Chapter 12: Cognoscenti, and “The Only Valid Thing”
• Expert talk and real understanding. The avoidance of mystery. • Expert “taste” and “judgement.” Novelty and the avant-garde. • The rise of the middle classes. Money and the arts. Charles Saatchi and the Brooklyn Museum of Art. • Walker Percy on our “surrender of sovereignty to the expert.” • What “experts” can do for us, and what they do and don’t risk. Risks taken by the artist. • The goal, the quarry: an “ecstasy of truth.” • The expert as superior instrument of perception. • The work of art as grist for the mill of judgement, analysis and deconstruction— for talk. • The obtuse, the “dense,” as signaling profundity. A lecture by Jaques Derrida. • The need to shut out the laity. • The trite and simplistic or entirely meaningless, hidden in jargon-polluted prose. Theoryspeak as “fashionable nonsense.” • Vitruvius and “hunting the shadow.” • Harold Pinter and “practical and relevant matters” in the theatre. • The attempt to communicate the unsayable. • Experts can be wrong. Gombrich and Panofsky and linear perspective. Academic fear of being wrong. • Gratitude due so many experts, who enrich and inform us, and on a very high level, entertain us. Examples. • A sensuality of the mind.
The only valid thing in art is the one thing that cannot be explained, to explain away the mystery of a great painting would do irreplaceable harm, for whenever you explain or define something you substitute the explanation or definition for the image of the thing.
[Henri Matisse, quoted by Leonard Shlain in Art and Physics p 396]
By ignoring the fundamental mysteries we can see ourselves as expert, powerful.
[Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature, p 52]
[Herr Naptha:]“I know there is in all art regardless of the original motive of its creation—religious, political, or personal—a certain quality that distinguishes one work from the other as a work of art, and one may, though not all may, recognize this quality. A work of art emanates its aesthetic presence—”
“An ancient and conservative argument,” chimed in Settembrini, “one with its roots in Plato, and revived most recently by British art circles of the early twentieth century.”
“Sta’zitto!” commanded Tintin in a hiss. “Zitto. Non parlo con te. Non impicciarti degli affairi degli altri .” [“Shut up. I’m not talking to you. Don’t get involved in things you know nothing about!”]
[Frederic Tuten, Tintin in the New World, p 139]
In Frederic Tuten’s novel, the tall, lean Signor Settembrini is the editor of the Review of Human Suffering, a journal that though well-known, enjoys but a limited circulation. Its bywords are “humanism and science, progress and democracy”; its aim is to improve the human condition. Settembrini’s perennial verbal sparring partner is Herr Naptha, who is short and plump, and for years has been recommending a society based in Communist economics, yet following Roman Catholic spiritual and governmental principles. [1] Both savants belong to a group which some children I once knew called “PWKs,” pronounced as in “books”: People Who Know—that is, the Cognoscenti. The arguments between the two are fierce and continuous. The hero Tintin, in the passage above, speaks for many artists, and for at least some among lay enthusiasts, tired of analytical explanations and definitions of every kind. “Shut up!” he says. “I’m not talking to you!”
Tintin probably prefers Herr Naptha’s “ancient and conservative” opinion that a work of art “emanates its aesthetic presence,” but finds the analysis a distraction.[2] Artists generally see and value such presence more than do experts, who are focused on what can be said about the work, on who said what and when they said it, and how it may be re-analyzed in terms of the current intellectual fashion or their own theories. “Presence” may be less interesting to them; it is beyond words, and far outside the domain of science.
Can it be that some PWKs are constitutionally unable to experience aesthetic presence? Surely not. But qualities such as “presence” are far too subtle and complicated to be measured or defined, or scientifically studied. At the same time, it is difficult or impossible to set exams or give grades in relation to them, inevitably an important consideration in the academic enterprise.
The Cognoscenti write and talk, on and on, now and then discovering new facts and reviving old ones, hoping to say something original or at least quotable, elaborating on what they and others have said, agreeing and disagreeing, publishing or perishing. The mystery is ignored, put aside where it won’t complicate matters, exactly in the way that reductionist scientists may ignore or finesse data that don’t fit their equations or their theories. But that mystery is the very being of art. Though it is that which draws the professors and critics, like everyone else, to the arts, it is left out of the discussion. And again, many experts are more enamored of opinions about art—their own and others’—than of that which, in art, makes it art. Some, certainly, are fully aware that this most necessary quality can’t be named, or discussed in any but the most rudimentary ways.
All of our understanding is compromised by false beliefs that if we can talk expertly about something we understand it, and that to identify the subject of a work, or its message, or its context in place and time, is to know what it “means.” It is true that the more we know, the richer may be our awareness of the layers of significance in terms of human symbol systems within a given work. At the same time, an experienced viewer or listener may be more sensitive, more attentive, more likely to appreciate its virtues, and conversely to detect its shortcomings. This is what is meant by an educated eye or ear or palate. Some are by nature more interested in the nuances of aesthetic experience than others, and this is as true of experiences of music or sculpture as it is of experiences of food or wine.[3] One person may have more opportunity for conscious aesthetic exploration than another, but every human being has capacity for such pleasure, such discrimination.
A mind diverted cannot experience the deepest meaning, and there are many potential distractions specific to the connoisseur, for instance a pleasurable pride in one’s capacity for correct judgement, both innate and developed:
Taste is [the mid-twentieth century art critic Clement Greenberg’s] categorical imperative. …. “Esthetic verdicts are the warp and woof of esthetic experience,” he insists. As for objectivity, its ultimate proof is the unassailability of the canon, the historical consensus that develops out of accumulated (“congealed”) good taste. Some names get dropped occasionally, he concedes, but most argument about the greats concerns ranking, not qualification.…[Such judgement] is closer to being objective than subjective. How much closer is relative to the degree to which it is cultivated in a given individual, which only becomes clear posthumously (presumably when that individual’s tastes meld into suprapersonal esthetic consciousness).…But quality cannot be codified or prescribed; the essence of living art is surprise. It is the testing of conventions, which are nonetheless vital, and an evident “weight of decision” that insure quality, that expand the boundaries of the esthetic experience. New art needs to be avant-garde….
[David Cohen, “Homemade Esthetics: Observations on Art and Taste,” New York Times Book Review, 9/12/99.]
