Half-mad, Half-saved

I picked up this 1953 comic novel of Peter DeVries after reading a writer whom I respect report that it is a work that literally makes him laugh out loud. This, to me, is an extremely high commendation, something I myself have only experienced with two works over 25 years of “serious” reading: Nabokov’s Pale Fire and (the winner by a mile) John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces. No other work has had this effect. And sadly, The Vale of Laughter failed to add its name to this rarified club. While the book is occasionally amusing, much of the humor seems forced, and some of it positively groan-inducing. While DeVries seems to be aiming at a lighter, more absurdist version of Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), Roth’s work is significant more interesting—and funnier. I read through this book quickly, for fear of wasting too much of my valuable reading time on a novel that is not within the top 1000 ever written.

I have been a fan of the art of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood for several decades, since first encountering their works while sojourning in the United Kingdom. In fact, even before seeing the paintings of Rossetti et al., in their magnificent Tate Gallery splendour, I had already been introduced to their ideas via my work on Ruskin and William Morris (see below post on The Stones of Venice). I distinctly recall being shown a chapel at Cambridge (the specific college escapes me now), and remarking, immediately upon entering, that the windows were surely the work of Edward Burne-Jones. My guide, an older “fellow” (I mean that literally) of the cloth, was astonished that I recognized the artist, noting that I was the first ever to do so—a comment that made me both proud and sad, considering that I felt, particularly at that time, that EBJ’s art was nonpareil.

Here it is, now, exactly 20 years hence, and I have just read The Pre-Raphaelities and their World, a fascinating account of the life, work, relationships (though, alas, less on the women than the men) of the major artists in the self-conscious “movement” known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882), William Holman Hunt (1827–1910), John Everett Millais (1829–1896), Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898) and William Morris (1834–1896)—as well as the larger circle of like-minded artists, poets and acquaintances. This retrospective work, written by Dante Gabriel’s brother William Michael Rossetti, a founding member and unofficial scribe of the PRB, is rife with interesting biographical nuggets; to William Michael’s credit, he does not attempt to whitewash the flawed personalities of these idealistic, petit bourgeois artists, including that of their figurehead—his own brother Dante Gabriel (actually Gabriel Dante). While we get a strong sense of Dante’s love for his model/muse Lizzie Siddal, I would have liked to hear more detail of the illicit affair with Janey Morris, wife of William “Topsy” Morris, accomplished poet, designer, social critic, failed painter, and Dante’s friend and fellow traveler in PRB mentality. Other episodes involve the Brownings, Tennyson, Swinburne, Ford Madox Brown, Ruskin, Whistler, and just about any Brit with a claim to artistic or poetic fame during the late Victorian period. Although she remains a shadowy figure, largely confined to the backdrop of the tale, one also gets a glimpse of the strong personality of William Michael and Dante Gabriel’s younger sister, the poet Christina Rossetti.

The volume, produced by the Folio Society, also contains dozens of beautiful prints, including a variety of the PRB hits: Hunt’s Rienzi Swearing Revenge, Converted British Family, Our English Coasts, The Light of the World, Rossetti’s Ecce Ancilla Domini, Beatrice at a Marriage Feast, Beata Beatrix, Venus Verticordia, Millais’s A Huigenot, Ferdinand Lured by Ariel, Mariana, Ophelia, and so on. In addition, the book reproduces a few stunning works by less successful members and associates, including Morris, Lizzie Siddal, and Frederik George Stephens (whose Mother and Child is stunning).

I love love, and I love (for the most part) teaching and reading about love, especially when such involves the work of a ‘master’ of love such as Sappho, Ovid, Hafiz, Stendhal, or Octavio Paz. Giovanni Boccaccio, the ‘third leg’ of the great Italian humanist triad after Dante and Petrarch, certainly belongs in such esteemed company. His Decameron, with its earthy tales of human passion and trickery, is a worthy heir of the great Roman poets of love. After the desultory and disappointing Dead Sea Scrolls, I turned to a slim volume of Boccaccio’s less-famous treatise, Questioni d’Amore, or Thirteen Most Pleasant and Delectable Questions of Love, penned in 1336, when the author was a mere 23 years old. In fact, Questoini is only a small chapter of a much larger youthful work entitled Filocolo, which might be considered the first novel of modern Europe.

