The WRB is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
N.B.:
This month’s D.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Friday, January 24 to discuss the topic “Can we learn to be alone?” If you would like to attend, please email Chris for the details.
Links:
In the Financial Times, Dan Hancox on the death of Walter Benjamin:
I can understand the fascination around Benjamin’s death. The murder conspiracies, the tales of Nazi and Stalinist secret agents, the need to have someone specific to blame, but none of the evidence is much more than circumstantial. Perhaps it’s beside the point, the Nazi regime had effectively hunted him to his death anyway. In a letter to Adorno earlier in the summer, Benjamin wrote: “The complete uncertainty about what the next day, even the next hour, may bring, has dominated my life for weeks now. I am condemned to read every newspaper . . . as if it were a summons served on me in particular, to hear the voice of fateful tidings in every radio broadcast.” He might as well have been dead already.
In the cemetery, my friend and I talked about Benjamin’s legacy, and his last message to us. About the difficult but vital work of honoring the anonymous rather than the renowned; about the right to be unremarkable. He wanted us to see that every story of a once-in-a-generation genius fleeing death or destruction exists amid the stories of equally precarious ordinary lives, as rich and important in their ostensible mundanity as that of any great philosopher, renowned actor or Olympian athlete.
[To me all the theories around Benjamin’s death are an attempt to make something “cool”—for lack of a better word—out of it. The Death of Stalin (2017) works; I do not think The Death of Walter Benjamin would. —Steve]
In the Chronicle of Higher Education, an excerpt from John J. Callanan’s book about Mandeville (Man-Devil: The Mind and Times of Bernard Mandeville, the Wickedest Man in Europe, January 14):
When asking what made Mandeville’s work so offensive, we should also ask why it nevertheless emerged as one of the most influential theories of human nature and society in the eighteenth century. The answer concerns the distinction between Mandeville’s method and his theory, especially in the later sections of The Fable of the Bees that deal with the hypocrisy of modern mores. Mandeville approached his subject matter—the nature of human beings and their society—in a manner quite unlike anyone before him. He did not proceed from a stipulated definition of the human being, setting down the rules of society a priori, or by sermonizing upon God’s plan for humanity. Instead, Mandeville adopted the method of a social anthropologist. The introduction to the Fable begins with a complaint: “One of the greatest reasons why so few people understand themselves, is, that most writers are always teaching men what they should be, and hardly ever trouble their heads with telling them what they really are.”
[The greatest reason is actually that so few people are reading the WRB. He was close, though. —Steve]
Reviews:
In our sister publication in Hollywood, Zach Gibson reviews a reissue of Marguerite Young’s study of two nineteenth-century utopian projects in Indiana (Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias, 1945, 2024):
In Angel, it is the order of history itself that Young-the-dreamer chooses to weave. On the whole, the people, places, and events that appear were, in fact, real. But the narrative shape that Young imposes upon them rises to the level of artifice. This, however, is a fact of all historical narrative. The historiographer Hayden White points out that the “authority of the historical narrative is the authority of reality itself; the historical account endows this reality with form [ . . . ] by the imposition upon its processes of the formal coherency that only stories possess.” Angel is a unique work of history only in Young’s candid admission that the orderly, fairy-tale form the book’s narrative takes on is her own invention.
This is not to say that Angel wholly gives itself over to fantasy. Where Young takes liberty with the historical record, she does so to render the very real utopian impulse in a mythic, rather than historical, register. The work of myth, she writes in “The Artist as Wanderer,” is that of “elicit[ing] the wonder of our deepest recognition, seeming to express forgotten dreams, dreams long covered over by the dead weight of convention, dreams long buried in every man, yet awakening to sudden life.”
[We had some coverage of Young’s Miss Macintosh, My Darling (1965) in WRB—Aug. 31, 2022, WRB—Oct. 5, 2022, and WRB—Oct. 25, 2023. (Let me finish Clarissa first!) —Steve]
[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:
Fulke Greville’s idea of tyranny in Caelica
The terrifying effects of movie brain on writers
Hannah on the eroticism of Emily Dickinson’s visit to the sea in today’s Poem
If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below. And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you; I appreciate it. —Steve]
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