An Exchange On The Merchant Of Venice

10/12/17

More on the discussion of Bloom’s Anxiety Of Influence, but which veers off into some continued back and forth on the consternating The Merchant Of Venice.

Him:

....I am not an expert on The M of V as I have a letter in the New Yorker (along with a friend) on Stephen Greenblatt's essay on The M of V in said magazine which argues that Shakespeare's humanity breaks through the anti-semitism: 

Shakespeare’s Cure for Xenophobia

 The New Yorker Digital Edition : Jul 31, 2017

Here is our response:

....Stephen Greenblatt says ("If You Prick Us" July-10 & 17) that "what Shakespeare bequeathed to us offers the possibility of an escape from the mental ghettos most of us inhabit."  One mental ghetto we inhabit is the belief that great literature must be morally good for us.   It seems to me that "The Merchant of Venice" may well take the point of view toward Shylock that people do today who find that Israeli claims to being historical victims are hypocritical given their treatment of the Palestinians.  Might it not have been ludicrous to an Elizabethan audience that a man willing to kill a man by holding him to a financial contract portrays himself as a victim of inhumanity?  The greatness here would consist in portraying a bad person making himself a victim to court our sympathies, and we, today, get it wrong for obvious reasons. This seems more plausible than that a great playwright got carried away by his humanity and thus making his work incoherent (Greenblatt's word is "uncomfortable") rather than it sharing the routine prejudice against Jews in all ages....(end of letter) 

No-one worried about being anti-semitic in Sh's time and place (maybe in Holland), indeed, the idea did not exist.  So think of Shylock as the way that venture capitalists have been portrayed in movies about the 2008 stock market drop.  It is taken for granted they are selfish, inhumane minor league monsters, to be laughed at for any pretensions to humanity.  But Shakespeare can get a laugh by making his greedy Jew appeal to our better natures, just as a venture capitalist might, and get a laugh.  Philip Roth carries this kind of thing further in, I think, Operation Shylock, when he writes a brilliant rant by a settler defending his views.  Roth takes for granted that the settler is a mad fanatic but one gets sucked in.  Sh. did the same for Falstaff, failed a bit with Iago, whose defenses are pathetic (but maybe that works too).  (We don't laugh at the settler because he is a real threat and can't really enjoy his nuttiness and maybe some of the audience responded that way.  

So, once that is out of the way one judges the play as one normally would, and if one can at least imagine laughing at Shylock's defense, it's a pretty good play, but I don;'t think that your concern was about the play once we get over our our perspective.  Of course if one can't or shouldn't it's a bad play as it enhances the murderous stereotype and was popular in Nazi Germany.  The true humanist view (mine) thinks it can get a little outside being a Nazi or a pro-semite, but that may be a fantasy...

Me:

....Good letter. In fact it offers me a perspective on the play I never really sufficiently confronted, the portrayed evil in Shylock wanting to take a man’s life over a debt. 

Of course it’s not necessarily hypocritical to complain with justice about an unjust past even while treating others unjustly. It’s anomalous to be sure, situationally ironic in a bitterly bad way, but hypocritical doesn’t seem the right disparaging word. 

I can see more possible thematic coherence in the play, now facing concretely Shylock’s murderous desire, however lawful. And it mitigates my knock on the play. Yet it just still seems to me, or maybe your good point, which I just now read, hasn’t yet settled in enough, that the play is flawed in being emotionally and thematically discordant. 

Just reading the play and not trying to put myself into the being of an Elizabethan audience, I still feel the end flawed by the treatment and reducing of Shylock, as I first noted. Maybe a better ending would have been to accommodate what was magnetically and compellingly righteous in Shylock in dealing with him at the end whilst according mercy to Antonio. 

Mercy perhaps ought to have been shown Shylock while still visiting on him some consequence for his murderous desire. So I’d still argue his character got away from Shakespeare and that the form he chose, romantic comedy, marked by the merciless extirpation of a villain and the vindication of the young lovers, Jessica and the other guy, doesn’t work. 

I once tried out on myself the view that Shakespeare was subverting that form, showing Jessica as heedless and callow, but the ending celebration and its poetry are too elaborate for me to see the subversion working there. 

When I first read your letter, my first response was to move off my own view and take a more middling position, Greenblatt’s “uncomfortable.” But as I think it through to the extent I have in writing this note, I revert back to my original argument about the play as flawed, but with a more rounded and qualified view that takes seriously into account the good point you make. 

Just like Mill says, opposing arguments met and considered (hopefully here) improve one’s own...

