11 philosophy, literature, & music links

T. E. Hulme

Roger Kimball on T. E. Hulme: 'Hulme was more subtle, and perhaps more effective, in his attacks on the pacifism of Bertrand Russell and the Bloomsbury art critic Clive Bell in “War Notes,” the miscellaneous commentaries he wrote while convalescing in 1915–16.'

Christopher J. Voparil's 'Rorty and the democratic power of the novel ... On Richard Rorty's definition of the novel as "characteristic genre of democracy"'

From Scientific American, 'Borges and Memory'

Mark Thwaite on Karl Knausgaard and the unheimlich (according to which Adam Phillips omits Freud's essay on the uncanny from an updated version of a Penguin Freud anthology)

From last November, Stoic week at the Guardian: 'An interdisciplinary team of psychotherapists, philosophers and classicists are working together to find out the uses of stoicism for the modern day'.

Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé's 'The Everyday's Fabulous Beyond: Nonsense, Parable, and the Ethics of the Literary in Kafka and Wittgenstein'
 
2013 German Book Splurge (new English translations of German books)

'Minor Soseki work gets first English translation' Nowaki, by Natsume Soseki

A series of posts on classic CanLit books (mostly before Atwood and Munro)

Here's a nice collection of 'Lit Rock' on the Portable Homeland blog (videos inc.).

If you like retro photos (with a focus on the UK), check out the Library Time Machine.

Some philosophy, lit, and art links

Here's an interesting new-ish journal, nonsite.org, the focus of which seems to be on issues straddling the boundary between philosophy and literary studies. Issue 3 of nonsite has some articles on Wittgenstein. Issue 4 includes Gary Hagberg's reply to 'Wittgenstein on the Face of a Work of Art', which was in Issue 3.

Robert Pasnau has a nice article on 'The Islamic Scholar Who Gave Us Modern Philosophy', Averroës.

From an interview with George Steiner: 'My multilinguism enabled me to teach, and to write After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, and to feel at home everywhere. Every language is an open window on the world. This is in contrast to the grim attachment to roots advocated by someone like Maurice Barrès. Trees have roots; I have legs.'

While poking around looking for on-line stuff by or about Kleist for the previous post, I found this long reflection on Freud's development of the notion of the uncanny by reference to E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'The Sandman'.

Daniel Johnson reviews a book about  'the Jewish Haute Bourgeoisie of Vienna 1800–1938'.

Miranda Seymour reviews a biography of Stefan Zweig.

I first heard of Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach when I was doing some research on Gusto Gräser. I didn't realize, though, that Diefenbach was even more of a wild-man-with-a-prophet's-beard than Gräser was. Strange Flowers has a post on Diefenbach with some neat pics. In the slide show at the bottom of that Diefenbach post, one of the photos shows Diefenbach and several other proto-hippies with flowers in their hair.

Here's the ultimate site for Samuel Johnson's dictionary. 'Pudding: ... A kind of food very variously compounded, but generally made of meal, milk, and eggs.'

Richard Marshall reviews Stephen Barber's Walls of Berlin.

Cool but creepy photos by Stephen Berkman.

Joan Didion interviewed at the NY Public Library by Sloane Crosley:
 

Literary Links

Ernst Weiss

Podcasts with Richard Powers, Rebecca Goldstein, August Kleinzahler, Orhan Pamuk, and many, many more

Eileen Battersby on Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlin, followed by an interview with Fallada's son
An excerpt from Herta Müller's Everything I Own I Carry With Me

David Auerbach on László Krasznahorkai

Video of Thomas Mann at the beach (wearing a tie)

The Canetti family: "In some Jewish families, the least admirable member may be the one who wins a Nobel Prize."

Stephen Vizinczey on Central European classics

William Gass on Knut Hamsun

Coverage of the latest pieces on Robert Walser

A description of P. D. Smith's Metaphor and Materiality: German Literature and the World-view of Science 1780-1955 (on Goethe, Büchner, Stifter, Musil & Brecht)
Christopher Byrd on Ernst Weiss' Georg Letham

Geoffrey O'Brien on Kleist

Coetzee on Sebald and the Uncanny

Providentia blogs on the Kaspar Hauser story

David Askew on Jonathan Swift
Kevin Hartnett on Haruki Murakami

Colin Marshall on the 'scientifically surreal, eerily erotic novels of Kobo Abe'
Joshua Willey on Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence

CIM is collecting the tributes to David Markson

Allan Massie on a new collection of essays about Jane Austen

Jim Thompson -- 'a dime-store Dostoevsky'?

