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Faulkner Mississippi: April 1982 |Essay — Jack Hodgins

Apr 262010

Though I’ve known and admired Jack Hodgin‘s work for ages, we actually hadn’t met til we ended up on the same judges’ panel for a literary award three years ago. Usually, these things are tense affairs, but Jack, our third panelist, the novelist Joan Barfoot, and I had such an agreeable time together we became internet friends, a tiny community of three sending group emails back and forth. Joan lives in London, Ontario, and Jack lives far, far away on Vancouver Island. He has been known to complain ruefully, upon finding a sequence of emails from Joan and me, that everything happens in the rest of the world before he even wakes up in the morning.

Jack has been a huge and beneficent presence on the Canadian literary scene for a couple of generations now. You can find all this for yourself by exploring his website (which, incidentally, contains a generous amount of writing advice). I love the list of prizes he’s won; it’s almost as long as the number of books he’s published. I am also fascinated by his real life relationship with the fictional character Dr. Jack Hodgins in the TV series “Bones.”

This little essay is just a taste. I like it because it reminds me of all the friends who have made the pilgrimage to Oxford–so many of us loved Faulkner and yet had to fight our way out from under his stylistic shadow.

Jack has a new novel coming out in May. It’s called The Master of Happy Endings. This is what Alice Munro says about it: “From one of Canada’s master storytellers comes a powerful new novel about memory, belonging, helping others, and the vagaries of the human heart. It is also a compelling story about how a man in his later seventies manages to conjure one more great adventure for himself.” Buy the book.

FAULKNER MISSISSIPPI: April 1982

Walking up the pathway towards the front steps and white pillars of the house known as Rowan Oak, I was aware of a chill that lifted the hairs at the back of my neck. William Faulkner had lived here, had written most of his novels here, had walked up this pathway, perhaps had even laid this herringbone brickwork in the pathway himself. The man would not be inside, of course – he had been dead for several years – but the house was open to visitors, with a resident guide from the nearby university. Still, I was about to reach the destination in what was really a sort of pilgrimage.

We had spent a few sunny April days in New Orleans before driving the little rented car north, pausing only briefly in Baton Rouge before passing into Mississippi. We’d visited the ante-bellum houses in Natchez and toured the 16 miles of Vicksburg battleground before driving on up the highway through pine forests in the direction of Oxford.

In the direction, that is, of the town where once lived the man whose books had thrilled and inspired me, and whose powerful voice and vision had so invaded me as to destroy all my earliest attempts at writing – two bad novels and several stories, all rejected and abandoned — before I’d eventually found my own place and my own voice. Still, though I may have shaken off much of the power I’d once allowed him to have, I had not abandoned my admiration for the man and his work.

Of course the first indication we were entering Faulkner country was the little signpost naming the Yocana River, which was just a narrow yellow creek barely moving at the bottom of a muddy ditch. It was not easy to imagine this “Yoknapatawpha” in anything like flood, or to believe in the difficulties it gave the Bundren family when they crossed it with the mother’s coffin, heading, as we were, for the town where “Pa” would get a new set of teeth, bury his wife, and find himself a new one. I hoped this was not a hint of more disappointments ahead.

Read the rest!

The View from the Masthead: Moby Dick Cut in Half — Gary Garvin

Apr 232010

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

Down in the mouth myself the past months over matters personal and literary, I decided to follow Ishmael’s advice and took to the sea, vicariously at least, and reread Moby Dick, or rather Moby Dick; or the Whale—the full title of the original edition. It was a good break. I had a chance to leave behind the present noise and let myself drift in its sea of words, be carried by the slow, restless rhythms of musings that took me everywhere and nowhere. To read Moby Dick is to become aware of the immensity of things one cannot explain, that one may never understand, yet at the same time be reminded of humanity and culture. All three are related.

I also ran across two recent editions, both abridgments. Orion, a British publisher, released Moby Dick (Moby Dick: In Half the Time) a version that did just that, cut the novel in half, to make it accessible to those of us who just don’t have the time to read those big, old books. This edition prompted Damion Searls to take all the parts that were removed by Orion and present them together as a novel in their own right, ; or The Whale—the part of the title Orion cut—which appeared in its entirety in The Review of Contemporary Fiction (Summer 2009). The Orion edition does not name the editor (editors?) who made its cuts.

I have the Searls but not the Orion. It’s impossible for me to read either fresh since I have read the full version several times and would be able to fill in what is left out in both. I have, however, skimmed through ; or The Whale. It is a strange, wild book that intrigues me in many ways, for reasons I may never be able to sort out, which intrigues me as well.

The introduction to the Searls also gave an excerpt from Adam Gopnik’s New Yorker review of the Orion (“The Corrections,” October 22, 2007), which I also tracked down.

These passages are, by modern critical standards, “showy” and “digressive,” nervously intent to display stray learning and to make obscure allusion more powerful than inherent emotion… Melville’s story is intact and immediate; it’s just that the long bits about the technical details of whaling are gone, as are most of the mock-Shakespearean interludes, the philosophical meanderings, and the metaphysical huffing and puffing.

Gopnik is referring to the parts that were deleted. He is also voicing an esthetic, “modern critical standards,” and that is what I want to look at in this post.

Melville does spend an enormous amount of time detailing whales, whalers, whaling ships, and the history and practice of whaling—and so much more. He also densely packs his writing with a wide range of allusions that span centuries and cross cultures, East and West. Many day-to-day incidents are related in scenes that have no dramatic bearing on the essential plot, the course of events leading up to the fatal encounter with that huge, white fish. Allusions and other references are pared down; the introductory section “Extracts,” which contains excerpts from the Bible and literary writing that mention whales, was removed entirely. What Shakespeare did with language, apparently, should be left in the Bard’s grave. Not only is philosophy idle bluster, neither, apparently, is there much use for religion. Orion also removed the chapter on Father Mapple’s pulpit and, needless to say, we don’t get to see him climb it and hear him deliver his sermon—based on the book of Jonah, of course.

But what is essential to this novel—or to any novel? Some standard needs to be set, and one is suggested: emotion is what should drive a novel and not thought. Gopnik elaborates:

By the same token, the Orion Moby-Dick is not defaced; it is, by conventional contemporary standards of good editing and critical judgment, improved. The compact edition adheres to a specific idea of what a good novel ought to be: the contemporary aesthetic of the realist psychological novel.

