WRB—Dec. 4, 2024

“his ideas have been endlessly recycled”

Would God that all the LORD’s people were Managing Editors of the Washington Review of Books, and that the LORD would put his spirit upon them!

Links:

• In The Drift, Jack Hanson on a recent wave of books about Simone Weil:

  Though widely read by Christians and indeed an ardent believer—in her letters she unequivocally proclaimed her love for Jesus—Weil was never baptized, preferring to remain without institutional affiliation. This independence, which some might read as a sign of ambivalence, in fact represented an intensification of Weil’s religious commitment. She wrote that “it is necessary and ordained that I should be alone, a stranger and an exile in relation to every human circle without exception,” in order to more fully embrace the affliction that was, to her mind, the surest path to God and communion with all creation. Her refusal to be included within a structure the authority of which she nevertheless affirms is at the heart of Weil’s thought, and its religious potency: her thinking is perhaps most radical in its striving to confirm old ties and obligations, a constellation which we embrace as greater than ourselves, even as we accept that we are, in large part, its makers.

  • Madoc Cairns reviewed one (The Literary Afterlives of Simone Weil: Feminism, Justice, and the Challenge of Religion, by Cynthia R. Wallace) in the TLS a few weeks ago:

    One exemplum: her disaffection with the Church and her attacks on Judaism are hard to disentwine. Her interpretation of Christianity was one systematically expurgated of Jewish influence. Athens displaced Jerusalem, with the Gospels reread as the “last and most marvelous account of Greek genius,” and Dionysus and Osiris recast as “in a certain sense, Christ Himself.” In Weil’s schema, radically Hellenistic and radically universalizing, non-Christian spiritualities have a place. Judaism—an exclusive revelation, for a people apart—has none. The exception is an aspect of the rule.

  • Alan Jacobs:

    By “practices of exclusion” I mean Baptism—those baptized are “inside,” others “outside”—and limitations on the reception of Holy Communion. Weil hated every such distinction with a furious hatred. It’s hard to say whether Weil’s antisemitism develops from her rejection of what she calls the “spiritual totalitarianism” of the Roman Catholic Church, or the other way around.

    [The most recent entry in

    Phil Christman
    ’s series on Marilynne Robinson, dealing with her “deep immersion in Calvin, and her deep love of Genesis,” is an interesting contrast here. As he quotes throughout, “Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.” Cairns also references Weil’s “account of medieval Languedoc as a fusion of ancient Egypt, the Athenian Golden Age, and a repristinate—if suspiciously Weilian—Christianity of pacific, cultured humanism,” which is not all that far off from the account given at around the same time by another antisemite who was also happy to attack the Roman Catholic Church, Ezra Pound: “I believe that a light from Eleusis persisted throughout the middle ages and set beauty in the song of Provence and of Italy.” —Steve]

• In Lit Hub, Merve Emre and Adam Dalva on George Gissing’s The Odd Women (out in a new edition from Smith & Taylor Classics next week, with forewords by Emre and Dalva):

  Emre: When Everard proposes to Rhoda that they live together in a free union, he thinks, “He must be able to regard her as magnanimous, a woman who had proved herself worth living or dying for. And he must have the joy of subduing her to his will.”

  But these are contradictory desires. A magnanimous woman is a woman who gives of her own free will, not one who lets herself be subdued to the will of another. But Everard’s desire for domination is too strong. He can’t be with a magnanimous woman. His ideal type is a fantasy, founded on a paradox.

  Everard and Rhoda both claim they want the other person to prove their love, but they really want proof of how willing the other is to be dominated. It makes me think of Mr. Knightley’s description, in Emma, of “the very material matrimonial point of submitting your own will, and doing as you were bid.”

  • BDM
    on the same:

    As a work of social commentary I think it is fair to say The Odd Women has aged unevenly. As a legal and social institution, “marriage” today is just not what it was; a woman in Rhoda’s position does not have to choose among sexual fulfillment, a life lived independently, and having a good name. If somebody operates under marriage-or-nothing terms these days they do so on a strictly opt-in basis. The scandalous musing of one charcter—that in the future perhaps people will be able to divorce for no reason except wanting to—is just how things are. I can certainly see why I didn’t finish it when I tried to read it back in the day. Though at the same time, I can remember how bitterly I resented the ending of Middlemarch at that age (in which Dorothea chooses happiness over greatness), and I might have worked my way around to fondness for The Odd Women if I’d actually got to the end.

    [Jude the Obscure, written in the same decade, has the same problem as social commentary and has similar scandalous musing as well. But there the argument is not so much about “marriage” as it is about “Thomas Hardy’s marriage.” To be fair, this is no sure sign of a lack of greatness; the same applies to all of Milton’s work on the subject—Sonnet 23, which

    Adam Roberts
    recently commented on, strikes me ever so slightly as the work of a man who was not a good husband in life. (Maybe I’m just bringing what I know about Milton’s life to reading it.) —Steve]

• In Meanjin, Eli McLean interviews Gerald Murnane:

  Obviously the person you see is the same person who would be sitting at his desk, but I can’t find it in me to talk to you as a flesh and blood person in a real room overlooking a real street in the way that I would write to my unknown ideal reader. My unknown ideal reader is a construction of my own needs and wants and feelings. It’s usually a female, and I’d know her better than I would know you, even if we spent six months together on a cruise. This is a practical session that we’re conducting. There’s a purpose to it. It’s going to lead to something, the publication of this interview in an actual magazine. The wonderful—and it is a source of wonderment—nature of the writing that I do for the invisible reader, or the ideal invisible reader, is that I don’t know when I start writing where I’ll be when I’ve finished. It’s not an idle sort of thing. I don’t enjoy writing any more than most writers, but what I do enjoy is the long session that leads up to a discovery. I’m a great crosser-out and discarder of unwanted pages—or I was for most of my career, I’ve got a bit smarter towards the end of it—but the great pleasure and joy is the final discovery of what you’re on about, as they say. I might sit down with an idea of writing in one direction, but after some time I find I’m writing in another direction, and that was the true direction. With that sort of wonderful writing, when I’m writing at my best, there are no known limits, and you can end up anywhere.

  [I have made so many jokes about the ideal reader of the WRB that I no longer have any real conception of what that would look like. (As I’ve said before, much of the commentary gets refined in conversation, in which case the person on the other end of the conversation becomes the ideal reader.) Nevertheless, I am a river to my people. —Steve]

[Behind the paywall: Steve on the vision of the WRB, Hannah on horses, as well as The Magic Mountain, Mondrian, Iris Murdoch, Paradise Lost, knowledge on the Internet, and more links, reviews, news items, and commentary carefully selected for you, just like on Saturdays. If you like what you see, why not sign up for a paid subscription? The WRB is for you, and your support helps keep us going.]