A call to rebellion

"... because personalism drew upon Catholic social theory, its notion of community drew upon a heritage of corporatist thinking that linked the person to the intermediate collectivities of family, church, and nation. In this way, the individual would be protected from the depredations of the modern state. Significantly, in contrast to Fascism, which also deployed a communitarian, corporatist language, it refused to countenance the swallowing of these "natural" communities by the political state." (The Catholic Origins of Quebec's Quiet Revolution, 1931-1970, by Michael Gauvreau p 24)

In theory anyway. In practice, the social activists and politicians who grew out of the Quiet Revolution were only too willing to allow the government to swallow up organic communities. The wonderful thing about the Gauvreau book is that he gives us some inkling of why that happened. For the clerical activists pushing Action Catholique groups in Quebec in the first half of the twentieth century encouraged young Catholics to think of their parents' religious beliefs as empty.

Any evaluation of the cultural impact of Catholic Action must therefore take as its starting point the meaning of words such as "solitude," "community," "anxiousness," and "authentic," which recurred over and over again in Quebec between 1931 and the mid-1950s. What was significant that these words represented religious values that were always positively attributed to young people, and always in reference to the negative qualities of conformity, complacency, individualism, hypocrisy, a sterile obsession with moralizing, and bad faith, all of which marked the religious experience of the previous generation. (Gauvreau, p 15)

And I can testify that it didn't stop in the 1950s. These are the values my parents taught me when I was growing up in Quebec in the 1970s. It was also what I was taught in Religion (they stopped calling it "Catechism") classes at the Catholic High School I attended in Quebec in those years. And you can still hear this stuff from the pulpit of many Catholic churches in Quebec today (preached to mostly empty pews).

And the effect this was to have was disastrous for the church. To teach young people that institutions need to be preserved while, at the same time, teaching them that the people currently running these institutions are a bunch of lazy, moralistic hypocrites who have subverted those institutions was a recipe for that disaster.

And note that this was all going on before Vatican 2! There was, within the ranks of priests, monks, friars and nuns serving the church, an active rebellion ready to pick up the ball and run with it long before Vatican 2.

Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun.

That's Raymond Chandler describing a world that, at first glance, seems utterly unlike the Catholic Church, although he is talking about the same period in history, the 1930s to 1950s. And it would be unfair to simply brush off this generation of reformers as deluded and selfish. They grew up with a church that had lost its way and needed to be reformed. On the other hand, it is painfully obvious, with the benefit of hindsight, that their reforms were a disaster. (Well, it should be, Pope Francis seems to think that the solution is to drive off the cliff again only faster this time.)

But what is the solution? There has been a lot of talk of a "hermeneutics of continuity" that is to be preferred over a "hermeneutics of disruption". But that needs content. What should be the basis of the continuity. Talk to some Catholic traditionalists and you will leave with the impression that "continuity" means to not reform at all.

Whatever a worthwhile reform is, it cannot be an abstract exercise and it cannot be a political exercise. It needs to draw on something deeper than that. That is why I favour a Catholic Romanticism. Not Romantic Catholicism because I don't want Romanticism to modify Catholic. I think Romanticism is the right way to approach the past but not any Romanticism. Romanticism needs to be modified and Catholic aims and goals is what it needs. I'm sure all that will seem silly to some. I don't blame them but I think the notion can be given real content.

Emotions, rationality, morality and "Catholic Romanticism"

We easily allow ourselves to be persuaded that our emotions are irrational. When someone tells you that "you're being emotional" they mean that your judgments are unreliable because your emotions are governing you. The implication is that it is immoral to be emotional.

On the other hand, we also recognize that the person incapable of feeling emotions is likely to be, as Jane Austen described Mr. John Dashwood, "cold-hearted, and rather selfish". Here, emotion is a prerequisite for being moral. The Gospel tells us that Jesus was moved with pity.

Robert Solomon argues that emotions are judgments but also dispositions. To be afraid is to be afraid of something, to love is to love someone and so on down the roster of emotions. At the same time, to be angry or jealous or suspicious is often the consequence of a life-time of training ourselves to be that way.

In addition, there are feelings that, unlike full-blown emotions, aren't directed at anything in particular. Anxiety is the feeling that bad things are about to happen—when I am anxious I have no idea where the crap is going to come from but I'm sure it will hit soon. Similarly, Thos. was telling me a while ago that he has patients who suffer from severe stress problems that are triggered by their own body responses to stress—they notice that their heart is running fast and that makes them nervous so their heart starts running even faster so they get more nervous so they break out in a sweat which makes them even more nervous ... lather, rinse, repeat until they have to take you away in an ambulance. I've done something like this on a smaller scale when I've had too much coffee and my own stress level makes me think that something must be wrong even though there is no fact or situation to justify my concern.