Mr. Greenberg was probably confident that his taste (that is, his judgement) was “good,” and that he could identify the direction which new art was taking and should take. He believed that such art “needs” to be avant-garde—perhaps because he liked to be surprised (as we all do), but perhaps also because the new offers exciting opportunity for knowledgeable talk, for analysis and interpretation.[4] When he writes that “esthetic verdicts are the warp and woof of esthetic experience,” does he mean the choices made by the artist, or that the judgements of critics are all-important, the very substance and foundation of experience of the arts? This can be looked at with Rudolf Arnheim’s pronouncement, quoted earlier: “Unless one understands what the artist is saying by means of his shapes and colors or musical sounds, there is no real point in examining the formal conditions by which a picture or dance or sonata is held together.” My contention, clearly, is that both statements are mistaken, in that each provides a view of the aesthetic that is both narrow and shallow, and is founded in the idea that an educated eye is essential, while entirely ignoring what Matisse insisted is “the only valid thing in art.” Greenberg gives primacy to the new and surprising, that which “tests conventions,” and Arnheim to a verbally expressible content as justifying form. (The quotations given are only fragments, but they can serve to represent whole spectra of attitudes in current art criticism.) Lee Siegel identified a similar situation in American philosophy:
The contemporary American philosopher Richard Rorty…has striven to fuse pragmatism with poststructuralism. To put it crudely, he seems to have reached a dead end, ending up with a vision of life in which meaning is reduced to language, language is reduced to its various specific contexts, and these contexts are reduced to the currents of decentered power that course through them. The result is a world of competing “narratives,” each one as valid as the other, a world that one can change simply by “redescribing” it in different words with different values.…
[Lee Siegel, “Cold Verities: The chilly ethics of American pragmatism,” Harper’s magazine, Oct 2001, p 88]
The new, the avant-garde, is always moving forward, in only one of many possible directions; it is not entirely self-propelled in its trajectory into the future. It is fueled and justified by various institutions and groups within contemporary culture. One of these is the critical establishment—respected journalists like Greenberg and other pundits, academic professors of the ‘science’ of aesthetics and of art history, of literature and poetry, of architecture, music, theatre, and dance. Another, and associated, driving force is the international art market. Less than 150 years ago none of these phenomena existed.
Journalist-critics first arrived with the advent of daily newspapers, which served the expanding middle class made prosperous earlier by the rise of commerce and, later, the industrial revolution. [5] Such critics, kept, and keep, the affluent au courant and thus able to take active part in a cultural life for which they may have little time or interest, but in which they hope to invest money, for profit or prestige, without making costly and embarrassing mistakes. Now as then, critics function very much as do experts who write about horse racing, or about stocks and bonds: they advise those who have various amounts of money when and where to spend it, at the same time educating readers in their subject. Of course this is only part of the truth. Human beings love to categorize and evaluate and pontificate and speculate on every aspect of their world, whether it be the stock market or theology or the rock star’s love life—and to listen to other people do the same. The study and analysis of the arts is only part of this ongoing entertainment. Experts of many kinds can stimulate our thinking and increase our factual knowledge, and, if they love art and stay honest, can be invaluable in their activities on its behalf.
Charitable foundations, capitalists with money to invest, governments and corporations have long taken the place of aristocratic patrons and the Church both as sources of grants, awards, commissions, and prizes, and as collectors. To invest cannily, to “buy cheap and sell dear,” these patrons and their agents must stay up-to-date as to who are the important artists. Whether dealer, museum, foundation, business, or private collector, they predictably want to buy at a “good” price, and to collect today works by artists who will be seen as important in the future. Money has come to be an all-pervasive influence in the world of the arts and in intellectual fashion: money to produce plays and films, to endow museums and universities, to fund prizes and fellowships, to rent halls, to support artists. Of course the money anticipated as future profit from today’s investment plays its part. Journalism tends to support all this, and is itself part of the system.[6]
Ultimately much of the money comes from us. If we flock to see and hear the vulgar, the banal, the obscene, the trendy—works that exploit mental laziness, the cosy familiarity of the obvious, or a sniggering pleasure in the prurient—then naturally we are offered more. Predictions as to what we will like are founded on what we have paid for in the past, and we are given more of the same, more of what we deserve.
One curious by-product of the commodification of art is the popular image of the artist as an incoherent and marginally stable being who, when properly anointed by the PWKs, suddenly metamorphoses into a kind of god. When poor and unknown, he or she is a pathetic figure, languishing outside the money culture. However once the work has been validated as commercially viable, and exactly to the degree that it has become a recognizable commodity, its maker is as revered as if she or he had been “successful” in some other sort of business, like real estate, or hedge fund management. A recent example is J.K. Rowling, who was invited to give the commencement speech at Harvard in 2008.[7] The man who introduced her to the graduates had nothing to say about her imagination and originality, or her abilities as a mesmerizing story teller, or about the possible influence of her books on contemporary and future children. He praised Ms. Rowling as “one of most successful authors of our time.” Her books had set sales records, he said, and she is also a “notable philanthropist,” who has set up a trust which gives “millions of dollars” to worthy causes. He did say in passing that the Harry Potter series had won awards, and he referred vaguely to her “vast contribution to literature,” but otherwise he might have been introducing a profit-producing corporate executive. Clearly, if an author is critically validated as being a Great Poet, or a composer as a Great Musician, a similar metamorphosis can occur. [8]
When an influential critic indicates that the arrow of the arts is pointing in a certain direction, some artists will try to move that way so as to be seen as attractive investments. All the validating powers of the experts—in books, newspapers, journals, academic lectures—are in general at the service of the chosen works. A story is developed, a seemingly inevitable historical sequence imagined, the heroes and heroines anointed. No one wants to be left behind or left out, and each statement made in support of that proposed sequence—of certain artists and certain works as seminal—will serve to further establish the verdict. Luckily, as time passes there is a counter-force, fired by curiosity as to what else may have been made in a given period, which now and then brings neglected works into the limelight. Occasionally there is an adjustment or enrichment of the story, the “historical consensus.” Good work, we hope, will out. But the people capable of making such work may well be so discouraged by the system that they lose the will and courage to continue.