Heather Mac Donald On Implicit Bias

https://www.city-journal.org/html/are-we-all-unconscious-racists-15487.html

On Bloom, Anxious Influence, Joseph Epstein, The Merchant Of Venice And More

10/11/17

For the billions and billions waiting anxiously for this, waiting to be influenced by it: 

On Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” as Joseph Epstein has it, round two. 

And then moving outward from there to The Merchant Of Venice and a few other points.

My friend, who didn’t want to comment further till he reread Bloom and  who had been defending him:

....It's worse than Epstein says.  Amazing he can get away with it.
My copy has a Preface written 24 years after and it, on the other hand, is quite good and also tricky.  

In it he pooh poohs the Greek names for the various defenses and the over-systematization, says it is not a "theory of poetry" (the sub-title) but is only about the way a few great poets respond to earlier poets, and this process only begins with Shakespeare and Marlowe, who were not in the original.  He also says that the book was an effort to counter the going theories that made literature the prisoner of power, while its effect then was just to be another theory.  

He also keeps saying (in the main text) that his theory is meant to re-invigorate close analysis of individual poems but he gives no example and it certainly doesn't do that.  

The Preface however makes good points against the reigning contextual criticism and offers a lively account of the relationship between Marlowe and Shakespeare, including a nice statement in accord with my New Yorker letter that The Merchant of Venice is a good anti-semitic work while Jew of Malta, and his argument is the same one that he makes for Sh's special place in the canon, pointed to by his silly phrase, "the invention of the human."  

What that amounts to is the "inwardness" we find only after Shakespeare and mostly in a few novels by the greatest novelists, a sense that here for the first time one has characters who are fully human, whose full humanity is made available (as it never is in actual life in my view).  

My hope is that I had read the Preface before and was thinking of that!  But I am afraid I was just defending his Shakespeare stuff, The Western Canon and an essay on pedagogy that I admire in a perverse way....

Me, in response:

....So what I’m getting from you, maybe not entirely clearly, is that the book, on your rereading, is even worse than what Epstein says and that his 1/4 century later Preface to, I presume, a then updated republication of the book rationalizes what critics complained about in it. 

Is that right? 

Is he, for instance, pooh poohing his own original pompous bs? Is he saying, after the fact, that his book meant no systematic theory of literature, anxiety of influence, but rather was confined to specific writers, when in fact he does propose a grand theory? 

What does he mean when he says he was countering theories of literature that in fact made it a prisoner of power? Does he as mean post modern theory especially Foucault’s? If he doesn’t mean that, then what does he mean? 

I take it he, as an after thought, claims that his purpose was to enliven close reading of individual texts when in fact his book does none of it. It’s hard to see logically how an assertion and elaboration of anxious influence jibes with the postscript-claimed effort to revivify close reading.  

I don’t get a clear idea of what he or you mean by the “reigning contextual criticism.” Is it a species of pomo criticism; is it the kind of criticism that the New Criticism reacted against and transformed as an academic school of criticism; or what? 

Faisal, I don’t think the M of V is a good play, depending on what “is” is, so to say, which is to say, what “good” is. 

Forgetting Marlowe, why is it good? What’s the argument for that? 

I think it’s a bad play with a massive and unredeemable thematic and emotional final let down, with the flat final celebration of, as it’s presented, routing out villainy, with the undermining of the sparks of power and complexity that shone through what was flat, dull and “tricky,” to use your word, namely the power and complexity of Shylock as a character. He in my view got away from Shakespeare, as measured by his impact in relation to his brief presence in the play. The undermining is most potent in the final making a fool of Shylock, making him abject, talking away all his estate, and have him exit stage left or right like a beaten dog,  turned servile and cowardly. 

So again, what’s the argument? If it’s the presentation of “inwardness” that comes from full characterization, then I’d disagree, not with the inwardness, but with its redemption of the overall play as good. 

 My point is this: for all the good of Bloom’s vast learnedness, a point Epstein concedes, and how with that he has made literature better understood  and accessible too for scholars, critics, teachers and lay readers like me, something I’m not in a position to assess, but I’ll take Epstein as providing a working hypothesis requiring rebuttal, to me, subject to that rebuttal, he’s just another guy talking, when he does, about specific works. That is how I encountered him when I wrote my essay on Hamlet, an unscholarly effort to be sure, consulting only cursorily no more than three or four commentators, Bloom being prominent among them and most widely consulted only because I had a few of books at hand.

He was the least helpful. 

Catherine Belsey in a few comments on Hamlet was illuminating, authoritative on the point she made— the drive to revenge as a province of Hell. 