This all happens because our emotional responses are unconscious—a right-brain phenomenon. We often become aware of being uneasy without being consciously aware of what in specific is making us uneasy. We can focus on the feeling rather than looking for what caused it. You could say that feelings don't rise to the level of an emotion. I once heard someone say that anxiety is what you feel when you don't have the courage to have an emotion; that's too broad a generalization but it is true some of the time. (It took me a longer time than it should have to become a real adult because I lived in an almost constant state of anxiety because I was scared to have actual emotions towards the people closest to me.)

Cognitive?

We cannot simply dismiss emotions as irrational. The tendency to do so is rooted in a number of things. It is undeniably true that emotions can be wrong, even very wrong. I can be angry at my sister but later discover that she had not done the thing that I did not like. It's also true that emotions are hard to reverse—once I'm worked up into a state of high dudgeon, I can't easily calm down even when shown that my original reasons for being angry are unjustified.

But lots of human activities can sometimes be wrong without being qualified as irrational. Courts occasionally convict innocent people and instruments occasionally give incorrect readings. Our faith in these things is not based on their being infallible but rather on their being correct much more often than not. (A false conviction rate of even one percent would be regarded as ridiculously high.) The same should be true of emotions. We notice when emotions are unjustified because that is a relatively rare phenomenon. We don't notice the many, many times our emotions are correct. And it must be this way: if our emotions were not highly reliable cognitive indicators they would have been evolved out of the human race centuries ago.
Anterior and posterior emotion
When we worry about the rationality of an emotion, we typically do so as a posterior phenomenon. I start to feel anger and stop and ask myself whether the anger is justified. Even if I decide that my anger is justified, I should think carefully about how I react and I might, I often do as a personal matter, do my best to hide my anger even though I I believe that anger to be justified.

We think less often about the anterior rational process. We don't worry so much about the habits and ways of thinking that incline us to have certain emotional responses in the first place. But the first way people jump tells us a lot about them. In The Philadelphia Story, Tracey Samantha Lord rejects George because he suspected her of infidelity on the eve of their wedding. His suspicion is not ungrounded. Tracey was drunk and isn't entirely certain what she did or didn't do. She certainly did something—she flirted with and amorously kissed another man. She did not, however, have sex with him as George suspects and she herself fears. In the end, after she is cleared and George is reassured, she leaves him because she thinks that his initial response should have been to trust her. She would prefer a husband who would instinctively take her side.

That's analogous to the way Catholic moralists talk about conscience. That is the opposite of the way we usually think of conscience. In our culture, we think of conscience as a posterior phenomenon: I do something and then start to question whether I should have done it. Catholic moralists recognize that that is part of conscience but believe and argue that anterior conscience is the more important thing; that it is more important to have a disposition to react in a certain way in the first place rather than to correct mistakes afterward.

Emotions have to be part of this. Empathy is a trained emotion; we have to spend years learning how to be empathetic. This is true of a wide range of emotions, both good and bad. I had a relative who spent her entire life training herself to lose her temper when others failed to respond as she wished. She was highly intelligent and she never changed so it obviously worked for her. People got scared off and didn't challenge her. Of course, they also got scared off and kept their distance so she ended up having very few close friends despite having a very large social network. (She also, and this was probably narcissism, rejected other people's emotions as illegitimate any time they did not line up with her assessments.)

Emotional disposition is a kind of moral fitness. It isn't a matter of making moral choices. That is a cold activity, something like a moral calculus. The relative I mention above also used to exhort others to "be more charitable". What she meant by that was to make more effort to see the good in others. I don't think she realized, however, that she herself was not a good role model in this regard. She grasped the principle perfectly but hadn't done the moral training to make herself better at it. Charity was not an anterior emotion for her.

Moral fitness is hard work because we don't have direct access to the thing we are trying to change. We can't adjust it the way we can move the thermostat or put on a sweater when we want to be warmer. It's more of a long-term project that involves changing our habits and showing constancy much as is the case if we want to get into better physical shape.

Catholic Romanticism

One of the things that a certain kind of romanticism did was to value emotions as rational ways of being human. The Enlightenment emphasized rationality but the rationality it emphasized was a narrowly proscribed rationality. That is to say, Enlightenment thinkers set out to be rational by outlawing a lot of human behaviour as irrational. That produced a counter-reaction. At first the reaction was to reject rationality and embrace feeling (the term at the time was "sensibility") as something separate from and superior to rationality. For many people, this is what Romanticism did. Others argue that it was an attempt to expand what counted as irrational so as to include some emotional responses.