The polluting commercialization of the art world increases year by year. Fame comes from talk, from hype. Therefore, be easily identifiable, be shocking, fit your label. In 2000, for instance, various works from the personal collection of the British advertising entrepreneur Charles Saatchi were exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Mr. Saatchi made his fortune partly by “pushing the envelope” of what public taste finds acceptable in advertising; his forays into the art world seem to be guided by a similar empathy with public avidity for the freakish, “the horrid graces” of the noxious. As everyone interested may remember, the show featured such works as the carcass of a dead animal being feasted upon by live fly maggots (enclosed in a clear glass or plastic box so that the stench was not part of the aesthetic experience) and a banal and sentimental painting of the Virgin made partly of elephant dung and surrounded by small cartoons of winged buttocks and sexual organs. It turned out that the exhibition, which was called “Sensation” in case anyone should miss the point, was funded largely through donations from those who could profit from it financially. The largest contribution, $160,000, came from Saatchi himself, and word got out that during the show’s pre-opening development, senior museum officials “repeatedly expressed concerns that Mr. Saatchi had taken control [of the artistic content] of the exhibition.”[9]
Situations like this are becoming more common. At the time, the New York Times pointed out that “Museums rely increasingly on donations from art dealers, corporations, auction houses and wealthy collectors who all stand to gain from public displays of art in which they have a private commercial interest.”[10] In response to this particular exhibition, the American Association of Museums adopted new ethical guidelines for displays of art borrowed from private collections, including recommendations that museums should question whether “the inclusion of the object(s) is consistent with the intellectual integrity of the museum,” and that a museum “should retain full decision-making authority over the content and presentation of the exhibition.”[11] As is so often the case, the new rules attempt to establish an ethical condition resembling the one which the public has, until now, assumed to be the norm. If museums are increasingly vulnerable to corruption, how can they be trusted as arbiters of taste? In a world where critics, experts and theorists may well have commercial interest in what they are presenting, or hold opinions based on those of others motivated by such interest, can we take anything they exhibit, promote, or say—seriously?
Poet, novelist and essayist Walker Percy warned against our abject and even grateful acceptance of “expert” opinion and direction:
[A] priority of title of the expert over his particular department of being [is recognized]. The whole horizon is staked out by "them," the experts. The highest satisfaction of the sightseer (not merely the tourist but any layman seer of sights) is that his sight should be certified as genuine.… Yet the caste [hierarchy] of layman-expert is not the fault of the expert. It is due altogether to the eager surrender of sovereignty by the layman so that he may take up the role not of the person but of the consumer. I do not refer only to the special relation of layman to theorist. I refer to the general situation in which sovereignty is surrendered to a class of privileged knowers, whether these be theorists or artists.…The dogfish, the tree, the seashell, the American Negro, the dream, are rendered invisible by a shift of reality from concrete thing to theory which Whitehead has called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. It is the mistaking of an idea, a principle, an abstraction, for the real.[[12]] As a consequence of the shift, the "specimen" is seen as less real than the theory of the specimen.
[Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle p 54]
Until very recently, most artists would probably have concurred, as does Matisse in the epigraph here: “…[W]henever you explain or define something you substitute the explanation or definition for the image of the thing.” This is true whether the “thing” is a lizard or a play, a galaxy or a sonata.[13] Our “eager surrender of sovereignty” to the expert, all-pervasive in contemporary culture, is born of mental laziness and timidity, and of our pitiable, because doomed, quest for security, certainty, and perfection.
Many of us still respect our own opinions on art as long as we view the work, such as a film, as entertainment. We know what we like, dammit! But if it’s ART, who are we to arrive at—let alone express—an opinion? If we’re “wrong,” then we’ll feel like outsiders; ignorant, lost, at risk. Most people feel unsure of their credentials as appreciators (they haven’t studied art or musical history, can’t talk the talk) and are therefore wary and uncomfortable, however much some of them may bluster. All this is the product of the increasing division of all kinds of knowledge into narrow categories within each of which only a few can be “expert.” For us as individuals it is a profound loss, separating us from that which could nourish and sustain us in the world. Focused and relaxed attention becomes impossible; we cannot enjoy that which makes us feel inadequate and vulnerable, nor can we learn from it. The phenomenon continually reinforces itself, and the change is occasionally noticed:
The professionalization of intellectual life was underway even in Koestler’s lifetime[1905 –1983].… He understood the term “intellectual” in a much broader sense than we do today, and felt comfortable ranging over a huge number of fields in which he had no professional expertise….This approach to the life of the mind, perfectly acceptable in the Vienna of Koestler’s youth, simply looks amateurish from the perspective of the present.
[Anne Applebaum, “Yesterday’s Man,” The New York Review of Books, 2/11/10 p 10]
At the same time, we often hear lip service given to the need for holistic, interdisciplinary thought. To “range over a huge number of fields in which [one] has no professional expertise” is surely what a thinking human being does, and we’re all “amateurish” outside our own personal experience. We can stand only where we are, and we can see only with our own eyes. Expert opinion and information may stimulate us to look at or listen to a work long enough to be fully possessed by it, and our experience is enriched when a critic helps us to notice something we might have missed, to understand a reference or a nuance of motive or of gesture. The “expert” can place a work in its historical context, can suggest other ways of looking at or listening to it. All this can be intensely interesting and rewarding. A work that fails as art, but receives intelligent and sympathetic analysis, can lead to other more successful efforts, by that artist or by others. If critic and audience are present in hope of the same fundamental experience, all can be well—though seldom, fortunately for the pleasures of discussion, unanimous.
A friend tells me that during her nine years as a Merce Cunningham dancer in New York and abroad she thought of critics as parasites feeding on the living work of those taking the risks; she resented the fact that she was over-elated by their praise, overly discouraged by their neglect. Later, as a graduate student in the humanities, she came to understand criticism as another art form. However any such equivalence is undermined by the fact that the critic risks being judged wrong by peers or by posterity, but generally does not risk his or her essential being and deepest authenticity in the way that the serious artist at work must do. The artist’s experience of greatest danger occurs in a realm where the ego is entirely without defenses:
During this time I reached that state of naked need and utter isolation which every artist has got to meet and conquer if he is to survive at all. Before this I had been sustained by that delightful illusion of success which we all have when we dream about the books we are going to write instead of actually doing them. Now I was face to face with it, and suddenly I realized that I had committed my life and my integrity so irrevocably to this struggle that I must conquer now or be destroyed. I was alone with my own work, and no one could help me with it no matter how anyone might wish to help. For the first time I realized another naked fact which every artist must know, and that is that in a man’s work are contained not only the seeds of life but the seeds of death, and that the power of creation which sustains us will also destroy us like a leprosy if we let it rot stillborn in our vitals.… I might not live long enough to get it out of me…I had created a labor so large and so impossible that the energy of a dozen lifetimes would not suffice for its accomplishment.
