Category Archives: fine arts

the generational politics of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons

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Novels of multiple generations provide excellent vehicles for exploring changes in politics and culture. That is certainly true of Turgenev’s Fathers & Sons (more literally, “Fathers & Children”), published in 1862. Two friends return from college to the rural province where they were children and move together from one household to the other. That creates a set of about 10 relationships between the young friends and the older people in their two families. Nearby is a third country house that belongs to two lovely and available young women. A marriage plot–or even a dual marriage–seems likely, but I will not spoil the conclusion by revealing whether the novel turns into the comedy that the beginning promises.

Turgenev actually belonged to the parents’ generation in the novel. In his youth, the only opponents of the Czarist regime and critics of serfdom had been liberal aristocrats. The middle class had been too small and weak, and the peasants too oppressed, to resist. The liberal aristocrats of Turgenev’s generation were brutally suppressed and achieved little politically. But by the sixties, the regime was loosening and real reforms seemed attainable. Serfdom was actually abolished in 1861. Meanwhile, a new political class arose: commoner sons of priests and lawyers who could obtain university educations. They were angrier, more alienated, more drawn to radicalism, and more ambitious than members of Turgenev’s generation has been.

In Fathers & Sons, Yevgeny Vasil’evich Bazarov represents the new cohort. He is a self-described “nihilist,” having no elaborate positive vision but much resentment, irony, and anger. He is a scientist who believes–if he believes in anything–in facts. He comes from humble origins and likes to think he can relate to the peasants, although they laugh at him behind his back. He is attracted both to an heiress and to a servant girl. His admiring young friend Arkady Nikolaevich Kirsanov comes from the gentry and has no political views of his own. One question is whether he will follow Bazarov or return to the life that is expected of him: marrying a respectable lady and presiding over a country estate.

Fathers & Sons is unusual in depicting the passionate love of parents for their grown children. In romantic fiction, a suspenseful question is whether the protagonist’s love will be requited. In this novel, the same question arises for the fathers and the surviving mother. Will their sons give them attention and affection and choose to live in their homes, or will these young men disdain their old-fashioned beliefs and ride away? Perhaps Turgenev is asking the same question about the whole generation that follows his.

Turgenev was strongly criticized by both the moderates of his generation and the radicals of the next. Neither faction liked the way it was exemplified in Fathers & Sons. That is because all the characters escape simple stereotypes, positive or negative. Bazarov, for example, could be cursorily described as an angry young sophisticate who returns from college to mock the bourgeois old folks in his home town. Except that he really loves his parents and has as much contempt for himself as for them.

I see Fathers & Sons as “liberal” in the sense promoted by Lionel Trilling, Vladimir Nabokov, Isaiah Berlin, Richard Rorty, and others in their tradition. Depicting subtle and unpredictable characters is a political statement, because this is Turgenev’s view of a good society: one in which all people (including the peasants) are able to develop their individuality and in which each person appreciates the others for who they are. On one hand, that stance made Turgenev a bitter critic of Czarism and serfdom; he suffered imprisonment and exile for his politics. On the other hand, it prevented him from satirizing or stereotyping anyone in order to make a political point. The novel is suffused with the empathy and kindness that its author wants for his country.

a translation for spring

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Dante sought his last refuge in Ravenna at the invitation of Count Guido Novello da Polenta (?-1320). According to Boccaccio, Guido was a person “well tutored in liberal studies” who honored “worthy men and especially those who exceeded others in knowledge.” Dante served Guido in various important capacities, including possibly as professor of rhetoric. He died as a member of the count’s household, having just completed a crucial diplomatic mission to Venice on Ravenna’s behalf. Guido organized a solemn funeral for Dante and had the poet buried in a classical sarcophagus in the local monastery of San Francesco.

Dante chose Guido’s own aunt, Francesca da Rimini, as a major character in the Inferno. Romantic-era critics saw Francesca as a doomed heroine, suffering because her love had violated arbitrary conventions and oppressive rules. I argue (along with several modern critics) that she is supposed to be a real sinner. Dante has placed her in hell because she deserves her punishment for adultery, and besides, she doesn’t really love Paolo, whom she describes with a pastiche of slight misquotations taken from love poetry. She is a 14th-century Madame Bovary, in love with the literary concept of love, not with the individual man.

