Year-End Retrospective for 2015

Our first discussion of 2015 took place on February 23rd. Our selection was from "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding," by David Hume.  Here Hume expresses an extreme skepticism of "operations of understanding" that go beyond our sensory impressions.

On March 23rd, we took up Percy Bysshe Shelley's "A Defence of Poetry," in which Shelly claims poetry to a higher form of expression than prose.  (Some readers may see irony in that Shelley,  one of the great English Romantic poets, made this claim NOT in a poem, but in an essay.

April 27th was devoted to "The Pardoner's Tale," from "The Canterbury Tales" of Geoffrey Chaucer.  Though Chaucer's Pardoner loves to preach that "Radix malorum est cupiditas," ("The root of all evil is greed,") he is quite up front about how it's money that motivates him. 

May 18th,  Leo Tolstoy's Second Epilogue to War and Peace was featured.  Here Tolstoy takes up deep philosophical questions about history,  in particular the "Great Man" theory, with Napoleon's invasion of the East as his case study.  By the way, now when people ask me, "Have you read War and Peace, I truthfully answer, "No, but I have read the Second Epilogue to it.

On June 22nd, we covered the short story, "The Man Who Would Be King," by Rudyard Kipling.  It is a tale of two adventurers in British India who found a colony in present-day Afghanistan.  Only one survives and returns to tell the story.

July 27th was devoted to "The Unknown Masterpiece," by Honoré de Balzac,  a truly great story that raises deep questions about art and genius.

The play "Six Characters in Search of an Author," by Luigi Pirandello, was our reading on August 24th.  Like the Balzac story,  it was concerned with philosophical issues of artistic creation.  The characters in this family, which today we would refer to as "dysfunctional," desperately seek to conform their behavior to a mold imposed from outside of themselves.

On September 28th,  we discussed Stephen Crane's story "The Open Boat," about four survivors of a shipwreck striving to row back ashore in a lifeboat.  It is a beautiful depiction of men who teeter on the boundary between sea and shore, death and life.

Sherwood Anderson was our featured author on October 26th.  His "Death in the Woods" tells the story of a country woman who dies in a snowstorm on her way home from town, where she had bartered eggs for some meat, liver, and bones from the town butcher.  Participants were impressed with Anderson's ability to give us a story that can so readily be approached either realistically or allegorically.

Our year ended on November 23rd, with "The Garden of Forking Paths," by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges,  a wildly unrealistic World War I spy story that nevertheless delights as a reflection on the nature of time and the life choices an individual makes as he moves through time.

By the way,  if you were wondering whatever happened in January, we had to cancel, as there were predictions for blizzard conditions the evening we were to meet.  Let's hope for better luck next month!  

November 23rd Meeting on "The Garden of Forking Paths," by Borges

Great Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges (1900-86) called his imaginative writings "ficciónes." In English that translates to "fictions," but the Spanish conveys a unique Borgesian flavor.  Next Monday the Group takes up Borges's "The Garden of Forking Paths," ("El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan" in Spanish).  Below is an aid to understanding "The Garden of Forking Paths," which I have prepared to help us grasp the relationships of the key characters in the piece.

Crane's "The Open Boat"

This past Monday evening our featured selection was "The Open Boat," by American author Stephen Crane, of "Red Badge of Courage" fame.

Crane in Greece in 1897

In "The Open Boat," four survivors of a shipwreck -- the captain, two crew members (a cook and an oiler), and a newspaperman (the "correspondent") who had been on his way to cover a story -- struggle over several days and nights to navigate safely to the shore.

The moods of the men on the boat seem to rise and fall with their prospects of survival.  Interspersed in the story are philosophical musings of the correspondent.  At a certain point, he sees "distant dunes," "black cottages, and a tall white windmill" on shore.

"The tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants."  It is reported that the tower represented to the correspondent, "the serenity of Nature amid the struggles of the individual."

Crane goes on:  "She [Nature] did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise.  But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent. It is, perhaps, plausible that a man in this situation, impressed with the unconcern of the universe, should see the innumerable flaws of his life, and have them taste wickedly in his mind, and wish for another chance. A distinction between right and wrong seems absurdly clear to him, then, in this new ignorance of the grave-edge [emphasis added], and he understands that if he were given another opportunity he would mend his conduct and his words, and be better and brighter during an introduction or at a tea."