[Thomas Wolfe, “The Story of a Novel,” in Brewster Ghiselin ed., The Creative Process, p 193]
This may sound a little extreme, a little exaggerated. It is not.
The poet May Sarton concurred:
...The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up.
[quoted in Lewis Hyde, The Gift, p 146]
Exploring another dimension of creative work in the arts, an interviewer asked German film director Werner Herzog what he is after in his work:
Interviewer: You toy with the notion of truth—your documentaries often have staged scenes and your dramas are often shot like documentaries.
WH: The borderline is blurred. Facts are not that interesting, and you get not beyond the surface of things. I'm into something much deeper. An ecstasy. An ecstasy of truth: something that illuminates you. And sometimes it is possible in cinema and quite often in great poetry or music, and that is what I am after.
Are you able to point to moments of this in your films?
WH: There are moments that have this strange sort of deep insight, and the audience knows it and the audience extends it when they come back again and again for these moments. That is what makes it worthwhile to keep on working.
Can you give an example in Rescue Dawn?
WH: No. It's too fresh.
[www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/news/werner-herzog-2.html, accessed 4/23/10]
For the interviewer, “truth” lies in that which is factually documentary. For Mr. Herzog, the artist, the border between art and fact is cloudy, and for him as well as for the audience it takes time to be sure of what’s there. But the goal, the quarry—an “ecstasy of truth,” a “strange sort of deep insight”—is the same for all human beings, whether we are conscious of it or not.
Lewis Hyde, in his remarkable book The Gift, quotes the American poet Gary Snyder:
You get a good poem and you don’t know where it came from. “Did I say that?” And so all you feel is: you feel humility and you feel gratitude. And you’d feel a little uncomfortable, I think, if you capitalized too much on that without admitting at some point that you got it from the Muse, or whoever, whatever, however.
[Gary Snyder in Lewis Hyde, The Gift, p 149]
+
The self-conscious “connoisseurship” of art arose during the 17th and 18th centuries, as we have seen, and eventually took on a life of its own apart from the acts of making or simply enjoying. I noted in my second chapter on Beauty that the philosopher David Hume, in the face of Enlightenment hopes of finding objective, “scientific” standards of beauty, insisted on the relativity of aesthetic judgement, and thus the subjectivity of the experience of beauty. Once this principle had been accepted, the logical next step was toward the idea that the more objective and scientifically precise the beholder might be as an instrument of perception, the more certain the validity of the judgement. Clement Greenberg’s “categorical imperative” that “esthetic verdicts are the warp and woof of esthetic experience” carries a similar conviction—that art is experienced by consciously judging and analyzing it. It may also imply that just as the microscope or telescope shows us what we cannot see with our ordinary human eyes, the expert must instruct us as to what a superior instrument sees or hears, and what a trained mind thinks about it. Here is a more recent example of a kindred attitude, in an article in Harvard Magazine by a professor of history of art and architecture at the university:
To do justice to the impact of this person, this persona, you really have to stand before the picture, or better yet, lead a discussion with friends or students in front of it.
[Joseph Koerner, Harvard Magazine, November/December 2015, p 45]
Certainly to experience a picture’s impact one must stand before it, but is it true that to know it fully one must talk about it, having first achieved the status that allows one to “lead the discussion”? This is, obviously, the point of view of the expert. Yet the artist made the painting, the author wrote the book, for you and for me, and unless we come to love and treasure it, it can endure through time only as an historical curiosity. Tintin might say, “Sta’zitto!”
Nowadays the work of art, the novel or poem or dance, is commonly treated as being merely grist for the mill of judgement, analysis, and deconstruction—the “specimen,” as Walker Percy says.[14] It has become the “text,” rather in the way that over many centuries the Old Testament (the Torah) has been the text for voluminous ongoing analysis by rabbinical scholars. Personal information about the art-maker complements such analysis: what was the artist’s relation to women? to men? to money? to the political ideas of the time? We have another locus for our fascination with the gossipy details of other people’s lives. Van Gogh is the one who cut off his ear; Beethoven was notoriously bad-tempered; the Pre-Raphaelites treated their wives badly; is the poet a lesbian or not? We’re not going to stop doing this, since it’s part of our nature and useful to us in other contexts, but it is irrelevant to the contemplation of art.
When < >´ is achieved, everyone rejoices: performer, artist, audience, ushers, critics, cognoscenti. We clap until our arms ache, and clap on again, full of gratitude, lifted beyond ourselves, proud to be human beings. We sometimes feel that other members of the audience are our friends and fellow initiates, all of us knowing a secret which cannot be told. We have been present when something beyond ordinary experience has occurred.[15]
Some years ago, in California, I went to hear a public lecture by Jaques Derrida, one of the high priests of the international academic avant-garde at that time. He was led to the stage by a woman from the faculty of the University, who introduced him with a smoldering admiration. She was dressed all in black. The front two rows of seats were occupied by a group of young people, apparently graduate students, nearly all men, also dressed entirely in black and wearing the oval metal-rimmed eyeglasses once known as granny-glasses, then signaling intellectual chic. M. Derrida was a small man, broad-shouldered and very dapper in a white double-breasted suit, his white wavy hair carefully coiffed. He spoke for an hour, striding back and forth, and beyond the first few sentences all that he said was entirely incomprehensible—as impenetrable as a lecture I heard in 1989, given by the composer John Cage in his Norton Lecture series at Harvard.[16] In both cases there were recognizable words and phrases—in Derrida’s often having to do with signifiers and the signified, with works of art as “texts,” all the jargon of “deconstruction.” But I could find no way to put those moments of clarity together so as to grasp the great man’s thesis, or even to identify it much beyond the lecture’s title.