The story in Questioni, as in other parts of the larger novel, is rooted in autobiography, specifically Boccaccio’s infatuation with a woman named Maria d’Aquino, whom the author first glimpsed on Holy Saturday, 1336, as he lounged with his pals on the steps on the church of San Lorenzo in Naples. She was, in a word, his Beatrice, his Laura (or his Yvonne, of Le Grand Mealnes fame; more on this later). And yet, as Harry Carter, illustrator of my edition of Questioni (a reprint of H.G.’s flawed 1566 translation), adds: “This was to be no spiritual union, such as satisfied Dante with his Beatrice, nor was it to be the idealized and romantic love of Petrarch for Laura. Boccaccio’s desires were of the flesh and he pursued them with the single intention of consummation.” Now, there is some truth in this – compared with his two towering forebears, GB’s prose tends, as noted, towards the Ovidian. And yet, the tone of disapprobrium is not only overly moralistic for my tastes, it also misses the possibility that one can be both ‘spiritual’ and fleshly’ at the same time.  In other words, it buys too-readily into the Platonic-Christian dualism that runs against, in my humble opinion, the way most folks actually feel when in love (and by ‘love’ here I mean ἔρως in the full, original, Greek sense).

So what of the tales themselves? A few are of interest, though they lack the sophistication or the tales of the Decameron, perhaps betraying the author’s youth. I do appreciate, however, that GB lets women tell half the tales, and generally avoids making their stories  ‘gendered’. And while I personally disagree with most of the advice given by ‘Queen’ Fiammetta (who stands in for Maria d’Aquino), her logic is generally sound. Certainly, the most interesting chapter is in the very middle, where Galeone asks Fiammetta whether love is “a good or evil thing.” Galeone asks this while gazing, enraptured, at his interlocutor, which clearly colors her reply. In the end, she concludes: “Truly, if it were lawful we would willingly live without Love. But of such a harm we are too late aware. And since we are caught in his nets, therefore until the light that guided Aeneas out of the dark ways as he fled the perilous fires may appear to us, it is better for us to follow him and be guided submissively to his pleasures.”

After finishing Ruskin’s Stones of Venice, I turned my ‘leisure reading’ eyes to something completely different — albeit a text and author equally indebted to “Gothic” sensibilities of another sort — Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber & Other Stories (1979). This collection is a ‘post-feminist’ reconfiguring of classic fairy tales, as bloody and lubricious as the originals, but without the problematic gender divisions. I love the fact that Carter, who published her classic and controversial essay The Sadeian Woman in the same year as The Bloody Chamber, ‘updates’ these fantastical stories, adding a dark mirth without sanitizing — indeed, rather reveling in — their chthonic violence.

My favorite of the nine tales is The Bloody Chamber, a revisioned (and better-written) Dracula in which the heroine’s mother — who in her youth had “outfaced a junkful of Chinese pirates, nursed a village through a visitation of the plague, [and] shot a man-eating tiger with her own hand” — comes riding wildly to the rescue of her daughter (and her daughter’s kind but impotent male ‘protector’), felling her astonished husband — the beast — with one well-aimed rifle shot.  The Company of Wolves, which plays on/with the overt sexual innuendo of Little Red Riding Hood, also ends with a dramatic twist to the classic tale: “All the better to eat you with. The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat. She laughed at him full in the face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it in the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing. The flames danced like dead souls on Walpurgisnacht and the old bones under the bed set up a terrible clattering but she did not pay them any heed.”

Carter’s prose is perfectly suited to this genre; tight and clean, without Stoker’s indulgence, thereby doing justice not only to the classic fairy tales as retold by the brothers Grimm, but evincing a ‘primitive’ directness that reminds one of Emily Dickinson and the “J” author of Genesis (who, if Harold Bloom is correct, was also a woman). Here is one examples: “The telephone shrilled; for her. Her father. Such news!” Compare J’s beautifully pithy account of the Fall, in Rosenberg’s translation: “To its fruit she reached; ate, gave to her man, there with her, and he ate.”

I plan to use these posts to unload random thoughts on any and all topics, especially  those connected to the six interlocking spheres most important to me: philosophy, religion, ethics, politics, literature, and the environment. I have no idea if anyone besides myself will ever read them, but that is of little concern to me.

Let me begin with a few thoughts on a book I am currently reading, John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (1851–53; Folio Society edition, 2001). My appreciation for Ruskin goes back to the very beginnings of my academic career. In my senior year as an undergraduate at McGill, I wrote an  joint honor’s thesis on Ruskin and his influence in 19th and 20th century politics and social theory: ‘No Wealth But Life’: Art & Nature in Left Cultural Politics from Kant to the Frankfurt School (see excerpt below). Besides being a decidedly eccentric personality, Ruskin was a fascinating hybrid of cultural currents: a Romantic who disdained the heavy-handed forms of the Renaissance in favor of the spirit of “Gothic”; an unabashed aesthete who was also an quasi-Christian moralist; a cultural conservative who developed one of the earliest (and non-Marxist) analyses of labor and alienation; and a writer whose frequent flights of over-the-top prose belie a steady commitment to the virtues of temperance and restraint. I see the trace of Ruskin in many of my favorited 19th century figures and movements: the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, William Morris, the Arts & Crafts Movement, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde.