Lamb & Jerome

I've been reading essays, an endeavour that (hopefully) will improve my own writing. I've heard that Hazlitt, Lamb and Carlyle are especially good. I plan also to take a look at Burke and Macaulay. Masters of English prose!

I've begun with Lamb's Essays of Elia. I'm enjoying my leisurely stroll along his rambling lines.

I saw in a bookstore a new copy of Jerome K. Jerome's collection, Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (issued by Hesperus in 2007). I didn't know much about Jerome. I'm glad I purchased his book, but his reflections are more uneven than Lamb's. Even though Jerome's works appeared about sixty years after Elia, it's in the former writings that outmoded attitudes preponderate with disturbing effect. Several of Jerome's articles are blighted by his smug sexism.

While Jerome sinks lower in places than Lamb, he also rises higher on occasion (so far), particularly in 'On Being Shy' and 'On Cats and Dogs'. In the latter case, we find the now cliche contrasts (cats are clever, dogs are stupid but more affable, etc.), but encounter also some nice remarks on rats ('They are ... so cruel, so secret'). Then, in the midst of his brief bestiary, Jerome breaks his humorist's pose to plumb the depths with some reflections on the Pied Piper. The children, says Jerome, "hear the weird, witched music and must follow." He continues,

"One day the sweet, sad strains will sound out full and clear, and then we too shall ... follow. The loving hands will be stretched out to stay us, and the voices we have learned to listen for will cry to us to stop. But we shall push the fond arms gently back and pass out through the sorrowing house and through the open door. For the wild, strange music will be ringing in our hearts, and we shall know the meaning of its song by then." (p. 76)

His other reflections on this fairy-tale bring out its 'uncanniness' (a term that he applies to rats).

Here are a couple of passages in which Lamb and Jerome advance similar ideas in their very different ways.

"Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that, being nothing, art every thing! When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity -- then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calld'st it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being every thing! the past is every thing, being nothing!" -- Charles Lamb, 'Oxford in the Vacation' in Essays of Elia (c. 1820)

"It is this glamour of the past, I suppose, that makes old folk talk so much nonsense about the days when they were young. The world appears to have been a very superior sort of place then, and things were more like what they ought to be. Boys were boys then, and girls were very different. Also, winters were something like winters, and summers not at all the wretched things we get put off with nowadays. ... [T]he young folk of today will drone out precisely similar nonsense for the aggravation of the next generation." -- Jerome K. Jerome, 'On Memory' in The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Incidentally, here's a neat site that includes many classical essays with recent commentaries.

Reflections on Der Schimmelreiter by Theodor Storm

I just read Denis Jackson's nice translation of Theodor Storm's Der Schimmelreiter (first published in 1888). For more about Storm, I recommend Jackson's great site about the author.

Storm’s novella contrasts two ways of responding to nature: there are the fanciful legends and superstitions of the community, and there is the more modern scientific and technological deployment of reason exemplified by the protagonist, Hauke Haien.

The story of Hauke’s life is told to a traveler by an old teacher, a ‘rationalist’ who doubts the supernatural elements of the tale. The teacher depicts Hauke as a great innovator whose engineering prowess gave him superior powers over nature, enabling him to design a better dyke to protect the community. The people repay Hauke with dark suspicion and rumors of his diabolical affiliation.

In the teacher's retelling of the story, the supposedly supernatural elements appear only ambiguously. So, e.g., there is a seemingly spectral horse, which is sold to Hauke by someone who laughs like ‘the devil’ (p. 72). But nothing much comes of this – the horse functions in the rest of the story like a natural though somewhat wild horse, one that only Hauke can tame (just as Hauke alone can tame the wild sea with better dykes). Then there's Trin Jans, who is presented not as a real witch but rather as ... well, as the sort of character who's a witch in more fanciful legends. There's also the suggestion that Hauke is cursed because he killed her cat (the cat came back, as it were). Thus, while the old teacher is aware of the supernatural aspects of the tale, he reigns them in to make them fit into a naturalistic interpretation.