What is one to make of such an experience? John Cage’s lecture was to some degree the performance of a work of theatre, or perhaps of music; it made no claim to be comprehensible to anybody. It was, for one thing, an opportunity either to savor or to suffer the aesthetic experience of an intentionally imposed and inescapable boredom, something that contemporary director Robert Wilson has also offered audiences in his “Theatre of the Static.” Professor Derrida’s “performance” was a “lecture,” but a lecture directed only at the few people who themselves use that particular jargon and are reassured, rather than offended, by the obtuse—by the “dense,” as they say admiringly. In fact it is often the impenetrable, and may conceal a message which is either already common knowledge or else is nonsense. The two lectures were similar in multiple ways, but John Cage’s audience (the small number of us who stayed to the end) seemed to feel a certain bemused pride in our tenacity and endurance, our membership in a select group of survivors. Most of those who heard M. Derrida probably felt left out, intellectually unworthy. He was a famous intellectual, and they, though sufficiently interested to be present, found themselves apparently too stupid or too ignorant to understand what he was saying.
Mary Midgely, herself an Oxford-trained philosopher and professor, has written that in academia, even possible topics for discussion are sometimes limited by the need to shut out the laity:
Academic literary critics…have been moving steadily further and further away from their traditional function. They no longer want to be thought of as ready to help readers in using great literature to deepen and enlarge their view of the world, a vision meant to be actively used and lived by. Instead, these critics are more and more occupied by highbrow technical battles between various theories of criticism—theories which are not even meant to concern anybody but other scholars.
There is a real change here. The point is no longer just that some parts of the studies are difficult and technical, understandable only by those who specially study them. That has always been true, and it does not matter. What matters is the belief that professionals should be concerned only with these parts. On this view it is the mark of an untrained amateur to discuss—especially in public—any aspect of one's enquiry which could naturally interest what are significantly called ‘lay people.’ Knowledge is increasingly divorced from wisdom.
[Mary Midgley, Wisdom, Information and Wonder p 18]
In Brave New World, H.G. Wells prophesied the future condition of the most erudite experts:
All knowledge is stored in distended brains…. [These beings] for the most part are rapt in an impervious and apoplectic complacency, from which only a denial of their erudition can rouse them…. Some of the profounder scholars are altogether too great for locomotion, and are carried from place to place in a kind of sedan tub, wobbling jellies of knowledge that enlist my respectful astonishment.
[H.G. Wells, quoted Ibid. p 11]
We are impressed by academic credentials and by jargon, and we may in fact be reassured by incomprehensible talk from experts; our incomprehension makes us feel secure in their superior knowledge.[17] A friend who is a landscape architect was warned by his collaborating colleague that to make their statement of the theoretical foundations for their entry in a design competition understandable would be to forfeit the respect of the judges. Currently fashionable jargon can be a key to success—just as, to many, “dense” writing signals profundity.
Charles Dickens was familiar with the affectations of experts, and he, like H.G.Wells, amuses us at their expense with all the liveliness of art:
Now, Mrs. Curdle was supposed, by those who were best informed on such points, to possess quite the London taste in matters related to literature and the drama; and as to Mr. Curdle, he had written a pamphlet of sixty-four pages, post octavo, on the character of the Nurse’s deceased husband in Romeo and Juliet, with an inquiry whether he really had been a “merry man” in his lifetime, or whether it was merely his widow’s affectionate partiality that induced her so to report him. He had likewise proved, that by altering the received mode of punctuation, any one of Shakespeare’s plays could be made quite different, and the sense completely changed; it is needless to say, therefore, that he was a great critic, and a very profound and most original thinker.
[Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, p 286]
Dickens lived in a time when an uncomprehending faith in some version of the ancient ideas that I have been putting forward, in this case Aristotle’s “unities” in the drama, was the accepted dogma, which didn’t mean that those ideas were generally understood. This faith was as ridiculous—and perhaps (though I doubt it) as destructive—as is our automatic obeisance to the “scientific” in theory and the “avant-garde” in expression today. Later in the same book, Dickens gives us more of Mr. Curdle, who talks portentously about “the unities” without any apparent comprehension of what they might mean:
“The original piece is a French one,” said Nicholas. “There is abundance of incident, sprightly dialogue, strongly-marked character—”
“—All unavailing without a strict observance of the unities, sir,” returned Mr. Curdle. “The unities of the drama, before everything.”
“Might I ask you,” said Nicholas, hesitating between the respect he ought to assume, and his love of the whimsical, “Might I ask you what the unities are?”
Mr. Curdle coughed and considered. “The unities, sir,” he said, “are a completeness—a sort of general oneness, if I may be allowed to use so strong an expression. I take those to be the dramatic unities so far as I have been able to bestow attention on them, and I have read much upon the subject, and thought much.”
[Ibid. p 287]
At the Derrida lecture, his acolytes could be identified as readily by their expressions of hauteur as by their dark vestments and wire-rimmed glasses. They were student PWKs, aspiring to the lofty realms of literary and aesthetic theory, and no doubt already able to spin out the necessary jargon. Jargon is clearly not only useful but inevitable in conversation among experts within a given discipline, but this jargon is an odd achievement: it is a secret language whose very intent is the exclusion of outsiders, like the variations on pig-Latin of children hoping to frustrate the curiosity of grownups and unfavored contemporaries. Further, its use produces nonsense—writing and speech which fails to communicate anything at all, or conceals a trite, simplistic, or irrelevant idea in a cloud of verbal “density.”
In 1996, the influential American academic journal of cultural studies Social Text published an article by American physicist Alan Sokal, titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Soon afterward, Dr. Sokal revealed that the article was a parody, “crammed with nonsensical, but unfortunately authentic quotations about physics and mathematics by prominent French and American intellectuals.”[18] To talk such nonsense on purpose is not easy for most of us. Dr. Sokal writes:
Like the genre it is meant to satirize—myriad exemplars of which can be found in my reference list—my article is a mélange of truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs, and syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever. (Sadly, there are only a handful of the latter: I tried hard to produce them, but I found that, save for rare bursts of inspiration, I just didn’t have the knack.) I also employed some other strategies that are well-established in the genre: appeals to authority in lieu of logic; speculative theories passed off as established science; strained and even absurd analogies; rhetoric that sounds good but whose meaning is ambiguous; and confusion between the technical and everyday senses of English words. (N.B. All works cited in my article are real, and all quotations are rigorously accurate; none are invented.)
[Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense, pp 268-9]
The fake article was written in an “erudite but impenetrable lingo,” and so the journal’s editors, properly impressed, failed to notice—or perhaps to care—that it made no sense at all. [19] Its very title, “Transgressing the Boundaries,” was slyly designed to attract those committed to marching ahead with the avant-garde. It was obviously written by a bona fide authority (a physical scientist!), and employed all the right buzz words. Who could ask for more? Its author later wrote the witty and bracing book Fashionable Nonsense with Belgian physicist Jean Bricmont—not, they say in their preface, just to point out isolated abuses, but to expose examples of “mystification, deliberately obscure language, confused thinking, and the misuse of scientific concepts,” which they see as indications of a whole set of intellectual practices commonly encountered today.