(At the same time, this sort of Romanticism, as Oakeshott argued, would have to expand what counted as irrational. Some kinds of activity that meet the Enlightenment requirements for rationality perfectly should be recognized as irrational and monstrous.)

That sort of Romanticism appeals to me. It is not what everyone means by Romantic. I would, even though many would refuse to do so, recognize Jane Austen as Romantic and even have tendency to see her as the exemplary Romantic.

I would further, however, modify Romanticism with the adjective "Catholic". I would not accept "Romantic Catholicism" even though there are aspects of it that I mind find congenial because I think that when we redeem Romanticism from most of its sins when we modify it with Catholic. This will be, I hope, something of a theme of this blog as I go forward.

A little heavy culture: Disengaged?

Gauis made a comment on one of yesterday's posts that got me to put so much effort into my reponse that I think I'll make it the basis of today's post.

The comment is about the insolubility  of modern arguments pitting rights against morality (and his argument is reminiscent of Alisdair McIntyre's arguments at the beginning of After Virtue.)

I think the most interesting thing is the mix-and-matching of two arguments, which you could call the "public policy" argument and the "morality argument." And this is on both sides. Neither people who feel strongly that gay marriage is wrong on moral-religious grounds, nor people who feel strongly that it is necessary for reasons of justice-rights-morality, are likely to be convinced by arguments that gay marriage is either beneficial or harmful to society. That’s both because such arguments can never be as fully scientific as they claim to be (whose society? What’s ‘harmful’? what’s ‘beneficial’? How can you prove this? Aren’t such arguments inherently ideological? Etc.) and therefore not convincing, but also because (I think) people recognize legal norms as basically the shadow or simulacrum of ‘real’ morality, and to a degree they hold back from recognizing legal-societal norms as fully legitimate.

I think that is exactly right. and I added the following.

At some level, that [meaning seeing "legal norms as basically the shadow or simulacrum of ‘real’ morality"] is inevitable. There is always going to be a gap between a set of legal moral principles and what we believe for ourselves. What seems to have happened lately in our culture is that we no longer even pretend to think that the morality embedded in the law is real. Somewhere on YouTube there is a video of some of the people now loudly proclaiming that same-sex marriage is a right saying that marriage is necessarily between a man and a woman in an equally self-righteous tone. Liberals are fully engaged in mass morality but they think it is endlessly malleable, which is another way of saying it doesn't really exist.

It makes me think of a line originally in the Ferris Bueller script but cut from the final version, "It took you twenty years to find out you don't believe in anything?"

Christians, OTOH, are more and more detached. My wife made a presentation to a group of Anglicans in their 20s and 30s on popular culture a few years ago. These were pretty typical Anglicans, which is to say pretty easy going and willing to accommodate their practices to make living in the modern world easier. The jarring discovery, as my wife put it elsewhere, was that even these easy-going types had created their own world separate from the common culture. She couldn't get them to even begin to engage issues arising from it. For them the only morality that matters is between them and God, except that you wonder how much separate existence they attribute to God as he always seems to tell them they can do the things they really want to do.

I wonder to what extent this is driven by modernism? Modernism has seen a huge revival as the generation raised on Ikea aesthetics have become adults, parents and leaders. As the Lemon Girl and I were saying just the other day, it's not as if the problems that caused modernism to collapse in the early 1960s have been solved or magically gone away. And yet modernism has seized us all by like some sort of irresistible sexual impulse might do.

I am now reading a great little book called Decadent Enchantments which is about how Gregorian chant was revived at the abbey of Saint Pierre at Solesmes. It's a fascinating story and is very well told by Katherine Bergeron. She makes two fascinating distinctions. (Fascinating to me, anyway, I suspect this may end up being the least-read post in the history of this blog.)

The first distinction is between the situation at the end of the French revolution versus the normal decline and fall of cultures. Most cultures leave some ruins. Which is to say that, however much wanton destruction takes place, there are usually ruins that become ruins through decay. The situation for a religious revival at the end of the French revolution was different. Everything thing had been destroyed or, worse, removed from its historic setting and placed in a museum. The French word "vandalisme" (the source of our English word) was coined to describe this new kind of destruction. Bergeron says that the restorers saw what was left as an era of debris rather than an era of ruins.

