Cruel and Unusual Punishment: T. S. Eliot's Spelling Bee

T. S. Eliot

Wikipedia

From the proverbial T. S. Eliot: "April is the cruellest month."

Less cruellest would be: "April is the cruelest month."

"If space and time, as sages say . . ."

Literature Across the Spatiotemporal Continuum?

Illustration by O.O.P.S.

New York Times

In a recent NYT review of Hari Kunzru's Gods Without Men, "Convergences" (March 8, 2012), Douglas Coupland tells us that the book belongs to a new literary genre that reflects our current reality, or in his words:

[W]e appear to have entered an aura-free universe in which all eras coexist at once -- a state of possibly permanent atemporality given to us courtesy of the Internet. No particular era now dominates. We live in a post-era era without forms of its own powerful enough to brand the times. The zeitgeist of 2012 is that we have a lot of zeit but not much geist. I can't believe I just wrote that last sentence, but it's true; there is something psychically sparse about the present era, and artists of all stripes are responding with fresh strategies.

A sort of twilight zone of the gods, one might say. Or I might, anyway. But what's that new genre Coupland mentioned?

This new reality seems to have manifested in the literary world in what must undeniably be called a new literary genre. For lack of a better word, let's call it Translit. Translit novels cross history without being historical; they span geography without changing psychic place. Translit collapses time and space as it seeks to generate narrative traction in the reader's mind. It inserts the contemporary reader into other locations and times, while leaving no doubt that its viewpoint is relentlessly modern and speaks entirely of our extreme present. Imagine traveling back to Victorian England -- only with vaccinations, a wad of cash and a clean set of ruling-class garb. With Translit we get our very delicious cake, and we get to eat it, too, as we visit multiple pasts safe in the knowledge we'll get off the ride intact, in our bold new perpetual every-era/no-era. Translit's precursors are, say, "Winesburg, Ohio" and "Orlando," and the genre's 21st-­century tent poles are Michael Cunningham's novel "The Hours" and David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas." To these books we can add Hari Kunzru's gorgeous and wise "Gods Without Men."

Having read Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, I see what Coupland means by this and why he calls the writing translit. Mitchell's novel spans several centuries and tells various interrelated stories of characters who seem to be related across space and time, at times as if they share the same soul transmigrating over time and place. One can also consider Mitchell's tendency to link his various novels in minor but notable ways, as when a character from one novel appears briefly in another, giving one a sense of familiarity across novels, as though some sort of community were being established to bring all characters into communion despite their conflicts with one another. Is that a feature of translit? Can the genre include characters from one novel appearing unexpectedly in another, especially if that other novel is by a different writer? Intertextuality gone wild? Perhaps I should ask Coupland his opinion?

And what's this O.O.P.S. illustration thing?

T. S. Eliot and Prufrock's 'Daring' Peach

T. S. Eliot

Amar Nath Dwivedi

(Google Books)

Today's blog entry will likely interest only me, for I'm merely adding some details about a couple of scholars who have interpreted T. S. Eliot's "peach" in the poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" as a reference to the "forbidden fruit" of Genesis.

The text shown in the image above, T.S. Eliot: A Critical Study, is by Amar Nath Dwivedi and was published in 2003. I'm not sure that Dwivedi can be trusted as a scholar, given his interpretation of the famous "ragged claws" that Eliot has Prufrock allude to:

The reference here is to a kind of seagull having rough and rugged claws and running swiftly on 'the floors of the silent seas.' Left with no other options to console himself, the protagonist walks down the seashore dandyishly in his white flannel trousers where he can part his hair to conceal his baldness and 'risk the solaces of a peach' -- the sole forbidden fruit . . . . (page 31)

Can one trust a scholar who has mistaken a crab for a seagull? Or who misquotes the famous "silent seas" line? Or who invents -- or so I gather -- the quote about peach risk? Probably not. But I have to acknowledge the reference to forbidden fruit.

The other scholar might be more trustworthy. Young Min Hyun (현영민) -- in an article titled "T. S. Eliot's Poetry: 'Do I dare to eat a peach?'" -- tells us the following, at least in the English abstract:

T. S. Eliot's impersonal theory of poetry is closely related with his nature of a Catholic, Calvinistic, or Puritanical temperament, which became the basis of his religious and sexual imagination in his poetry. We should bear in mind that his concept of tradition expounded in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is inseparable from his belief in the Christian dogmatic belief in Original Sin, as he explained in After Strange Gods, a lecture delivered at the University of Virginia in 1933.

