Minister for Education (People's Commissariat for Education or Narkompros) the Symbolists, Suprematists, Constructivists, and Futurists who might seem petty bourgeois individualists, were tolerated, both within and without Bolshevik circles.  Even apparently reactionary formations, such as the “changing landmarks” movement, which had been associated with the Whites, and a number of religious writers wrote and published in the first years after the Revolution, though the scope allowed to them shrank consistently during the ‘twenties and Lunacharsky, who had been pursuing “god-building,” the construction of new rational surrogates for religion, was removed from office in 1929, the same year Trotsky left the country.

     Before that time, however, even the committed revolutionary writers of the Kusnitsa (or Smithy) group demanded “complete freedom” in their manifesto and Bogdanov’s Proletkult sought autonomy from the Party.  To replace such undependable cultural groups an organization for writers willing to follow the government’s line without fail, the Russian Association of Proletarians Writers, was founded in 1925.  The preference for unquestioning loyalty from writers with little regard for other standards was clear by the time of the 1932 Central Committee’s order that all arts groups must come under centralized control.  In 1934, when Gorky prescribed Socialist Realism as the sole acceptable literary method in a speech to the Soviet Writers Congress, he established the parameters that later were enforced by the Kharkov Doctrine (later identified with Zhdanov) which required absolute obedience to the state line from intelligentsia and artists. 

     The Soviet example, now continued under Putin’s kleptocracy, has perniciously influenced other countries claiming to be socialist including China, Korea, and Cuba.  In spite of outstanding and creative Communist revolutionary poets like Mayakovsky, Césaire, Quasimodo, Neruda, Alberti, Hikmet, Darwish, and countless others, it is inevitably philistine timeservers who come to administer these repressive systems. 

     The relations between artists, even those, like the Proletkult members, who are sympathetic to socialism, and bureaucratic ideologues has often been uneasy in capitalist countries as well.  In 1925 Breton, Aragon, Eluard, Péret, and Unik joined the French Communist Party though neither side knew quite what use to make of the other.  Though Surrealists officially supported (for a time) the Party, their delegates were viewed with great suspicion as bourgeois bohemians, solipsistic individualists whose writing style could never be popular among the masses.  The leftists were particularly offended by real or fancied homosexuality which to them meant degeneracy, while many Surrealists objected to the imposition of a mandated political line for the movement.  Breton was repeatedly criticized by the French party’s Central Committee for insisting on maintaining his Surrealist identity along with his Marxist one. [10] Aragon, Buñuel, and Unik abandoned Surrealism when obliged to choose between the art movement and the party.  In later years Surrealism and communism remained intertwined in Situationism and Franklin Rosemont’s Chicago Surrealist Group.

     Leon Trotsky was one figure prominent in the Bolshevik revolution who avoided the narrow-minded restrictions of Stalinist Socialist Realism, deviations which, among others, resulted in his exile and eventual assassination.  In 1938 Breton visited Trotsky in Mexico and they composed a “Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art” [11].  This document opposes “those who would regiment intellectual activity in the direction of ends foreign to itself” and insists on utter freedom as a necessary precondition for the production of art.  “The free choice of these themes and the absence of all restrictions on the range of his exploitations –- these are possessions which the artist has a right to claim as inalienable.” 

     While conceding the role of central economic planning, Trotsky and Breton contend that direction from the top is wholly out of place in the realm of culture.  They could hardly have been more emphatic in their contention that autonomy is imperative not only for the arts, but for all intellectual work.  The reader can sense in their urgent words the distress of suffering Soviet writers and revolutionaries under Stalin. 

If, for the better development of the forces of material production, the revolution must build a socialist regime with centralized control, to develop intellectual creation an anarchist regime of individual liberty should from the first be established. No authority, no dictation, not the least trace of orders from above! Only on a base of friendly cooperation, without constraint from outside, will it be possible for scholars and artists to carry out their tasks, which will be more far-reaching than ever before in history.

     While the manifesto compares the threat fascism poses to culture to the legendary depredations of the ancient Vandals and maintains that art or science in the cause of reaction is in an “absolutely intolerable” position, the authors were careful to object in equally strong terms to government control of writers in the Soviet Union.  Breton and Trotsky express guarded sympathy with anarchists, Futurists, and Freud, implying acceptance of a popular front broader than any the Comintern would have tolerated. 

     Yet they went further, to a far more sweeping claim.  In the end they assert that, since art offers fresh perspectives “expressing the inner needs of man and of mankind in its time,” all art is in fact at heart revolutionary.  For them “true art is unable not to be revolutionary, not to aspire to a complete and radical reconstruction of society. This it must do, were it only to deliver intellectual creation from the chains which bind it.” 

     In signing this statement Trotsky was perhaps seeking allies in his attacks on Stalin and his attempts to construct a Fourth International independent of Soviet rulers.  Yet when he held power years earlier he had espoused similar views in his book Literature and Revolution (1924).  In this volume he lays out the theoretical basis for his view of revolutionary art as well as discussing the current Russian literary scene in rich and lively detail, sometimes vituperative.  Few, even among specialists in the period, will recognize the names of many of the writers he discusses.  Yet Trotsky has strong opinions on them all, which he expresses in often colorful language.  His polemics do not, however, focus directly on the class origin or loyalty of the authors, or on their party fealty, but rather on their personal qualities or their allegiance to metaphysical ideas.  Thus to him Blok’s work is “romantic, symbolic, mystic, formless, and unreal,” (116) and Schkapskaya’s religious inclinations are “so organic, so biologic, so gynecologic.”  His misogyny allows him to include in his ridicule Akhmatova and other “real and near poetesses.” (41).

