How can a literary community-dedicated to serious discussions of literature-avoid, on the one hand a vulgar elitism and, on the other hand, allowing for pure nonsense?

I think a place to begin addressing this question is with a clarification-an elaboration, if you will-on the nature of the poles between which we might be allowed to seek our community. To qualify myself, the following represent exaggerated caricatures meant only to clarify the nature of the problem by exposing the extremes:

Vulgar Elitism

He imagines himself well-read. He knows enough of Shakespeare to quote him at a pulse, but not enough to  restrain himself. He has read Derrida and Foucault, and believes he understands language quite well. He is impressed with himself for said understanding. He believes himself quite intelligent (and he may be), yet he disdains conversation with most-for after all, he has read so much more, and must not waste his time with the plebes.

Pure Nonsense (2 Varieties)

1)    He believes, on a basic level, that discussions on literature amount to little more than a sophisticated joke. Sophisticated-as in sophistry. He believes this either out of a commitment to post-modernism or to indolence, and he cannot understand why he should ever spend his time talking about stories.

2)   He believes, on a basic level, that discussions on literature amount to little more than a forum for self-expression; that is, the rude ejaculation of opinions. That is, narcissism. He is compelled to connect everything in literature to some form of social activism, and to use magnetic poetry to further “diversity” and multifarious multi-cultural experiences. 

Besides these over-drawn exemplars, we can try to understand the poles in a number of other ways. On the one hand there is insularity, on the other hand, plurality. On the one side there is over-seriousness on the other side there is none. On the one hand there is hyper-criticism, and on the hand there is a slobbering-affectionate-malaise. Yet in what way are these poles (besides the details) particularly related to literary discussion? Are these not more general concerns about personality?

 All of this is just to say that I suspect when we say we are concerned about a serious literary forum becoming elitist, it seems to me to be the case that we are, in fact, worried about one of two more general things:

1)    Unpleasant personalities and their preponderance.

2)   The quality of our own intelligence. 

To the first, I can only say that this is a general concern of mine. And to the second, that in moderation this would seem like a good thing-for it would seem to signal that we have something to learn from other who are involved in the conversation. At a certain point we have to take responsibility for how we manage the doubt-whether we let it prevent us from engaging with others who seem to exhibit great pretense. 

For it simply cannot be the case that to say something intelligent on the Amherst campus is to be an elitist (in the negative sense). Did we not come here hoping to say a good many intelligent things, and to hear a good many intelligent things said in return? 

I believe we do ourselves a great disservice if we allow the intelligence of our peers to be stifled by an oversensitivity to pretense.  

Xairete   

1) Doesn’t a literary “blog,” by virtue of its abstract, anti-social, and virtual nature risk losing something basically human about discussions on literature?

To be fair, my friend, I think the answer is yes. There is significant risk associated with this project, and I think you are exactly right to locate a part of this risk on the medium. For one thing, it does seem to be the case that good discussion about literature are good as much for the intimacy that they support between conversants as they are for anything we might hope to uncover about literature. What I think you are pointing to (and please correct me if I am wrong) is the following question: to what extent does the medium of the Internet dehumanizes communication?

On one level, it seems perfectly obvious that it does. When we look at instant messaging and email and the quick often thoughtless way in which they are released, it seems pretty clear that they are not comparable as modes of communication with the Letters I spoke about in my last post (and that is to say nothing of the violence committed behind the strange veil of anonymity that the Internet so quickly affords).But on another level I think the situation is less clear-and may have more to do with our own shortcomings (which the medium of the Internet merely brings into relief) as communicators.

What I have in mind this the following: A few weeks ago I was in a meeting with Professor Howell Chickering in which I was making the case to him for opening up the Bruss Room to English Majors (precisely on the grounds that English Majors needed an intimate space to have the sort of fireside literary discussions your letter alludes to). Part of my argument for the room in that meeting had to do with the Department’s symbolic poverty-that we had no rich, collective symbol.I tried to point to Johnson Chapel as a possible source of “rich” unity for English Majors (on the grounds that it is both beautiful and old). Professor Chickering, thankfully, balked at this and pointing to his temple replied, “The richness is all up here.” In other words, he was suggesting that I had confused a basic premise of my argument–that paramount among the resources offered to us at the College is the richness of each other’s minds. In this sense, I find the argument that the Internet (and by implication-god help me-the “blogosphere”) inherently dissolves the richness of human expression somewhat weaker.

If you really want to know the truth, I think that there is a deeper problem here, and that is, that none of us have really been taught how to write–properly with or about feeling. I do not mean this in the sense of the self-esteem movement, and I am not a proponent of uncritical self-expressionism. To my mind these exist on the same level as exhibitionism, and are generally much less amusing. But rather I mean it in the sense that we have not yet learned to write them, our feelings-to take impressions and unrefined experience, to think about them critically, to handle them, to familiarize ourselves with them, to re-read them, and then to organize them, with whatever strength our constitution allows, into something which is not simply a mechanical reaction to our environment-a whine or a yelp-but constitutes a honest reflection and a real response. For inevitably, as we move towards preparing a feeling to be communicated, we must (if we are paying any attention at all) move deeper into that feeling and maybe even learn something about it.