But back to Guido: Intriguingly, he wrote a minor poem that contains a striking phrase that Francesca also utters (almost verbatim) in her last lines to Dante in hell. Either Guido borrowed the phrase that was spoken by his own dead-and-damned aunt in Dante’s already-famous poem, or else Dante read Guido’s poem before he wrote the Inferno and had Francesca quote it. Since almost everything else Francesca says in the Divine Comedy is a slight misquotation, I am inclined to think the latter is true: Dante took a line from his friend’s naive ingenuous sonnet and assigned it to a sinner in hell.

I make no great claims for Guido’s poem, and less for my translation, but I offer it today because the Boston weather reminded me of it. It’s in my Dante book, pp. 17-18:

The air was serene and the sky was clear
And the birds by the river sang.
That day was the first that felt like spring
When I saw you, my joy, so fair.
Your face wore an unaccustomed blush
That never leaves my thoughts today
And whenever I travel far away
Your pleasing smile seems to rush,
Gently launched toward my heart
By the look that comes to your pretty eyes,
And the smile that so sweetly flies
To blend with mine and never part.
Now she can never be torn away;
Joy shall spare me from misery.

Era l’aer sereno e lo bel tempo
et cantavan gli augei per la rivera
et in quel giorno apparve primavera
qand’io te vidi prima, bella gioia.
Ben fosti gioia, chè tal m’apparisti
e col novo color nel tuo bel viso
che già da la mia mente non se parte.
E quando sono in più lontana parte
più mi sovvien del tuo piacente riso.
Sì dolcemente nel mio cor venisti
per un soave sguardo che facesti
dal tuoi begli occhi, che mi mirar fiso
sì che già mai da te non fia diviso,
tanta allegrezza mi dà fuor di noia.

(cf. “che non mai da me no fia diviso”: Inferno v, 133-5).

Donald Justice, Men at Forty

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I don’t read to see myself reflected on the page. I read primarily to learn how someone else thinks and to analyze and appreciate the formal characteristics of a carefully constructed work. But if I were going to cite a poem that simply speaks to me and my condition, it would be this one, from Poetry magazine, 1966.

I’ve written more detailed notes on two other poems about mortality written by middle-aged men: Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Spring and Fall,” and Philip Larkin’s “Aubade.” They strike me as more complicated and richer than this work–although it’s worth noting the pattern created by the four-line stanzas, each of which introduces a central verb and a new setting:

1. Closing doors in rooms
2. Feeling motion on staircases
3. Rediscovering a face in a mirror
4. Aging (implied)
5. Sounds filling space

But what I admire is how Justice discovers wonder in the most terrifying intimations of middle age.

(See also Donald Justice, “About My Poems.”)

moral network mapping and literary criticism: a methodological proposal

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A moral worldview is a set of beliefs or values connected by various kinds of relationships. For instance, one belief may imply another, or may subsume another, or may be in tension with another even though both are truths. If analyzed that way, a whole worldview can be mapped as a network, with the beliefs viewed as nodes, and the relationships as ties.

Using that method, we can map the moral network implied by a work of literature, such as a lyric poem. Previously, I wrote some notes on W.H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939” (notes here; full text here.) I then mapped the moral network of that work. I think my first effort was a bit off, so here is a revised map:

What assumptions underlie this method?

1. The moral evaluation of literature is a valid and useful mode of criticism. It is not just about judging the values of the text (pro or con), nor is it merely a matter of elucidating what the author meant or what the text implies about moral issues. It is rather a critical engagement with the moral perspective of the work, a kind of joint investigation into what is really good and right that is informed by both the text and the reader’s critical response. Although I think that remains a rare mode of literary criticism, it has prominent defenders.*

2. Formal network analysis, a branch of graph theory, offers insights about the structure of any system that is composed of objects and relationships. Tools from network analysis, such as calculating the centrality of nodes or the density of relationships, can help to elucidate and assess the moral worldview of a work of literature.

Underlying this premise is a deeper assumption that moral worldviews should not be assessed only (or mainly?) by evaluating the correspondence between their separate ideas and truths about the world. It’s also (or more?) important to ask how the whole worldview hangs together. The question is not whether Auden should be against tyranny, but how that stance fits into his overall thinking. When people argue for assessing a whole worldview instead of individual principles, their next step is usually to look for internal consistency. But consistency is not the main virtue of a well-structured worldview. Better a mentality that incorporates valid and fruitful tensions than one that avoids all inconsistencies at the cost of narrowness or oversimplification.** Network analysis reveals density and other virtues that are more helpful than consistency. (See also “ethical reasoning as a scale-free network.”)