Moby Dick does have many penetrating psychological observations, but these are only one part of his development of characters, of the ground beneath the plot. The main plot itself, the pursuit of the white whale, is determined by more than Ahab’s obsession and subsequent mental breakdown. Melville takes a position that people are more than a mixed bag of motives, traits, and pathologies, that our identities and behavior are defined not just by the interaction of these with those of other people, but also by whatever else exists in our cultures and whatever might lie beyond that.

I’m not sure what a realist novel is, however, though know I haven’t read one yet. Reality is a subjective matter that depends on who looks at what, how he or she looks, and why. Melville’s technical and historical excursions are what ground me in the “reality” of the book, and their bulk massively persuades me to accept it. But reality is only one effect in fiction. Mystery is another. Why are we so profoundly moved by an immense mammal that is largely comprised of that fragrant, oily stuff whalers refined to light America? Melville explores this question at length. We need to ask a similar question about his novel.

It is what a good editor, of the Maxwell Perkins variety, would do: cut out the self-indulgent stuff and present a clean story, inhabited by plausible characters—the “taut, spare driving” narrative beloved of Sunday reviewers…

There is nothing self-indulgent about Moby Dick. Ishmael, the narrator, is self-effacing and rarely speaks about himself. He always step backs, placing himself in the vast perspective of the subject matters of the novel. It is one of the least egotistical books I’ve read.

Self-indulgent, however, is a word I’ve often heard lately from readers and reviewers—and editors and agents. Pretentious is another. Again, I’m not sure what they mean, but these words seem to be applied to anything that taxes them in content or form, or slows them down, or stretches their frame of reference.

The subtraction does not turn a good work into hackwork; it turns a hysterical, half-mad masterpiece into a sound sane book. It still has its phallic reach and point, but lacks its flaccid, anxious self-consciousness.

If these editors have their say—and they have—this is my greatest regret about writing today, that we can’t have anxious, half-mad, much less fully mad, novels. For me it is enough cause to write one.

But the novel is an exploration of sanity, set against the serious madness of Ahab. Not mentioned in Gopnik’s comments is what buoys the narrative and helps keep madness in check, Melville’s generous democratic spirit and the expansive humor that infuse his book. Nor does Melville ever rest with certainty, or the appearance of certainty. He does not claim to have all the answers, or any of them. This, to me, is sanity, and Moby Dick is as sane as a novel can get.

Moby Dick is a ponderous book that promotes pondering. Is there a god or gods, thus a basis for religion? Is there any point to philosophy? Is our culture determined by anything other than our desires and their manifestations and perversions? I have no idea, but all of these are engaging esthetic propositions that give a novel depth and extension. Literature, however, I am certain exists, and Melville sustains a discussion about literature that has been going on for millennia and, I would argue, looks forward to its future.

Some of the writing, to be sure, is overblown, and many of his allusions strike me as odd and forced. And it is an odd book. The novel takes the point of view of Ishmael, yet often abandons it. In one chapter we see Ahab in his cabin, talking to himself; in another we hear a voice from another ship, the Delight, as the Pequod sails away. Several chapters are written like plays, with stage directions and characters’ lines. Sometimes the narrator steps back in time, sometimes forward, and sometimes steps out of it altogether as he writes chapters that take the form of entries in an encyclopedia.

None of which disturbs me. It is a novel that necessarily has to be hit or miss in its writing, given the magnitude yet elusiveness of its subject. A harpooner has to hurl several times before he hits his target. Not only does it grapple with life’s questions, it questions novels themselves, taking on the conflict between form and content, between containers and what they try to contain, between points of view and larger perspectives. It is a novel that debates the novel. I don’t have to adjust much to make the shifts work.

“Call me Ishmael”—is that actually the narrator’s name, or is he characterizing himself by this allusion, a kind of Ishmael about whom the angel said:

And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him. (Genesis 16:12)

A judgment Melville must have taken to heart, given his literary career. Or is Ishmael a pseudonym the narrator gives himself? We never hear his last name and are told almost nothing about Ishmael’s prior life except that he once sailed on a merchant ship. Is the young narrator, in fact, a budding novelist, who presents himself both as a character in the book as well as the Author? (The Author is Melville, writing from his experience as a sailor and writer, but not Melville, since Melville never sailed on the Pequod.) The dominant time of the novel is not that of the events on the Pequod but of the writing of the book itself, a time to which so many chapters return; the dominant voice is that of the mature writer. It is a novel of reflection and looking back, and the Author is an author who tests authorship.

I have no objection to judicious editing or to realist psychological novels. Both depend, however, upon a set of assumptions, which, like any other, need to be examined and considered against other possibilities. To decide these modern critical standards have priority is to make the mistake that form should determine content, and not the other way around.

If these are our only standards, what esthetic and cultural decisions have been made, with what effects? These editors suffer, I fear, from a modern condition known as sanity. Fiction has made progress, and we have discovered its true structure. There is no longer any need to experiment with the form. Novels must be terse, direct, and clean, where motives and actions are what count most, perhaps all that count. Action speaks louder than thought and should be decisive and quick. There is no room for doubt or hesitation, no reason to question ourselves or look for other contexts. Our references should come from the things that most catch our attention at the moment, that most thrill. We know all we need to know now and have no need for looking back.

And what if our ways of telling stories are telling us how to live? Once upon a time there was a passionate man of action who decided if we took out the bad guy—well, what? Peace and world order would be restored? Did our last president look at other texts or think past the dramatic climax to the story he wrote about Iraq?

An excerpt from ; or The Whale, Chapter 10 in its entirety:

Chapter 10

A Bosom Friend

long-drawn

It may seem ridiculous, but

He made no advances whatever; appeared to have no desire to enlarge the circle of his acquaintances.

If there yet lurked any ice of indifference towards me in the pagan’s breast, soon thawed it out, and

More excerpts can be found here. Searls comments on ; or The Whale here, at The Quarterly Conversation. A translator, he also writes fiction and offers his manifesto for the New Aestheticism here, again at The Quarterly, which might be compared and contrasted with Gopnik’s esthetic. We’re trying to find our way now, once again. Excerpt:

Modest in aim, New Aestheticist art does not want to change the world—to bear witness, deconstruct, problematize. It does not batten onto greater social goals, the kind responsibly fundable with tax dollars. It wants merely to be beautiful.

It differs from the old Aestheticism, “art for art’s sake,” in that it no longer believes in Art as a sake either, as a holy cause. New Aestheticism is art for people’s sakes. It is not antisocial; it aims to please. It is elitist but not discriminatory, for it is open to any and all who care to love it.

