Group Membership

Jean-Paul Sartre turned down the Nobel Prize for Literature in part because "He stated that a writer's accepting such an honour would be to associate his personal commitments with the awarding institution." As an existentialist, Sartre was staunchly individual. Furthermore, as a philosopher and artist, he may have had keener reasons to keep his own work separate from the commitments of an institution--associating himself with an institution may have tainted his independent artistic and philosophical commitments.

Does the same standard apply to any individual joining a group? Though an advocate for animal rights, I have refrained from personally joining any animal rights or animal welfare organization. PETA stands for and fights for many things I stand for, but I've often taken issue with PETA's focus and methods (I think self-promotional publicity is a close second to animal welfare in their list of priorities). Should I support a group that mostly fights for what I believe in, but which often does things I don't support? I finally did decide to join the group.

Of course, I knew they would do things that would make me embarrassed to be a part of it. As Jim Rome said on the radio today, they're over the top, and that's why you don't want them on your bad side. It's also a point my wife has made: PETA is a pushy, persistent organization--they get shit done because they're so bothersome.

But PETA, regarding Michael Vick, let it go. If you don't want to do PSAs with him or support his entry back to the NFL, fine. But brain scans and psychological tests? The man committed a crime and has spent time in prison for the crime. You should let him move on. If you don't think Vick is a good role model, that's fine: don't cheer for him. But professional football is about adults playing a game for our entertainment, not about athletes being role models to children about kindness toward animals.

This sort of inanity embarrasses me. There are all sorts of serious problems in the way animals are treated in this country--trying to prevent Michael Vick from continuing his football career, and making blatant publicity grabs with inflammatory language and demands for psychological tests, does little to help those animals.

I'm again reminded of Les Miserables. Javert cannot accept Valjean's redemption and reformation, insisting that there is something inherently criminal in Valjean's nature that cannot be changed and demands punishment. When PETA requests brain scans and psychological testing to find out if Vick is a "psychopath," they dehumanize him. They want proof he's even "mentally capable of remorse." Ingrid Newkirk, do you really want to play the role of Javert?

See
"PETA Withdraws PSA offer to Vick" (Sports Illustrated).
"Is Michael Vick a Clinically Diagnosed Psychopath or a Reformed Dogfighter?" (PETA)
PETA's letter to the NFL (PDF).

Continuing away...

I'm currently reading John Gardner's On Moral Fiction, with an odd result: I don't think I can quite view Jean-Paul Sartre the same. Put another way, I can't quite take Sartre so seriously. Gardner's critiques of Sartre are incisive, and I think they'll stick with me in further considerations of Sartre's ideas.

Another step toward being a former existentialist.

Literature in Our Lives

I've frequently used literature to make sense of or mark significant moments during my life.

As I noted below, my wife and I included a passage of poetry from Milton on our wedding invitations:

The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest, and providence their guide.
They, hand in hand, with wand'ring steps and slow
Through Eden took their solitary way.

The hope and humanity in these lines helped make the moment more meaningful.

My son's birth was the most intense moment of my life. And when I finally held him in my hands, I quoted King Lear to him: "When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools." At this moment, this intense, dramatic, meaningful moment, I called on the Bard for deeper meaning.

During one stretch of bad luck (it seems insignificant now, but during the frugal days of grad school, it felt rather overwhelming), I was rather consumed by the idea that the universe was just a mishmash of hazard and chance, entirely indifferent to us all. I taped to my door two passages: one from the Bible, when Jesus tells his disciples not to worry so much (As an Obsessive Complusive, this is a pretty meaningful passage for me. Indeed, I again put the passage on my wall at my current house, feeling I need to be reminded that I ought not worry). But I also put a passage on the door from Hemingway's Farewell to Arms, a passage exploring the indifference of the cosmos to human problems. That I could look at these two passages every day in some way helped me.

Literature has not been an abstract, dry study in my life. These are rather concrete examples when I've used literature in my own life. In a broader sense, I've seen the world differently, I've experienced human beings differently, because I've read Dostoevsky, because I've read Fowles, because I've read Sartre. I see the world, myself, and humanity in a different way because of what I've read.

And literature offers us metaphors to make sense of our existence. Homer gave us Scylla and Charybdis to articulate the difficult, impossible choices we sometimes confront in our lives. In the shadow of Abu Ghraib, Cornwall's servant in King Lear, who disobeys his master to try stop him from blinding Gloucester, has deep resonance. Wilfred Owen gives us a poetry to discuss the horrors of war; we can share the reference of "Dulce et Decorum Est." The Lord of the Flies offers us an image: if we want to consider the dark side of humanity, we can picture a bunch of murderous boys running around an island (but then, that's not necessary: when I consider the dark side of humanity, I picture black and white images of Nazis and Death Camps, recalling the Holocaust literature I've read that made me ache for the evils of humankind).