     Trotsky’s approach, while impressionistic, is based in theory.  Trotsky begins with the assumption that the art of every era reflects its socio-economic structure, art, in fact is “the highest test of the vitality and significance of each epoch.” (9)  Yet the evolution of such an internalized Weltanschauung, what Trotsky calls “the formation of a new culture” requires “considerable time.” (184)  Those qualified in the arts at the time of revolution are inevitably bourgeois and even those who are sympathetic to the cause of the people will be “not the artists of the proletarian Revolution, but her ‘fellow-travelers’” (57).  Proletarian literature is, he maintains, unlikely to emerge before the dictatorship of the proletariat has given way to the altogether classless society of communism in which art will have no class character.  Thus “there can be no question of the creation of a new culture.” because “there is no proletarian culture” and “there never will be” due to the brevity of the transitional period.  Furthermore, during this “brief period” (185) the regime will be unable to afford much art and will be obliged to dedicate its resources to material economic progress. (185) 

     These rosy expectations sound sometimes quite like utopianism.  Under communism according to Trotsky “the powerful force of competition” over wealth under capitalism will be alchemically transmuted to “a higher and more fertile form,” “the struggle for one’s opinion, for one’s project, for one’s taste.”  Using Freudian language, he says that what had been greed will be “sublimated,” “channelized into technique, into construction which also includes art (230).”  The book’s conclusion sounds romantic, starry-eyed. 

Life will cease to be elemental, and for this reason stagnant.  Man, who will learn how to move rivers and mountains, how to build people’s palaces on the peaks of Mont Blanc and at the bottom of the Atlantic, will not only be able to add to his own life richness, brilliancy and intensity, but also a dynamic quality of the highest degree . . .Life in the future will not be monotonous. (254)

The prospect inspires Trotsky to grand and lofty rhetorical flights.

Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher biologic type, or, if you please, a superman. (254-255)

     Of course, a hundred years later we are aware that these hopeful expectations have not been realized in history.  The whole idea of the inevitability of the coming of communism under a workers’ government as predicted in The Communist Manifesto has always sounded like a kind of messianism, though it looked more plausible a century ago.  Still, this question has no bearing on Trotsky’s skepticism about the possibility of proletarian culture or his recommendation that artists must have, in the words of the 1938 Manifesto, “free choice” and “the absence of all restrictions” as “inalienable” rights.

     Ironically, on the cultural side, Breton actively exercised his Surrealist leadership in a dictatorial manner himself, parodying the official Soviet government authoritarianism without knowing it, prescribing requirements and ousting those he saw as dissidents while maintaining a more libertarian stance in theory.  Radical artists as well as dogmatic rulers, it seems, may seek to impose their visions on others.  Under externally imposed limits, art can prove resourceful.  Roman Catholicism did not disable the brilliance of Dante and Eisenstein’s imagination glows brightly even under Stalin’s scrutiny.  Imposing non-aesthetic requirements does not preclude the creation of great literature and great paintings though the interference of reductive and overly confident systems is likely to set them askew.   

     Surely the strongest revolutionary movement must be one in which each field’s progress is guided, not by expertise dictated from outside but by practitioners and their peers.  Farmers are experts in farming; printers in printing.  The principle is no different in intellectual work than in the production of goods.  Scientists must have autonomy to do good science, and artists must have no less.  There is no “party line” in aesthetic endeavors any more than there is in particle physics or hydraulic engineering. 

     Since the Romantic Age, a good share of artists has been politically radical, for the most part more or less on the left, though with extreme rightists as well.  This critical stance is not dictated by aesthetic theory, but rather by the compassion of the creators upon witnessing the suffering of the poor and the indifference of the comfortable.  Since the whole business of art is the exchange of subjectivities, the artist is likely to be more adept than some with the practice of empathy.  In a curious ironic turn, for some the spontaneous charity of the heart entails, or at least renders attractive or acceptable, the imposition of non-aesthetic standards on their own work as well as, what is worse, seeking to extend these irrational limits to others.  Every advance toward socialism, toward the greater well-being of most people, is welcome, while at the same time each expert should be allowed sovereign freedom in every field whether it be fishing, mining, construction, chemistry, mathematics, or, yes, art. 

 

 

 

1.  This journalist’s questionnaire is reprinted in Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, Moscow, 436

2.  Letter from Marx to Engels. Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, Moscow, 261

3.  Letter to Margaret Harkness.  Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, Moscow: Progress, 93.

4.  Letter to Laura Lafargue Marx and Engels On Literature and Art, 439.

5.  See K. Dasgupta, “Lenin on Literature,” Indian Literature XIII, 3 (September). 

6.  “Rough Draft of a Resolution on Proletarian Culture” (1920).

7.  “Leo Tolstoy as the Mirror of the Russian Revolution” (1908).

8.  “Party Organisation and Party Literature” (1905).

9.  Proletkult, under the leadership of Lenin’s rival Bogdanov, was absorbed into the education ministry in 1920.  The Kuznitsa writers challenged the regime from the left, denouncing, for instance, Lenin’s New Economic Policy, but they moderated their deviations carefully enough to survive until 1932

10.  See Robert S. Short, “The Politics of Surrealism, 1920-36,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 1, No. 2, Left-Wing Intellectuals between the Wars (1966). 

11.  Though signed by André Breton and Diego Rivera, the statement was written by Trotsky and Breton.  In a translation by, Dwight MacDonald it appeared The Partisan Review 1938, vol. IV #1 , Fall 1938.

12.  A high point of Trotsky’s polemic is surely his ridicule of Biely who, he says, “day in and day out caught in his immortal soul certain little insects and spread them out on his fingernail,” etc. (Literature and Revolution, 54).

Every Reader’s Dryden

 

This is the seventeenth in the Every Reader’s Poets series, essays meant to introduce (or re-introduce) non-scholarly readers to the work of important poets. In these I limit my focus to the discussion of only a few of each writer’s best-known works while providing a bit of context and biography, eschewing most byways and all footnotes. A general introduction “Why Read Poetry?” is also posted on this site.  For a complete list, see section 5G of the Index which is always posted among the current month’s essays in the archive on the right of the page. 