Another obvious body of writing-for-obfuscation can be found in the great morass of theory and what has been called “artspeak” which arose along with abstract or nonobjective painting and sculpture in the 20th century. Fully nonobjective work carries no message, and its subject is itself—this much black, this much red, arranged in this way, using these shapes, in an attempt to reach < >´ in a thus-far-unmanifest form. The expert is provided a challenging opportunity to hold forth. Much “dense” writing results, and much of it is nonsense, produced, like the pseudo-scientific analysis that Sokal and Bricmont ridicule, to confuse and impress the laity, and to screen poverty of content with the complexity and incoherence of the language. At Harvard's Graduate School of Design in the late 1980’s a visiting lecturer from Germany warned an audience of faculty and students that originality is a rare and difficult thing, that a really new idea is seldom seen, and that to use words against their meaning and call that originality is ludicrous. This caused not a ripple in the culture then prevailing within the building.
Many artists of all kinds have now taken up the challenge to talk what George Orwell might have called “theoryspeak”—it has come to be a necessary part of their equipment in the climb to fame and fortune in a world of commodified art. Many art schools now offer courses in it, and any art student is well-advised to learn it; a student who has a gift for it is seen as a potential star, no matter the quality of his or her work. At times, that work and the theoretical justification provided for it are entirely at cross purposes, but no one seems to care. In another lecture at Harvard, Swiss/French architect Bernard Tscuhmi described his use of chance and randomness (two then-fashionable generators of form) in the design and placement of small red-painted buildings or “follies” in his competition-winning design for Place de La Villette in Paris, a vast paved open space, the 55-hectare site of a demolished abattoir, or slaughterhouse. The architect had consulted Jaques Derrida in the preparation of his design proposal. As Tschumi spoke, his slides showed the festive red follies from the air, their positioning clearly rationalized by a regular square grid pattern built into the overall paving of the open space.[20] Probably nothing is less random than a grid: any object placed within it is immediately organized in relation to its stable linear datum.[21] The buildings, though different from one another, were also unified by their identical volumes (fitting into a cube of a prescribed size) and lipstick-red color, and by their Russian Constructivist forms. Everyone in the audience probably knew this, but no one objected.
There is always a small thrill in being in-the-know, even for the lay viewer. While trying to get near the works on view at blockbuster shows of visual art, or during concert intermissions, one is often unable to escape the loudly expressed opinions of some lay expert who has taken a course or two, read a book or two, and who apparently has no sense of humility or even of reticence, either before the work or when surrounded by the art-loving public. A kind of closed society is implied—made up of the expert, present in the gallery or talking through headphones, the educated viewer, and even, now and then, the artist. There are levels of hierarchy among the knowers, but together they form a group apart.
Can any of this be a matter for serious objection when the formation of elite groups is so natural to human beings? Aside from the unhealthy reverence for the expert which allows us to avoid thinking for ourselves, it is important because, for one thing, it deprives many people of the benefits of the arts by making them feel, again and again and in myriad ways, inadequate to the experience.
A young American who for years had read of the power of the great Zen stone and sand garden at Ryoan-ji was at last able to visit it. To his dismay, he found that he experienced nothing remarkable when looking at it. Here was one of the great sights of the world and he could not see it! His foreknowledge of the garden stood between him and the experience, and spoiled it for him. He expected great things, both of the group of stones set in raked sand, and of himself, and he was disappointed in both. His ability simply to contemplate that profound work of art and its setting—to experience purely what was there—had been sabotaged, and he didn’t know how to restore himself. If he had silenced the monkey mind, so as to contemplate what was before him with quiet mind and open senses, and been willing to trust in himself, the experience available there, “emanating its aesthetic presence,” would have reached him, nourishing and enlivening him and allowing him to feel safe at home in the world and full of joy. As it was, its reputation had more power in him than its reality did.
Arrogance is the occupational hazard of the expert, the critic. To know more about something than other people, and to be not only invited but paid to make judgements in relation to other people’s work, can be heady stuff. Some experts cultivate (or indulge a natural tendency toward) a snide, dismissive, and superior tone intended to intimidate those less fluent with “facts” and references and vocabulary.
Here again is Walker Percy:
The technician and the sophomore who loves his textbook are always offended by the genuine research man because the latter is usually a little vague and humble before the thing; he doesn't have much use for the equipment or jargon. Whereas the technician is never vague and never humble before the thing; he holds the thing disposed of by the principle, the formula, the textbook outline; and he thinks a great deal of equipment and jargon.…a predicament in which everyone finds himself in a modern technical society—a society, that is, in which there is a division between expert and layman, planner and consumer, in which experts and planners take special measures to teach and edify the consumer.
[Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle, p 61]
A division between theorist and practitioner was recognized as early as the first century CE, when Vitruvius offered advice on the education of the architect:
It follows therefore, that architects who have aimed at aquiring manual skill without scholarship have never been able to reach a position of authority to correspond with their pains, while those who relied upon theories and scholarship were obviously hunting the shadow, not the substance. But those who have a thorough knowledge of both, like men armed at all points, have the sooner attained their object and carried authority with them.
[Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, p 5]
This prescription presumes, of course, that the theorist wants to talk sense in relation to the realities of experience, rather than to impress the listener while hiding the obviousness or shallowness (or falsity) of what’s really being said. The late British playwright Harold Pinter hunted the substance, rather than the shadow.
If I am to talk at all, I prefer to talk practically about practical matters, but that’s no more than a pious hope, since one invariably slips into theorizing, almost without noticing it. And I distrust theory. In whatever capacity I have worked in the theatre, and, apart from writing, I have done quite a bit of acting, and a certain amount of directing for the stage, I have found that theory, as such, has never been helpful. The best sort of collaborative working relationship in the theatre, in my view, consists in a kind of stumbling erratic shorthand, through which facts are lost, collided with, fumbled, found again . . .
