Furiously missing the point

I have now read some of Randall Jarrell on Auden, and am not sure what to think. On the one hand, I am self-aware enough to know that I will shrink back, even hide, from criticism of that which I hold most dear. But I really do think there is a Lilliputianist strain to his complaints, wrapped in a lot of the kind of Marxist "realism" that English departments regularly collect and cultivate, like mold in a petri dish, as a sort of salve to soothe their members' own lack of talent and as a prop for their weird political inclinations. Mendelson's response is better than anything I could come up with; but I'll let you decide whether Jarrell's point is valid.

Randall Jarrell, "Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden's Ideology," in The Third Book of Criticism (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1969), pp. 185-187.

[Auden] is fond of the statement Freedom is the recognition of necessity, but he has never recognized what it means in his own case: this if he understands certain of his own attitudes as causally instead of logically necessary--insofar as they are attitudes produced by and special to his own training and culture--he can free himself from them. But this Auden, like most people, is particularly unwilling to understand. He is willing to devote all his energies and talents to finding the most novel, ingenious, or absurd rationalizations of the cluster of irrational attitudes he has inherited from a former self; the cluster, the self, he does not question, but instead projects upon the universe as part of the essential structure of that universe. If the attitudes are contradictory or logically absurd there, he saves them by taking Kirkegaard's position that everything really important is above logical necessity, is necessarily absurd. In the end he submits to the universe without a question; but it turns out that the universe is his own shadow on the wall beside his bed.
     Let me make this plain with a quotation. On the first page of the New York Times Book Review of November 12, 1944, there appeared a review of the new edition of Grimm's Tales--a heartfelt and moral review which concluded with this sentence: 'So let everyone read these stories till they know them backward and tell them to their children with embellishments--they are not sacred texts--and then, in a few years, the Society for the Scientific Diet, the Association of Positivist Parents, the League for the Promotion of Worthwhile Leisure, the Coöperative Camp for Prudent Progressives and all other bores and scoundrels can go jump in the lake.'
    Such a sentence shows that its writer has saved his own soul, but has lost the whole world--has forgotten even the nature of that world: for this was written, not in 1913, but within the months that held the mass executions in the German camps, the fire raids, Warsaw and Dresden and Manila; within the months that were preparing the bombs for Hiroshima and Nagasaki; within the last twelve months of the Second World War.
    The logical absurdity of the advice does not matter, though it could hardly be more apparent: people have been telling the tales to their children for many hundreds of years now (does Auden suppose that the S. S. men at Lublin and Birkenau had bot been told the tales by their parents?); the secular world Auden detests has been produced by the Märchen he idealizes and misunderstands, along with a thousand other causes--so it could not be changed "in a few years" by one of the causes that have made it what it is. But the moral absurdity of the advice--I should say its moral imbecility--does matter. In the year 1944 these prudent, progressive, scientific, cooperative "bores and scoundrels" were the enemies with whom Auden found it necessary to struggle. Were these your enemies, reader? They were not mine.
    Such mistaken extravagance in Auden is the blindness of salvation, a hysterical blindness to his actual enemies (by no means safe enemies as Prudent Progressives) an to the actual world. But it is hard for us to learn anything. When the people of the world of the future--if there are people in that world--say to us--if some of us are there, 'What did you do in all those wars?' those of us left can give the old, the only answer, 'I lived through them.' But some of us will answer, 'I was saved.'

 Edward Mendelson, Later Auden (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1999), p. 193:

Randall Jarrell furiously missed the point when complained that 'these prudent, progressive, scientific, cooperative "bores and scoundrels" were the enemies with whom Auden found it necessary to struggle. Were these your enemies, reader? They were not mine.' But no one needed to be warned against enemies who loudly threatened to kill or enslave. The enemies Auden warned against were the voices that threatened to lose the peace by establishing a political religion--as in the anti-Communist inquisition of the 1950's--and the voices that sought to reassure Auden and his readers by telling them their enemies were so clearly evil that they themselves could comfortably congratulate themselves on being good.

Christ, Scientist

I've been working through Auden's "The Prolific and the Devourer" for several weeks (I am a bear of very little brain, and I can only absorb so many thoughts a day), and have found absolutely nothing I disagree with, and much that I have always believed, though nothing like as clearly and profoundly (of course). Auden began the work in August of 1939, according to Mendelson (who prints the work in the second volume of Auden's prose in his series, The Complete Works of W. H. Auden (Princeton: 2002)), but seems to have put it aside at the outbreak of the war. He described it as "a new marriage of heaven and hell" (ibid., p. 409), but it seems to me a marriage of just about everything in the world to everything else in the world.

In a lengthy discussion of divine and human laws, and religion, as a whole, Auden has this to say about Christianity and the modern world. (I quote at length no only to give the context for the surprising statements at the end of the excerpt, but to give you the flavor of the whole work. Note the way he forms a complete thought in several paragraphs, with an opening, development, and conclusion, almost a small essay, over and over again. Then, too, there are the aphorisms and the Curile  pronouncements which are a characteristic of this and much of the rest of his prose.)

