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I don't know if excavated classics are meant to challenge existing classics, they're just more interesting than most contemporary work. I don't read the Nyrb classics hoping that I'll read the next Virginia Woolf, I just hope what I'm getting will be better than Ocean Vuong, and it almost always is. I do think the canon almost always gets it right (although part of me wonders if canonization encourages a more careful and generous reading that canonized books inevitably benefit from), but I also think there's lost stuff that's great. I mean Gilgamesh was lost for two thousand years! Beowulf for eight hundred! At some point Beowulf was just a weird poem some Icelandic scholar found in an old manuscript. But yeah do i think merve Emre is gonna uncover the next Beowulf in a mailing to me? No, not really. Nonetheless, the discovery of the next Beowulf does rely on efforts like hers.

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I agree with you in general. I was (hyperbolically) thinking of a more narrow phenomenon, the aesthetic of "minor" midcentury writers the NYRB seems to cultivate (e.g, John Williams: I need to finish Stoner, but honestly wasn't bowled over by what I did read). On the other hand, I kind of like Brigid Brophy's (hyperbolic) argument in Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without that Beowulf isn't actually that good and was elevated to its present Homeric height only because England wanted an epic in the era of romantic nationalism.

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Lol, I should read that Brophy book! As you mentioned some time ago, attack is also part of the process of canonization. I mean yes it's hard to imagine a French person reading Beowulf, but we are English, essentially, no? The book is our oldest work of vernacular literature, a link to our unfathomable national past. I don't think wanting a national epic is bad. That's why I love Anglo Saxon poetry and the Anglo Saxon language in general--their literary sensibility is so alien, so different from ours (very lonely, almost hopeless, lacking in humor) , yet the language is recognizably similar. Also, what else is there to compare it to? It's the only extant work of Anglo Saxon epic poetry, and the oldest work, in the world, of northern European vernacular literature. It stands alone, incomparable to anything else.

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I feel like this conversation is drawing some latent crypto-woke identity politics out of my Latin self....I could never get too into the Anglo-Saxon material (I haven't studied it since college though) and date the true birth of English literature to the French and Italian infusion represented by Chaucer! (This was also Pound's view, as I recall, though I obviously disavow his Italian rendezvous.) But you are, again, probably right.

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On a high-culture geneological level, that is correct, since all of Anglo-Saxon literature is contained in four medieval codices written circa the year 1,000 and rediscovered in the 17th and 18th centuries (one of them in a monastery in Italy!), and it's unlikely any of our major writers had studied them. Even the most AE-influenced Middle English work, Gawain and the Green Knight was itself almost unknown until the 19th century. But I think on a lay level, it's the same language. Like, this tongue bubbled under the surface for hundreds of years, and AS literature is our only access to a language something like what people spoke before the Norman conquest. If we put it a different way, it's exactly the Old English and Old Norse influence that differentiates English literature from French literature. And the most alive and versatile parts of Chaucer are the parts in northern dialects and the parts that are about ordinary life and have less of a fancy-pants Norman chivalric or Italian nouvelle element to them. To discount AS literature as imaginative art is not fair to it, I think. It's beautiful stuff, particularly in the original--there's a haunting sadness to it. All the poems are about the falling of civilizations, the end of things, and the search for home. But I also went through an AS phase a few years ago and learned the language, so I have a lot invested in it at this point =]

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You are la miglior fabbra here—I defer to your superior knowledge!

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Lol, never!

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I think people revile Emre because: 1. She gets a lot of attention and is professionally successful, and people get jealous of that. 2. She is young and good-looking, and older and uglier people get jealous of that. Twas ever thus... EDIT: The most conservative thing about Emre is that she is happily married, to a man, whom she clearly loves, respects and admires, and who has fathered her children, whom she also loves. That alone is enough to inspire a tidal wave of revulsion among those whose existential orientation to life is primarily defined by ressentiment and hostility toward the phallogocentric cisheteropatriarchal order.

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Sure—but, if I may briefly sympathize with the resenters in your last sentence, it is a bit annoying when a job you didn't used to have to be hot to do becomes a job you do have to be hot to do.

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I don’t think I’ve read as much of her as you have, but the main Merve Emere thing that sticks with me is her statement in that podcast that Paglia is all style with a core of just plain ol reaction-which is I think likely true but misses something of the magic of that aesthetic and sensibility. Ironically I think in the long run there might be more of a home for a Trump-esque sensibility with the Democrats then on the right. Both Eric Adams and some of Biden’s loopier moments seem to point in that direction, although time will tell! My favorite Trump quote is probably that one about hopping in the trucks and driving away, and how he’s had such a good life-if only because it hints at a kind of existential horror of being Donald Trump!

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Yes, after describing discussions of racism and sexism as "shopworn," I generously overlooked that bit of anti-Italian racism. (I need to hunt down the Isobel Armstrong reference. I think I read the book she cites—I mean it is in the bibliography of my dissertation anyway—but I don't remember the Paglia part. Armstrong, intriguingly, is the dedicatee of Byatt's Possession.) And yes, ironically, if you take Trump himself out of the equation, the Dems, industrial policy and zany remarks and all, look more Trumpian than the unendurable GOP nerds at that debate.

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Well, to be fair it’s Mediterranean on Mediterranean violence of a sort that we Americans, whose paradigm of racial conflict is always white on black (or I as I think it’s increasingly becoming, nonblack on black) have struggled to know how to deal with. Do share what you find, I was interested by that and also that Tim Dean book she mentions!

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