Seamen had to take their turns standing at the mastheads, ever on the lookout for whales. But they didn’t have a crow’s nest as such, but rather had to stand and balance themselves on two thin spars—the t’ gallant crosstrees—with only two metal rings to cling to. Ishmael describes the temptations of his first watch:

… but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space… There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever.

Also deleted in the Orion.

I must confess I took a few lines out myself.

The picture of an American whaler, above, is by Currier and Ives.

— Gary Garvin

Gary Garvin lives in San Jose, California, where he writes and teaches English. He has written two novels, and his essays and short stories have appeared in Numéro Cinq, the minnesota review, New Novel Review, Confrontation, The New Review, The Santa Clara Review, The South Carolina Review, The Berkeley Graduate, and The Crescent Review. He is currently at work on a collection of essays and another novel.

Dance in America, Cosmology & the ‘F’ Word: Essay — Richard Farrell

Apr 132010

Lorrie Moore

Dancing Amidst Despair: From Cosmology to Counterpointed Characterization

We begin adrift, as an idea hovering above a blank page, as two cells floating in the miasma of fallopian tubes. Our stories and our lives begin as little-things, as truly, almost nothing. And from the void emerges a word, a unified cell; and thus begins the story, begins the life. How much does an idea weigh? Certainly even less than a single cell, if such weights were quantifiable, yet all things are built upon these foundations of lightness. A creation begins with the merest thing. The idea, like the cell, must gain by accretion. It lives only with connections to other ideas—without those connections, it vanishes. And with variability, with diversity, with contrast, the stories and characters become rich and layered.

Pattiann Rogers opens her essay, Twentieth-Century Cosmology and the Soul’s Habitation, with this thought: “I’m very curious about the grid upon which we mentally place ourselves in time and space. There must be a grid of some kind there for each of us, a visual scaffolding, for balance, for orientation.” I think of that grid as a story, as the details which define the particular world of imagined lives captured on a page. I think of that grid as the small, Pennsylvania college town where Lorrie Moore’s unnamed narrator has gone for an evening to meet up with her old friend, Cal, in the short story “Dance In America.” I’d like to dwell on that grid awhile, to see if it can provide some clue what it’s all about.

Moore opens with an evocative, almost lyrical passage about dance. Yet absent in this opening is character. The unnamed narrator speaks in abstractions to an undefined audience, albeit with carefully crafted words.

I tell them dance begins when a moment of hurt combines with a moment of boredom. I tell them it’s the body’s reaching, bringing air into itself. I tell them it’s the heart’s triumph, the victory speech of the feet, the refinement of animal lunge and flight, the purest metaphor of tribe and self. It is life flipping death the bird.

I make this stuff up.

Despite the power of the language, the story suffers because we don’t have a grid yet, we don’t have a context for what’s happening, until the second paragraph, that is. Until the narrator bursts in and says, “I make this stuff up.” That short sentence brings life in. It opens up the story so that a character speaks honestly about herself. It reveals instantly a penetrating and close narrative voice. The rest is slight by comparison—beautiful phrases destined for posters hanging in a dance studio. Without the dancer, the words mean almost nothing. Character must be present to contextualize the abstraction.

Later, the narrator and Cal are out walking his dog, and talking about the past. “He’d been exaggerating his interest in dance. ‘I didn’t get it,’ he admitted. ‘I kept trying to figure out the story.’” Dance continues to remain abstract here, a concept not yet alive. Cal as much as tells us this. There is also a distinct coolness between these two old friends so far. “I’m determined to be agreeable,” the narrator says at one point; “I must be nice,” she says just a paragraph later. They talk about paint colors and trade witticisms about Snickerdoodles, but all of this is surface clutter. There is not enough contrast or conflict between the narrator and Cal. At one point on the walk, they even think the same thoughts. “Up in the sky, Venus and the thinnest pairing of sickle moon, like a cup and saucer, like a nose and mouth, have made the Turkish flag in the sky,” thinks the narrator. “‘Wow,’ Cal says. ‘The Turkish flag.’” Were this to continue, I would argue that these two characters would not generate much dramatic spark. Such energy-providing contrast comes from what Charles Baxter calls counterpointed characterization. This will come in a minute, but first, back to the cosmos.

Rogers quotes Bertrand Russell when she says, “The point of departure must be ‘unyielding despair.’ We start from the recognition of that point to build the soul’s habitation.” This despair emerges from a modern cosmology, a historically recent understanding of the universe and our almost imperceptible presence in it. Rogers says:

The Sun is tiny compared to the size of the solar system, the solar system to the size of the Milky Way galaxy, the Milky Way to the size of the Andromeda galaxy, which is twice as big, containing 400 billion stars. And yet the Andromeda galaxy is tiny compared to the universe, which contains billions of other galaxies. All of that, up there, going on at this moment.

The point of departure Rogers refers to is the act of creation within the vast coldness of an indifferent cosmos. In the past, such creation had a single source and a single destination: the divine and it’s manifestation of a destiny—a revealed plan for man. For a long time in the West, art, history, politics and society served and glorified God, with a capital G. Modern thinking, however, must contend with a much different perception of reality. Rogers says: “As a result of this cosmology all of us, I would venture to say, have seen ourselves at some moment or other as ‘mankind aimlessly adrift in a meaningless universe.’” We begin adrift. This awareness of our diminished role in the cosmos leads directly to a sense of unyielding despair. What can we do, specks of dust on a piece of rock floating in an unfathomable, endless universe? How can we create something of value in a universe devoid of meaning? Rogers turns not to science’s reductive approach of cutting and measuring (which she also defends and respects) but by seeking an artistic interconnectedness in things. “The creative person, whether scientist or artist,…is that person who imagines new, different connections, broadening our conception of the universe and its interconnectedness as a whole.” Charles Baxter echoes this too, although more narrowly, when he talks of the “incompatibility of passion and gentility” in James Joyce’s short story “The Dead.” The artist seeks to illuminate the human condition in the darkness of an unfathomable universe. Creation, in its highest forms, begins as an act of passion. “Passion knocks decency right off the stage,” Baxter says. The soul’s habitation is constructed on this grid, against this backdrop of cold, endless despair, filled with quotidian formality, gentility, struggles and structures, but in the hearth, a fire surely burns.

