“People, it’s time to tell the truth! This is a great crime! A conspiracy of Tusk, Obama and Putin!” Thus shouted one man through a loudspeaker in Warsaw when the coffin of Maria Kaczyńska, the Polish president’s wife, was being carried through the streets. In itself, this was unusual—if not necessarily the theory expounded, at least the public voicing of it in such a time of national mourning—but what followed was perhaps even more so. A white-shirted member of the public pleaded with the man to calm down, put away the loudspeaker, kneel on the ground and pray to God for forgiveness. The bewitched conspiracy theorist did so, after which he silently left the scene of the crime, loudspeaker in hand. [Read more →]

It is often surprising to see how true and applicable is George Orwell’s aphorism that “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” Sometimes one discovers what was directly in front of one’s nose only after walking away from that place, and seeing it floating mid-air from a distance. Fr Aidan Nichols, writing in the Catholic Herald, does make some interesting points in his article “The March of Nonsense on Stilts”, but where he fails, it is exactly in the aforementioned blindness to the obvious. [Read more →]

In Emerson’s Shakspeare; or, the Poet, the “sage of Concord” argues that great poets, contrary to the received view, do not deal in originality. Rather, they are the most free borrowers of ideas from others. This, perhaps, is not so controversial, but it is odd that Emerson goes on to write something like an Ode to the People out of this simple idea:

It is easy to see that what is best written or done by genius, in the world, was no man’s work, but came by wide social labor, when a thousand wrought like one, sharing the same impulse. Our English Bible is a wonderful specimen of the strength and music of the English language. But it was not made by one man, or at one time; but centuries and churches brought it to perfection [...]

Undoubtedly, the machinery of culture is a complex thing, and much of Shakespeare might not have been written without Tyndale’s Bible, which obviously could not have been written without the Bible itself, and may have been radically different if not for the spirit of reformation in the Europe of the day. It is also undoubtedly true that Shakespeare would not have been quite the same Shakespeare had he been born thirty years earlier or later. But to reduce his role, as Emerson seems to do, to that of the man who gave the final tug on the final stone of the Great Pyramid, is greatly to misconceive the nature of genius. The bard stood on the shoulders of giants, as Newton did, but those giants were not so different for Shakespeare than they were for Marlowe or for Jonson, yet those two, as brilliant as they were, paled in comparison. All writers since Shakespeare have him to add to the list of cultural progenitors, but there has not yet been anyone who can seriously challenge his position at the top of the canon. [Read more →]

The above might be a rather grand title; but then, it is a rather grand subject. In our post-Enlightenment age, there is no area to which we will not bring the blunt hammer—or fine scalpel, however you view it—of science. There is perhaps a certain contingent which will not accept this. Certainly, that’s true of religious fundamentalists, but it’s also true of certain literary figures, who consider a scientific understanding of literature hardly an understanding at all, and only hopelessly and meaninglessly reductive. It’s probably true that it is reductive to think of art as serving a specific evolutionary purpose, or to analyse a musical phrase in terms of its frequencies and the resulting brain-wave reactions. But that is not to say that nothing can be gained from such a reduction. Indeed, it may be true that more can be gained from it, even while accepting that literary criticism, in the classical sense, and a scientific analysis of literature, are, as Stephen Jay Gould might put it, non-overlapping magisteria. [Read more →]

I finished reading Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence yesterday, and am not quite sure what to make of it. Partly, this is because most of my reading sessions were begun at two in the morning and ended at two fifteen, and so I couldn’t absorb anything other than the most striking of points. But quite apart from that, even if I had read it all while fully awake, I’m quite certain that much of it would have passed me by. This is partly Bloom’s fault and partly mine. It is Bloom’s fault in that he seems to insist, in his writing, on making bold assertions of fact without the kind of backing up that would be accepted anywhere other than in the world of literary criticism. And it is my fault in that I find this style of writing hard to just accept and get on with. [Read more →]