 

 

     John Dryden dominated the literary scene of his day.  He was the first poet laureate officially named by the crown (in spite of his youthful adherence to Cromwell’s Protectorate) and he, along with Pope, somewhat later, exemplified the era’s neo-Classical taste.  Like Shakespeare he had a financial interest in a theater, the King’s Company, for which he agreed to produce three plays a year, and he supported himself for decades with income from the stage, composing twenty-nine plays, both comedies and tragedies, once popular, but rarely performed today.  His theatrical reputation  is not aided by the fact that he took it upon himself to improve a number of Shakespeare’s plays. 

     He wrote important critical works such as An Essay of Dramatick Poesy and The Art of Satire as well as doing significant work in translation, producing versions of Vergil, Persius, Juvenal, Ovid, Lucretius, and Homer that were widely read and praised.

      Though  he once magisterially dictated taste, as literary standards evolved the appeal  of his own poetry diminished considerably.  A couple of generations after his death, Samuel Johnson, an excellent critic, anticipated many readers since when he found Dryden “not often pathetick,” with little skill in “exhibiting the genuine operations of the heart,” a poet more “of strong reason than quick sensibility.”  This impression has since strengthened, magnified by the Romantic prejudices many literati retain that view his sensibility as lacking in passion, and his style as pedantic and artificial. 

     In addition, the intellectual controversies, political and artistic, that excited his day now arouse only antiquarian interest, and many of his strongest works are long polemical poems that today require a quantity of footnotes intolerable for impatient twenty-first century readers.  The satires for which he is best-known represent a genre almost altogether absent in today’s poetry.

     When Dryden was writing, readers relished lengthy symbolic exercises in wit, even when these were composed in poetry, fueling constant sallies back and forth between controversialists with every exchange sold to the public in what are called “pamphlet wars.”  The topics might be political, theological, or  aesthetic.  Late seventeenth century authors could depend on the common reader’s familiarity with Classical literature, since Greek and Latin were fundamental to the educational system until quite recently.  Most of today’s readers know little either of Dryden’s topical interests or his Classical lore.

     Though the passing of centuries and the variation in taste may have made some of Dryden’s poetry an acquired taste, his masterful skill can still impress and even amuse a modern reader.  One piece that requires no annotation is a passage from Dryden’s translation of Book IV of Lucretius dealing with sexual positions, often reprinted under the title “The Posture.” 

 

Of like importance is the posture too,

In which the genial feat of Love we do:

For as the females of the four foot kind,

Receive the leapings of their Males behind;

So the good Wives, with loins uplifted high,

And leaning on their hands the fruitful stroke may try:

For in that posture will they best conceive:

Not when supinely laid they frisk and heave;

For active motions only break the blow,

And more of Strumpets than of Wives they show;

When answering stroke with stroke, the mingled liquors flow.

Endearments eager, and too brisk a bound,

Throws off the Plow-share from the furrow’d ground.

But common Harlots in conjunction heave,

Because ’tis less their business to conceive

Than to delight, and to provoke the deed;

A trick which honest Wives but little need.

 

     The notion of Dryden as Dryasdust is hardly compatible with this bit of advice in spite of its Latin source.  Lucretius maintains that making love face to face is typical of “Strumpets,” as it is said to be less likely to lead to conception than when women “Receive the leapings of their Males behind,” making this the appropriate position for married couples.  The putative interest in family planning covers an explicitly lubricious tone (“leapings,” “frisk and heave,” “mingled liquors”) as the artfully turned couplets tumble one after another toward the passage’s conclusion.  Its wit does not suffer from the fact that the reader may well think that even “honest Wives” may wish to employ “delight,” for their own sake as well as for their mates. 

     The background rhythm of iambic pentameter allows subtle variations to contribute significant sound effects.  For instance, the extra syllable in “genial” sounds like a grace note celebrating the joys of the bed.  The extra foot in “And leaning on their hands the fruitful stroke may try” recalls in sonic cadence the physical movements of love-making.  (The device occurs again a few lines later in “When answering stroke with stroke, the mingled liquors flow, where again the prolongation is palpable.)

     Absalom and Achitophel, a satire of over a thousand lines, is a prominent example of Dryden’s topical work, today much praised by specialists and little scanned by anyone else.  Readers wishing to understand the poem today must not only be more familiar than most moderns with the story from Samuel II of Absalom’s ill-considered rebellion against David, but also with the details of the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-1681 when some parliamentarians sought to exclude Charles II’s brother James from succession because of his Roman Catholicism.  The bills failed and James took the throne only to be deposed (after suspending Parliament and ruling for three years by decree) in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. 

    Understanding Dryden’s own politics is complicated by the fact that, when the Protectorate was in the ascendance, he worked for Cromwell’s government (as Milton and Marvell did) and wrote “Heroic Stanzas on the Death of Oliver Cromwell” in the praise of its leader in which he depicted the overthrow of Charles I as the founding of a new and better age.  Yet after the Restoration he scrambled to praise Charles II with equal enthusiasm. 

     Perhaps he was primarily a defender of the status quo. In one passage from Absalom and Achitophel he argues that any socio-political change will be for the worse, and therefore defends reaction as a general principle. 

 

If they may Give and Take when e'r they please,

Not Kings alone, (the Godheads Images,)

But Government it self at length must fall

To Natures state; where all have Right to all.

Yet, grant our Lords the People Kings can make,

What Prudent men a setled Throne would shake?

For whatsoe'r their Sufferings were before,

That Change they Covet makes them suffer more.

All other Errors but disturb a State,

But Innovation is the Blow of Fate.

If ancient Fabricks nod, and threat to fall,

To Patch the Flows, and Buttress up the Wall,

Thus far 'tis Duty; but here fix the Mark:

For all beyond it is to touch our Ark.

