For some reason, I was thinking about all the dramatically different

ways in which people have seen and admired J.S. Bach since his own day.

• There is Bach as a virtuouso improviser, the man who could sit

  down at a keyboard and swiftly invent a multi-part fugue on any

  theme. This is Bach as forerunner of a jazz musician, an exciting

  live performer.

• There is Bach as pedagogue, the man who taught three sons who

  were much more successful than himself and who wrote great instructional

  works such as the "Well-Tempered Clavier." These musical

  texts have been consistently consulted by composers even when Bach’s

  other works were forgotten (for instance, in Mozart’s time).

• There is Bach the profound spiritual master, the Lutheran churchman,

  the author of great narrative choral works such as the Passions,

  which realistically depict human emotions in relation to God’s providence.

  This is the Bach whom the Romantics admired most. They even disparaged

  the "Christmas Oratorio" because it recycled music from

  secular works—so it couldn’t be spiritually inspired.

• There is Bach as an anti-Romantic, an unpretentious musical worker.

  Whereas Romantic musical geniuses were supposed to be free of all

  worldly motives and inspired only by Art, Bach happily turned out

  church music for every Sunday, often re-using material, borrowing

  from other sources, and making do with amateur performers. For this,

  he was admired by leftish anti-Romantics such as Paul Hindemith.

  If I recall correctly, Bertold Brecht used to call himself a Schreiber,

  not a Dichter—someone who makes his living by writing,

  not a literary Artist. The same could be said of Bach.

• There is Bach as mathematical genius, author of technically and

  formally complex instrumental works, especially the "Musical

  Offering," that seem as other-wordly as mathematical proofs.

After writing a list like this, one is expected to say, "Of

course, Bach was all of these things, and that’s why he is

so great." I’m going to be a little less predictable and say

that Bach was all of these things, of course, but he was

at his greatest as the composer of narrative works that were grounded

in his understanding of human life and emotion.

Here is a somewhat different way of analyzing the campus battles over

"great books" versus "multiculturalism" or "diversity."

Participants can be sorted into groups depending on what kind of works

they think should be available or required in schools, colleges, and other

venues. "Canonical classicists" want everyone to read great

works from Plato to NATO. "Diversity proponents" want everyone

to be exposed to works written (or composed, or painted) by people

of multiple ethnic, cultural, religious, sexual, and racial identities—in

order to promote empathy, respect, tolerance, etc. And true "multiculturalists"

want people of different cultural backgrounds to be able to study intensively

works created by people like them, so that a campus will be home to multiple

cultural communities.

This is one dimension that we can use to categorize the antagonists in

the campus culture wars. But there is also another dimension. At one end

of this second spectrum are those who emphasize that students should experience,

appreciate, understand, or at least be exposed to works created in the

past or in other places. Somewhat contentiously, I’ll call this the "consumerist"

approach. At the opposite end of the spectrum are those who stress that

we should create new cultural products, including stories and paintings,

performances, critical interpretations, and historical narratives.

Putting the two dimensions together, we see that there are at least six

possible positions in the debate:

	canonical classicism	diversity	multiculturalism
consumerism	a	b	c
creativity	d	e	f

The standard conservative view is (a)—there is a fixed supply of

great works from the past that students should experience and appreciate.

The standard diversity view is (b)—everyone should experience works

by authors of color. And the standard multiculturalism view is (c)—people

should be encouraged to study works by members of their own groups, using

their own cultures’ criteria of excellence. These positions are "zero-sum":

adding a text to the curriculum may require taking another text out. In

contrast, options (d)-(f) are potentially "win-win," and I think

they are underdeveloped. There is a fair amount of (e)—i.e., people

of all colors and creeds should collaborate because this will create the

most interesting new works of art. But I think conservatives should work

on developing (d), if indeed it is a viable position. And multiculturalists

should develop (f), which would amount to the view that people of various

cultures should be assisted in producing new works, thereby contributing

to the global commons.