The Stones of Venice is generally regarded as Ruskin’s magnum opus, and the chapter “The Nature of Gothic” provides a succinct distillation of his central moral/aesthetic concerns. Here Rusking outlines the “moral elements of Gothic”, as follows: 1. Savageness or Rudeness; 2. Love of Change; 3. Love of Nature; 4. Disturbed Imagination; 5. Obstinacy; 6. Generosity. Without going into the details that Ruskin goes on to provide, let me say that these are six values that I, too, hold as ideals – which perhaps explains my love for his work.

The following is a short excerpt from my essay, “No Wealth But Life.” Though I wrote this two decades ago, I stand by my argument with regard to Ruskin’s applicability today:

Ruskin was heir to a particular brand of British Romanticism (via Thomas Carlyle), and he was also very much a Victorian in his reflection upon the ills of his society. With his aesthetic grasp of the human condition, however, Ruskin was far from common, and it is this aspect of his work that has most relevance, and which is often cited when Ruskin is hailed as a prophetic figure. Like Marx, Ruskin witnessed first hand the wrath of capitalist industrialism, and turning from his artistic background felt compelled to speak out on social issues, without ever losing his background in aesthetics or his love of beauty and human creativity. Speaking with unabashed contempt of all the so-called ‘higher practical achievements’ of his century, Ruskin viewed Victorian cities as “so many working models of hell.” He launched a full-scale assault upon orthodox political economy, which in his view was entrenched in capitalist, utilitarian-technological principles of calculation and exchange-value. Ruskin, then, follows Carlyle in the denunciation of the Machine Age, but his critique extends further to a more general attack on post-Enlightenment scientific and rationalist thought. At once an outcry against social injustice and inhumanity, Ruskin’s work is also a direct assault upon the “bastard science” of political economy, which mechanizes, isolates, and fragments human beings and society, producing in its wake a vast impersonal machine of separate, self-interested atoms.

Industrial machinery, says Ruskin, is only the most concrete manifestation of a way of thought that renders life impure. Human beings and society must only be understood as complex and multi-faceted organisms, rather than as Ricardo’s homo oeconomicus, which for Ruskin is an insult upon human dignity. Mechanical development in the Machine Age subdued humankind to a state of spiritual slavery, whereby development gains priority over human happiness and quality of life. Ruskinian critical theory has its base in one central tenet immortalized in his essay “Unto This Last:” There is no Wealth But Life. For Ruskin: “Intrinsic value is the absolute power of anything to support life. Exchange value is merely the price the possessor will take for it, and they are not identical. The exchange value of a cannon ball and a pudding may be the same but their intrinsic value is not. To exclude intrinsic value from economic calculations is unscientific.”

Life, says Ruskin, in its totality, must be the end and aim of consumption, as well as the focus of any true political economy. Here Ruskin borrows from Edmund Burke, adding social affections and moral factors into political and economic calculations, not as sentimental whim but on the basis of scientific procedure and common sense. The questions of art, economy, and politics cannot be separated from each other—or from the questions of morality and ethics.

Essentially, Ruskin sees, at the roots of the central problems of his day (the dehumanization of humanity in poverty, ugliness and squalor), not a certain class of people, but, first, a philosophy based on a mechanistic account of human nature, and second, a belief in liberty when the reality of depravity made such a concept hollow and useless. As well, Ruskin mentions a third problem: the (Mandevillean) conviction that communal prosperity can only be achieved by the pursuit of individual self-interest. Fro Adam Smith to Malthus to Mill, Ruskin combated the liberal democratic vision of humanity as the sum of his own interests, detached from a social context. “Unto This Last” was written with the dual purpose of giving a logical definition of wealth and to show that the acquisition of wealth is possible only under certain moral conditions of society. In particular, Ruskin voraciously attacks so-called progress that, based on an incorrect notion of wealth and prosperity, cannot help but be disastrous to humanity in the long run. A true definition of value, he suggests, would be one based upon the original Latin root (valorem)—a word that means to be strong or valuable for someone or something. Value, like wealth, must be concerned with, or avail towards, life.

Ruskin’s aesthetic background is fundamental to his life philosophy. A society so dedicated to squalor and heartless brutality, he says, cannot help but be indifferent to all praised of beauty. Drawing a link between morality and the realm of beauty, Ruskin sees in art (especially Gothic, i.e., pre-industrial, art and architecture in particular) the achievement of an equable relationship between human creativity and the given world. As a mediaevalist in both aesthetics and social theory, he sees in the idealized picture of the mediaeval European craftsman and his village a prototype for all human artistic and social fulfilment. Yet art must have a purpose, which is ultimately to “get the country clean and the people beautiful.” An aesthetic principle for life not only benefits humanity directly, but also indirectly, by enjoining the beautification and sustenance of nature. Ruskin broadens the concept of art by enlarging the formal emphasis on beauty to cover a whole range of human (and non-human) experience.