To change Foundations, cast the Frame anew,

Is work for Rebels who base Ends pursue:

At once Divine and Humane Laws controul;

And mend the Parts by ruine of the Whole.

The Tampering World is subject to this Curse,

To Physick their Disease into a worse.

 

     Thus, while no moralistic pedant, he was definitely conservative politically.  One must imagine a vision of an ignorant mob behind the “they” of the first line of this passage describing those who wish to arbitrarily alter the order of things, though in doing so they are very nearly blasphemous (as the king is the “image” of Godhead).  Radicals are, like Lucifer, rebels against both “Divine and Humane Laws.”   For some this preference for avoiding change is an adequate explanation of his shifting loyalties, and the fear of disorder conveniently conflates with a writer’s appeals for the patronage of the powerful.  The image of reformers as quack doctors who increase rather than relieve suffering must have had resonance for seventeenth century patients.

     A passage from the mock-heroic epic Mac Flecknoe exemplifies Dryden’s vituperative polemical style.  The entire work is devoted to ridiculing Thomas Shadwell, a rival playwright and political opponent whom Dryden considers the Emperor of “all the realms of Non-sense.”   The tone of the work is suggested by the fact that Dryden, by suppressing Shadwell’s name and writing instead “Sh----,” a convention that allows the reader to take the word to be shit as in “But loads of Sh—— almost choakt the way.”  In the following passage Dryden describes the devolution of drama since Elizabethan times, paralleled by the decline in a neighborhood which once included defensive fortifications implying an age of heroism, but which has since become a red-light district.  “Augusta” in  the first line is simply a name for London.  

 

Close to the walls which fair Augusta bind,

(The fair Augusta much to fears inclin’d)

An ancient fabrick, rais’d t’inform the sight,

There stood of yore, and Barbican it hight:

A watch Tower once; but now, so fate ordains,

Of all the pile an empty name remains.

From its old Ruins Brothel-houses rise,

Scenes of lewd loves, and of polluted joys.

Where their vast Courts, the Mother-Strumpets keep,

And, undisturb’d by Watch, in silence sleep.

Near these a Nursery erects its head,

Where queens are form’d, and future heroes bred;

Where unfledg’d actors learn to laugh and cry,

Where infant punks their tender voices try,

And little Maximins the gods defy.

Great Fletcher never treads in buskins here,

Nor greater Jonson dares in socks appear;

But gentle Simkin just reception finds

Amidst this Monument of vanisht minds:

Pure Clinches, the suburbian Muse affords;

And Panton waging harmless war with words.

Here Flecknoe, as a place to fame well known,

Ambitiously design’d his Sh—–‘s throne.

 

     In this scene the urban decay is apparent in the “Ruins” of old buildings, moral decline in the proliferation of prostitution, and aesthetic weakness in the popularity of clownish characters like Simkin and Panton.  The scene is for Dryden a “Monument of vanish’d minds.” 

     A song from one of Dryden’s plays provides relief from the rolling pentameters of the preceding three poems.   This piece from Marriage à la Mode was popular enough to have been included in the 1673 book Choice Songs and Ayres for One Voyce, so we can imagine people singing it at home after hearing it in the theater.

 

I

Why should a foolish marriage vow,

Which long ago was made,

Oblige us to each other now,

When passion is decayed?

We loved, and we loved, as long as we could,

Till our love was loved out in us both;

But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled:

’Twas pleasure first made it an oath.

 

II

If I have pleasures for a friend,

And further love in store,

What wrong has he, whose joys did end,

And who could give no more?

’Tis a madness that he should be jealous of me,

Or that I should bar him of another:

For all we can gain, is to give ourselves pain,

When neither can hinder the other.

 

     The Puritans had closed the theaters in 1642 and, in reaction, when drama returned in 1660 following Charles II’s taking the throne, the stage, only just free from several decades of prohibition, filled with libertines and loose women.  Reminiscent of the sophisticated hedonism of Cole Porter’s “Just One of Those Things” and familiar enough in an age when some espouse polyamory, this song must have offered audiences the thrill of transgression in the late seventeenth century. 

     Perhaps Dryden might object that this selection has leaned on his slightly improper poems.  If so, the intention  has simply been to challenge his reputation as dull and to make him accessible to readers unfamiliar with his work or with the period.  It is not, however, altogether inaccurate. Pepys, after all, hardly a prude himself, objected to Dryden’s play An Evening’s Love as “too smutty.”  Dryden was one of the last who could write of most any topic in verse with a poised and witty tone, constructing elaborate  rhetorical periods well-shaped and balanced, juggling abstractions often, it seems, simply for the fun of it.  At the same time in his own way he assumed the laureateship quite seriously, speaking for the nation in celebrations of royalty in poems like Britannia Rediviva and Threnodia Augustalis. 

     Like his contemporary Milton, Dryden does not enjoy the favor of modern taste.  This may be all the more reason that the reader may find in him something unexpected and once again new.  His craftsmanship and ingenuity remain exemplary in an age when the sound of poetry is largely neglected and rhetoric, long the heart of literary theory, has acquired a bad name.  Dryden’s mastery of the poetic line is evident throughout his work.  His poetry as well as his plays are at their best when read aloud. 

Book as Object: A Copy of the Taishang Ganying Pian

 

This essay is not really a study of this popular Daoist text as much as an appreciation of the artifact of one copy of the book itself and a bit of a glance up a few of the innumerable paths it, like all other objets d’art, opens to view.  In the last paragraph I venture a few rhetorical firecrackers that might seem out of place in a soberer article. 