For the Romantic spectator, then, the violent dislocation of historic monuments offered an image not so much of decay as of debris. The sight of such fragmented remains [in a museum] could produce no meaningful "effects", to use Chateaubriand's word, because these broken pieces no longer possessed the aura of pastness. It was the very existence of debris, a vulgar index of revolutionary change, that seemed to enable this new Romantic ideal of decay. Decay emerged as a countersign, a shadowy figure of not-change imagined, by necessity, as aura surrounding the now lamented natural ruin was a haunted sign, a ghostly specter of lost presence. Decay as such, together with the past plenitude it embodied, became poetic at the moment when debris had effectively taken it's place. (From Decadent Enchantments by Katherine Bergeron, p. 4)

That should be familiar to readers Brideshead Revisisted as it is exactly the attitude of Charles Ryder. I think it needs some work as no fully sound argument will include ugly expressions like "pastness" and "not-change".

Anyway, she then goes on to distinguish between that Romantic attitude and a later Modernist understanding that saw restoration as possibly "recreating" a form of life that "may have never existed".

It is perhaps not surprising that, perched on a hinge between two centuries, the figures of Pothier and and Mocquereau should be seen to swing in such different directions, betraying historical orientations that might be called, for convenience's sake, Romantic and Modern. For Pothier, Gregorian history appeared as an the aura of time imaginatively experienced by one who, standing at the end of the historical continuum looks back—collecting the accumulated reside of the past into a single aesthetic moment. For Mocquereau, such history appeared as a new beginning, a field of possibilities so vast it's ultimate truth, though glimpsed in the present, could only be assigned to some distant future.

The odd thing about right now is that "Modernism" itself has become part of the debris that the Ikea generation has picked up and "restored". Progressives and the few remaining liberal Christians  tend to be "Romantic" about this restored Modernism—that is they see it as an opportunity to put themselves at the end of an historical continuum. The group I see myself in, which includes a lot of the younger Christians I have been working with, on the other hand, tend to be "Modernist" about a restored Romantic Christianity, seeing it as fragmented but offering a glimpse at an ultimate truth to be realized in the future.

Also true of Emily Bronte

Martin Amis discussing Christopher Hitchens in the forward to a new book, says the author often “speaks like a genius” but “thinks like a child (that is to say, his judgments are far more instinctive and moral-visceral than they seem, and are animated by a child’s eager apprehension of what feels just and true)”.

I don't know enough about Hitchens to say but that describes Emily Bronte perfectly.

The English Romantic Catholic Tradition

I've been thinking about where to go with blogging next and, by coincidence, reading The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, which is pretty much the perfect thing to read if you are trying to put off thinking about more serious issues.

The Castle came along with Christmas. I was given an e-Reader (a wondrous thing) and it came with 100 books prepackaged. Many of these were selected for the very good reason that they are in the public domain, and thus The Castle of Otranto.

I'd never read it. I'd heard of it because it, along with Ann Radcliffe, was introduced as background in English literature courses I took a long time ago. None of my professors thought these things worth reading. The woman who taught me, who now lives up the street from me, dismissed Gothic literature as stuff for empty-headed 18th century girls. Another professor who taught me gave the impression that classic Gothic novels were just like the stuff you find the in Fantasy Literature section of bookstores today.

It was only last year that I read Ann Radcliffe for the first time and only this Christmas that I read The Castle of Otranto for the first time. It's great stuff.

There is not a lot of characterization in these novels. Some might argue that they are, therefore, not really novels but romances. That's fine with me. That they are very entertaining is all I'd claim.

Two things about them jump out at me. The first is the very heavy debt to Shakespeare. I know, I know, serious readers will say, "This is nothing like Shakespeare," meaning by that that it is not nearly as great. And that is fine but consider the famous comparison of classic French cooking and Big Macs. In classic French cooking it is not the meat that gives a dish its distinction so much as the sauce that goes with it and in a Big Mac ... I'm sure you can figure the rest out.

These writers also tell stories that feel like told stories just as Shakespeare does. It isn't hard to imagine how Shakespeare might have treated them.

This is armchair tourism literature. Like Shakespeare, neither Walpole nor Radcliffe had seen the foreign places they right about. Radcliffe obviously spent a certain amount of time with guidebooks creating background but background is all it is. All her scenes could take place on a stage with a painted background. Or you could leave the background out as Walpole does; the settings for Otranto are "a castle", "a monastery", "some caves" and various "private chambers" within the castle. And that is all there is. When reading this, you imagine people with wooden swords standing on a  stage acting out parts.

The other thing that jumps out at you when you read these stories is the Catholicism. It jumped out at first generation readers too. It is partly a real Catholicism but also partly an imagined one. In theory these writers, especially Radcliffe, are giving us a critique of Catholicism and the presentation is not intended to be charitable.

