Prufrock: Thomas Becket’s Psalter, the Politics of Linguistic Realism, and Reagan and Eisenhower

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Thomas Becket’s personal psalter discovered in Cambridge: “A Cambridge academic believes he has discovered Thomas Becket’s personal book of psalms, an ancient manuscript the martyred saint and so-called ‘turbulent priest’ may have been holding when he was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170.” More: “The psalter dates from the very early 11th century, and it was clearly made in Canterbury. Its text shows that it was probably made for private use by an archbishop. A likely candidate would be Alphege (or Ælfheah), archbishop from 1005 to 1016, when he was killed by the Danes in Greenwich. He was canonised as a saint in 1078. Readings commemorating the holy death of Saint Alphege were added into the psalter in the mid-12th century, in the time of Becket. It is likely that the manuscript was found at Canterbury by Thomas Becket, who became archbishop in 1162, and that he then kept it as a personal relic of his martyred predecessor.”

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Buckley’s greatest book? “Rarely is a writer’s greatest book published nearly a decade after his death. Nevertheless, Christopher Buckley believes this may well prove the case for A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century, an anthology of his late father’s eulogies.”

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Reagan and Eisenhower: “Eisenhower took a special interest in Reagan: He thought his vice president, Richard Nixon, was the most qualified Republican to be president; but he feared that Nixon, after losing to John F. Kennedy in 1960, couldn’t get elected in 1968. But Reagan could, thus Eisenhower’s eagerness to help. Ike never saw Reagan as too conservative; quite the contrary. He watched Reagan’s famous television speech (“A Time for Choosing”) for Barry Goldwater in 1964 with an expert’s eye. “Looking and listening to Reagan, a new Republican star in the making, Eisenhower liked what he saw and heard,” Kopelson writes. He saw Reagan as “an important part” of rebuilding the GOP after the Goldwater loss.

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Revisiting the Russian Revolution: “By the end of 1916, all the participants in the First World War were desperate to find some way to end the bloody stalemate. Anything that might possibly bring some advantage, no matter how unlikely its chance of success, was not to be ignored. Under the direction of Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau, Germany’s ambassador in Copenhagen, peace initiatives had already been forwarded to the Russians. The German foreign ministry spent millions on peace propaganda directed at its enemies, all to no avail. Next, the Germans looked to Russia’s revolutionary parties to help bring tsarism to its knees. They began secretly funnelling funds to them through a network of agents and spies, including the notorious intriguer Alexander Helphand, also known as Parvus. It was Parvus, in January 1915, who was apparently the first to approach the German government offering advice on how their enemy’s enemy could be put to work by encouraging upheaval at home and so speed the end of the war. Living in European exile, Lenin was stunned when he learned of the fall of the monarchy in March 1917. ‘Staggering!’ he cried to his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. ‘Such a surprise! We must get home.’ Here, Lenin’s and the German High Command’s wishes aligned. Lenin was desperate to get back to Russia and he began exploring every possible option for making his way across Europe. When no other country would help with his return, he accepted the German offer, after a fleeting moment of doubt about how this alliance might be interpreted by his countrymen back home.”

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The literary world is in a tizzy after an Italian journalist revealed the identity of the novelist who writes under the nom de plume of Elena Ferrante (reported in yesterday’s Prufrock). The revelation is apparently a “disgrace,” sexist, crass, etc. This is a bit much. We live in a celebrity culture, like it or not. If you write novels that are popular the world over, make millions, and want to stay anonymous, you certainly have the right to try. But others are also free to figure out who you are if they want. Reporters are free to be curious and even to make money being so. As all adults know (or should), every role in life comes with pluses and minuses. You can do your best to minimize the minuses, but if you can’t, well, that’s life, and adulthood is mostly about accepting them. Ferrante has suggested she might stop writing if her true identity was ever revealed. She can if she wants, but I think that’s unlikely.

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Essay of the Day:

In The Montreal Review, Bruce Fleming skewers the modern dogma of “linguistic realism”–the idea that language is the only reality–and its politics:

“The dogma of the intellectual upper classes today is a bedrock belief in what I call ‘linguistic realism,’ and by extension the realism of all representation: the belief that the world is made up of words and images, so that words (or images) are the very stuff of reality. If I say I am a woman, I am a woman, whatever others think. If I say I feel myself to be oppressed, I am. If I say that I was the victim of what we call sexual assault, I am—even if a court later decides there was no assault and hence no victim: in the meantime I get a Victim Advocate. And as for ‘words will never hurt me?’: so last century. Now we focus on ‘hate speech.’