 

     My copy of the Daoist text titled Treatise of the Exalted One on Response and Retribution, the T’ai-Shang Kan-Ying P’ien, today transliterated as the Taishang Ganying Pian (太上感應篇), was printed in 1906 [1].  How such a book came to be published -- not only in America, but in LaSalle, Illinois, which might by some standards be regarded as the middle of nowhere – is, unsurprisingly, a story of a few nonconformists.  I grew up near Chicago and LaSalle to me was simply the town by Starved Rock State Park.  In college I had a housemate from LaSalle and I noted his pronunciation of his hometown – “Láy-sal” – with the stress on the first syllable (just as its sister city Peru was called by the natives “Peé-roo”).  [2]

     My book, in excellent condition apart from severe browning of its acidic pages, is a fruit of the business success of a German immigrant, Edward Carl Hegeler.  During the nineteenth century coal and zinc mines were developed in the LaSalle area, in part by this university-educated free-thinker.  Hegeler was a man of philosophic bent who appreciated spirituality yet could not accept orthodox religion.  Once he had become prosperous through his business activities, Hegeler sought to spread his notion of a new sublime vision based in science and uncorrupted by superstition.  In support of his opinions, he became active in the Free Religious Association, a group advocating a rational universal religion [3] and eventually assumed the editorship of the Association’s journal, formerly The Index, as the Open Court magazine, after he had founded the Open Court Publishing Company, which published books as well as another periodical, The Monist. 

     Under the editorship of Hegeler’s son-in-law Paul Carus the company became a significant source of information about Asian philosophy and religion in the West as well as publishing work by Charles Sanders Peirce.  Carus himself had a doctorate from Tübingen and a mind that, like that of the young Augustine, kept inquiring.  Once a Spinozist, he next decided that Buddhism most closely approached his own beliefs and wrote The Gospel of Buddha, modeled on the Christian gospel, in an effort to make Asian spirituality more approachable for Americans.  He eventually adapted Ernst Haeckel’s brand of hylozoism, called panpsychism, terming his own refinement panbiotism, which he described as a variety of monism that holds all nature “is fraught with life; it contains life; it has the ability to live” [4].

     In association with the World Columbian Exposition, the world’s fair in Chicago celebrating the quatercentenary of Columbus’ arrival in  the Western hemisphere,  a Parliament of the World’s Religions was held in 1893.  There Ramakrishna’s disciple, Swami Vivekananda, fascinated the audience with his universalist Hinduism (which was to form the basis for the Vedanta Society).  Among the other representatives of major traditions who appeared at the Parliament was  Soyen Shaku, the first Zen master to teach in the United States.  Carus met Shaku and asked if he would be willing to translate Asian texts for Open Court. Though Shaku declined, he suggested his student D. T. Suzuki, who was to become the most important exponent of Zen in America. 

     Among the projects Carus and Suzuki undertook was the T’ai-Shang Kan-Ying P’ien (as they called it is the old Wade-Giles transliteration).  They produced a curious volume neither wholly popular nor scholarly, spiritual in its final aspirations, but offering a number of rewards short of enlightenment.  The book is designed with care and taste.  The decorative cover, reproduced above, is only the first of its visual charms.  A frontispiece features a magisterial portrait of a grandly bearded Lao Dz looking utterly satisfied by Keichyu Yamada whom Carus then hired to illustrate Open Court’s edition of Scenes from  the Life of Buddha (1898).  Scattered throughout are  curious anonymous line illustrations from late editions of the book. 

     The annotated translation by D. T. Suzuki and Paul Carus follows the Chinese text each page of which is accompanied en face by a grid indicating the meaning of every individual character, in this way giving the reader without knowledge of Chinese some insight into the language while providing Sinologists with the original. 

     The book itself, as its English title Treatise of the Exalted One on Response and Retribution indicates, concerns karma, the cause and effect of people’s actions, with the intention of inculcating a simple morality based on retributive justice.  Job’s counsellors would have agreed with the author of this little book that every good deed unfailingly brings good fortune whereas every sinful or ignorant act brings an inevitable punishment.  Surely Lao Dz himself, like Job, would reject this mechanism as woefully reductive if not outright untrue.  Indeed, everyone can see in lived experience that it is every bit as common for the good to suffer while the wicked prosper.  Though in practical terms too inaccurate to be the governing principle of many people’s actions, the idea of immediate and perfect divine justice is so tempting  it has received wide currency.  This “myth” in the Platonic sense of a “royal lie,” a “needful falsehood” [6] is useful in shaping people’s behavior, influencing them toward selflessness, even if they know in a way that it is a fiction..

     Though attributed to Lao Dz himself (the “Tai-shang” or “grandly high one” of the title, the main text has been dated to  1164 C. E.  From the first, the book enjoyed state patronage and large editions were distributed as an act of virtue by the sponsors and to elicit good behavior from the masses.  In spite of its association with Lao Dz, the book shows little affinity with the Dàodé Jīng.  It is rather a product of the Chinese syncretic tradition that mingles elements of Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism with local folk belief, one product of which is the Lushan school of Daoism [7].  So great was the book’s appeal as a simple way of performing a moral act by distributing a book which encourages virtue among its readers that countless copies were manufactured and given out by religious laypeople and governmental agencies.  In their “Introduction” Carus and Suzuki suggest that perhaps no book has attracted greater devotion or has enjoyed more readers.

     The proliferation of this particular text in numerous editions over the years was enabled by the rise of inexpensive printing but was motivated in the first place by the treatise’s own promises.  Rather like the Gideons (who continue to distribute millions of Bibles annually), pious Daoists sought to accumulate merit by disseminating the Treatise which was classed as a “morality book” (shanshu 善書), a prescriptive guide to righteous behavior. The Open Court volume follows the model of numerous Chinese editions which append narrations of anecdotes that provide particulars of people’s well-deserved benefits and punishments in the present life with occasional recourse to heaven and hell.  The very first tells of a man who always revered the Treatise and, as a result, ascends with his family bodily into heaven, just as tradition says Enoch and Elijah did.  In the second story a poor but devout scholar pawns his clothes to support a printing of the Taishang Ganying Pian and shortly thereafter receives prestigious appointments from the emperor. 