Eliot interprets the Fall of man as originated in man's sexual passion which is symbolized in the act of eating the forbidden fruit in Genesis. This forbidden fruit is variously featured in Eliot's poetry as a peach in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," or a fig in Ash-Wednesday, or an apple in Four Quartets. Man should continually avoid the bodily desires not to eat the forbidden fruit. To relieve himself from the fear of His punishment, he should continually humiliate himself before God. This religious myth is accommodated to Eliot's impersonal theory of poetry which asks of the artist a continual surrender or self-sacrifice. In Eliot's poetry, women are dismissed as a temptress to be avoided. By cleansing his desires by the burning spiritual fire, man is recreated. Therefore, Eliot's ideal woman is a lady of silences in white and blue dress like Virgin Mary, a lady like Dante's Beatrice, a lady like Poe's Helen or Annabel Lee, whose beauty cannot be defiled by man's animal desires.

His poetic assimilation of his religious belief in terms of sexuality is inherited from the Puritan poetic representation of the abstract and spiritual value in terms of the concrete and sensual image, as seen in Jonathan Edwards, a last Puritan.

This sounds a little more scholarly, if a bit off about Eliot's religion -- was it "Catholic, Calvinistic, or Puritanical"? -- but since the article itself is in Korean, I can't check it on my own. Hyun's comparison of the peach to Eliot's fig and apple will bear looking into, it seems.

I might as well note K. K. Ruthven's article, "The Poet as Etymologist," in Critical Quarterly (Volume 11, Issue 1, March 1969, pages 9-37), which is not about Eliot but which offers the following obscure but intriguing remark:

The word has been potentially ambiguous ever since the peach was a 'Persian apple' (persicum malum) on account of the similarity between malum ('apple') and malum ('evil') . . . .

Unfortunately, I don't have the page number or the context since I'd have to purchase the article.

"Do I dare to eat a peach?"

Peaches

(British Literature Wiki)


I've been blogging on Ben Hale's novel, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, and focusing upon the peach that served as an apple of temptation for Bruno, enticing him to enter the fallen world of humanity. Bruno even asks:

Did I dare to eat a peach? Indeed I did. (page 13)

He's alluding to T.S. Eliot's poem (nearly rhymes with pomme!) "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in which the appealing Prufrock poses to himself an overwhelming question -- "Do I dare to eat a peach?" -- as Ben himself also explained the other day:

I slipped the TS Eliot joke in there, which fit so nicely . . . .

I noted in that same blog entry that Ben might conceivably have received an obscure influence from Paradise Lost, but I won't go into details on that again right now since the link will supply that argument. Instead, I'd like to think about Eliot's use of the peach. Another Milton scholar and I began to wonder if Eliot were alluding to the forbidden fruit as a peach, possibly also obscurely influenced by Milton. I did an internet search and found in the British Literature Wiki website that one scholar has indeed suggested that Eliot was referring to the forbidden fruit in asking himself if he dared to eat a peach:

While Eliot only briefly mentions the peach in this poem, it has come to be one of the most critically contested images, in terms of deciphering its meaning. In his book, Ascending the Prufrockian Stair, Robert Fleissner dedicates an entire chapter to offering various interpretations of "Prufrock's Peach." Firstly, he considers the idea that the peach, in this context, could be a reference to the Forbidden Fruit of the biblical Creation story. With this interpretation, Prufrock must choose between knowledge and immortality. This struggle fits in closely with Prufrock's constant grappling with his own mortality. In Prufrock's eyes, he has already eaten the biblical fruit and must now heed the consequences: a burdensome awareness of the world around him and his own approaching death.

The footnote identifies the source more fully: Robert F. Fleissner, Ascending the Prufrockian Stair: Studies in Dissociated Sensibility (Peter Lang: New York, 1988). I'll have to try to get ahold of this book somehow. I've searched online without success, finding only one source that explicitly notes Fleissner's thesis about the peach, namely, a review by D.J. Childs, "Eliot Facts" (Essays in Criticism 39.4 (1989), pp. 348-352 ) :

"Professor Fleissner is interested in . . . a typological analysis of Prufrock's peach as forbidden fruit . . . ." (p. 348)

I've only accessed this one page out of the five, so I don't know if Childs has more to say, but I'll be looking into this more, along with another scholar.

"Lying for the truth..."

Willi Münzenberg

(Image from Wikipedia)

My friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, posted a link to a long but fascinating article that very nearly convinces me that there was indeed not only a Communist 'conspiracy' but even a rather effective one at work in the middle years of the twentieth century.

I say "very nearly" because I'm not sure that the 'conspiracy' was quite so effective, but that's a point for debate.