Continuing the theme of modernism from yesterday

… For six hundred years, English has been tinkered with until it has

become a fine instrument for describing what’s literally going on and

what people are thinking. The vocabulary is famously huge, the syntax

is supple, and there are narrative techniques for all occasions. As an

example of perceptive modern prose, consider James Joyce‘s spare

description of Leopold Bloom in a hearse:

Mr. Bloom entered and sat in a vacant place. He pulled the door to

after him and slammed it shut tight. He passed an arm through the armstrap

and looked seriously from the open carriage window at the lowered blinds

of the avenue. Nose whiteflattened against the pane. Thanking her stars

she was passed over. Glad to see us go we give them so much trouble

coming.

We don’t really know how the old woman talks or what she’s thinking.

Maybe she’s a police informant spying on the house opposite; maybe she’s

a he. But Joyce has focused his lens so that only Bloom’s mind

shows clearly. Thus we learn about the objects that Bloom handles—the

door and the armstrap—but only about their functions, because he

is too preoccupied to note accidental features like material and color.

His very name reflects his state of mind, for he experiences himself as

"Mr. Bloom" when he rides in a hearse. We might like

to learn more (for instance, what kind of buildings line the avenue?),

but such information would ruin the realism. Thinking is perspectival,

selective; and we know just what Bloom notices.

Modern literary English allows an author to choose almost any vantage

point, any focus, and any depth of field. Why then does Joyce use so many

other idioms? For instance, in the "Oxen of the Sun" episode,

he mimics every major prose style in the history of English. At one point,

Bloom has just entered a house where a woman is suffering her third day

of labor. He means to express his sympathy to the family, but he finds

himself among callous drunks who are loudly discussing whether it would

be better in the eyes of the Church for the woman or the baby to die.

Bloom mutters vague abstractions to avoid expressing a view, perhaps because

any opinion could be heard upstairs. Then …

in Joyce’s version …. That is truth, pardy, said Dixon, and, or I err, a pregnant word. Which hearing young Stephen was a marvellous glad man and he averred that he who stealeth from the poor lendeth to the Lord for he was of a wild manner when he was drunken and that he was now in that taking it appeared efstoons. But sir Leopold was passing grave maugre his word by cause he still had pity of the terrorcausing shrieking of shrill women in their labour and he was minded of his good lady Marion that had borne him an only manchild which on his eleventh day on live had died and no man of art could save so dark is destiny. And she was wondrous stricken of heart for that evil hap and for his burial did him on a fair corselet of lamb’s wool, the flower of the flock, lest he might perish utterly and lie akeled (for it was then about the midst of the winter) and now sir Leopold that had of his body no manchild for an heir looked upon him his friend’s son and was shut up in sorrow for his forepassed happiness and as sad as he was that him failed a son of such gentle courage (for all accounted him of real parts) so grieved he also in no less measure for young Stephen for that he lived riotously with these wastrels and murdered his good with whores.

in a literal paraphrase … "That’s the truth," said Dixon. "And a pregnant word, if I’m not mistaken," he added, when the thought struck him. Young Stephen roared at the pun and added sarcastically, "He who steals from the Lord lends to the poor." He was wild when drunk: his eyes shone and his voice was loud and shrill. But Bloom was grave and quiet, for he still heard shrieking from upstairs. The sound of a woman in labor always moved him, and these particular cries reminded him of his wife Molly, who had borne his only baby boy. The baby had died (of accidental poisoning) after just eleven days. The doctors had said that nothing could be done. Molly was so grief-stricken that all she could do was to shop for the best little wool blanket so that their son wouldn’t have to lie cold in the winter ground. Now Bloom watched brash young Stephen, his friend’s boy, and grieved for his own dead child. But as much as he mourned the baby (a beautiful child, everyone said), Bloom was just as sorry to see Stephen wasting his life with drunks and his money on whores.

Joyce’s prose resembles a thick but uneven hedge screening the literal

truth. Here, we can just about cut through the fifteenth-century language

to to see what’s going on. In other places, it is impossible to make out

even the basic narrative facts. For instance, we are almost never permitted

to overhear Bloom’s thoughts about what to do or where to go next. Much

like Odysseus, he just shows up in episode after episode.