Several of our participants were struck by Crane's depiction of the natural world as indifferent to the concerns of humans.  One pointed out how, on the other side of the coin, the humans in the story convey a great deal of emotionalism.  It's a stark contrast.

My takeaway: our moral sense becomes quickened in the "new ignorance of the grave-edge." The power of literature is that we needn't survive a shipwreck or have some other "near-death" experience in order to accept this.  With the narrator as our guide (and Crane himself went through a similar event in his life), we can be "armchair" survivors.

Pirandello's Preface to "Six Characters"

Our August discussion was on Pirandello's "Six Characters in Search of an Author."

Bust of Pirandello in Palermo.

Pirandello published a preface to his play in 1925, a few years after it was first produced.  I read the following excerpt at the end of our meeting, because I thought it shed light on where he was coming from:

To me it was never enough to present a man or a woman and what is special and characteristic about them simply for the the pleasure of presenting them; to narrate a particular affair, lively or sad, simply for the pleasure of narrating it; to describe a landscape simply for the pleasure of describing it.

There are some writers (and not a few) who do feel this pleasure and, satisfied, ask no more.  They are, to speak more precisely, historical writers.

But there are others who, beyond such pleasure, feel a more profound spiritual need on whose account they admit only figures, affairs, landscapes which have been soaked, so to speak, in a particular sense of life, and acquire from it a universal value.  These are, more precisely, philosophical writers.

I have the misfortune to belong to the last.*

*As translated by Eric Bentley

Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder as Seen by Balzac

We had a group of 24 on July 27th come over on a lovely summer evening to hash out Balzac's "Unknown Masterpiece."

In the final scene of the story, Poussin and Porbus wait outside Frenhofer's studio while he puts the finishing touches on his painting The Quarrelsome Beauty ("La Belle Noiseuse"), which he has been working on for ten years.  Poussin has agreed to allow his live-in girlfriend, Gillette, to model for Frenhofer.

When Frenhofer unveils the painting, he thinks he has created a masterpiece, and waxes poetic as he extols its virtues. Poussin and Porbus see nothing discernible, except a foot.  Poussin even calls Frenhofer "more a poet than a painter.  Porbus continues his flattery of Frenhofer (is it because Frenhofer is rich?)

Poussin remarks, "But sooner or later he'll notice there's nothing on his canvas."  It triggers a violent reaction in Frenhofer, who calls him names ("vagabond, good-for-nothing, cad, catamite"). Frenhofer then becomes crestfallen, and thinks himself a fraud.

The men have completely forgotten Gillette until Poussin hears her weeping in a corner.  Her speech contains a startling juxtaposition of opposites when she says, "I'd be vile to love you still -- you fill me with contempt.  I admire you, yet you horrify me. I love you, and I think I hate you already."

The three artists have forgotten the true source of their inspiration.

The interactions of these characters amount to a set of profound reflections about the wellsprings of art.  Frenhofer's death that night, I would argue, is incidental to those reflections.

Balzac's "Unknown Masterpiece"

(Credit: couscouschocolat)

Our selection this month is "The Unknown Masterpiece," by Honoré de Balzac. Seen at right is Auguste Rodin's sculpture of Rodin, of which British art historian Kenneth Clark had this to say: "His Balzac is to my mind, the greatest piece of sculpture since Michaelangelo. Balzac's body has the timelessness of a druidical stone and his head has the voracity of an owl.  The real reason why he made people so angry is their feeling that he could gobble them up and he doesn't care a damn for their opinions." (quoted in "Gates of Hell, Rodin's passion in Stone," by Arline Boucher Tehan).

Kipling's "The Man Who Would Be King"

1891 portrait of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) by John Collier (1850-1934)

Rudyard Kipling's story, "The Man Who Would Be King," discussed at our meeting last Monday, the 22nd, has more than first meets the eye.  It tells of a journey of two ex-patriot Englishmen in British India, Daniel Dravot and Peachey Taliaferro Carnehan, to Kafiristan, a remote part of Afghanistan. Once there, Dravot and Carnehan are bent on making themselves kings.

They accomplish their goal through "luck and pluck."  Dravot picks up native tongues readily.  He breaks the neck of a man who attempts to rob them.  They organize the locals into militias, encourage the building of bridges to knit diverse clans together, and engage in political machinations Machiavelli would have admired.

