In his argument for biopoetics and against the old guard, Brian Boyd begins with what may seem a truism, if not in some English departments: “We love stories, and we will continue to love them. But for more than 30 years. . . university literature departments in the English-speaking world have often done their best to stifle this thoroughly human emotion.” Our desire to form patterns, to weave a net that has a structure we can sense if not always see, is central to our human understanding. We love plots and characters, we love them in gossip and in great literature, in soppy romances and classic drama. We loved them as children in fairy tales and we love them as adults whether we read history or literature.
Arts & Letters
Biopoetics: Brian Boyd Argues His Case
Last June, Shannon Love began a post: “I am myself an agnostic and a rabid evolutionist,” moving on to describe how those beliefs help him structure his understanding in broad ways: “I am a free-market advocate and a Chicagoboy because I believe the free market is a Darwinian process that reaches better solutions quicker and less selfishly than political systems. In short, an evolutionary viewpoint forms the foundation of my entire world view.”
I thought of that when listening to Brian Boyd last fall; he gave a talk here and the small classroom that had been set aside couldn’t hold the audience, which spilled into the next room (the door was opened, so students could still peek at him) and into the hall. His literary criticism, like Joseph Carroll
In his “Getting It All Wrong: Bioculture critiques Cultural Critique,” Boyd writes with a clarity and directed passion we are grateful for in literary criticism. Introduced in an earlier post, he teaches at the University of Auckland in New Zealand; his American Scholar essay was linked on Denis Dutton’s Arts & Letters Daily.
Heads Up
Don’t forget to toast the Professor tomorrow (Wed 3 Jan) at 9 PM local time.
Leave Me Alone, I Can Do It Myself
In Hamlin Garland’s “Under the Lion’s Paw,” the narrator asserts something that most small businessmen, farmers, and self-employed artists know: “No slave in the Roman galleys could have toiled so frightfully and lived, for this man thought himself a freeman, and that he was working for his wife and babes.” Well, yes. And such workers fight collectivization because it takes from them purpose – a heavy work load is a lot easier to sustain than alienation.
How we make a living is not the only place where we are both more active and more sacrificial than we would be if we merely met other’s requirements. Several articles in the last few days have pointed to that; I suspect these arise from the fact America is an outlier — with our emphasis upon self-reliance, we see our selves defined by the internal & personal choice rather than the social & fulfillment of custom. This leads to misunderstandings – by us and of us. Europeans, for instance, are less likely to understand how we approach religion, culture, and society’s “safety net.” Of course, this post just notes new sources that substantiate old generalizations.
Further Mutterings on the More Succinct & Sound Remarks by Jonathan & David
Knowing history is an important part of being educated, not only because it’s good to honor the people who came before us, and who built the world that we take for granted, but also because if we don’t know what people did in the past we will needlessly repeat many of their mistakes. This is as true on an individual level as it is in geopolitics. We forget it at our peril, and too many people have forgotten it. Jonathan
Honoring is thanking, respecting, learning from. This is something that takes us a while to understand. Some find it hard to see Hamlet as a tragic hero – he’s too self-absorbed, too cynical, too indecisive, too – well, too non-heroic. He doesn’t do great deeds, he is more worried about his father’s ghost than he is about the kingdom his father ruled. That diminishes heroism. He’s the adolescent tragic hero. Well, we’ve got plenty of them.
Some day, people may look back on our time as that of “The Adolescent.” (I hope it ended with a new period so harshly entered on 9/11 but I fear it may not.) David Foster’s “temporal bigotry” comes from a lack of sympathy & imagination as well as history. Most of all, it comes from hubris. But it is not an Olympian hubris; rather it is that of a teen-ager in the throes of first love, unsure of his own dignity and self, angered by the demands of classes and work he finds demeaning. He complains the world is not sufficiently accommodating, voices the petty doubts of the village atheist and classroom cynic.