In one of history's many ironies, the effect was quite the opposite for many because the caricature of Catholicism that was presented, probably precisely because it was a caricature, proved to be liberating for many.

We do this all the time if you think about it. Cultural caricatures are often demeaning for the people who are, in theory anyway, targeted by the caricature. But often these caricatures are just as much, if not more, about wish-fulfillment fantasy for the people promoting them.

Modern soul and dance music as well as Japanese Anime cartoons, for example, trade in racial and sexual stereotypes that are often enthusiastically embraced by young black men and young Japanese women. Pay attention to both sets of stereotypes and you can see what young white women and men wish there partners were like.

You may say, but these things are an exaggerated cartoon and not real life at all! And you are right but that is precisely what makes it safe for those young women who listen soul singers exalt a very muscular, dominant forceful idea of male sexuality. But don't kid yourself, if the men in their own lives could be more like that they wouldn't say no. Likewise the image of womanhood you find, for example, in Anime is not one that most men would say no to; that is to say very feminine and even girly and dressed in a very neat, feminine and erotically elaborate fashion. Again, we have all been taught that we aren't allowed to ask for this sort of thing so we don't ask (most of us anyway). But if the gift were offered, it would not been turned down by many.

The Catholicism you find in English Romanticism beginning with the Gothic novels is often like that. It gives in to the sensually appealing aspects of Catholicism in a "safe" way.

As it turned out, not as safe as was imagined. Anyway, as the year starts off that is where my interest will be. It's something that has always fascinated me and a natural follow-up to Brideshead Revisited.

What Waugh didn't like about Julia's speech

The Season of Brideshead
A Twitch Upon the Thread, Chapter 3
For many critics, the big problem with Brideshead is that it is not realistic. But realism is a nebulous thing. There is. for example, a site on the web that offers students information for essay writing that says the following with great authority

... and one Anthony Blanche, a ridiculous character who, as scholars say, embodies every gay stereotype of Waugh’s era. He also speaks with an affected stutter.

I don't know which "scholars" are supposed to have said this but Anthony Blanche is a very realistic portrayal of a guy named Brian Howard and there are other verbal portraits of him that confirm Waugh's. It is the scholars who are deluding themselves because they so desperately want to believe that these are just stereotypes. All gay men are not now, and were not then, like Anthony Blanche but there are people today who fit the type and it isn't hard to find them. And they are not, as the supposedly "unbiased" author of the above would have it "ridiculous".

Imagine if I wrote the story of an ordinary middle class kid who never did anything to change the world but I had as one character in his life a supreme court judge whom this kid knows and talks to. You might be inclined to think, what  a crock, ordinary kids don't get to confide with supreme court judges. But that story is very real for you see it is my story. Every famous person knows some ordinary people.

The point being that one of the most common criticisms of Brideshead is bogus. It is often said that the people portrayed are not realistic because they are not typical. And while it is true they are not typical, they were very real. Every character in this book is like people Waugh actually knew. In one sense at least, this is very much a realistic book.

The other criticism is that Waugh is too close, too enamoured about the people he is writing about to be realistic. And yet, if we actually read the book, we can see that this too is unfair. The presentation of these people is not sycophantic or fawning, it's actually quite cold and critical.

So what is it that bothers critics? Well, a big part is the fact that the novel is Catholic and, little as they like to admit it, many critics don't want a novel in which a man is convincingly converted to Catholicism. But, more than that, the novel uses some of modernism's favourite techniques to undermine modernism. It isn't the snobbish story of aristocratic glory that critics attack but it is very much a capital-R Romanticism we are reading here.

Romanticism
Seen from enough distance, patterns begin to emerge that cannot be seen from close up. That, at least, is the ideology. And the standard story that goes with it is like this: for a long time the people lived in darkness and then came the Enlightenment and scientific and political progress; but the Enlightenment had excesses and in response to that there arose a movement called Romanticism; and Romanticism, however, was slowly overcome by Modernism; eventually Modernism itself was replaced by Postmodernism. The story gets a bit murky here, however, because nobody really knows what Modernism was supposed to be about and that makes defining Postmodernism difficult.

As I've said before, you can see the problem right in the word "Postmodernism" which, like Post-Impressionism from which it descends, tries to define something by a negative quality. People only do that when they don't know what to say and decide to get by by faking it.

But the whole idea that we see things better from a distance, that is dispassionately, is an Enlightenment idea. The whole idea that history divides into periods that represent a progress from darkness to greater and greater levels of ... well of enlightenment is an Enlightenment idea.