I don’t want to imply that I am counseling lack of intelligence as a working aid. On the contrary, I am referring to an intelligence brought to bear on practical and relevant matters, on matters which are active and alive and specific, an intelligence working with others to find the legitimate, and therefore compulsory facts and make them concrete for us on the stage…
[Harold Pinter, program notes for the film The Homecoming, American Film Theater, 1973-74 season]
The search for the “legitimate, and therefore compulsory facts” of the work is the very heart and foundation of the project, but these facts cannot be found by any prescribed path, or once found, expressed in words. It is a matter of: This must happen this way in relation to this other thing in order to be somehow right, because we, as artists—and again, somehow—recognize that it is legitimate, simply a fact, and therefore compulsory. But to find these “facts” about the work takes all our intelligence and all our intuition. “Intelligence brought to bear on practical and relevant matters” could serve as a definition of insight. Peter Hall, Pinter’s director for the film The Homecoming, described the process slightly differently:
[P]eople always want to simplify anything which is rich and ambiguous and alive, and, if they feel slightly baffled, they want formulas, they want answers. What any Pinter play is about is what happens, what happens in it. And it seems to me perfectly evident what happens. But he deals in such complex situations that you have to keep the options open…
…[Y]ou can’t define poetry or sonnets. You can’t say what Hamlet means.
And I think it’s a comparable situation. I know what I think [the play] means second by second. So does the cast, or they couldn’t have played it. Of course, I discussed it with Pinter. Of course I say to him, the emphasis there seems to be that way, but he never says no it isn’t. He says, ah, that’s very interesting let’s try that. And if you say to him what does it mean, he says what does it say. And I think that is the right attitude for an author.… But he can and does say to me that’s wrong. He will never say that’s right, but he will say that’s wrong, and that’s why I like working with him, because it is my job to find out why it’s wrong and what’s right.
[Peter Hall, Ibid.]
This may be difficult to grasp fully, but that is not because the speaker is inarticulate, or trying to impress the interviewer. He is making a sincere attempt to communicate the unsayable, “the one thing that cannot be explained”—Matisse’s “only valid thing.” And like Walker Percy’s “genuine research man,” he is “a little vague and humble before the thing.” An interviewer may want to find out how the play, as finally performed, is made, decision by decision, in order to inform his readers. The director wants to tell him—but it is, finally, impossible. This, you may say, is common knowledge! But it is vital. It is usually unmentioned, and therefore easy to forget, but it must be kept in mind as fundamental, just as we relate our imaginings of what is possible in the real world to the mysterious fact of gravity.
One last expression of the artist’s view was encountered in an article about Elsa Klensch, whose CNN program, “Style,” covered the world of fashion in the 1980s and ‘90s. Klensch believed that her role was to convey the designers’ thoughts to her audience.
Designers adore Klensch.…[Calvin] Klein, who is usually very reluctant to talk to the press…cheerfully enumerated her virtues.…“Her show is a designer’s dream, because this is a way to communicate my message through Elsa, without any misinterpretation…. The way that she set up the program was to inform people—and the truth is, who knows more about what they have created than the person who created it? It is a no-brainer, but why is Elsa the only one who does it? Others review, they theorize, they criticize”—Klein’s tone was dismissive—“but they really tell you more about themselves than about what you are seeing.”
[Rebecca Mead, “Elsa’s Reign,” The New Yorker, September 20, 1999]
+
In my inventory of complaints against experts, here is a final and obvious one: Being human, they are sometimes wrong. This inescapable fallibility, combined with their temptation to arrogance and the now habitual and mindless acceptance of their dicta, can produce results more damaging than might initially be seen. First, there is the inevitable confusion resulting from jargon-infested, “dense” writing, and the helpless and sometimes angry discouragement of the student compelled to read it and to pass exams in the material by parroting or by imitating it. Beyond that, however, there is the clearly stated, but mistaken, claim, which, thanks to the authority of the claimant, is then woven into the general fabric of understanding. It becomes a “truth” on which further thinking is confidently based, sometimes for many years. Sometimes, no doubt, it is never corrected.
The unavoidable fact that the respected pundit Erwin Panofsky had made such a seminal mistake was admitted by his fellow-expert, E.H. Gombrich, in the New York Review of Books in 1996:
With his customary ingenuity and erudition Panofsky sets out to prove that the ancient world lacked the concept of space that would have enabled its artists to develop one-point perspective.…meanwhile the philological arguments on which Panofsky relied have proved erroneous.[[22]]…Richard Tobin [1990] has demonstrated that Panofsky, in drawing his conclusion about ancient concepts of space, misinterpreted Euclid’s text.…Decio Gioseffi [in 1957, but in an Italian journal] had made a similar charge against Panofsky’s reading of an admittedly very obscure passage in Vitruvius.
[E.H. Gombrich, New York Review of Books, 2/15/96]
The “very obscure passage in Vitruvius” is actually an intriguing paragraph in the one short book on architecture which survives to us from classical times; I have occasionally quoted from it here. Vitruvius’s treatise is probably assigned reading at every school of architecture, though it may be that few students actually read much of it, for the reasons mentioned earlier: that as C.S. Lewis wrote, “To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge—to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior—this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded.”[23] But we might expect that anyone writing on the Italian Renaissance would feel obliged to study Vitruvius’s little book, since it was the standard architectural reference and authority during that stunningly creative period, and is our only original source on classical architecture.[24] One of the book’s notable features is that nothing in it is “obscure”; it is the plain writing of a plain and practical man, setting forth important principles for the edification of the Emperor Augustus Caesar. In his introduction to Book VII, Vitruvius writes:
I express unlimited thanks to all the authors that have in the past, by compiling from antiquity remarkable instances of the skill shown by genius, provided us with abundant materials of different kinds. Drawing from them as it were water from springs, and converting them to our own purposes, we find our powers of writing rendered more fluent and easy….
…Agatharcus, in Athens, when Aeschylus was bringing out a tragedy, painted a scene, and left a commentary about it. This led Democritus and Anaxagoras to write on the same subject, showing how, given a centre in a definite place, the lines should naturally correspond with due regard to the point of sight and the divergence of the visual rays, so that by this deception a faithful representation of the appearance of buildings might be given in a painted scenery, and so that, though all is drawn on a vertical flat façade, some parts may seem to be withdrawing into the background, and others to be standing out in front.
[Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, p 198]
Note that Virtuvius mentions three ancient Greek authors who wrote on the use of linear perspective to represent three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface such as a stage flat. But even if we didn’t have Vitruvius, or if his works were legion and full of “obscure passages,” would it be rational to claim that the ancients “lacked the concept of space,” when every living creature able to move is obliged to form such concepts when first learning to crawl, stumble or slither from one place to another? Professor Panofsky didn’t limit himself to the mistaken claim that linear perspective was invented during the Renaissance; he hugely extended the idea, claiming that the ancients somehow failed to conceive of space itself.
In the preface to his 1991 book, Art and Physics, physician Leonard Schlain describes himself as “a responsive, alert member of the culture,” a lover of both art and science. But he tells us that after a visit to MOMA in New York City his twelve-year-old daughter asked him a question which obliged him to recognize that although he knew “the intellectual context of each modern movement” he didn’t really “get” much of twentieth century art. He then “felt annoyed” with the artists “who made comprehension so difficult for us; who refused, as it were, to let us in on some important secret.”[25] As a surgeon, a craft which he says “demands a finely honed sense of aesthetics,” Dr Schlain follows a “maxim” of his profession: that “if an operation does not ‘look’ beautiful it will most likely not function beautifully.” He hopes that the fact that he is neither a physicist nor an artist will enable him to “demystify” art by means of “scientific interpretation.” In his bibliography he lists Ernst Gombrich’s Art and Illusion; A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation.[26] His chapter on the development of linear perspective and its benefits quotes William Ivins’ “incisive” book Art and Geometry:
Perspective is…the central projection of a three-dimensional space upon a plane. Untechnically, it is the way of making a picture on a flat surface in such a manner that the various objects represented in it appear to have the same sizes, shapes, positions relatively [sic] to each other, that the actual objects as located in actual space would have if seen by the beholder from a single determined point of view. I have discovered nothing to justify the belief that the Greeks had any idea, either in practice or theory, at any time, of [linear perspective].…It is an idea that was unknown to the Greeks.
[Leonard Schlain, Art & Physics, p 53]
Professor Gombrich tells us, in the article referred to above, that when Professor Panofsky’s mistake became known, the sage’s response was, “I myself am unfortunately too old and too set in the good old ways actively to participate in this development …but…I have a dim consciousness that something extremely important is happening.”[27] Such elderly evasiveness in the face of discovered error is rather more graceful than the reaction which might be expected of H.G. Wells’s PWKS-of-the-future, “rapt in an impervious and apoplectic complacency, from which only a denial of their erudition can rouse them.” Mary Midgely has written about fruitless academic controversies and the fear of being seen as wrong:
Why are we [academics] so drawn to controversy, and why does that controversy so often prove unprofitable? It seems important here to ask a large question. Is the point of academic enquiry to get right answers, or to avoid getting wrong ones? At a glance, these two enterprises look rather alike, but actually they diverge surprisingly. And there are many features in academic life that seem to tend us to the second rather than the first. In our professional work, we are usually addressing an audience of fellow-experts who, in spite of their disagreements, do agree on a wide range of basic assumptions. If this audience is small, we can often find strength to resist them, and this is also easy if it is already divided and we have only to join one party. But where it is monolithic, at a certain point the mass goes critical…unless we are exceptionally tough, their tacit expectations will dominate us. It is hard for us even to think of taking quite a different line.…
So how is any mistake that these experts are all making ever to be corrected? (Anyone who doubts that they could all be making such a mistake might do well to look at the back numbers of journals in their own subject for ten, twenty, forty years ago.)
[Mary Midgley, Wisdom, Information and Wonder, p 66]
The objection, then, should be—not to an expert’s being wrong, but to the reverence accorded to the views of great experts by lesser experts or experts in other fields, and by the public. Professor Midgely’s book, Wisdom, Information and Wonder: What is Knowledge For? is a forthright and informative essay on these matters, a plea for common sense, and a great pleasure to read.
Gratitude for that book brings me naturally to a so-far overlooked part of my subject: the works of all those experts, all the critics, professors and pundits, whose opinions, theories, essays, lectures, articles and books on every kind of topic so enrich, inform, and—on a very high level—entertain us. They succeed, I believe, because they retain Walker Percy’s “humility before the thing.”[28] They are in touch with what they are talking about, experiencing it in the way that any other human being might, and that experience is their primary source. If they are also sensitive, erudite, knowledgeable, and eloquent, they may produce something marvelous indeed.
Here is an example of such writing, by the late Bert O. States, an expert on theatre and also a professor:
Immediately we see that the I of the actor is not at all the I of the character he is playing, the voice that keeps saying “I, I, I” throughout the play. The actor’s first person is what appears before us as the character, the being that has, in effect, no voice of its own but whose very presence and way of appearing constitute the act of direct speech within the indirect speech of the enacted event. It is visible in the effortless hard work that produces on the actor’s brow beads of perspiration that do not belong to the character he is playing. But the I is not simply the actor’s real body. It is rather the unnatural attitude of the body, the thousand different means and behavioral peculiarities by which the actor unavoidably remains just outside the character he is playing. He is always slightly quoting the character, though…not as a consciously estranged style. Even if he is quoting in the Brechtian sense, there is a quotation behind this quotation. No matter how he acts, there is always the ghost of a self in his performance (not to be confused with egotism). Even the most unsophisticated theatregoer can detect something else in the characterization, a superconsciousness that could be nothing other than the actor’s awareness of his own self-sufficiency as he moves between the contradictory zones of the illusory and the real, vraisemblance and vrai, seeming and being—between Hamlet and what of himself he has allowed to be displayed as Hamlet. It is not a statement made by the body or the eyes, but an intentional edge in the performance, signified by the aura of style and concentration, or by the submission of the body to a certain rigor, or absence of excess, that relieves the most naturalistic performance of a completely convincing realism. It is something that could not be found in any other form than that of art.
[Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, p 124-5]
What makes this so wonderful?
-
What is said: revelatory, informative, reminding of things not consciously noticed before, making reference to historical precedent, stimulating curiosity (what is “quoting in the Brechtian sense”?)—and, to my ear, making both tacit and explicit reference to < >´, allowing “the mystery” to be an ingredient in the discourse.
-
How it is said: clearly, sparely, elegantly, rhythmically, eloquently. It sends us back, again and again, to our own experience, which in this case, for me, supports it at every instance and nuance, so that I have a continuing experience of fellowship with the author, of walking with him in a sort of dance. It is both simple and erudite, both precise and playful. What pleasure to be in such company!