In order to render such passion in fiction, characters must be brought into contrast. Baxter says, “Plot often develops out of the tension between characters, and in order to get that tension, a writer sometimes has to be something of a matchmaker, creating characters who counterpoint one another.” Baxter says that characters are designed to rub up against each other, to create friction of sort, or even warmth, but that it is the connections between the characters that make the story. “Certain kinds of people are pushed together, people who bring out a crucial response in each other. A latent energy rises to the surface.” It can’t be done with beautiful prose alone, at least not in a sustainable way. Without the characters, the prose energy cools quickly. With counterpointed characters, the energy levels rise even more quickly. In “Dance In America,” Lorrie Moore works to heat up her story with the introduction of a seven year-old boy named Eugene.

Eugene, the son of Cal and his wife, Simone, has cystic fibrosis and his “whole life is a race with medical research.” Moore never says so directly, but we gather that the boy is dying. “Already, Cal says, Eugene has degenerated, grown worse, too much liquid in his lungs. ‘Stickiness,’ he calls it. ‘If he were three instead of seven, there’d be more hope.’” Enter the backdrop of despair. Yet in spite of his condition, a condition which makes him labor for breath, Eugene steals this story, crashing into it with life and verve. Notice the verbs Moore uses with respect to Eugene: shouts, slides, chases, races, grabs, and smiles. Eugene roars with life, overcoming his parents, the narrator and even our own despair. Before he even enters the story directly, his presence pulsates with energy. Talking to the narrator, Cal says:

‘It’s not that I’m not for the arts’, says Cal. ‘You’re here; money for the arts brought you here. That’s wonderful. It’s wonderful to see you after all these years. It’s wonderful to fund the arts. The arts are so nice and wonderful. But really: I say, let’s give all the money, every last fucking dime, to science.’

Notice the contrast here. The repetitive use of wonderful and the clichéd language in relationship to abstract things, and in relation to the narrator’s visit, builds to an almost ecstatic outpouring for Eugene, who has yet to appear but whose illness has been introduced. Moore uses the word fuck two times in this story, and both times (I will examine the second use below) the energy and force of that most un-genteel word strike exactly the right tone. There is no vulgarity here, only passion. The last sentence of this paragraph works like a prayer, like a devotion to the modern god, Science, driven by the most desperate yearning of the human spirit.

Eugene works as the counterpointed character to the adults in the story. With only Cal, Simone and the narrator, the story would fall flat. Eugene reminds the other characters what life is supposed to be about. In talking about counterpointed characters, Baxter says:

A third element is born when these characters meet. This element is not just drama, the force of conflicting desires. It is a kind of invisible presence whose identity is generated by the proximity of these…characters, and this presence in not moral or simple.

Eugene shakes up this story when he arrives. The adult lives are turned completely around. The story becomes exciting during Eugene’s time on stage. Notice the changes in the voice of the narrator especially—gone is the cynicism and ironic detachment from her voice. “He huddles close, cold in the drafty house, and I extend my long sweater around him like a shawl.” “He watches, rapt. His brown hair hangs in strings in his face, and he chews it.” With Eugene present, the narrator is dancing for the first time. Through his suffering, Eugene teaches the narrator (and presumably, hopefully, the reader) to celebrate life. After dinner, they actually go and dance in Cal’s living room. The narrator takes the hand of the “amazing Eugene” and loses herself to the music of Kenny Loggins. “We make a phalanx and march, strut, slide to the music. We crouch, move backward, then burst forward again. We’re aiming to create the mildew, resinous sweat smell of dance.”

This story works with no real direct conflict in it, other than the unyielding despair of an indifferent universe that would besiege a seven year-old boy with cystic fibrosis. What drives this story is the contrast between the adult word of sophistication and social codes and the free, more open world of Eugene. It’s Baxter’s passion knocking decency off the stage again. “Counterpointing substitutes for conflict, or displaces it,” Baxter says. Were Eugene not present, some other motive force would have to drive this story forward. Instead, Eugene’s vibrancy works to shake the characters loose of their doldrums. It’s managed carefully, however. Moore is hardly preaching and hardly providing a caricature of morality. In one telling scene, Eugene practically begs the narrator to visit his classroom the next day, when she stops by his school to conduct a dance workshop for older kids. “‘Sure,’ I say, not knowing that, in a rush, I will forget, and that I’ll be on a plane home already, leafing through some inane airline magazine before I remember that I forgot to do it.” Moore uses prolepsis here to underscore this scene’s importance, and she shows us how easy it is to forget the sublime in place of the mundane. The use of the airline magazine works to underscore this point. Just because Eugene’s presence shines like a beacon in this story, Moore is a careful enough artist to render reality’s often cold indifference to the light.

Yet, in spite of the pain and suffering, we press forward. Rogers puts it this way: “And here’s a miracle that must be constantly celebrated: In spite of the moments of the soul’s desperation, we do proceed.” Moore paints this picture vividly in the story, again using the sharp contrasts between Eugene and the adults. After he is called to dinner, Eugene must take a regimen of pills for his illness. Notice the verbs and how they contrast between the characters.

‘Coming!’ shouts Eugene, and he leaps off the couch and slides into the dining room, falling sideways into her chair. ‘Whoo,’ he says, out of breath. ‘I almost didn’t make it.’

‘Here,’ says Cal. He places a goblet of pills at Eugene’s place setting.

Eugene makes a face, but in the chair, he gets up on his knees, leans forward, glass of water in one hand, and begins the arduous activity of taking all the pills.

I sit in the chair opposite him and place my napkin in my lap.

In this short example, we have despair and miraculous procession. The illness hovers always over Eugene. Like the universe, it is a dark, relentless presence that cannot be escaped. Yet Eugene perseveres, undaunted by the magnitude of it. Notice also the counterpointing to create this effect: Cal, placing the pills, the narrator placing the napkin, while Eugene shouts, leaps, slides and falls into his chair. And though out of breath, he finds the strength to speak while the adults watch in near silence. As readers, we feel the emotional weight of Eugene through the adult consciousness of the story, but it is Eugene, not the adults, who instructs us how to live under the cold universe. Rogers says that “we continue to build the soul’s habitation” by “expressing the awe and thrill and gratitude we feel at the mystery and beauty of the universe.”

The final scene in “Dance in America” seems to capture this feeling of awe perfectly. The characters are dancing in the living room but Eugene tires due to his illness. He is “determined not to cough until the end,” and the narrator then goes to him. Notice the change in language from the opening.