Romanticism, on the other hand, has never really gone away. If you think it has, I have two words for you: Harry Potter. Or the Lord of the Rings, or teenage-girl vampire fiction. In fact, perhaps the most embarrassing secret for those who wish to be modern or enlightened is that Romanticism has always been the art of the modern era.

In many ways we might say that far from moving from Enlightenment to Romanticism to Modernism to Postmodernism, we've actually been having the same argument between a kind of Progressivism and Romanticism. People keep buying Romanticism even while our betters keep pushing us to accept an art they feel is more in accord with the modern world.

Through it all, the rallying cry of the Progressives is that we must see things dispassionately, from a distance, so we can see them as they really are. They accuse Romantics for failing to do this and, therefore, of embracing a past that never was.

And Waugh?
We can see the contradictions in reactions to Waugh. Here is Charles Rolo in The Atlantic of October, 1954.

The paradox, in fact, is that when Waugh is being comic, he makes luminous the failures of his age, confronts us vividly with the desolating realities; and when he is being serious, he is liable to become trashy. For without the restraints of the ironic stance, his critical viewpoint reveals itself as bigoted and rancorous; his snobbery emerges as obsessive and disgusting; and his archaism involves him in all kinds of silliness. 

Rolo is only one of many critics who keep telling us this about Waugh. And he is only one of many who keeps telling us that we shouldn't like the side of Waugh that we like the most, that is the Romantic side. Back in 1954, Rolo was obliged to admit the following:

Despite the fact that Brideshead Revisited -- which introduces the "later" or "serious" Evelyn Waugh -- has sold many more copies in the United States than all of Waugh's other books put together, his name, at least among the literary -- is still most apt to evoke a singular brand of comic genius. 

It is now more than five decades since Rolo wrote that and the gap between sales of Brideshead and all of Waugh's other books put together has grown. And, to be rude about it, the reputation of our betters—"the literary" as Rolo would have it—has plunged to the point that their very future is in doubt. Humanities, once the largest faculty at most universities, now attracts about one in ten students. Magazines such as The Atlantic have a very uncertain future and only survive because of cost-cutting and patronage.

The contradictions of realism
In one way or another, the anti-Romantics have always been realists of a sort. They have always accused the Romantics of embracing not just illusions but, and this is the more important part, embracing illusions that have no place in the modern world. One of the early moves was straight realism. If art could simply represent the world as it was, it would conquer Romantic illusions.

It didn't work out as planned.

Here are two paintings of the Annunciation. Neither is a realist painting but the second might be said to be more realist than the first.

And here we see a number of paradoxes here. The first is that the more realist of the two paintings is the second one that is more likely to give us a sense that a supernatural event like the Annunciation could actually take place. Rossetti's Mary has a Halo and Rossetti's angel's feet are not actually touching the ground and yet everything else is close enough to real that we can imagine the picture without either of those two supernatural details. In a modern movie, the Angel could be a guy who just shows up in Mary's room.

The Burne Jones painting, on the other hand, is clearly mythological. And yet, Burne Jones, as I've remarked before, can be more honest in his portrayal than Rossetti as we will note that his Mary, as we would expect in a young woman, has very nice, touchable-looking breasts. Rossetti's Mary (his sister was the model if I remember correctly) doesn't seem to have entered puberty yet.

And those are the contradictions of realism. It seems to subvert its own aims in that you can use very realistic representations to make the unreal more convincing. Realism always turns out to be just a series of stylistic conventions that promise honesty.

Conversely, non-realist art can often be honest in ways that realist art cannot. Even today, you would cause scandal if you crossed the two paintings. If someone re-did the Rossetti painting above but gave Mary a convincing sexual presence–imagine her bra-less breasts pressing through that thin fabric and you will see the problem. It is only by making her mythological that Burne Jones can get away with painting Mary as a fully sexed woman.

Waugh plays with these paradoxes all the time. As Rolo dimly recognizes, it is in the exaggerations for comic effect that Waugh is most bluntly honest. But he fails to see that Waugh is not deluding himself when he writes more realistically. Rolo may mock Waugh for being a snob with a taste for the archaic and things aristocratic but he could not possibly mock Waugh more mercilessly than Waugh mocks himself for these things. When Waugh writes realistically, as he does in Brideshead, he does so with the explicit intention of undermining our sense of the real. And he lets us know this is plain language when Charles tell us (in "Brideshead Deserted", chapter 1):

I had left behind me—what? Youth? Adolescence? Romance? The conjuring stuff of these things, 'the Young Magician's Compendium', that neat cabinet where the ebony wand had its place beside the delusive billiard balls, the penny that folded double, and the feather flowers that could be drawn into a hollow candle.