The resulting narrative is in places quite eerie. Examples include the narrator's partly anthropomorphic characterization of some birds on the tidal flats (pgs. 22 & 99) and Trin Jans' uncanny story about a mermaid, which actually makes the mermaid seem terrifying, like something more and less than human (p. 98). In both cases the author embeds fragmentary human traits in what are ultimately strange, alien creatures that, like nature itself, efface humanity with a chilly indifference.

More generally, the tale charts a mundane landscape suffused with potentially supernatural elements that appear fleetingly in ambiguous forms, never quite surfacing as truly supernatural phenomena but, instead, appearing to be at home in the confines of nature. There is thus an ongoing juxtaposition of the world as (on the one hand) a natural order that fits the technical-scientific templates of reason and (on the other hand) a chaotic abyss from which wild, non-rational forces periodically erupt with cataclysmic effect.

These unpredictable natural forces find their echo within the human psyche. Hauke Haien, a paragon of reason, isn't alert to these destructive elements in his own soul, and so he's unaware of how they have eroded his own foundations over the years. Eventually, they catch him totally unawares, welling up from within and casting him into the abyss. Such a psychological reading is pursued in a meticulously Freudian direction by Anette Schwarz in her paper, “Social Subjects and Tragic Legacies: The Uncanny in Theodor Storm's Der Schimmelreiter” (The Germanic Review 73.3 [Summer 1998]: 251). Schwarz points out that neither Hauke nor his wife (Elke) has a mother who figures in the narrative (even though their fathers both loom large), and that Trin Jans stands in symbolically as the mother figure.

The most Freudian thing about Storm's novella, in my opinion, is its uncanniness. In describing the uncanny, Freud said that it characterizes fictional works that seem "to move in the world of common reality" but into which some strange, improbable or impossible events intrude. Freud focused on E. T. A. Hoffmann, but Storm's work seems a better epitome of Freud's theory.

Thomas Mann characterized Storm's achievement as "an art kind to the mystical and uncanny, the pagan northern art of [Der Schimmelreiter]. ... [I]t is precisely here ... that something of primeval power is finally achieved, some combination of human tragedy with the wild mystery of nature, something dark and heavy with the greatness and unknownness of the sea...." (Thomas Mann, 'Theodor Storm', 1930)

Update (Dec. 15, 2008): New York Review Books will re-issue James Wright's 1964 translation of this novella in early 2009. In their announcement of this upcoming publication, they quote from Kirkus Reviews the claim, "There is nothing better in German fiction prior to the work of Thomas Mann."

Falling in love with an automaton

I revisited E. T. A. Hoffmann's The Sandman, which Freud discussed in his paper on the uncanny. Written in the early 1800's, Hoffmann's tale anticipates more recent fiction involving automata. E.g., in The Sandman, a character falls in love with Olympia, whom he then discovers to be a robot. Freud notes that this strand of the narrative isn't the source of the story's uncanniness, and that, if anything, Hoffmann puts the automaton to a humorous, satirical use. E.g., once Olympia is exposed, Dr. Spalanzani, one of her designers, has to flee to "escape a criminal charge of having fraudulently imposed an automaton upon human society," a crime that sows "an absurd mistrust of human figures." Indeed, to be sure they're not dating robots, men start requiring their girlfriends to demonstrate their human imperfection by singing and dancing out of time, which is a very different male response from the one in Ira Levin's The Stepford Wives (where the realization that one is dealing with an automaton is uncanny). A similar motif animates one of the best episodes in the 1960's TV series The Outer Limits. This 1964 episode, 'Demon With a Glass Hand' (written by Harlan Ellison & starring Robert Culp), presents a woman's response to the discovery that she's fallen for an automaton -- she screams and runs away.

Update (Sept. 26, 2009): According to this Wiki article on the 'Uncanny Valley', real automata inspire only revulsion.

Update (Sept. 27, 2009): Unsurprisingly, there's also an old Twilight Zone episode featuring a relationship between a human person and a automaton. It's called 'The Lonely'.

Update (Oct. 4, 2009): And of course there's a Star Trek episode (from the original series) to be cited. It's called 'What are little girls made of?' It featured several 'androids', the best one of which was the obvious robot, Ruk (who was played by the same guy who played Lurch in the Addams Family).