     The main body of the text is a simple catalogue of ethical mandates, the great majority of which would be acceptable in most times and places.  The author illustrates such general rules as “do not proceed in an evil path” with specific positive advice such as advocating aid for the needy  while denouncing evildoers who lie and oppress others.  Some injunctions warn against improper ritual observance or violation of taboos (such as by needlessly killing a snake or a tortoise, by performing an execution on a holiday, or by exposing one’s nakedness at night).  The book thus constitutes a convenient epitome of moral teaching, a little law-book like the Albanian Kanun by which the individual might guide daily behavior.

     Anyone partial to the radical mysticism of Daoist or Advaita or Chan masters is likely to be taken a bit aback when, mingling with robed monks for the first time on a trip abroad, the traveler sees a pious supplicant genuflecting and reverently placing a package of Mallomars on the altar before a figure of the Buddha, while praying for a new baby, good grades, healing, or a promotion.  A certain suggestive potency does linger over such a scene.  It is, if nothing else, a spectacle of need, a touching glimpse into the abyss of human desire.  And the people, one guesses (or hopes) may be perhaps just a bit gentler than their more secular neighbors, for all organized religions teach ethics, laws, and moral rules their leaders say are ordained by higher powers. 

     Yet surely such petitioners have been as often disappointed in their hopes as often as they have been gratified.  Still they return the next time with the same belief in the efficacy of offerings.  Just as a  disappointed practitioner of juju will conclude that someone else must have had a stronger charm, these ordinary laypeople retain their faith in retributive justice in spite of seeing injustice daily. 

     Ethics are only meaningful within human communities, and Ultimate Reality can have little to do with such moral judgements.  Even far short of that last conceptual horizon (when all bets are off), moral concepts would vanish altogether should humankind become extinct.  On the other hand, in all societies religions have flourished, insisting on a patterns of behavior in part rational and functional and in part ritual and magical.  The Taishang Ganying Pian,  by attributing a systematic account of people’s moral obligations and expectations to a recognized sage, provided a guide to conduct that proved useful for centuries in China.   

     Practical it may be, but the book is warm with the glow of faith and scintillating with the peculiar Chinese fancy which seems never to take itself entirely seriously.  One reason a sinner cannot escape judgement, the reader learns, is that when he falls asleep on Kûng Shên Day his misdeeds will be reported to the Director of Destinies (siming 司命), a bureaucrat of the Jade Emperor Yù Huáng.  The informers are what Carus and Suzuki call “three body-spirits.”  In popular Daoism these are more precisely called the Three Corpses or Three Worms, hostile spirits dwelling within the human body, parasites that sometimes seek to bring disease, but always record their host’s moral failings.  From this belief arose the practice of staying up through the night of Kûng Shên in order that the hostile spirits would not then be able to fill out the proper reports in heaven.

     This sort of thing deems to us altogether fanciful.  Did the Chinese actually believe it, or did they merely welcome the opportunity to socialize through a long night?  Did Carus and Suzuki believe that they would bring enlightenment a bit closer with their republishing amid the flatlands of northern Illinois?  Or did they simply enjoy each other’s company and relish intellectual labor as an end in itself?  Did I believe my mind might catch sight of a bright spark from perusing this book? Or was I, too, only  passing the time, just as another might do with a popular novel or a situation comedy?  And you, dear reader, what brings you here?  There may in the end be little distinction between a search for truth and bliss and just getting through the day.  Both bring one at last after all to evening.  But I find that I am dreaming over this odd little volume, the most excellent characteristic of which is perhaps to stimulate dreaming.   

 

  

1.  My copy was printed in 1944 but purchased perhaps twenty years later.  Like the old Dover company and others in the days prior to the 1979 Supreme Court decision that made large inventories impractical, Open Court used to support their backlist forever.  Today Open Court offers a wide range of titles including a series on philosophy and popular culture that includes studies of the philosophical implications of Mr. Rogers, RuPaul, and the Simpsons.

2.  There seems to be a principle of this rural American displacement of accent to the first syllable.  Another Illinois town is Pekin, pronounced “Peé-kin” and named, like Pekin and Canton in Ohio, because its founders thought they were on the exact opposite side of the globe.  Until 1981 the Pekin school’s athletic teams were called the Pekin Chinks. 

3.  In particular on evolution.  Darwin was a regular donor and a subscriber to The Index. 

4.  Paul Carus, “Panpsychism and Panbiotism,” The Monist, Vol. 3, No. 2 (January, 1893).

5.  Among the titles used by other translators are Tai Shang's Treatise on Action and Response, the Treatise on the Response of the Tao, and the Treatise of the Most High on Action and Retribution.  The text was included in volume forty of the Sacred Books of the East series under the title Tractate of Actions and their Retributions in a translation by james Legge, the first Oxford professor of Chinese.

6.  Republic, Bk. III.

7.  In Chinese this is called the sanjiao yiguan (三教一貫) or sanjiao heyi ( 三教合一).  The Lushan sect continues today, including the use of shamans called  "masters of rites" or fashi (法師).

 

 

 

 

The Idea of Nature in Pope’s “Essay on Criticism”

  

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; those in  parentheses refer either to lines in the “Essay on Criticism” or the “Essay on Man” or to Canto and stanza in Dryden’s translation of Boileau’s “L'Art poétique.” I use the text of the “Essay on Criticism” available online at https://www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org/works/o3675-w0010.shtml.

 

     The distinction between the natural and the artificial is among the bipolar oppositions most commonly invoked in the discussion of poetry.  The ancient “Asiatic” rhetorical style, Occitanian trobar clus, and Euphuism, for instance, revel in language that is pointedly artificial in contrast to the Attic style, trobar leu, and Philip Sidney who concluded sonnet 1 in Astrophel and Stella with the line: “’Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart and write.’”  His pose, of course, is as much a convention as any. 