I am thinking of the dancing body’s magnificent and ostentatious scorn. This is how we offer ourselves, enter heaven, enter speaking: we say with motion, in space, This is what life’s done so far down here; this is all and what and everything it’s managed—this body, these bodies, that body—so what do you think, Heaven? What do you fucking think?

This passage is the narrator’s direct answer to the cosmos; it’s her defiant answer to the question, What’s it all about, down here? In spite of the flaws and terrible fates awaiting them, these characters are dancing. They are staring into the unfathomable emptiness of infinity and “flipping death the bird.” Moore’s narrator has reclaimed the language of her opening, by rubbing up against Eugene, and has taken the “latent energy ris(ing) to the surface” and burst it over the top. By achieving a harmonious balance between very different characters, Moore has crafted both a simple story and a profoundly moving one, one that seeks to find a grid, a location to construct the human soul’s rightful habitation in the universe.

—Richard Farrell

Works Cited

Baxter, Charles. Burning Down the House. (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1997)

Moore, Lorrie. “Dance in America.” In Birds of America. (London: Faber and Faber, 1998)

Rogers, Pattiann. “Twentieth-Century Cosmology and the Soul’s Habitation.” In Writing it Down for James, edited by Kurt Brown. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995)

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On Kierkegaard: Essay — Jacob Glover

Mar 202010

Jacob Glover

The first sentence of Søren Kierkegaard’s The Present Age is: “Our age is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion, momentarily bursting into enthusiasm, and shrewdly relapsing into repose”. I will argue that underlying this quote is the Platonic premise, continuous throughout Western philosophy, that there are two worlds, the world of existence (the material or phenomenal world, the world of empirical science) and the intelligible (the world of Forms, universals, God, and the Good).^[1] Kierkegaard says that man in the present age finds himself no longer rationally able to conceive a relationship between himself and God or the Good (the intelligible world). (Kierkegaard’s present age was the 1840’s, but his ideas seem applicable now because they describe what was the beginning of modern industrial capitalism that exists today.) Earlier philosophical claims for interaction between the two worlds such as mediation (Hermes Trismegistus), emanations (Plotinus), or imminence (Spinoza) are no longer possible. In the present age, man cannot know anything about the intelligible world, God, or the Good. The intelligible world is radically separate from the material world. So Kierkegaard’s question is: What can or do we know? Reflection, Kierkegaard seems to be saying, is a form of thought, characteristic of this new age, which re-conceptualizes the material world without God. Kierkegaard contrasts reflection with idea of passion which seems to be a desire to know or engage with something radically unknowable. Passion, this desire, is linked to Kierkegaard’s idea of the leap of faith. Since in the present age we cannot know anything beyond the material world, the only way to live an authentic, ethical, or individual life is to passionately embrace a radical uncertainty about God or the Good. We must take a leap of faith, a leap into uncertainty.

Reflection, this process of thinking in the material world separated from the intelligible world, changes our motives and the way we value things and actions. Reflection suggests a new sort of rationality grounded solely on the material world and without regard for an intelligible world. This new rationality changes the objective and subjective value system for actions and decisions. For Kierkegaard, “eternal responsibility, and the religious singling out of the individual before God, is ignored.” Kierkegaard is referring to two effects, or characteristics, of reflection. In the present age two things are ignored: “eternal responsibility” (the drama of sin, salvation, and grace) and the “singling out of the individual” (the creation of individuals in relation to God or the Good). In other words, people in the present age, the age of reflection, now cut off from the intelligible world (and God and the Good), no longer have an “eternal” telos, or purpose; man in the present age can only perceive a purpose for himself that is dependent on, or related to, the material world. Without this “eternal” telos there is no reason to act or make decisions as if the actions or decisions have “eternal” importance, which is to say, in the age of reflection, there is no “eternal responsibility.”

People lose a sense of individual eternity as they lose or, “ignore,” this idea of “eternal responsibility” and further separate, metaphysically, from the intelligible world, God, or a greater Good. Kierkegaard calls this the “leveling process” or “the victory of abstraction over the individual.” That is to say that people in the present age, the age of reflection, lose a sense of eternal importance in what they do or think because essentially all people are so radically equal no one can capture any uniqueness, no one can conceive of themselves or what he does or thinks as eternal. People in the age of reflection are all entirely dependent on and, in a sense, enslaved to an obscure form of community. Not a community based, as I say, on anything eternal, but on pragmatic values derived from the new rationality of the age of reflection. It is a community of slaves whose master is their own interdependence. In Kierkegaard’s words, “The individual no longer belongs to God, to himself, to his beloved to his art or to his science, he is conscious of belonging in all things to an abstraction to which he is subjected by reflection, just as a serf belongs to an estate.” In the present age, the age of reflection, a person is so radically separated from anything that he can derive lasting, eternal, importance from individually that he loses his individuality and is swallowed into obscurity and dependency.

In the original quote Kierkegaard contrasts reflection with passion. According to Kierkegaard, the present age is passionless. But what is passion? The word “passion” derives from the Latin verb patior which means to suffer. I think this crucial in the discussion of what passion is to Kierkegaard because it emphasizes the inherent struggle that defines passion. Also the word probably refers to the Passion of Christ. Christ at the end of his life does not know, with any certainty, that God exists, but he wants to believe and does so anyway. Christ on the cross demonstrates what passion is: a desire to know, believe, or engage with, something you cannot rationally conclude exists, or even establish a metaphysical connection with. Passion, as Kierkegaard seems to imply, can only really exist in relation to reflection. Reflective thought occurs when people try to understand the material world, now that it is radically separated from the intelligible world, and passion is the desire to believe in an intelligible world, God or a greater Good even though you have no reason to. What’s crucial is the idea of reasons for something, something’s rationality. Like I said above, with reflection there is new rationality grounded in the material world, so of course there is no “reason” to believe in an intelligible world. But crucially this situation only exists in the age of reflection. Before Kierkegaard philosophers thought that the intelligible world was accessible in some form, knowable, and, in fact, based their rationality “in” it, thus they had “reason” to believe in its existence. So passion, to Kierkegaard, is the desire to believe in something that, rationally, you cannot, and, according to the word’s etymology, is a sort of internal suffering. To Kierkegaard, in the present age it seems unlikely that, “there is a single man left ready, for once, to commit an outrageous folly.” For Kierkegaard this “outrageous folly” is passion. It would seem outrageous, ridiculous, or foolish to want to believe in, or know, something that you cannot.