When they discover elements of freemasonry in the beliefs and rituals of the locals, they exploit it to consolidate their power.  Dravot concedes that luck also plays a part, when a symbol on Dravot's apron turns out to be identical to the one on the underside of the square stone he had selected as his "Master's chair."  After that ceremony they are considered semi-divine.

Later in the story, Dravot's decision to take a wife becomes the pair's undoing.  Carnehan says,

I wished then that we had explained about the loss of the genuine secrets of a Master-Mason at the first go-off; but I said nothing. All that night there was a blowing of horns in a little dark temple half-way down the hill, and I heard a girl crying fit to die. One of the priests told us that she was being prepared to marry the King.

In the wedding ceremony, Dravot attempts to kiss his bride and gets bitten instead.  When blood is drawn, the Kafiristan people in attendance know the Englishmen are mortal.  Their cover is blown.  That's why Carnehan says later that in hindsight he wishes they had "explained about the loss of the genuine secrets" at the first "go-off."

Before the wedding, Carnehan also says "I saw the priests talking together in whispers, and the Chiefs talking together too, and they looked at me out of the corners of their eyes."  By using the terms "whispers" and "corners of their eyes," Kipling gives the reader the clear implication that Dravot and Carnehan are being set up.

Tolstoy's Second Epilogue to War and Peace

"Portrait of Tolstoy," by Nikolai Ge (1831-1894)

On last Monday evening, twenty-seven of us met to discuss the Second Epilogue to Tolstoy's War and Peace.  Several pointed out that Tolstoy employs metaphors to get across his points about the (a) role of power in history, and (b) age-old philosophical debate on free will vs. "necessity."

I was grateful to members who noticed Tolstoy's artistry, and went back to the text to compile some examples:

"Amid a long series of un-executed orders of Napoleon's, one series, for the campaign of 1812, was carried out -- not because those orders differed in any way from the other, unexecuted orders but because they coincided with the course of events that led the French army into Russia; just as in stencil work this or that figure comes out not because the color was laid on from this side or in that way, but because it was laid on from all sides over the figure cut in the stencil." I add the emphasis.  In other words, a whole series of forces and events led to the French invasion.

"Men are hauling a log.  Each of them expresses his opinion as to how and where to haul it. They haul the log away, and it happens that this is done as one of them said.  He ordered it.  There we have command and power in their primary form.  The man who worked most with his hands could not think so much about what he was doing, or reflect on or command what would result from the common activity; while the man who commanded more would evidently work less with his hands on account of his greater verbal ability."  In other words, a leader is someone too busy talking to do the work.

"These justifications [i.e., of killing in the name of national glory or some other ideal] release those who produce the events from moral responsibility.  These temporary aims are like the broom fixed in front of a locomotive to clear the snow from the rails in front: they clear men's moral responsibilities from their path." In other words, Napoleon was able to cite lofty goals to rationalize the invasion of Russia.

Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale

"Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims," by William Blake (1810)

"Pardoners sell forgiveness, which is best.  Yet the tale tricks every reader into the momentary sin of failing to pardon...."
--Donald R. Howard (The Canterbury Tales: A Selection, Signet Books, 1969)

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Portrait of Shelley by Amelia Curran (1819)

Our author this month was a lyric poet known for works such as "Ode to the West Wind," "Ozymandias," and "Prometheus Unbound."  The featured selection is a work of prose entitled "A Defence of Poetry."  A response to fellow poet Thomas Love Peacock's "The Four Ages of Poetry," "A Defence of Poetry" was originally planned to have three parts but was never completed. Shelley's tragic and untimely death occurred when a violent storm picked up in the Gulf of Spezia and capsized the boat he was sailing in with a friend. 

"Funeral of Shelley" by Louis Edouard Fournier

Tonight's Meeting Cancelled

Tonight's Discussion on Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale" has been cancelled because of the snowstorm.  Because the library's publicity is done on a two-month cycle that coincides with the newsletter, I am not able to re-schedule the Chaucer discussion until springtime.  Our next meeting will be on Monday, February 23rd and the reading will be David Hume's "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding" from Great Conversations 3.

At that meeting we will have our 10th Anniversary Celebration originally scheduled for this evening.

Stay comfy, cozy, warm, and safe at home.  May I suggest you take a break from 24-7 weather updates and give your soul the sustenance great literature and philosophy affords!