    There is nothing “natural” about even such direct and simple lyrics as those of A. E. Housman.  All poetry is simply sounds in the air or marks on a page, with no necessary correspondence to lived experience of the world.  Every work of art is oblique and conventional in signification, relying on sound, symbolism, and allusion.  Though no story is “realistic,” since every narration is “made-up,” some have “seeming reality,” while others strike readers as fantasy, and in poetry some writers seem to rely more heavily on nature and inspiration, while others seem more consciously craftsmanlike.  Each is a pretense, an equally manufactured impression created by the author. 

      Still, a poet’s expressed reaction to nature signifies a whole complex of accompanying attitudes.  Nature is a critical element in the contrast constructed by literary historians between Classical and Romantic ideals.  The Classical artist is associated with inspiration through imitation, achieving effects through mastery of rhetoric, and a general attachment to urbane sophistication, while the Romantic is stimulated by direct experience, expressed in a “spontaneous overflow” of words, responding with “natural” emotion to beauty.  

     While Pope is often considered the prime exponent of a neo-Classical poetics, and his “Essay on Criticism” is intended as an English counterpart of Boileau’s L'Art poétique (itself a revision of Horace), in fact both Pope’s poetic theory and practice are far from doctrinaire.  In numerous important ways, Pope contains the embryo of Romanticism in his own writing, though the meaning his gave to the word “nature” was quite different from later usage including our own. 

     The “Essay” does indeed prescribe rules, but also allows for their violation.  While he cautions “Discretion” (163) in violating traditional artistic practices, he recognizes that “Great Wits may sometimes gloriously offend” (153) and please readers with “lucky LICENCE” (149), constructing   “Nameless Graces, which no Methods teach” (145).  To Pope “Some Beauties yet, no Precepts can declare,/ For there's a Happiness as well as Care” (142-3).  The aesthetic effects beyond those taught in the schools are not necessarily unknown only because of their novelty; according to Pope, they may be in fact beyond analysis.  “Some Beauties yet, no Precepts can declare.” (142)

     A source of inspiration beyond the models of the ancients, beyond even their conscious understanding, was nature, though for Pope the word had a meaning rarely used today.  The most reductive formulations of the Classical-Romantic dualism would premise a Classical preference for civilization, typified, perhaps, by Samuel Johnson’s comment (according to Boswell) “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford." [1]  The Romantic answer would be a reverence for nature as equivalent to “the fair and open face of heaven” as  Keats put it in “To one who has been long in city pent.”

     The word nature to a modern suggests trees and streams, a landscape unshaped by people, but Johnson’s dictionary, which offers eleven definitions, never quite includes this one.  Johnson begins with Nature as a mythological personification and ends with “physics.”  This last comes close to what Pope had in mind when he declared “First follow NATURE” (68).  The “Essay on Criticism” could hardly be more emphatic about the value of nature in the composition of poetry.  To him “That Art is best which most resembles Her” (74) as nature is “At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art” (73). 

     The character of Pope’s concept of nature emerges in his justification for literary convention which insists that  “Rules are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz’d” (88).   The next line insists “Those RULES of old [are] discover’d not devis’d” (89), though, of course, in fact, works of art are always culturally constructed. 

     Nature impresses Pope’s sensibility not as the picturesque but as a beautifully functioning system.  He loves not the nighttime stars, but the patterns of their movements, not the lily but the annual death and rebirth of vegetation as a whole.  Thus to him nature is the spectacle of the system, miraculous in complexity, that animates the universe.  The analogy with literary “rules” or conventions is natural, reinforced by the veneration for the ancients in which it seems that “Nature and Homer were, he found, the same” (136).

     The same privilege Pope grants to generalities underlies his opening passage in which he maintains, somewhat counter-intuitively, that incompetent critics do more harm than bad writers.  By suggesting the wrong general principles, a misguided critic will deny the order that constitutes nature.  

     Among the notions that might seem to be Romantic, but which Pope affirms is the existence of the natural “true Genius” (11) among poets as well as critics.  To him the greatest writers are “Poets, a Race long unconfin'd and free” (652).  To such gifted artists the rules that govern most artistic practice appear as “vulgar Bounds” and the poet flouting them exhibits “brave Disorder,” enabling  by this violation “a Grace beyond the Reach of Art” (155-156).

     Yet in much of what Pope maintains, he is seconding the views of Boileau, the législateur du Parnasse, who, though he said  “A hundred times consider what you've said:/ Polish, repolish” (I, 11), also prescribed  “To study nature be your only care” (III, 49) and insisted the writer should “Strive to be natural in all you Write” (III, 50).  His treatise opens by  declaring that only those born under a “Poetic Influence” should attempt poetry and that “In all you Write, observe with Care and Art/ To move the Passions, and incline the Heart” (III, 30).

     Furthermore, both Boileau and Pope praise Longinus, the author of On the Sublime, who focuses on the reader’s reaction and allows for subjective intuitive judgements.  Boileau had himself translated Longinus, and Pope hails him enthusiastically. 

 

Thee bold Longinus! all the Nine inspire,

And bless their critic with a poet's fire.

An ardent judge, who, zealous in his trust,

With warmth gives sentence, yet is always just:

Whose own example strengthens all his laws;

And is himself that great sublime he draws.

                                                           (675-680) 

The language here emphasizes the reader’s emotional response to a text with word like “fire,”, “ardent,” and “warmth,” and justifies Longinus’ judgment, not through logical reasoning, but because his own writing is powerfully moving.  

     The view of nature that underlies Pope’s literary criticism is expressed as well in his more generally philosophical “An Essay on Man” where nature is divinely inspirited. 

