Now I understand more of the strange disconnect I feel when reading Arthur Miller, that sense of an essential absence in his way of thinking--because anyone who thinks of Tolstoy as the fairest and most impartial of writers is missing a few rivets in their analytical machinery. Tolstoy does a remarkable job of stepping back and seeming to allow his characters to speak for themselves, but he looms behind them like the god of judgment, sorting them each according to their politics. In Anna Karenina one over-the-top, hypocritical Pietist stands in for all Pietists; the liberals are all empty-headed, hedonistic morons who repeat whatever the newspaper tells them to think; and the Tolstoy stand-in always, despite his faults, comes out on top. Why are all happy families the same? The book has become so liberal-coded that no one sees what Tolstoy clearly meant: they are the same because the man, strong and true, makes his way through the world, while the woman stays home, modest and kind, to tend the crop of children he's sown in her womb. Or take Ivan Ilych, just another liberal who barely finds spirituality only in the nick of time... Tolstoy, in so many ways a conservative Christian patriarch, likes to pretend to be impartial; it is only a success of his buried rhetoric (and by comparison to Dostoevsky) that he appears to be so.
Yes, I agree with you—Tolstoy's narratives are pretty rigged, in a way that, to take his most hated example, Shakespeare's, are not. Granted, this might be more the rule than the exception among 19th-century novelists, but all the more reason not to single him out for objectivity, except maybe a certain objectivity of literal phenomenological perception of the perceptible world. (And Anna K's characterization is so rich as to transcend his design, as sometimes happens.) Miller's works are even more rigged than that—he's a didactic melodramatist, I've always thought, if an exceptionally skilled, affecting one—so no surprise at his comments.
Fascinating thoughts in footnote 1, I was thinking something similar during your discourse with Noah Kumin the other day about Kojève/Fukuyama and the Frankfurt school. I’m not sure if you know this, (if you do I apologize) but those apparently occultist Southern Agrarian circles that produced New Criticism are sometimes regarded as one of the points of origin for postwar movement conservatism-which connects rather well to your Wildean esoteric reading of conservatism as the proper ideological home for the American Artist. I’m probably more in the camp of Socrates and Plato (as I joked last year, I’m an Atonist) than you and brother Kumin, but these readings are always fascinating. Keep it up!
Thanks! I might have known that in the most general sense, but not in any detail. (I'm better with the other side of the Atlantic for that era of criticism.) Land- and place-based appeals don't do it for me—my people have been in this country for about 10 minutes and never south of the Mason-Dixon line—so I prefer to reconfigure the esoteric conservatism to substitute the aesthetic per se for locale. "Our homeland, the text," in George Steiner's Jewish neoconservative but paradoxically also anti-Zionist formulation. One still wants to keep the government far away, however! I once had a theory about Wildean allusions in Absalom, Absalom!; let's see if I can remember it by the end of the year for the IC.
Just started Marvel Universe and man this book is something else (and I'm very impressed by the non-cringe command of social media argot for a man in his 60s).
Now I understand more of the strange disconnect I feel when reading Arthur Miller, that sense of an essential absence in his way of thinking--because anyone who thinks of Tolstoy as the fairest and most impartial of writers is missing a few rivets in their analytical machinery. Tolstoy does a remarkable job of stepping back and seeming to allow his characters to speak for themselves, but he looms behind them like the god of judgment, sorting them each according to their politics. In Anna Karenina one over-the-top, hypocritical Pietist stands in for all Pietists; the liberals are all empty-headed, hedonistic morons who repeat whatever the newspaper tells them to think; and the Tolstoy stand-in always, despite his faults, comes out on top. Why are all happy families the same? The book has become so liberal-coded that no one sees what Tolstoy clearly meant: they are the same because the man, strong and true, makes his way through the world, while the woman stays home, modest and kind, to tend the crop of children he's sown in her womb. Or take Ivan Ilych, just another liberal who barely finds spirituality only in the nick of time... Tolstoy, in so many ways a conservative Christian patriarch, likes to pretend to be impartial; it is only a success of his buried rhetoric (and by comparison to Dostoevsky) that he appears to be so.
Yes, I agree with you—Tolstoy's narratives are pretty rigged, in a way that, to take his most hated example, Shakespeare's, are not. Granted, this might be more the rule than the exception among 19th-century novelists, but all the more reason not to single him out for objectivity, except maybe a certain objectivity of literal phenomenological perception of the perceptible world. (And Anna K's characterization is so rich as to transcend his design, as sometimes happens.) Miller's works are even more rigged than that—he's a didactic melodramatist, I've always thought, if an exceptionally skilled, affecting one—so no surprise at his comments.
Fascinating thoughts in footnote 1, I was thinking something similar during your discourse with Noah Kumin the other day about Kojève/Fukuyama and the Frankfurt school. I’m not sure if you know this, (if you do I apologize) but those apparently occultist Southern Agrarian circles that produced New Criticism are sometimes regarded as one of the points of origin for postwar movement conservatism-which connects rather well to your Wildean esoteric reading of conservatism as the proper ideological home for the American Artist. I’m probably more in the camp of Socrates and Plato (as I joked last year, I’m an Atonist) than you and brother Kumin, but these readings are always fascinating. Keep it up!
Thanks! I might have known that in the most general sense, but not in any detail. (I'm better with the other side of the Atlantic for that era of criticism.) Land- and place-based appeals don't do it for me—my people have been in this country for about 10 minutes and never south of the Mason-Dixon line—so I prefer to reconfigure the esoteric conservatism to substitute the aesthetic per se for locale. "Our homeland, the text," in George Steiner's Jewish neoconservative but paradoxically also anti-Zionist formulation. One still wants to keep the government far away, however! I once had a theory about Wildean allusions in Absalom, Absalom!; let's see if I can remember it by the end of the year for the IC.
Just started Marvel Universe and man this book is something else (and I'm very impressed by the non-cringe command of social media argot for a man in his 60s).
Yes, his best books are incredibly strange; they really resemble nothing else.