Anyway, if you have an hour, go and read Stephen Koch's long essay, "Lying for the truth: Münzenberg & the Comintern" (The New Criterion, Volume 12, Number 3, November 1993). One hour is about how much time that I spent yesterday reading this fascinating report on one of yesterday's threats to world order. That hour was time that I didn't actually have available for leisurely reading, but I could justify the luxury of enjoying a well-written essay by telling myself that we can possibly learn something about the current methods of Islamists by studying the past methods of Communists. This rationale might even be true, but whether it is or isn't, the article itself made for compelling reading, as you can see from its opening lines:

On October 22, 1940, not far from a tiny French hamlet near Grenoble called Montagne, two hunters out with their dogs stumbled across something gruesome hidden in a small stand of woods. At the foot of a fine old oak sat, upright, the decomposing body of a man. The man had been dead for a long time, and he appeared to have been hanged.

What the hunters found that day would become more than a legend of their town; it would take its place among the enduring mysteries of modern politics. For this was the body of a man named Willi Münzenberg, and Willi Münzenberg had lived and died as one of the unseen powers of twentieth-century Europe. When the hunters found it, his corpse was almost entirely covered with fallen leaves. Only the vile face and the popped stare of strangulation were visible -- that and the noose. The reek was awful; the body had plainly been there for months. The knotted cord around its neck seemed to have snapped, probably quite soon after he had been hanged, and when it broke, the body had apparently dropped to the base of the tree. There it had stayed, knees up, all through that summer of the French defeat, sitting oddly undetected until October began to cover it with the drift of autumn and the hunters' dogs, yelping and whining, discovered the thing.

The French villagers knew nothing about Willi Münzenberg. Münzenberg was and is not a famous name, though this man's power had given him a potent grip on the workings of fame. Since his radical youth in 1917, Willi Münzenberg had been a largely covert but major actor in the politics of the twentieth century. As a founding organizer of the Communist International and a leader in the structure of Marxist-Leninist power outside Russia, Münzenberg had played an especially influential part in the conspiracies, the maneuvers, the propaganda, the secret policies and actions that had led to this very spot: here to the fall of France; here to Hitler's war on the West; here to these woods, and this death.

Unlike those French villagers, I'd heard of Willi Münzenberg, though I didn't really know his story, but this opening had my curiosity whetted for more details, and I read the entire essay without being distracted despite the various people coming and going through the faculty lounge that doubles as 'my' office.

What did Münzenberg do? He worked, rather successfully, to organize a network of Communists, their witting sympathizers, and their unwitting-but-culturally-influential fellow-travelers into a conspiracy aimed at shaping cultural values in the West, especially in Europe. How did he do this? Through the Comintern:

The instrument through which Münzenberg organized this cultural power was the Communist International, or, as it was almost always known, the Comintern. The Comintern was in many ways the quintessential Leninist institution, shaped from its inception by the two leading passions of Lenin's political personality: his obsession with secrecy, and his preoccupation with absolute power. Its aims were never even remotely democratic, never even remotely meliorist, and never were intended to provide any real assistance, however minute, to any branch of the left not entirely under Soviet control.

It worked like this:

Münzenberg's information network controlled newspapers and radio stations, ran film companies, created book clubs, ran magazines, sponsored publicity tours, dispatched journalists, and commissioned books. It planted articles and created organizations to give direction to the "innocent." To use the jargon of a different age, it was a media combine. Yet it differed in a number of ways from the BBC, Time Inc., or even from an explicit instrument of political propaganda like Radio Liberty. For example, many people working for it did not publicly acknowledge the connection. Many operated under aliases. Many led classic double lives, sometimes totally changing their identities, concealing their true mission from their friends, even their spouses, and certainly from employers, who often included unsuspecting editors, publishers, and producers whose ideas were very remote from the real agenda. They were, in short, secret agents, people who lived and worked, however publicly, in a secret world: the realm of intelligence gathering, covert action, undercover penetration, clandestine influence, quiet sabotage, discreet blackmail -- what the American counter-spy James Jesus Angleton, quoting T. S. Eliot, called "a wilderness of mirrors." Nor did the work stop with the media. Münzenberg also courted business people who could be used in industrial espionage, both in Europe and the United States. Given Lenin's obsession with electrification, for example, an early target was General Electric. And back when the revolution was still young, it was Münzenberg's task to create for much of this vast unseen enterprise a persuasive public face.

Münzenberg's efforts ultimately failed. History ever slips through our mortal fingers. But in its day, Münzenberg's network shaped European and even American attitudes profoundly enough to persuade many that Niccola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were innocent. Why? Münzenberg cared not whether the two were innocent or not. The point was a different one:

Münzenberg's ... idea was to create and sustain a worldwide anti-American campaign that would focus its appeal upon the mythology of the country's immigration. The purpose of such a campaign would be to instill a reflexive loathing of the United States and its people as a prime tropism of left-wing enlightenment. To undermine the myth of the Land of Opportunity, the United States would be shown as an almost insanely xenophobic place, murderously hostile to foreigners.