David Horowitz, yep him, then a (graduate?) student or Chafee at Columbia, was wonderful for near to poetic analyses of Shakespeare’s vision and of Hamlet’s inner torment, beautifully wrought and written by Horowitz. 

Compared to these two, Bloom, in getting right down to the text, was competent and ordinary, with some nice analyses of some of the imagery, but botching thematic extrapolation from them and getting lost analytically in the spume of his prose. I got nothing useful from him save for starting points to take off from and to disagree with. 

I’ve found that too when I read him on other plays and others’ works...

On Harold Bloom By Joseph Epstein Including The Idea Of The Anxiety Of Influence

10/9/17

Anxious Influence:

I'm having some fun arguing with a friend of mine about some whys, wherefores and the quality of Harold Bloom's idea of the anxiety of influence. Our discussion takes off from what I consider an eviscerating take down of Bloom, including that idea, by Sheriff Joe, being Joseph Epstein who likes to run pomposity, pretentiousness and flabby thinking parading as something grandiose out of town.  

A mutually self deprecating limit on our discussion is that we're both at some remove from actually having read Bloom. In the spirit of that self deprecation, I'll say that "some remove" is quite liberating for comments that are written in, how to put it?, a free wheeling, casual way, with no claim to particular depth or expertise.

So I was saying....

....Talk about tricky: that’s all a lot of stuff I haven’t read and I can’t say anything really on what I haven’t read. In fact, as I say, I haven’t read Bloom’s book for an awfully long time and even then only parts of it. So in effect I now comment by way only of what I know of it by hearsay including most recently Joseph Epstein’s.

One thought I have is to ask, whatever the scope of the idea Bloom asserts, anxious influence, which I’ve taken to be a claim of an encompassing idea in literature—Epstein noting that he sees Bloom seeing it everywhere and making unsupported broad brush claims for it that rest not on evidence, says Epstein on Bloom, but rather on Bloom’s say so, or whether as you say he confines it only to specific writers where the anxiety manifests itself, why limit that claim to writers? 

Deeper than only occurring in literature, I's think anxious influence to be a human trait applicable to all endeavours from bakers to candlestick makers. And certainly since no one works at anything ex nihlo, but rather and always within a tradition, where those who reach heights do so by being exemplary within the tradition or by being exemplary in subverting the tradition and reforming it, some influence presumably anxious and haunting and some—most?—not, I still can’t see what Bloom adds theoretically to anything by harping on anxiety. 

And  if he does, as you say, confine himself to specific instances, then save for illuminating particular cases (where compelling evidence for the anxiety supports his claim,) then what does that do to any claim for him enunciating a grand theory? 

What Epstein quotes as an example of the theory at work seems both breathless, ponderous, pretentious, unsubstantiated and altogether critically unhelpful. From everything I remember and have read about Bloom’s book and his idea, my impression is that he means that idea to wear the clothes of grand theory. And again, if it’s only certain writers-specific, then its existence as a theory seems non existent. 

You say that Bloom attempts classification of anxious influence. (Like seven types of ambiguity?) But I’m unaware of any other discipline in which the modes or modalities of influence get classified. Clearly, since all art, indeed essentially everything we do in the way of work, occurs within a tradition, something dialectical is universally afoot, showing itself in varieties of ways, if only the imprint, effects, of specific works on the tradition, which is what I remember of Eliot’s famous essay.

So while I’ve seen plenty on how “tradition and individual talent” has worked out in specific cases and across a spectrum of disciplines—this kind of dialectic seems to lie at the  very heart of the history of ideas—I’ve not, again, seen either the modes or the modalities of influence taxonomized.

I don’t know what it means to say that Bloom tried to classify anxious influence on the model of or by analogy to Freud’s defence mechanisms or even how Freud classified them. But I can imagine. Yes, I can imagine that Freud classified varieties of defence mechanisms sourced on the basis of, flowing out of in recurrently describable and predictable ways, his mainframe theory. If that’s indeed something like what Bloom attempted, I can’t imagine what his classification consists of, what theory it’s rooted in, and it surviving any analytical or evidential scrutiny. Also, classification suggests to me much more than the discrete examination of particular instances; rather it suggests, perhaps necessarily, the enunciation of a grand theory. 

So if Bloom, as you say, has ideas, what are they beyond the tracing of specific instances of anxious influence, which, again, would itself only have utility in particular cases insofar as evidence supports it? 