All are but parts of one stupendous Whole,

Whose Body Nature is, and God the Soul

                                            (259-260)

 This holy universal nature is then identified with the aesthetic: “All nature is but art unknown to thee.” (281).  As the godhead is the supreme artist, the order of creation is the ultimate work of art, the model for all human poets.  To him the ancients were able to conform to the dictates of an all-but-deified nature that they borrowed from it some flames of “Coelestial Fire” (198). 

     This nearly numinous concept of nature underlies Pope’s literary theory, allowing him to contain in  embryo significant elements of what came to be Romantic assumptions about art.  His reliance on authority, on the “unities” attributed to Aristotle and other prescriptive rules, and his claim that "True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,/ As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance" (362–363) are quite real, but they arise from the conviction that reliance on literary tradition and drawing from nature itself are similar processes.   For Pope the contemplation of the phenomenal world and the appreciation of earlier poetry both lead, not through rational processes but through a kind of spiritual apprehension, to an understanding of beauty.  Pope’s conflation of art and nature allows him simultaneously allegiance to the natural and the artificial; for him there is little difference since god is an artist like himself.  In the study of nature and of poetry (and of the divine as well) Pope finds an ineffable element, revelatory yet resistant to analysis, known only by the afflatus Longinus called the sublime.

 

 

1.  This is consistent with the Biblical attitude in which the wilderness is regularly opposed to the garden.

2.  For Boileau reason often stands in place of what Pope calls nature.  “Always let sense accompany your Rhyme” (I, 2).

Portraits from a Floating World: A Passage from Africa to Europe

 

From a 1971 journal – thus the reference to Rhodesia.  This is one of a series of monologues, here a small cluster of voices, heard during the chance encounters of travel.  For others, see “Portraits from a Floating World” in Travel (section 10 of the Index), found under the current month in the Blog Archive on the right of the page.

 

     Once, when the Libyans refused us entry into their country from Tunisia, we turned back toward Europe and booked deck passage to Palermo.  On the route it seemed we were virtually never out of sight of some little island, perhaps just a rock protruding from  the unruly surface of the Mediterranean.  Many of the people we met on board seemed as rootless and itinerant as ourselves which was, at that time, saying something.

     During boarding, before we were sorted into the proper shipboard neighborhood to which our tickets entitled us, we chatted with an older lady traveling alone who looked like something of a lost grande dame.  She told us she had just been on safaris in Kenya and Tanzania and had concluded that she much preferred Rhodesia, saying, “They know how to do things more or less properly there, though  I can’t imagine why.”  We thought we probably knew why she had that impression even if she did not.  She was going next to Russia, then the Balkans, then “the Holy Land,” with further destinations yet  to be settled.  “I read too many books, you see,” she said.  “You begin wanting to see everything, but soon nowhere seems quite right and you always want to move on.”    Every detail of the pre-embarkation formalities confounded her.  When we had to show our passports, she asked rather oddly, ”Do they make you carry one of those, too?”

     Once we had been segregated from the better-off, we encountered a rumpled old Oxonian who was more adrift than the lady.  He was accompanied by a couple of young Swedish travelers who had met him in Libya.  They told us we had been fortunate not to be allowed to enter the country because, apart from the suspicion of Gaddafi’s bureaucrats, the exchange rate was highly artificial, making everything very expensive for foreigners and, besides. the signs were in Arabic only and no one knew English.  They had conducted the British man out of that environment as something of an act of charity and were planning to split from him in Italy.  “We have been with him a week and somehow we don’t know a thing about him.”

     He seemed more communicative with us, saying that he was in the middle of a lifelong quest to learn music.  He had spent years in  Africa, he said, learning drums, then went to Spain for guitar, India for sitar, and so on.  He said that work was to him was ”a tremendously wasteful expenditure of energy . . .Money  is, after all, just pieces of paper,” he went on, “I don’t worry, sometimes I almost starve, but I get along, you know.  Anyway, the government owes me a large sum of money.  Some day that will turn up.  Maybe.”

     He asked Patricia is she would call herself “collegian” or “collegiate,” perhaps curious about some difference in American usage.  “Sometimes I play music,” he said, though he was traveling too lightly to carry an instrument.  He was familiar with Leadbelly and loved jazz.  “I haven’t any idea where I’m going,” he said pleasantly.  He did note that the one place he avoided was the United Kingdom.  “they put you in hospital there.”  He wandered about discussing philosophy with Patricia for half the night.

     One of his Swedish companions gallantly offered Patricia his bunk as we had only deck chairs for the night.  “I prefer the floor or not sleeping at all.  Often I don’t sleep when traveling and it may be two weeks before I get home.  I have had maybe no sleep at all.”  He worked on ships as a service employee.  “People take everything out on waiters.  I shall try to get a job in the engine room next time.”  He was heading back to Sweden to sign on for another voyage, since his purse was nearly empty.  “But people must let me cross no even without money, because I am on my way home.  That is the law, people going home must be allowed to pass whatever their circumstances.  I always travel the cheapest way, sometimes hitching, but I can tell you the only way out of Tripoli is to blow money on a cab.” 

     Two Nigerians whom we met were perhaps even poorer.  In pursuit of their plan to study in the United States, they had applied to American schools and they said they had been accepted by one.  From their home in the Sahel, they had set out to hitchhike across the Sahara.  They had had a rough time persuading the truck drivers who used the sand-covered tracks to take on two passengers, but said any among them who spoke Hausa as they did would be bound by ties of kinship however remote to give them a ride.  They said they still had spent days and nights on their own and had scars on  their hands since the desert, while scorching during the day, became very cold at night, and they had built campfires and burned their hands trying to keep warm.  They told us that their intention was to attend university in Oskaloosa, Oklahoma where they meant to study refrigeration science.  They asked whether Oklahoma was near the coast, and we had to tell them not only that it was in the middle of the country, but that Oskaloosa is in Iowa.