“The indeterminacy of meaning, ‘facts’ written with scare quotes, the subjectivity of the observer, constant references in the humanities and social sciences to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty principle (applying the reality of very small particles interacting with large human beings to practically everything), Thomas Kuhn’s famous ‘paradigm shifts’ (which suggested that truth was relative to a specific way of seeing things), and then the Skokal Hoax where a scientist pretended to question the objectivity of science and was welcomed as a confrere, then said he was joking: what a time it was for American academia, this time of several decades before the Great Recession of 2008 and beyond! Everything was a fiction, just some more pernicious than others. (Some, according to Richard Rorty, were actually positive, like patriotism. At least sometimes.) All inquiry, all thought, all academic enterprises—even science! only there, of course, the scientists demurred, but what did they know?—were subjective, or at least we could never achieve an objective world even if it turned out to exist. Philosophy took, in the words of Rorty, and influenced by the later Wittgenstein, a ‘linguistic turn’: we made structures of X and Y, simulacra of objectivity but really nothing but constructions of words.

“The basis of linguistic realism is the rejection of words as a means, and the acceptance of them, and other forms of representation, as an end in themselves. It was the Romantics, those grandfathers and –mothers of the modern world, who first rejected the notion of the representational window as means out of the room of the self. M. H. Abrams’s succinct summary of the contrast between the classical view and the Romantic offers two images of how words and art in general work: the classical view was that literature and the arts copied or mirrored the world (what Eric Auerbach, from World War II Istanbul, analyzed in Mimesis); the Romantic that they were like a lamp projecting outwards the light of the artist’s genius. Other thinkers past the early Romantics accepted their premises: Nietzsche articulated the notion that knowledge was subjective, and the expression of particular groups; this dovetailed with Marx’s more hard-headed insistence that tenets whether intellectual or artistic were the result of the economic givens of their time, as expressed by specific groups or classes within the economic landscape. And Freud articulated the subjective nature of our relationship with the world, all determined by our particular experiences and the structure of our own selves. Dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue: this subjective landscape was the world.

“Thus what I am calling the linguistic realism of our day is a legitimate grand- or great-grandchild of Romanticism, expressed in new terms. Its immediate progenitor was Modernism, itself a logical heir to Romanticism, which in turn produced post-Modernism. For the Modernists, painting was first and foremost a square with shapes in it, a flat surface; music an arrangement of tones; literature a grab bag of techniques of narration; dance movements between people on the stage rather than the means to conveying a story with development and denouement.

“And meanwhile, through academia and the arts establishment, the liberal world of the US and to a great degree the entire West, the notion that representation mechanisms are as close as we can get to the world has become dogma. For the intelligentsia of the modern American world, we are surrounded by the membrane of our sign systems which we cannot pierce. Talking about the world becomes the most profound thing we can do, not interacting with it or with other people.

“It’s the ultimate justification of intellectuals, probably because the vast changes in the real world in the twentieth century rendered them of only vestigial interest. It’s their form of revenge: if they can keep you talking, they’ve won, because you’re still caught in the web of words, emeshed in the play of signifiers. Derridean Deconstructionism, that intellectual dernier cri for long after its last echo should have faded on college campuses in the third quarter of the last century and beyond, waited until the speaker was finished and then showed him or her what it was that s/he had not said, what s/he had presupposed, what it was s/he had avoided saying. Anything seen as solid (human presence, say) turned out (surprise!) to be logically dependent on its opposite: anyone asserting the usual terms with plenitude was shown to actually be proving the primacy of absence. And of those asserting absence? They were the deconstructionists, and so not presupposing presence. They alone could not be trumped. It was all a game of responses, rather than assertions—which of course was the content of its philosophy (that assertions presupposed and indeed were secondary to responses). What fun!”

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“This view that the world is a series of footnotes to footnotes, us caught in the web of other texts, and so eternally within the referential hall of mirrors of signifiers, is the linguistic realism I am describing here. However it’s the dogma of only a specific group of people, those who use words professionally and who deal with art in the same way—which is to say the American (and to some degree Western) intelligentsia and by extension, the educated elite. Thus it is a dogma with a political valence: it’s the dogma of today’s liberals.

“It’s not held by those who work with their hands, by the dispossessed, by many people in ‘red’ states of the US, or by most conservatives. It is not an exaggeration to say that this conflict over the dogma of linguistic realism—liberals espouse it, conservatives reject it—is the source of the deep national fissure between left and right currently playing out in the US. The liberal dogma of linguistic and semiotic realism in turn leads to the insistence that individuals when speaking create their individual worlds. Each of us has to articulate to be heard, and to make his or her world come to be. Making your voice heard and self-definition are, for liberals, the highest goods. Talking is its own end.

Meanwhile conservatives are disgusted by the value liberals place on ‘political correctness’—saying the right thing, with no consideration of what is thought or done. For liberals, it seems to conservatives, it’s all about saying, not doing. And conservatives see themselves as do-ers, not talkers. Increasingly, conservatives as a group overlap with the group of white males, held by some liberals to be responsible for most of the ills of the world: non-white non-males have to be linguistically protected. And it’s white males who cling to the now-discredited notion of a ‘master narrative’ of their own values. (More articulate conservatives reject the Balkanization of the conversation that this ‘defend your own postage stamp of turf’ view of culture implies.)”

Read the rest.

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Image of the Day: Human towers

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Poem: Karl Kirchwey, “Roman Fountain”

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