With such an aim (and possibly Communism's principal, lasting success), the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti was a thing that the Communists only pretended to oppose, as revealed in the following anecdote that Koch attributes to the writer Katherine Anne Porter:

The Communist goal was never to save the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti. Acquittal would have dissolved the whole political point. Katherine Anne Porter, like hundreds of writers and artists of the time, participated in the Boston deathwatch. She reports an exchange with the Comintern agent who was her group leader, Rosa Baron, "a dry, fanatical little woman who wore thick-lensed spectacles over her accusing eyes, a born whiphand, who talked an almost impenetrable jargon of party dogma. ... I remarked ... that even then, at that late time, I still hoped the lives of Sacco and Vanzetti could be saved. ... 'Saved' she said, ringing a change on her favorite answer to political illiteracy, 'who wants them saved? What earthly good would they do us alive?'"

Ms. Baron's remark is either the profound cynicism of the nihilist or the deep conviction of the true believer that every deception is permitted in pressing forward toward the utopian 'truth' ... and maybe both at once.

In this regard, the old Communists -- unwittingly of course -- prepared the way for today's Islamists ... but will history slip through their fingers?

Poetry Minute: "If-"

Rudyard Kipling

(Image from Wikipedia)

Yesterday evening, as I was tutoring my 8-year-old son, En-Uk, in English, we read together the famous poem "If-", by Rudyard Kipling.

I confess to rather liking the poem, though T.S. Eliot did use it as an evidence that Kipling was merely a 'versifier' and not a true poet (though he adds that Kipling's verse was "great verse"). I don't recall having read Eliot directly on this point, but I know from a review by George Orwell that Eliot's remark comes from the preface to a selection of Kipling's poems (A Choice of Kipling's Verse, T.S. Eliot, editor). I also seem to recall that somebody once called Kipling "our best bad poet," but perhaps I'm recalling a similar remark made about William McGonagall, except that McGonagall is so execrably bad that Kipling's poems are by contrast truly great. Orwell, at any rate, called Kipling "a good bad poet," one who wrote poetry that was "a graceful monument to the obvious."

As I was reading this poem with my son, I recalled that when I was about 13, my own not-especially-literary father, whom I didn't know very well, sent me a card with Kipling's poem "If-" printed on it, thereby exemplifying a remark made by Kipling himself:

Among the verses in Rewards [and Fairies] was one set called 'If-', which escaped from the book, and for a while ran about the world .... Once started, the mechanisation of the age made them snowball themselves in a way that startled me .... They were printed as cards to hang up in offices and bedrooms; illuminated text-wise and anthologised to weariness. Twenty-seven of the Nations of the Earth translated them into their seven-and-twenty tongues, and printed them on every sort of fabric. (Chapter 7, "The Very-Own House,"Something of Myself)

It seems that everybody read "If-", prompting Orwell to implicitly compare people who only knew this poem to Colonel Blimp:

In the stupid early years of this century, the blimps, having at last discovered someone who could be called a poet and who was on their side, set Kipling on a pedestal, and some of his more sententious poems, such as "If", were given almost biblical status.

I hope that I'm no Colonel Blimp, and I don't think that my father was that, but here's the poem that he and I both liked:

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

I recall putting the card aside with a bit of distate at the final line -- despite my having previously liked the poem -- because I didn't like being addressed that way by my distant father and didn't want any of his advice (and doubted, anyway, his own qualities as a capitalized "Man").

Yet, I still liked the poem, a 'versification' that perhaps illustrates Orwell's point about bad poetry being "a graceful monument to the obvious" -- except that the following lines are hardly obvious to me:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss...

More obvious is the truism that you shouldn't put all your eggs into one basket, but Kipling was likely adducing here an aristocratic virtue of manliness, whereas I'm rather bourgeois in my virtues.

So, anyway, my father and I have both liked this poem. Yet most of what I know about my father suggests to me that he was an ordinary man. Perhaps Orwell's words are relevant here:

The fact that such a thing as good bad poetry can exist is a sign of the emotional overlap between the intellectual and the ordinary man. The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time. But what is the peculiarity of a good bad poem? A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form -- for verse is a mnemonic device, among other things -- some emotion which very nearly every human being can share. (George Orwell, "Rudyard Kipling: Review of A Choice of Kipling's Verse, T.S. Eliot, editor"; from Critical essays (1946), but originally from Horizon (February 1942))

If Orwell is right, then my father and I shared a certain "emotional overlap," which might be taken as evidence of our special kinship ... except that Orwell speaks of this as a kinship with the entire human race.