a delayed entry from a few days ago

Workable and unworkable traditions


Writing the post that mentioned "workable and unworkable traditions," I found myself remembering Doris Lessing’s aside in Shikasta about how little the young valued the availability of all the world’s contradictory religious texts side by side in bookshops, a condition that had never existed before and might not persist much longer. And indeed, the side-by-sideness has turned what was once the purview of a few fortunate intellectuals in places of cultural ferment into a supermarket for the soul, or, preferably, a tool for what Joseph Campbell called “the age of comparison.”

I’ve cited the many reasons why we are ill equipped to carry out the comparisons, and why we tend to cling frantically to this or that orthodoxy, whether the orthodoxy be called “that old time religion” or “skeptical inquiry.”

Anyway, I was reminded that it is past time for someone to update the histories of the Victorian era; we already knew, from half-century-old survey texts like J. H. Buckley’s The Victorian Temper, how successive waves of economic upheaval and scientific discovery led to all sorts of literary as well as social consequences.

But I’m not aware of a recent popularizing text that tries to unite such disparate strands as the books reinterpreting late Victorian occultism and such books as The Search for the Buddha (which appeared in England as The Buddha and the Sahibs) with the more familiar story of the discovery of dinosaur bones and the rise of paleontology somewhat prior to evolutionary biology (Wallace off in the Moluccas pondering the significance of what is still called Wallace’s Line; Darwin, well, you know the story).

The Victorians were given, above all, to finding alternate explanations; and if there were no satisfactory explanations, to creating hypotheses that called into question the previous assumptions. Men stifled by the strictures of English religion were assiduous in finding out what it was that these cultivated fellows in the East actually did believe, even if it meant digging up archaeological remains and interpreting half-forgotten texts in the case of Buddhism and collating and comparing a slew of independently evolved religious and philosophical traditions in the case of Hinduism. Colonial conquest simply made the job more convenient, and if they tended to interpret the evidence through the filters of the education received by an English gentleman, well, they would, wouldn’t they? The amazing thing is that they got as much right as they did, considering where they started.

And likewise, perhaps, with the chequered history of British occultism at the tail end of the nineteenth century, but there the effort to make sense of borderline phenomena by applying the available insights of physics, combined with the natural tendency to overinterpret, is another story. It is a story paralleled by the overinterpretation of the findings of Charles Darwin through the extension of illegitimately conceived metaphors. The nineteenth century was given to grand overinterpretations in all directions, to be reined in or refuted in the later decades of the century that followed.

Has such a book been written? I can’t help but believe that it has.

Of course, before I could post this, a catalogue arrived in the mail listing a discounted edition of Alex Owen’s 2004 The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern which led via an amazon.com search to the writer’s earlier The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. which suggests that the would-be popularizer would have to keep up with a numbing immensity of new(er) books.

and about later centuries and embarrassments

One of my favorite observations, which I have cited often, is Hugh Kenner’s remark in The Pound Era that bits of cultural information are lost when people are no longer able to relate them to something in their own lives, or find anything useful in them, whether practically or emotionally.

And this, to continue an answer to a question Ron Drummond raised, is one reason for my perpetual state of apology; my questions and issues have always been treated as equivalent to the productions of people who build model battleships entirely out of toothpicks: one admires the skill and the determination, but one really can’t imagine why anyone would want to waste so much time accomplishing such a feat.

Many of my past obsessions have been genuinely inconsequential: tracing the careers of the Baltic exile diplomats, for example. They never set out to be national symbols; they simply happened to be in early stages of their careers when their countries were snatched away but their international recognizition was not, and they conducted business on behalf of a vanished national ideal until the day when Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania re-entered history as separate countries, and they found themselves carrying on the real-world negotiations for which they had been trained in their youth, at an age when their contemporaries had long since gone into retirement.

Not a big topic in the grand scheme of things.

On the other hand, I insist that there is value in keeping an eye on how we incorporate or lose cultural knowledge as things change around us. It occurred to me (and apparently occurred to Hillel Schwartz at about the same time, since he wrote a book on the subject that I never read) that turns of centuries typically impel people to sort out the cultural detritus with which they have been living comfortably for decades. Suddenly the accepted ideals and models for imitation start to look sort of quaint. And this has happened with almost all the heroes of the second half of the twentieth century; apart from the problems raised by models of his-tory (which, as I pointed out a few posts ago, does not spell “his story” but rather “his Tory,” usually the real point). It isn’t that the titans of the intellectual and creative world were a specific gender or ethnicity; it’s that they look, well, sillier and smaller than they did once upon a time. And this is because, by and large, no one has found a way to relate their concerns to contemporary ones. People who do usually end up picking the wrong analogies, and looking silly themselves. I shall spare you the usual forty-year-old examples of how well-meaning writers try to show that this or that classic example of something is really sort of like this or that cartoon or pop singer. Whenever they are written, such books are embarrassing.

As in Kenner’s example, which was discussing early modernism’s re-invention of fragments of antiquity, it requires a creative temperament firmly grounded in the present but also sensitive to the real meanings of previous creative accomplishments. And such folks are not only rare, they offend against the received pieties of the conservative and the tragically hip alike in every generation.

I think I shall post a comment on the need for a new history of the nineteenth century that I delayed dealing with because I had posted way too many observations the day I wrote it. I would add, and I think I already have in previous posts, that of course we need many new histories of the twentieth century.

I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to get started on the twenty-first.