On the Virtues of Academic Lassitude

As the story goes, J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings et al. stems from a  simple sentence (”In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.”) he absent-mindedly jotted down in an exam answer space a student had left blank.

Think about it–if that student had spent more time studying such that he had answered all the questions on that exam, that extra effort might just have deprived us of one of the greatest fantasy series of all time…

Not on my reading list

Quite.

Plus Ça Change…

I culled this little gem from a friend’s dissertation that I’m editing.  “Summer Reading” apparently has been dreaded by students ever since its inception:

 ‘there was a terrible day when a holiday book was suggested, in order that our minds should not relapse too much during the long summer holidays.’

-Dorothea Brooks

(Dunning, Dunning (ed.), Graham Street Memories, 1881-1931, Francis Holland Church of England School for Girls, London, 1931, p. 69.  )

“the underlying primitivism of modernity”

I’m an avid reader of the First Things blog, so I thought I’d share with you this post and a few comments on it.

Although I largely agree with the idea that much of “modernity” (whatever that really may be) is blind to the fact that it’s not actually as novel as it likes to think it is, there nevertheless was a fair amount of conscious “primitivism” in the work of “modern” and/or “modernist” artists. Just look at Stravinsky and “The Rite of Spring”, for example, or Picasso’s remark upon viewing the prehistoric drawings in the Lascaux caves: “We have invented nothing”. One could also go down the route of philosophy and point out developments like Bergson’s Élan vital and remark further that a consequence of the Modernist era was the rise of sociological methods in which contemporary primitive societies were considered more favorable–more “pure”–than developed civilization.

In other words, instead of setting up a “new vs. old” dynamic as a definitional basis for Modernism, these days I’m toying more with the idea of “conscious vs. unconscious”. Pound may have cried out, “Make it new!”, but the even more fundamental assumption to that injunction is that one has become conscious of what the labels “old” and “new” mean and can therefore fashion objects accordingly.

But before I launch into another paragraph that completely undercuts everything I’ve just said…this seems like a good place to trail off…

UPDATE: Here’s a bit of of an elaboration.

Nails on a Blackboard

About five years ago while I was riding in a car to see the Star Wars Episode Two, I recall that there was a discussion going on about Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which book the driver basically called a crock on account of a certain section wherein Campbell outlines his theory of the basic narrative structure of all myths by saying something tautological along the lines of, “at this point the hero does X, or he doesn’t”. Not being a terribly huge fan of hyper-reductive structuralist psychologizing, I’d meant ever since that point to read through the work in order to pinpoint the mentioned section and file it for later use. I only got around to that about a couple weeks ago. But let it suffice to say that I found the book so boring and uncritical that I never bothered to read further than the first score or two of pages, and I never found the section I was looking for. One can take only so much of “Hey, check it out! This one story sounds like this other story! I’m going to cite a whole bunch of people and books that also sound kind of like they’re talking about the same thing, and then claim that they really are!”

Now, that kind of scholarship probably was truly insightful around the 1940s, when the book was first published. But a lot of ground has been covered since then–enough so, I’d say, as to consign Campbell’s book to the realm of History of Scholarship. In other words, while it is an important and influential book, its methodology is too flawed in light of more recent developments as to warrant close study. I might get into that in another post, but for the record I’ll merely mention that the basis for much of his analysis and application to the entire human race stems from a rather uncritical (although understandably so) reading of Freudian psychology as confirmed by such anecdotal sources as an early 20th-Century American newspaper dream analyst. Let’s just say that I’m not surprised at the succeeding scholarly generation’s reaction to Eurocentrism and the like.

But all of that is prelude to the following:

Every so often one runs into such an appalling bastardization of the English language by someone apparently in a position really to know better, that one just can’t help but stare slack-jawed at the words on the page in astonishment that such dreck was ever deemed worthy of publication. The following excerpts come from the flabbergastingly tin-eared and obsequious quasi-introduction by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph. D., to the 2004 “Commemorative Edition” of The Hero with a Thousand Faces (complete with satin bookmark!). Here’s how it begins:

“I am honored to be invited to write this introduction to the work of a soul I have regarded in many ways for so long. The context and substance of Joseph Campbell’s lifework is one of the most recent diamonds on a long, long necklace of other dazzling gemstones that have been mined by humanity–from the depths, and often at great cost–since the beginning of time. There is no doubt that there is strung across the eons–a strong and fiery-wrought chain of lights, and that each glint and ray represents a great work, a great wisdom preserved. The lights on this infinite ligature have been added to, and continue to be added to, link by link.”

[I'm already cringing...]

“Campbell points out that coming through such struggles causes the person to be infused with more vision, and to be strengthened by the spiritual life principle–which, more than anything else, encourages one to take courage to live with effrontery and mettle.”

[I honestly wonder whether this has been run through an online translator...]

“Campbell acted as a lighted fire for many. The mythic matters he resonated to personally also attracted legions of readers and listeners worldwide. In this way, he gathered together a tribe of like-minded individuals, thinkers, and creators. His book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, continues to be one of the major rendezvous sites for those who seek the meridians where ‘what is purely spirit’ and ‘what is purely human’ meet and create a third edition of a finer selfhood.”

[durrrr.....was there even an editor?]

“Certainly, we have hardly ever faced a world in worse shape or in greater need of the lyrical, mystical, and common-sensical. There seem to be large and perpetual pockets where fair and sustaining values are more pale than they should be. But when we consider Plato, Strabbo[sic], and the apostles Paul and John, and many others over the centuries, we see that they also wrote about their times as being likewise devoid of proper ‘management and meaning.’ It appears that ‘culture at edge[sic] of utter corruption’ and ‘world at the edge of utter destruction’ are two of the oldest themes to be found in stories of the human race.”

[...and the finale...]

“Consider this book a time-capsule, then: one in which the words, and the numen behind them, are as fresh as the day the author wrote them.

Reader, turn the page now. Joseph Campbell is waiting for you, and as usual, the professor is in full mythic voice…“

…huh?