Frustrated by this and other omissions, we might say: If only Joyce would

just tell the story! Why does he have to use a pastiche of past and present

styles, so many of which are opaque?

The question assumes, of course, that there is a truth to grasp. But

perhaps my "literal interpretation" above is simply one idiom,

a product of its time, just as Everyman reflects the culture of

England in 1500. In that case, Joyce has carried realism to its final

stage. He doesn’t describe the world or consciousness (either objectively

or subjectively), because to do so would be to forget the fact that all

seeing is from the point of view of a style. Instead, he describes some

past and contemporary ways in which life has been described. As in one

of Nietzsche’s magic tricks, the real world—disappears! Literature,

not life, is the subject of Ulysses; yet the book itself counts as literature

(in Stephen’s words, as an "eternal affirmation of the spirit of

man"), because it is perceptive, tender, and humane.

This rare combination—a declaration of the End of Art that is also

art—is characteristic of the greatest works of modernism. Note, however,

that Joyce must deny that there has been progress in the history of English

narrative style. The succession of idioms that he mimics does not evolve

toward clarity. If modern English prose has somehow surpassed its predecessors,

then Joyce would have no excuse to abandon it.

I know less about ballet than about any other art form, which

is to say, nothing. Thus I was fascinated to read Jennifer Homans’ article

"Geniuses Together,"

in the New York Review of Books some time ago. I have long believed

that "modernism" means a recognition that all the past

ways of representing the world have been arbitrary and culturally relative

styles. Once modernism arrives, we have three main choices: (1)

historicism, the effort to reproduce past styles accurately and

comprehensively; (2) abstraction, the effort to move beyond style

and representation altogether by taking inspiration from something universal,

such as mathematics or the unconscious; or (3) irony, the joking

recognition that there is no way out of style. I’ve argued that these

are the choices faced by the visual arts and also by philosophy. My friend

David Luban argues

that even law faces this dilemma. From Homans’ article, it appears

that the ballets of Stravinsky perfectly illustrate the same situation.

First came a historicist phase, around 1909, when Michel Fokine was Stravinsky’s

choreographer:

Ballet, [Fokine] said, was hopelessly "confused." It was

historically nonsensical for pink-tutued ballerinas to run around with

Egyptian-clad peasants and Russian top-booted dancers; ballet dancers

were ridiculously "straight-backed." … Ballet, Fokine insisted,

must be reformed, and it was here that his ideas dovetailed with Diaghilev’s:

a ballet, he said, must "have complete unity of expression."

It must be historically consistent and stylistically accurate. Petipa’s

French classical vocabulary was appropriate only for French classical

or romantic subjects. If a ballet was about ancient Greece, then the

choreographer must invent movement based on the art and sculptures of

that place and time. …. In Fokine and Diaghilev’s historicist aesthetic,

classical ballet was not a universal form, but a particular style. ….

And then came abstraction, with Balanchine:

Choreographically, Apollon Musagète created a stylistically

unified, Fokinesque "whole" world. But Balanchine broke with

Fokine in one crucial respect. …. For Balanchine, what mattered was

that the external shape, color, and tone of the movement capture an

important idea. He was not interested in historical accuracy or what

he called "petty, everyday" emotions: he was trying to show

something more elevated: "supplication."[7]

In 1957, Balanchine further simplified Apollo (as it was then

renamed) by dispensing with the ballet’s seventeenth-century sets and

costumes in favor of simple black-and-white practice cloths against

a plain backdrop. As such, he brought Apollo into aesthetic orbit

with his most recent Stravinsky collaboration: Agon. …. Agon

was the culmination of an aesthetic Balanchine first introduced in 1946

with The Four Temperaments, and it changed everything we know

about how to watch a dance. Agon has no clear narrative, no melodic

or lyrical line: rather, it piles blocks of movement and music one on

top of another. ….

Of course, dancing in plain lyotards in front of plain drapes is also

a style. In the other arts, sooner or later, minimalism and abstraction

are seen as arbitrary styles, at which point irony becomes the only option.

I wonder whether this has happened in dance.