3. Abstract and general principles are overrated. I do not claim that they should be expunged from one’s moral thinking (that would be an over-radical form of “particularism”), but rather that there is no good reason to assume that a well-ordered moral mentality can be arranged like an organizational chart, with the abstract principles at the top and all one’s concrete beliefs and commitments as mere implications. That would be one kind of moral network map, and some people do think that way. Other people are much more concrete, or they mix concrete particularities with abstract generalities in interesting and complex networks. For instance, I think New York City and the “dive” bar where Auden sits in this poem are just as important to his moral vision as tyranny or selfishness.

One reason not to try to make the abstract principles fundamental to one’s whole network is that certain crucial ideas, such as love, will then be distorted. These ideas have the feature that they are sometimes good and sometimes bad, depending on the circumstances. If you try to organize your thinking around abstract and general principles, you will be compelled to divide love into the good and bad kinds, and that is false to the experience of what love is.***

Turning the map above back into a written analysis of “Sept 1, 1939” would take some space, but I think a few key points emerge:

  • Auden has a dense moral network, not dependent on just one or two ideas. It’s robust. For instance, he later came to hate the line, “We must love one another or die.” But the poem does not rest on that.
  • Love, art, and politics are densely interconnected.
  • Homosexuality is not mentioned in the poem but is alluded to at least twice. It is hard to know whether Auden would connect it to “unselfish love.” I would. So I am either in disagreement with the poem or sympathetic with Auden (a gay man in the 1930s) because he could not draw that connection openly.
  • Much depends on a polarity between public and private, but poetry occupies an uneasy space between. Consider declamatory statements like this: “There is no such thing as the State /  And no one exists alone.” Are they incursions of public demagoguery into a poem, which should be private? Or should the poem speak truth to power?

*See David Parker, Ethics, Theory and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack, Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 2001), Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton, 2006)

** Simon Blackburn, “Securing the Nots,” in W. Sinnott-Armstrong and M Timmons, eds., Moral Knowledge (New York, Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 95

*** This is basically my thesis in Reforming the Humanities: Literature and Ethics from Dante through Modern Times (Palgrave Macmillan, December 2009).

Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

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My favorite book of 2012 is hardly an original choice, since it also won the Booker Prize and has been extravagantly reviewed. But Mantel deserves all the praise she’s received for the second volume of her Thomas Cromwell series, Bring up the Bodies. The first volume, Wolf Hall, was my favorite book of 2010. Of course, I don’t read all that many novels–but many more than I blog about, and twice, Mantel’s were the best.

Below is a typical sample of her vivid imagination and fresh writing. Stephen Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester, is Cromwell’s nemesis. Although he plays a small role in this volume, he makes an impression when he arrives in an early scene:

Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester, blowing up like a thunderstorm, when for once we have a fine day.

When Stephen comes into a room, the furnishings shrink from him. Chairs scuttle backwards. Joint stools flatten themselves like pissing bitches. The woolen Bible figures in the king’s tapestries lift their hands to cover their ears.

To the right is a Tudor joint stool pictured in front of a woolen tapestry. It’s the kind of furniture that Shakespeare’s Fool cites when he says to Goneril, “Cry you mercy, I took you for a joint-stool.” If its top moved away from the Bishop of Winchester in consternation, its legs would bend to rightward exactly like a female dog urinating.

Of course, that doesn’t literally happen when Gardiner walks into the room; it is Cromwell’s perception. The whole book is told in the third-person present tense from a vantage point very close to Cromwell’s. “When for once we have a fine day,” is Cromwell’s implied voice, describing the actual weather–unremitting rains have ruined England’s crops–while  expressing his jaundiced view of the Bishop. Cromwell is “he” throughout the book. Mantel works hard to avoid using his proper name, thus making the “he” almost the same as an “I.”

The immense challenge she undertook was to restore the perspective of a man who lived long ago, who left few illuminating personal records, and who has figured mainly as the ruthless villain in the biographies of more famous people whom he sent to the block, especially St. Thomas More and Anne Boleyn. We know that he was an effective, reforming statesman who rose from humble origins; that is enough to make him intriguing. But to make him sympathetic is a tremendous achievement.

For the first volume-and-a-half, we see things from Cromwell’s perspective and learn to appreciate his humor, his efficiency and hard work, his unpretentious observations, and his love of family. He has survived a violent father, street brawls, wars, and the fall of his master, and we want him to survive at court. But I think the last part of Bring Up the Bodies shifts the moral center of the book. I will explain what I mean below the fold in order not to spoil the conclusion (which comes straight from history, but you can’t predict where Mantel will choose to end this volume).

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