When we speak of the lack on intimacy across electronic mediums, I think what we are really recognizing is the lack of cultivated feeling and the preponderance of emotional indolence that we hear (whether we recognize it in the moment or not) as the great white noise of the network age. All it takes is a quick comparison with the richness we have (probably at least once) experienced in another’s company to convince ourselves that the lameness of our discourse is due to the Internet-to the emergence of “blogs” where there were once drawing rooms-and not in any way to ourselves, and how we still have not learned to speak.

Don’t get me wrong, I am in favor of drawing rooms and fireside conversation of all sorts. I do not mean to have argued against these. I only mean to suggest that although our world has changed, the choice need not necessarily be between a Romantic (or romantic) attachment to an archaic past literary culture or our more “modern” soul-less chats. I believe there may yet exist other options. I intend, in so far as I can, to make this “blog” one of these options. I cannot help myself:

Men at some times are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

Thank you again for the thoughtful letter. I think there is plenty here to discuss for this week. Depending on how things go I plan on addressing the second and more difficult question that was raised next week.

Xairete

…. Ah dismal soul’d!
The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll’d
Its gathering waves—ye felt it not. (Sleep and Poetry 187-89)

Despite my having been warned against these tendencies, (and by the sound judgment of my very sensible friends), a man arrived recently—out of an alarming (and so disarming) proximity—to tease these regions of my heart. And I confess, for some weeks now I have been involved with the poems of John Keats.

As I have introduced the intent of “this ’ere log,” it might now seem appropriate (following these introductory remarks) to move into a detailed discussion of Keat’s poems, and together attempt to discern what we can as to the merits of the Romantic sensibility—moral and artistic. Pray, the Nightingale:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness –
That though, light-wingèd Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

I am not opposed to this approach, if this is where we want to wander naturally, and I certainly will do nothing prevent the affair. Yet for myself, for now, I cannot but admit that I am too much in awe of the man to speak upon his poems, and would—as in the haste of recent bliss—as quickly leave them as they lie, imposing, in the background of what follows.

What follows is the Letters and the true subject of my consideration tonight this morning. Professor Kim Townsend (The Moral Essay; Keats and Wordsworth) has called the Collected Letters of John Keats the best letters ever written by a literary figure. Whether this is, in fact, an accurate claim I cannot say—I simply haven’t read enough—yet from what I do know, it does not seem to me an unreasonable assessment. There is at least a great deal of interest in the letters: the oft-spoken of theory of Negative Capability, the metaphor of the “chamber of maiden thought,” Keat’s take on “soul-making,” and his letters to love Fanny Brawne–e.g:

“. . . . You absorb me in spite of myself–you alone: for I look not forward with any pleasure to what is call’d being settled in the world; I tremble at domestic cares–yet for you I would meet them, though if it would leave you the happier I would rather die than do so. I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute.” (3 May 1819)

Now, that has all been very tidily put, and I apologize for this, but I feel that I must once more step over my intent. For as worthwhile as the Letters are for their own sake, and for as urgently as I can recommend them, I have not spoken of them today for that sake, but rather for our own, and for what I worry it might mean for us to have come about in a world in which the vessel of focused intimacy traditionally expressed in epistolary discourse has no obvious analogue: We do not write each other letters.

I might, on dark days, even go so far as to say that we do not think each other letters. That for the convenience of our everyday discourse we, in fact, say very little to each other—ever—and that in this way, we are robbed of two things:

First, the intensity of bonafide human intercourse. There is a strange tendency for conversation these days to develop in one of two very particular ways. For the sake of simplicity, I will call them–”shooting the sh**”, and therapy. “Intensity” in our exchange has come to mean (roughly) a display of much head nodding and rude emotional disclosure. We seem to think that our emotions are intense, and do not themselves need refining, or rather, that the purpose of disclosure is merely display and certainly not criticism (read: empathy) and the possibility of growth.

Second, we miss the experience of getting to know someone as they piece together their own thoughts. That is, as they are. Recently, a movie was made about our College’s unfortunate “hookup culture.” Unfortunately, I was unable to make the film, but after it came out, I have thought once or twice about the connection “hookup culture” has with our decayed discourse. At first the causation seemed to run thus—people just want to get drunk and touch each other, thus, we learn very little about each other in “unnecessary” conversation. Yet part of me is coming to suspect that the arrow actually runs the other way. That the culture is so pervasive precisely because alternatives are not obvious, and that people (including, of course, myself) really don’t know what they want—

—unfortunately, my class began five minutes ago, and I am going to have to leave this thought—rough as it is—even vulnerable to criticism of incompleteness. Forgive the generalization in these last two paragraphs; they are of course in need of a great deal of qualifying and backtalk. Yet weigh the ducks against your own, and see if we cannot begin some worthwhile exchange.