I read long ago specific parts of Mimesis. I can’t remember its thesis. I can only remember, truth to tell, an essay on Don Quixote, the specifics of which escape me. But I do remember liking a lot what I read and only being impressed by it. That style expresses a culture—if I understand that, I’m not sure I do, but maybe I do—I don’t think I doubt. I’d only say this further on Auerbach: my impression of reaction to Mimesis is near to universal acclaim. Unlike anything I’ve ever noted about reaction to Bloom. 

 Can you say what “Bloom’s method” is? 

You may be cutting Bloom too much slack by emasculating what a theory is by saying that a theory of literature isn't right or wrong A theory to be a theory, about anything, must have within it a claim that it’s right. And it either is or isn’t. That establishing right or wrong proves somewhat indeterminate doesn’t obviate what’s fundamental to theory, that it attempts to be an accurate account--concededly provisional, its only a theory, after all, awaiting validation or falsification--of some slice of what is. 

I once read some theorizing by Ransom on the psychological basis of the New Criticism. It was impenetrable. 

Finally I’ve not read Empson’s book but I did read the sequel,  The 7 Types Of William Empson....

A Few Opening Thoughts On Rereading Norman Podhoretz’s Making It

10/4/17

I’m rereading Norman Podhoretz’s Making It.

I’m at the beginning.

Podhoretz says in it, written when he was 35, that he was basically unconscious, till he reflected back on it, of the distance he had traveled, as measured by the indicators of class, from his poor Jewish boy Brownsville, Brooklyn origins to his 35 year old’s arrival into the upper middle class of New York’s hothouse public, essentially Jewish, intellectual life. 

He makes that distance traveled integral to his theme: the contradiction or maybe rather tension in (then, 1965) American culture between ambitious upwards striving and the disdain for it. Upward ambitious striving, Podhoretz notes, was expected in the Brownsville, Brooklyn world he came from. Disdain for that striving, its apparent grubbiness, was the common attitude in the intellectual world he joined. 

Just a few preliminary notes for now: 

Podhoretz’s prose, while clear enough and accessible, tends to be stiff and laboured. He’s not a graceful writer. His phrasing is at times too formal, and, so, at those times awkwardly overwritten; and his sentence structure marked by his mounting subordinate  clause on subordinate clause in long processions interspersed with hyphenated asides requires some work at times to keep track of them and take them all in. 

Also I’m finding some disingenuousness in what Podhoretz says. The most glaring example I’ve so far read is this: the contradiction or maybe rather tension between his claim of a virtual unconscious arrival in the hothouse, his virtual unawareness of how far he traveled culturally and socially from where he began on one hand, and, on the other, both how self conscious he is as a literary intellectual and how utterly antipodal are the two different worlds, the one he left behind and the one he arrives at. To put it simply, I don’t believe his claim of social and cultural unawareness as he traveled along and up:

...ONE OF the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan—or at least from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn to certain parts of Manhattan. I have made that journey, but it is not from the experience of having made it that I know how very great the distance is, for I started on the road many years before I realized what I was doing, and by the time I did realize it I was for all practical purposes already there. At so imperceptible a pace did I travel, and with so little awareness, that I never felt footsore or out of breath or weary at the thought of how far I still had to go...

Finally for these preliminary thoughts, I remember well from my own experience as a graduate student in the late sixties and early seventies the disdain many of us felt for those, as Podhoretz notes, who strove for popular success, putting that over the supposed purity and meaningfulness, whether creative or intellectual, of what they were doing. But, Podhoretz unhelpfully complicates his theme to the point of near collapse  by saying in his own Preface:

...Success did not necessarily, or even primarily, mean money; just as often it might mean prestige or popularity. In any case, the concept always referred, as it was originally intended to do, to the possession of goods which had value in the eyes of others. These goods might also have had value in one’s own eyes, but that was a secondary consideration, if indeed it was ever considered at all. The main thing was to be esteemed, and one would no more have questioned the desirability of so pleasant an estate in life than one would have wondered about the relative merits of illness and good health...

The problem is that even on the simplest understanding of human nature we all, except maybe 113 ascetics, give or take 50 or 250, want deeply to be “esteemed.” That desire comprises no “dirty little secret” to use Podhoretz’s thematic phrase. He means in his book to expose the dirty little secret, so disdained by his community of New York intellectuals, the secret lust for “making it”:

...My second purpose in telling the story of my own career is to provide a concrete setting for a diagnosis of the curiously contradictory feelings our culture instills in us toward the ambition for success, and toward each of its various goals: money, power, fame, and social position. On the one hand, we are commanded to become successful—that is, to acquire more of these worldly goods than we began with, and to do so by our own exertions; on the other hand, it is impressed upon us by means both direct and devious that if we obey the commandment, we shall find ourselves falling victim to the radical corruption of spirit which, given the nature of what is nowadays called the “system,” the pursuit of success requires and which its attainment always bespeaks...