Kierkegaard gives the example of a skater on a lake. This example, to me, best demonstrates the differences between passionate and reflective thought. In a passionate age “the courage of the man” to skate out near the middle where the ice is thin, “would be applaud[ed],” but in the present age “people would think each other clever in agreeing that it was unreasonable and not even worthwhile to venture out so far.” In the present age, the age of reflection, the people don’t admire the skater at all, in fact, they admire each other as members of a group; they show dependence upon one another. The value judgments the people in the age of reflection do make are of the act of skating out so far, “an outrageous folly.” They conclude it to be unreasonable and not worthwhile. This is another example of the different rationality created by reflection that makes acts, such as are done by brave people, seem “unreasonable.” That is to say that in the age of reflection the people have no rational grounding for these sorts of actions; to them they have no purpose in the material world and are, therefore, purposeless. Furthermore these acts designate an individual and allow him, if only for a moment, not to be dependent on the others. He has found some purpose outside of the material world that is inconceivable in the age of reflection when the material is radically separate from the intelligible. Contrariwise a passionate age appreciates the individual and his attributes. The act itself seems to just demonstrate that which the man already possessed i.e. his courage. Essentially the differences stem from reflection and the lack of reflection, which is to say the separation of the intelligible world from one (the present age) and not from the other (a hypothetical passionate age).

The Present Age is essentially a thought experiment. Kierkegaard starts by describing the age of reflection when man has no rational connection to the intelligible world and finds himself radically subsumed in an abstraction of interdependence. Before the age of reflection people would derive their ways of life from ideas founded in the intelligible world. So now the question for Kierkegaard is: How do we live authentically? What do we base things like morals and ethics on, if our old fundamental principles are no longer rationally accessible? Moreover, how do we maintain any sense of self, or individuality, when we exist as eternally purposeless? Kierkegaard writes, “If you are capable of being a man, then danger and harsh judgment of existence on your thoughtlessness will help you to become one.” That is to say that, to live authentically, to have morals, to be an individual, you must do something that seems an “outrageous folly.” And in the age of reflection nothing seems more “outrageous” than assuming a connection with the intelligible world because in the age of reflection it is unknowable. But Kierkegaard insists, “Come on leap, leap cheerfully, even if it means a light hearted leap, so long as it is decisive.” In other words to live as an individual with morals, we must “leap” into belief. That is to say we must believe in something we have no reason, in the age of reflection, to believe in. We must contradict ourselves as rational beings and behave irrationally, we must embody passion, and “[our] thoughtlessness will help [us] to become” an individual.

—Jacob Glover

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Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

See Mappa Mundi: The Structure of Western Thought ↵

Death in Venice: Nonfiction — Richard Farrell

Mar 062010

In the dizzying euphoria of the days after packet-submission, I managed to read Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, in between bouts of endless movie watching, napping and otherwise avoiding anything to do with writing. Now that I’ve come back from the three day hiatus, and finished Death in Venice, (incidentally, my first time reading it, one of the many holes in my literary education) it seems appropriate to start with a quote from Douglas Glover’s essay “The Familiar Dead”:

To put it simply, the universal plot reads: Life is never what it seems, truth is always other (or the Other). (Notes Home from a Prodigal Son)

Clearly, one aspect of Mann’s novella is the other, manifest in Aschenbach’s obsession with the young Polish boy, Tadzio. Aschenbach goes to Venice for a summer holiday, and falls in love—I don’t think that’s over-stated—with this teenage boy. The saddest part of this story exists in the absolute lack of contact between the old man and the young boy. We see the story only as an incredible yearning from Aschenbach toward the boy, and the odd glances between the two. I kept hoping that they would speak, that some contact would be made. Yet it never happens, and the other in this story remains exactly that. The line is never crossed.

Inspiration to read Mann’s book came after reading Christopher Merrill’s essay “Regained Detachment: On Thomas Mann, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the New World Order.” Merrill is travelling in Slovenia around the time of the war that ripped the neighboring countries apart. He is on his way to Venice for an arts festival, and is excited to meet Marquez. He and a Slovenian friend (a radio journalist who will interview Marquez) pick Marquez up at the hotel, and drive him to the hotel where the conference is being held, the same hotel where Aschenbach fell in love with Tadzio. But Marquez is insulted by something, by Merrill’s presence it seems, and he jumps out of the car, cancelling the interview, stating, “I hate Americans. No interview.”

The refusal to make contact again, this time by the grand author, reminds me again how wide the gap can be between self and other. The essay concludes by Merrill explaining how none of the eminent figures gathered in Venice even discuss the genocide going on just a few hundred miles away.

I think of Aschenbach going to his grave with his love un-stated, with the gap between his self and the other uncrossed. Is there a sadder thing in life? It was much less satisfying to me than, say, Cortazar’s story, “Axolotl”, which sees a man turn into a salamander. The self and the other completely fused. Maybe that takes it too far…we can’t become salamanders, no matter how much we might want to, but we could, I think, at least make contact. We could at least reach out. I am reminded again, of Toni Morrison’s Nobel acceptance speech. Some young boys approach an old, blind woman with a riddle. They say they have a bird in their hand, and ask her if it is alive or dead. Because the woman can’t see, the boys have tricked her. If the bird is alive, and she says so, they will kill it. The speech (and the riddle) goes on to play off this paradoxical situation, and the blind woman tries to figure out the trap. She chooses silence, and we initially sympathize with the blind woman, until one of the boys speaks. The silence is no solution. He says:

“Is there no speech,” they ask her, “no words you can give us that helps us break through your dossier of failures? through the education you just given us is no education at all because we are paying close attention to what you have done as well as to what you have said? to the barrier you have erected between generosity and wisdom?

We have no bird in our hands, living or dead. We have only you and our important question. Is the nothing in our hands something you could not bear to contemplate, to even guess? Don’t you remember being young, when language was magic without meaning? When what you could say, would not mean? When the invisible was what the imagination strove to see? When questions and demands for answers burned so brightly you trembled with fury at not knowing?…

…Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong? You are an adult. The old one, the wise one. Stop thinking about saving your face. Think of our lives and tell us your particularized world. Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created….For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light…Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin.

Aschenbach refused to risk his ‘name in the street’, and refused to cross the line, and his love, his obsession, became a misguided question. I wish he had spoken to Tadzio, even just once. Garcia Marquez dismissed Merrill with a stereotype, with a generalized dismissal that spoke to nothing but a dossier of failure.