    Primitive religions are practical and political: a list of actions to do and actions to perform in order to survive from one day to the next. This do, and thou shalt live. The wages of sin is death. They assume that society will always remain the same.
    Advanced religions are based on the knowledge that society is changing, and attempt to forecast the direction of change. They conceive of an ideal society in the future, try to deduce what its divine laws will be, and set them down so that when man has reached that stage, he will be prepared and know how to act. Until then he must necessarily be sinful.
     Our judgement of the great religions will depend upon our estimate of the accuracy of their historical forecast. 

Jesus convinces me that he was right because what he taught has become consistently more and more the necessary and natural attitude for man as society has developed the way it has, i.e. he forecast our historical evolution correctly. If one rejects the Gospels, then we must reject modern life. Industrialism is only workable if we accept Jesus' view of life, and conversely his view of life is more workable under industrialism than under any previous form of civilisation. Neither the heathen philosophers, nor Buddha, nor Confucius, nor Mahomet showed his historical insight. 

Epicureanism is only possible for the rich. Stoicism for the highly educated. Buddhism makes social life impossible; Confucianism is only applicable to village life; Mahommedism becomes corrupt in cities. 

"By their fruits ye shall know them."
     If there is one method in which we have faith to-day, and with reason, for it has consistently succeeded, it is the Scientific method of Faith and Scepticism. If there is one method which has consistently failed it has been the method of dogmatic belief backed by Force. But this criterion by observable results is in itself a scientific not a dogmatic criterion. For what is the Scientific attitude but the attitude of love, the love that does not reject even the humblest fact, the love that resists not evil (recalcitrant evidence) nor judges, but is patient, believing all things, hoping all things, enduring all things.
     The teaching of Jesus is the first application of the scientific approach to human behavior--reasoning from the particular to the universal. The Church only too rapidly retreated to the Greek method of starting with the universals and making the particulars fit by force, but the seed once sown, grew in secret. What we call Science is the application of the Way to our relations with the non-human world.

I don't know what to think of all this, but I want to believe (as it were) that he's right. Still, I had always been taught the opposite, that Christianity was the dogma which interrupted the scientific development of the ancient world until the Renaissance, and I would have to read Plato again to see if he starts with particulars or universals.

Much to think about.

Caffeine

I have discovered that a large part of my personality, at least in the classroom, is made up of caffeine. Without it (as I have suffered for two days because of a stomachache) I am: more disorganized; less able to come up with quick fixes for said disorganization; less witty; more cranky; more flat-footed all around. With it I am: slightly less disorganized; quick with a fix for any lapses of thought; quicker to think on all fronts; more forceful in my approach. If there is ever an end to caffeine, there will be a corresponding end to at least part of me.

From a bouquet of poetry

I like to keep certain poems near the front of my brain so that I can hold them like so many fragrant flowers against the stench of humanity. Here's today's, from Housman's Last Poems:

Star and coronal and bell

    April underfoot renews,

And the hope of man as well

    Flowers among the morning dews.

Now the old come out to look,

    Winter past and winter's pains.

How the sky in pool and brook

    Glitters on the grassy plains.

Easily the gentle air

    Wafts the turning season on;

Things to comfort them are there,

    Though 'tis true the best are gone.

Now the scorned unlucky lad

    Rousing from his pillow gnawn

Mans his heart and deep and glad

    Drinks the valiant air of dawn.

Half the night he longed to die,

    Now are sown on hill and plain

Pleasures worth his while to try

    Ere he longs to die again.

Blue the sky from east to west

    Arches, and the world is wide,

Though the girl he loves the best

    Rouses from another's side.

Testy!

So, my students are today taking their Latin II test. We've been on the same chapter for four weeks (with a break for Thanksgiving, so it's been a while since the beginning of the chapter). They've gone over the vocabulary at least three times and been quizzed on it once. We whipped through some of the stories in the book because they looked like they were about to die every time I did a translation. But they all they need to know for the test is the main characters. The questions on the passage are multiple choice and, with a few exceptions, involve more thought than Latin knowledge. Perhaps that's the problem, but it really shouldn't be. The vocabulary section ("What page is the vocabulary on?" asks a student. "The same one it's been all month," says I.) is only derivatives, from that chapter. No meanings, no forms, no nothing. Just derivatives.

The third bonus question says, "See board." One student asks if he is supposed to replace that with what is on the board, then asks, "What does this mean?"

I guess, in the old days, I used to give tests which quizzed and rewarded memorization. It seems that this sort of test, which involves as much thinking as memorizing, or, rather, thoughtful rather than mindless memorization, is simply beyond them.

Auden on being an educator

   But what can one do? Dearie, you can't do anything for the children till you've done something for the grown-ups. You've really got nothing to teach and you know it. When you have repapered the walls perhaps you will be allowed to tell your son how to hold the brush. In the meantime some of us will go on teaching what we can for a sum which even in its modesty we do not really deserve. Teaching will continue to be, not a public duty, but a private indulgence. (Scrutiny, September, 1932; The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose Vol. I, p. 27)