'I have left behind illusion,' I said to myself. 'Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions—with the aid of my five senses.'

I have since learned that there is no such world, but then, as the car turned out of sight of the house, I thought it took no finding, but lay all about me at the end of the avenue.

His goal is quite clear here. Charles is embracing the real only to find that the real isn't real; it is only realism which is to say it is just a  series of stylist conventions.

And we see that happening in this chapter (A Twitch on the Thread" Chapter 3) as we see Charles, admitting even in the seemingly Idyllic moments that open the chapter that he "feared to break the spell of memories." As the chapter goes on we see Charles, the one who is trying to be realistic, increasingly forced to resort to artistic images to try and deal with what is troubling Julia by using art to explain reality. The height of which is his pulling out Ruskin's description of Holman Hunt's painting to try and convince Julia that her reaction to Bridey's comment about "living in sin" was just something psychological and his attempts to bring about a reconciliation between he and Julia by comparing their lives to a drama.

And that, for Waugh, is the problem with Julia's speech. It does not follow realistic conventions. Waugh knows full well that the problem is not whether a person might or might not say such a thing in real life but whether we would accept it as realistic. As he writes in the preface:

I have been in two minds as to the treatment of Julia's outburst about mortal sin and Lord Marchmain;'s dying soliloquy. These passages were never, of course, intended to report words actually spoken. They belong to a different way of writing from, say, the early scenes between Charles and his father. I would not now introduce them into a novel which elsewhere aims at verisimilitude.

His goal was to write in a  style that appears to be real as a way to undermine realism. As such, these two speeches don't really belong here. Both are much liked by some readers as Waugh points out. I feel that way about Lord Marchmain's dying soliloquy. But I'm not sure about Julia's outburst. I'm going to linger on it a while. More this afternoon.

The first post in the Brideshead series is here.

The next post will be here.

Character should count but ....

Blogging Rob Roy chapters 21-23

The bulk of these three chapters is made up of a mysterious encounter leading to people sneaking into a prison to visit someone who is being unjustly held. This is a classic romantic scene and it became a classic romantic scene largely because of the genius of people like Ann Radcliffe and Sir Walter Scott. This is great stuff and the thing to do is to make your imagination do some work. Just read it and allow Sir Walter to please you with this stuff. It's what he does best and nothing I could say here could improve on the experience of reading it yourself.

What I want to focus on instead is something that Sir Walter doesn't do so well and that is his attempts to provide us some glimpse of the inner workings of Frank's mind as he tries to explain, years after the fact, why he chose as he did. That is why he chose not to trust Mr. McVittie who had been recommended to him. (Scott, by the way, reminds us that this is Frank recalling his motivations years later by inserting an anachronism into the account and then having a footnote where his "editor" points out this anachronism.)

John Buchan is a deservedly forgotten writer who was once very popular. Think of him as the Ken Follett of his day. I mention him here because he was a huge admirer of Sir Walter Scott. If we look at Buchan's writing we can see the kinds of weakness that Sir Walter shows here at the beginning of chapter 21 blown up large so it is clearly distinguishable. Like Scott, Buchan was not good at presenting convincing portrayals of the way characters motivations connected with their actions.

At the risk of over-simplfying, I think they both got something exactly backwards. Scott's characters (and Buchan's) tend to have very complex motivations coupled with very direct, straightforward behaviours. In my edition, Frank takes two whole pages to explain the reasons he has for wanting to believe the mysterious stranger who spoke to him in the church and to distrust Mr, MacVittie. Two whole pages.

But, and this is rather stunning if you think about it, when push comes to shove he makes his decision based entirely on his not liking what he sees in McVittie's face. Buchan does this even more. His characters tend to have very complex motivations and yet when the crucial moment arrives, the hero will look at some guy and decide he is trustworthy because he meets his gaze steadily and has a firm handshake.

This, of course, is a characteristic of a lot of modern fiction. We get pages and pages of the internal life of a character as they think about what they should do and then boom, they may as well flip a coin. But modern fiction wants to make the point that our motivations do not give us reason enough to act one way or another. Modern fiction stresses the meaninglessness of modern life (or at least what modern authors think is the meaninglessness of modern life. Scott thinks life is meaningful and it is therefore a huge failure that he cannot tie reasons and action together more convincingly.