Literature can be a deeply meaningful experience for our lives. It can help us understand ourselves and the world we face; it can help us confront the universal reality of death. Part of that is the aesthetic: when poetry renders an idea into a new, beautiful, resonant form, it has powerfully connected with us. But that aesthetic meaning can be richer when it helps us to consider the experience, the thought, the meaning within it (Lutheran theology might be used to explain the relationship between content and form. Literature is like Consubstantiation: as Lutherans understand communion to be both bread and flesh, wine and blood, so is great literature both content and form, not meaningfully separated). Ultimately, literature has little to no meaning other than that which the reader is willing to give it. But if we willingly engage in it, it can provide us with something deep and meaningful.

I don't engage literature as an academic exercise. I engage literature as a personal renewal, as a spiritual growth, as a meaningful understanding of myself in the cosmos.

Reading Drama

Dirty Hands is probably my favorite Jean-Paul Sartre play. However, I can't imagine a staged production of the play being any good at all. Scenes go on much longer than they need to. The negotiations between Hoederer, Karsky, and the Prince about the makeup of a joint governing body make for rivoting reading, but I can't imagine it as anything but completely dull when performed on stage. It's a good read with tension and drama, but I think it would make a lousy show.

So how do we evaluate this or any drama? Is a play only as good as its actual performance, or is it to be measured by the words on the page? Or is there a platonic, idealized conception of the production, an imagined production which can never be realized, for which plays are truly evaluated?

Sartre's "The Flies"

From the moment Zeus is referred to as the god of flies and death, The Flies is full of mood. A mood of guilt, repentance, remorse, and fear, yes, but moreso a mood of sickness, rottenness, tragedy, and doom. The people live their lives in fear and guilt--but that does not make their lives empty. It makes them doomed. The set contributes to the sweltering sense of doom: Act I features a statue of Zeus, Act II, scene i features a giant boulder that holds the dead back, Act II, scene ii features a different statue of Zeus, and Act III features a statue of Apollo. Perhaps with some more time I'll analyze the meaning of the shift in dominant set.

And within this mood of doom, in which the oppressive flies take on an identity of meaning to themselves, Sartre explores his big themes: God, man, freedom, fear, and the Cosmos.

Random

"Important"
There are "important books. I would define an important book as either having a direct impact on the world (the writings of Marx or Luther, The Jungle), or having a wide impact on the realm of ideas, so that the way we think about things is affected by the book (Frankenstein). So there is no doubt there have been important books.

But have there been important films? If you think so, please provide me examples.

I do not include as "important" those works of art that change only the way other works of art are made or thought of. That's insular. I'm talking about "important" in the blood, bone, and guts world or important in the realm of ideas about living in the world. I'm also not in this case arguing about books that are personally important. All individuals can cite works that impact and change them and their worldviews. I would only include the work as important if many people could cite the impact.

The Stupid Thing I Think About Sartre's No Exit
I believe this is the most misinterpreted play ever written. People glob onto the obvious line "Hell is other people" and believe this is the main theme of the play. Look closer; it's not. In the play, hell is the guilt and remorse an individual feels for knowingly committing "sins," not in the divine sense of right and wrong but in breaking individual integrity. Read the play and tell me why I'm wrong.

Academic Freedom and Meaning
I see three fundamental flaws in the arguments of conservatives like David Horowitz and Tucker Carlson that complain that liberal college professors are forcing their views on students, teaching students that America is bad, etc.

1. Classroom: these people don't have an understanding of pedagogy, the college classroom, or the current attitudes of young Americans. As a professor, I face dull-eyed students, long silences, and lack of energy frequently in the classroom. In order to engage students into thinking and discussing issues, I will sometimes express extreme viewpoints simply to provoke thought and response.

2. Adulthood: college students are not "kids" who are being inflicted with the brainwashing of a professor's political views. They are adults. They should have the ability to think critically about what they are taught.

3. History: would these people prefer that the history of racial discrimination and injustice in America be ignored? This history includes slavery (and the institutional racism that has lingered since), the genocide of Native Americans (and the institutional racism that has lingered since), and the less well-known treatment of Asian-Americans (biased immigration laws, internment camps, exploitation of labor for mines and railroads). And should U.S. foreign policy post-WWII be filtered only through a pro-American viewpoint?

Why the Aliens can Destroy Us
Here is a new feature at Costanza Book Club. I think that when the aliens come to destroy humanity and take earth for themselves, they could make a legitimate argument that humankind deserves to be destroyed. The Holocaust alone is evidence that people are lousy and maybe another sapient species would do better (though of course if they had to wipe us out in order to try do better, then they would be no better than we are, but that's the paradox of this new gimmick). I intend to be far less grave and cite only artistic examples for the aliens to use to justify wiping us out.