But what is he exposing: our desire for esteem, something, he says, that is more potent and wanted than money, goods, power, prestige, fame and social position? 

If he had excised esteem as the prime constituent of success, then his theme would have stood sturdily enough. But by subordinating the ambition for these worldly attainments to the quest for esteem, he emasculates his theme, I’d argue. 

But let’s see how it all will go as I reread on.

Kate Millett v Norman Mailer

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/09/29/kate-millett-sexual-politics-and-family-values/

9/29/17

Here's a wonderful essay on Kate Millett and on what she got wrong (among other things?) in Sexual Politics. 

But apart from Shulevitz's main argument, concerning Millett's deep dissing of family, I'm shocked ands dismayed (not really, more bemused) to read her taking Millett's side in her contretemps with Mailer as it came out in his Prisoner Of Sex. 

Shulevitz is a whip smart, erudite and feet on the ground intellectual whose judgments I presumptively trust and have confidence in. Hence my shock/dismay/really bemusement: when I read Prisoner Of Sex many decades ago, around 1970, I thought it was great literary criticism as Mailer championed Hemingway, Lawence and Miller. I thought it marked Mailer as an extraordinary literary critic. I thought he was in brilliantly sympathetic tune with the writers he championed and what they literarily made of sex. And I thought he quite put Millett and other feminist critics like Susan Brownmiller in their boxed-in, mechanistic place, especially when it came to their critical treatment of sex. 

With Shulevitz siding with Millett over Mailer, I see that I have to reassess my long ago judgments. Maybe, they were the result of my then impressionable callowness, of not enough raised consciousness.

I'll at a minimum have to reread Prisoner Of Sex. 

Anyway here's the essay, a must read I'd think for anyone interested in these kinds of goings on.

Of Transgender, Male And Female, And The Issue Of School Washrooms

9/18/17

On transgender, body against mind and the issue of washrooms

An essay in First Things

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2017/03/supreme-incoherence-transgender-ideology-and-the-end-of-law

My tweet storm response:

1 This piece is in places pretentiously cryptic. I take the essence of the argument to be....

2 the contradiction between gender theory denying the biological and social reality of male and female, yet...

3 wanting, needing and cleaving to that antimony in the dysphoric state claimed, the personal expression of that state and (for example)...

4 wanting the right to a sex specific bathroom even while disclaiming the reality of binary sexual specificity.

5 Pace Milton, if a law refutes either itself or the premises it's necessarily built on, hence law itself, then that law cannot stand.

6 Therefore, a law (say the transgender washroom law) that embodies or necessarily implicates denying the objective truth of male and female.... 

7 anchored in the body undermines in-Milton's sense-the law forbidding discrimination on the basis of sex.

8 A problem is that the impetus for the transgendered washroom law needn't implicate that denial.

9 It's easy to see both clear cases of transgender and to see too the objective truth of male and female.

10 In theory, once the transgendered have finished their sex change the issue goes away...

11 but that completion won't largely typically happen for public school kids.

12 Sex change itself affirms the body as the anchor referent for gender.

13 So kids before that change are in more of a limbo than in a state of denial about make and female.

14 They're not yet in a position to accommodate their dysphoria medically and align body and gender identity.

15 And its that limbo that policy has to meet not Shafer's exaggerated concerns with the outer limits of gender theory.

16 Shafer wrongly extrapolates from the washroom issue, eliding the limbo, a false fixed paradigm of male female denial.

17 The issue of washrooms, unless maybe they're all retrofitted, raises problems arising from this limbo...

18 and not from some necessarily implacable denial of the objective truth of the male female binary.

19 The limbo doesn't admit of perfect solutions and the cost benefit of the alternatives need to be weighed.

20 If retrofitting is prohibitively expensive or even if it's not and parents understandably...

21 object to unsegregating kids' bathrooms, then the imperfect alternatives broadly speaking...

22 are either letting dysphoric kids use the school bathrooms of their choice or privately accommodating them...

23 even if they're set apart by that. To my mind, while neither solution in this limbo state is ideal...

24 I'd argue for the private accommodation. It's a case of two rights pitted against each other...

25 (often cited as a definition of tragedy.) But Shafer has with sweeping misconception and exaggeration blown the issue way out of proportion.