Here a contrast with Jane Austen is helpful. Austen's characters have rather simple motivations. They tend to be jealous, angry, insecure or in love and that is all there is to say. It takes Emma most of the book that bears her name to figure out that she loves Mr. Knightly but her love is not a set of complex emotions. It is quite simply love and Austen doesn't spend any time trying to spell it out. The same thing happens at the end of Mansfield Park. When it is time for Fanny and Edmund to fall in love, Austen effectively says, look there aren't than many pages in the book left and you all know how this works anyway so I'm not going to waste my time spelling it all out.

There is a significant agreement between Austen and the moderns here. She does not—contrary to what is often claimed of her—believe that our inner lives explain our outward actions. Scott thinks they do and keeps trying to connect (as EM Forster will also attempt with even less success). But she also agrees with Scott in believing that life is meaningful. What she does think is that character counts. It is the character of the people in her novels that determines whether they will succeed or fail. That Emma realizes she is in love with Knightly is less important than her realizing she has been a fool.

It is on the other end of the scale where Austen introduces complexity. Her characters' motivations are simple what is complex is the way they act. Having a motivation is never enough to guarantee success in attaining it. Darcy is in love with Elizabeth from fairly early on but contradictions in his very complex character seem to get in the way. Character is not visible in their inner lives but in their outer actions. The famous moment of self-revelation is not the turning point but the moment where the person in the novel comes to understand what the plot has already demonstrated.

Emma has virtues (because possessing or not possessing virtues is what character is) that would ensure her success at life even if Knightly had not also loved her (although I find it very hard to see how any man could not love Emma). Those virtues are not sufficient at the beginning of the novel but she has grown by the end. (Mansfield Park is a whole other story that I won't get into here.)

But what of Frank? It's pretty obvious he is now in love with Diana but what of his character. Will it develop such as justify his having a happy of unhappy ending we know must be coming?

Edward Ferrars (6)

It turns out Edward's family have big plans for him and those plans do not include a wife of Elinor's status. Mrs. Dashwood is apprised of this and that is an insult too many so she packs up and moves the family to Devonshire.

At which point the story really begins as we now have the back story out of the way. Before we go with them, though, I'd like to note one interesting detail. When Marianne complains to her mother that Edward lacks sensibility, she gives as evidence of this his reading of poetry. And her mother says:

"He would certainly have done more justice to simple and elegant prose. I thought so at the time; but you would give him Cowper."

Cowper?

One of the great bipolar writers of the 18th century* was old Cowper. Really bipolar! He attempted suicide several times. He was romantic before romanticism was cool. He was also a close pal of John Newton of Amazing Grace fame and that is something to keep in mind for when we get to Mansfield Park.

Here is another to keep in mind. Austen gives us Marianne's enthusiasm for Cowper as evidence of Marianne's Romantic attitude. In real life, Austen herself was a huge Cowper fan. Interesting, no?



* Who are the other great bipolar writers? Well, there are quite a few really but if you're interested, check out Christopher Smart and Samuel Johnson.

Henry Fielding

When people speak and write about Northanger Abbey, they often characterize it as a response to romanticism and to Ann Radcliffe in particular.

It is interesting to note then that the very first mocking reference to another novel in the book seems to be aimed at Henry Fielding's Tom Jones. While explaing why it is that Catherine has had no great love affairs yet, Austen mockingly notes:

There was not one family among their acquaintance who had reared and supported a boy accidentally found at the door — not one young man whose origin was unknown.

And her next target, which I will get to tomorrow, is Richardson.

Whence comes the assumption that Austen is concerned with Romanticism here?

Her reading habits

'[F]rom fifteen to seventeen" Austen assures us Catherine Morland was "in training for a heroine" and she does this by reading, although she does not have much of a taste for books that contain useful knowledge. The exception to this rule appears to be poetry books and Austen gives a list of maxims that Catherine acquires from poetry.

The poems in question are interesting for their old fashioned quality, particularly as Austen was fond of modern stuff. On Catherine's behalf she cites Alexander Pope, Gray's elegy, James Thompson* and three bits from Shakespeare. The first three are examples of poetic sensibility and the Shakespeare quotes fit in well with them.

Not one, and this is important, is a romantic poet. Romanticism is a word that was applied to the era in retrospect** in any case but it is important to note that Austen is not much concerned with the big guns of what we would call romantic poetry. As I blog through the six books (and yes, that is what I have decided to do without announcing it) I will be keeping an eye out but I cannot remember a single reference her contemporaries to Wordsworth, Coleridge or Byron anywhere in Austen.

The concern here is not Romanticism but sensibility.

I'll be coming back to this.


* Thomson, BTW, is also a favourite of young Anne Shirley's.

** Update: This is wrong. My fault for trusting someone else's essay without looking it up. The word was coming into use right around the time Austen was writing.