In the film The Producers, the song "The King of Broadway" was cut from the film but "That Face" was left in. This is the greatest travesty in the history of art and entertainment.

Pacifist Viking’s Existential Reader

Here is a reading list that illustrates my existential worldview. Since there have been no comments at this blog as yet, I don’t feel very guilty about this narcissistic exercise, since this entire blog has so far been a narcissistic exercise.

Paradise Lost, John Milton
A 17th century Puritan radical wrote an epic poem in which can be understood my existential worldview. Paradise Lost is in part about forced freedom: God makes it clear that Adam and Eve have free will to make their decisions, that they cannot evade this free will. Sartre wrote that we are condemned to be free, that we can’t choose to not be free. This seems to be the freedom that Milton presents in Paradise Lost. Satan, too, is a character wrought with existential implications.

The Brothers Karamozov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
One of the greatest novels ever written, in Karamozov Dostoevsky as created what Bakhtin calls the polyphonic novel. You get many voices, many ideas, many worldviews. For me the most compelling was Ivan Karamozov, whose “All is permitted” worldview betrays his deep desire for spiritual meaning. Ivan’s conversation with the devil should be required reading for anybody who wants to understand what the English teacher on “Freaks and Geeks” calls “an existential dilemma,” how one can be “both a nihilist and a moralist.”

The Magus, John Fowles
A fascinating novel about God and man, about art, and about freedom. It is a postmodern existential novel exploring individual freedom and responsibility.

The Age of Reason, Jean-Paul Sartre
In this novel, we see dramatized many of the important issues of Sartre’s existential philosophy.

Thoughts while reading Bakhtin

In Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin writes of how Dostoevsky invented the polyphonic novel, where several consciousnesses simultaneously coexist, even if their ideas are contradictory. Bakhtin argues that D does this is a dialogical manner, rather than bringing the ideas together under a monological development. He cites Kirpotin on what Bakhtin calls D’s “special ability to see precisely the soul of others” and what Kirpotin calls D’s “capacity to visualize directly someone else’s psyche.” Kirpotin says of D that "His world is the world of a multitude of objectively existing and interacting psychologies, and this excludes from his treatment of psychological processes the subjectivism and solipsism so characteristic of bourgeois decadence."

It might not be that hard for a writer to write a fairly narcissistic story about one individual's psychological struggles. The reason is that each writer is an individual, and every individual has experience with individual psychological struggles. A skilled and insightful human being like Dostoevsky has the ability to not write a solipsistic novel, but to examine different people, different psychological struggles. In The Brothers Karamozov he gets into the heads, I mean really, really gets into the heads, of Alyosha, Ivan, and Dmitri. Three different characters with different issues, and he presents not their narcissistic struggle, but their interactions with the world and with each other in facing these struggles.

Of course, a postmodern writer like John Fowles openly admits, within his novels, that he is incapable of penetrating the souls of his characters (see chapter 13 of The French Lieutenant’s Woman).

But I see a fair amount of good writers really writing these solipsistic stories of an individual (at the very least, narcissistic). Often they show real skill in the writing. But I'm not sure it shows a great deal of insight, since, as I said, any reflective individual knows of the solipsistic emotional, spiritual, intellectual, psychological struggle. A true genius penetrates outside of that and into others.

Bakhtin also notes that a dialogical, polyphonic novel exists over space rather than time. It contrasts to Hegelian evolution in that it does not monologically develop an idea, even dialectically—contradictory ideas exist in different consciousnesses without being resolved. Some modernists, I think, picked up on Dostoevsky’s dialogism and wrote what could be called polyphonic works of literature. In Faulkner’s works, for example, we see multiple voices, and multiple ideas, coexisting, and I don’t think Faulkner tries to resolve these voices monologically.

But I’m really simplifying Bakhtin here, and perhaps bastardizing him, and most surely making his ideas confusing, so perhaps you should just read Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, or at least the first chapter, “Dostoevsky’s Polyphonic Novel and Its Treatment in Critical Literature.”

Other works I’m thinking about in light of Bakhtin’s theories:

Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater
When reading this novel, I thought it suffered from a lack of an objective correlative; Sabbath’s inability to cope with loss was not matched with any loss in his life that is atypical of human existence. Another problem is the narcissism. The book doesn’t attempt to penetrate anything other than one man’s totally narcissistic problems. Perhaps this novel is the epitome of the anti-Dostoevskian novel.

Sartre’s The Age of Reason
On the one hand, this is a dialogical novel—it’s a book of ideas, and ideas are held by different consciousnesses, and they seem to coexist and interact. On the other hand, it’s a dialectically evolving monological novel. Sartre the existentialist guides the novel, and for the most part it conforms to his individual worldview. He doesn’t, as Dostoevsky, allow his ideas/consciousnesses to coexist without resolution; he uses these different ideas/consciousnesses to develop his monological ideas.