I guess it’s time to get back to the writing now.

— Richard Farrell

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On Spinoza: Essay — Jacob Glover

Feb 242010

Jacob Glover

In Proposition 15 in Part One of his Ethics Spinoza declares, “Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God.” For Spinoza, everything that exists is in God. Spinoza’s use of the preposition “in” is ambiguous because it doesn’t clarify whether he means physically encapsulated within God or metaphysically in God as a non-physical something pervasive in existence. Nonetheless the second half of Spinoza’s proposition implies that, though he used “in,” which implies an “out,” nothing can exist in the “out,” because everything that exists, exists in this relationship to God described by the word “in.” Spinoza proposes a monistic, as opposed to a dualistic, universe^[1]. Instead of the universe existing with a transcendent God outside of it; God, according to Spinoza, must be present in existence because “nothing can be or be conceived” without Him. This brings the argument once again back to the word “in” which seems to mean that somehow all things exist within God and simultaneously there is some part or element of God in all things that exist. In Proposition 15 Spinoza describes an immanent universe where God both contains and flows throughout all things, the world of existence. There are three fundamental parts to Spinoza’s universal structure: substance, attributes, and modes.

Substance “is in itself and is conceived through itself”(1). In other words substance is an ethereal material; it is somehow imperceptible as itself, perhaps as the idea of substance, but perceptible by means of what it contains which also happens to be itself. To Spinoza substance and God are synonymous. He writes, “There can be, or be conceived, no other substance but God.” Substance or God is a singular immaterial material that is wholly containing and wholly invasive throughout the universe, according to Proposition 15. Substance or God is eternal, an uncaused cause of everything. Spinoza writes, “if anyone asserts that substance is created, he at the same time asserts that a false idea has become true.” There is no separation between existence and God for Spinoza and that is what makes his universe monistic.

Humans do not perceive substance or God directly, rather they perceive an aspect or part, for want of a better word, of God—what Spinoza calls an attribute. (Of course to say “part” is ambiguous because it suggests divisibility in God, however the ambiguity exists in that substance, to Spinoza, must exist indivisibly but at the same time exist within even the smallest “part” of the universe.) Attributes are not the particular things perceived but the property of perceptibility. They are “that which the intellect perceives of substance as constituting its essence” and furthermore “each entity must be conceived under some attribute.” It seems that attributes work in two ways. In one way they are what appear to be the essences, basics, or fundamentals of substance. But in the same way they are property of perceptibility in particular instances of existence within substance. Although, I suppose, to Spinoza those are not two separate qualities because substance is all things. In other words, according to Spinoza, it would be enough to simply state that attributes make substance perceptible i.e. attributes make all things perceptible.

Humans have access to only two attributes of God or substance; objects of thought and objects of solid matter with dimensionality or extension (takes up space). But the attributes are distinct, that is they exist “one without the help of the other.” According to Spinoza the attribute of thought has no effect on the attribute of extension; they exist wholly separate as themselves but nonetheless they are both the essence of substance or God. Like the active intellects of the Neo-Platonists, attributes are intermediary properties between substance (God) and humans, but attributes are not like active intellects of the Neo-Platonists in the sense that they are passive properties of substance, which human intellect or the senses can act upon. To Spinoza the attribute of thought can only be perceived by thinking. And the attribute of extension, physical matter, can only be perceived by the senses. He writes that an attribute “must be conceived through itself.” The attributes exist within substance (God) but only as a means to perceive or intellectualize the universe.

The third part of Spinoza’s system is the mode. Modes are actually in the mind of the experiencing person or subject. The perception or thought within the mind of a human. But what exactly is a mode? There are two kinds of modes: modes of thought or ideas and modes of extension or physical objects. Speaking of physical matter Spinoza writes, “matter is everywhere the same and there are no distinct parts in it except in so far as we conceive matter as modified in various ways.” Spinoza here stresses the point that the attribute of extension exists the same and indivisibly throughout the universe, but for humans to sense it or conceptualize it the attribute must be modified; it must be a particularized instance of extension. A particular book is a mode of extension, but the ability of that book to take up space and be sensed is the attribute of extension. In another passage Spinoza writes: “we conceive water to be divisible and to have separate parts in so far as it is water, but not in so far as it is a corporeal substance.” In other words water is like the attribute of extension. As matter, or a mode, water can be divided, as a concept, or for lack of a better term, “waterness” it is indivisible. As a mode the attribute of extension exists as an individual thing but as the attribute proper it exists in its entirety indivisible. Modes are particular; they involve substance but are not directly it.

The universe Spinoza describes in Proposition 15 is made of three parts: substance, attributes and modes. The major problem then is that Spinoza appears to want this system to be immanent, yet at the same time exist as somehow divided in these three parts. It seems as if there is some sort of understood cohesiveness that contradicts this division. To me the best way to conceptualize this cohesive force is to me, is to think of substance as the text of a story. The actual physical text, alone, is not perceivable. But with, the property of readability, analogous to Spinoza’s attributes, the text becomes readable. But this property of readability works in two ways like the attributes. It not only makes the physical text legible and not gibberish, but also gives the story continuity which allows the reader to experience the smallest details and episodes within the story. These small details, therefore, are analogous to what Spinoza would call modes. To me, it seems that the organic evolving continuity that makes a story understandable is analogous to the cohesion that counter acts the apparent division within Spinoza’s monistic universe.

Spinoza’s system revolves around the ideas that substance is the basic ethereal material; substance and God are the same thing; all natural objects and thoughts “come” from, and inhere in, substance; substance has attributes (properties of perceptibility) of extension and thoughts; particular instances of substance are perceivable or intelligible because of the attributes and these instances are modes. Of course what’s truly crucial to Spinoza’s philosophy is its monism. That is to say that there is no second world, or realm, or transcendence, all things exist within existence and are part of substance (God). Spinoza writes, “For in the universe there exists nothing but substances and their affectations.” In other words nothing is but that which exists within substance. To Spinoza all these parts (substance, attributes and modes) are separate only in their accessibility by the intellect. There is no separation of levels or realms for Spinoza, but a constant existence of substance or God, attributes, and modes simultaneously, inherently and infinitely.

—Jacob Glover

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

See Mappa Mundi: The Structure of Western Thought ↵

Montaigne On Experience & Defecation: Essay — Jacob Glover

Feb 062010

Jacob Glover/

In the essay “On Experience” Michel de Montaigne writes, “I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics^[1]; that is my physics.” At first glance this statement seems generally narcissistic, even flamboyantly so. Essentially, Montaigne disregards the entire study of philosophy up until his own time and replaces it with his own idea of philosophy. He uses the word “me” to both express the idea of ownership of the philosophy but also to emphasize his philosophy is based on examination of the self. It is obvious that Montaigne studied many others, in addition to himself, and clearly understood their importance because he quotes them throughout the essay. Montaigne’s words, therefore, are not narcissistic: he is not saying he is self-obsessed. Rather Montaigne is trying to emphasize the human, not as a thinking animal, nor as a philosopher, but as someone who, while thinking and reasoning also lives in and is affected by the world. A human who, to borrow a term from Montaigne, “shits.” I will argue, in other words, that what Montaigne emphasizes is that humans are a composite and it is our full composition that makes us human; to deny our sensuousness is to deny our humanity, but at the same time to deny our rationality is also to deny our humanity. Montaigne’s essay is about how these two halves of the human must be used in conjunction to gain knowledge, understanding, or truth.

Montaigne begins the essay with a line borrowed from Aristotle’s Metaphysics: “No desire is more natural than the desire for knowledge.” The quote announces that the essay is going to be about the acquisition of knowledge. It is as if Montaigne is pointing out that he is doing the same thing Aristotle tried to; starting from the same basic platform of thought, how to gain knowledge and understanding, and writing about it in a new way. The interesting thing about Montaigne opening “On Experience” with a quote by an ancient is that it seems to both mimic the ancients and to name the people who will be the opponents in the essay. The ancients believed that the pathway to knowledge was in the mind alone, and that is what Montaigne would like to refute. In the body of his essay he discusses by way of implicative and digressive examples the importance of a composite human (both thinking and experiencing). First he points out failings in reason and then points out failings in experience. Montaigne comes to the conclusion that the only way to acquire knowledge, truth or understanding lies within the composite human — a thinking, and sensuous being.

First Montaigne discusses the failures of reason or contemplative thinking-a thing implied to be purely of the mind, and to have direct connection to the senses. What’s crucially different about Montaigne’s thinking, and what distinguishes him from the ancients, is that first reason is not perfect and second that senses can help to make up for reason’s imperfections. Montaigne writes, “We assay all the means that can lead us to [knowledge]. When reason fails us we make use of experience.” These lines can be read on two levels. On one level, they suggest that humans will naturally try to contemplate things first to gain knowledge. But on a second level, the line seems to claim that “we”, meaning epistemological theorists, have tried everything possible to find knowledge and now it seems that just thinking about forms or God is not enough: “we” now need to examine our own experiences. Montaigne’s gives examples of reason failing during his discussion on laws. He declares that “the most desirable laws are those which are fewest, simplest and most general.” This line describes a desire to reduce the number of laws, in order to find a more general set. The law makers “have so weighed down every syllable and every species of conjunction that they end up entangled and bogged down in an infinitude of grammatical functions and tiny sub-clauses which defy all rule and order and any definite interpretation.” Montaigne thinks that laws are a demonstrative example of reason failing because the amount, complexity, and particularization are all due to an over thinking by the law makers. To Montaigne the laws are a downfall of reason because they move away from a general interpretation of, in this case, justice to multiple interpretations. And “you can feel from experience that so many interpretations dissipate the truth and break it up.” This quote is crucial to Montaigne’s argument because he is pointing out that where reason fails experience points to the mistake. So to Montaigne laws are best made by someone who uses reason to create the law but experience to measure its applicability. And that is to say that a composite human is best suited for making laws, understanding justice, or more generally, grasping the truth.

Montaigne’s emphasis on a new composite human thinking process is, it seems, developed from the skeptical viewpoint that “reason has so many forms that we do not know which to resort to: [and] experience has no fewer.” In other words, there are so many ways to experience that “induction which we wish to draw from the likeness between events is unsure since they all show unlikeness.” And that is to say that in any similarity we can find between two forms of experience, any “likeness”, there is inherently difference because according to Montaigne “Nature has bound herself to make nothing “other” which is not unlike.” In other words nothing can be a separate thing and be completely identical to another thing. This pervasive difference makes experience an inherently faulty way of examining the world. As an example of experience failing Montaigne writes, “Scientific investigations and inquiries serve merely to feed our curiosity. They have nothing to do with knowledge so sublime.” Here where experience, in this case scientific observation, fails to gather the deepest truth; reason can provide support. The crucial idea to understand is that to Montaigne truth cannot be grasped by experience alone. Experience needs to be filtered by the mind in order for it to elucidate any truths or knowledge. This filtering process is what a composite human, both a thinking and sensing, would intuitively do, and which is what Montaigne believes is the way to truth, knowledge or understanding.

Montaigne concludes “On Experience” with a description of himself. The point of this section is to demonstrate the human as a composite. What Montaigne does here is take something he calls his metaphysics, thereby comparing it with The Metaphysics, and then writes about his “mortal fear of smells.” Montaigne wants to show the examination of the self can be a philosophical act. That is to say that experience can be a philosophical act. And this emphasis on self-examination is another example of Montaigne’s argument to find certainty within a world saturated with difference. Montaigne brings together the two halves of the composite human with the sentence “things are sensed through the understanding [and] understood through the senses.” In other words the halves are dependent upon the other to function. For someone to sense something he needs to know they are sensing it; for someone to understand something it must pass first through the senses. To Montaigne the human is body and mind and for a human to have understanding, or know truth he must use both parts of his duality.

To Montaigne difference and uncertainty pervade the world and make it impossible to glean any knowledge through the application of either reason or experience alone. But, as I have argued, these two tools used in conjunction are the key to understanding the world and gathering any truth. Montaigne writes, “All things are connected by some similarity; yet every example limps and any correspondence which we draw from experience is feeble and imperfect; we can nevertheless find some corner or other by which to link our comparisons.” That is to say that there are indeed similarities or certainties in the world, but we cannot purely sense them nor purely contemplate upon them. To Montaigne we can examine ourselves and therefore our sensual experience with, and along side of, our reason to find that subtle certainty and similarity in the very difference that subsists throughout the world. Montaigne finds a most basic certainty in the embrace of our composite selves as a necessity to glean knowledge, truth or understanding.

— Jacob Glover

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Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

See Mappa Mundi: The Structure of Western Thought ↵

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