Something the French Do, Something the Irish Did: Notes on the Audience for Philosophy and Poetry

A few years ago I found myself running late for dinner with my wife, parents, and friends in Paris. As I came careening gracelessly around a corner of the Place du Panthéon, I came damn close to knocking over a glamorous looking guy who was being interviewed by a small television crew. I muttered my "Je regrette" and "désolé," and then it struck me: the man was none other than Bernard-Henri Lévy, France's best-known philosopher. I gawked a bit, irking the television crew even more than I'd already done, before pulling myself together and huffing and puffing along on my way to the (now vanished) Table D'Aude, home of the finest cassoulet ever to clog Parisian arteries.

The scene I'd interrupted — an animated philosopher discoursing about pubic policy for a t.v. camera, against the background of the dome of the Panthéon — couldn't have been more French if it were carrying a baguette, smoking a Gauloise, and carrying pornography home in the basket of a scooter. I mean, one can hardly imagine an American equivalent, a scene in which NBC asked, say, T. M. Scanlon for a few casual comments on the events of the day. Philosophy simply has a bigger public presence in France than it has in the United States: philosophy is taught in French schools, French philosophers write regularly for the popular press, and guys like Bernard-Henri Lévy are recognizable media presences (everyone knows what the initials BHL stand for, and everyone knows the man by his trademark open-collar white shirts. No one in America knows or cares what T.M. Scanlon wears, and if asked what TMS stood for, most people would assume it's a new cable channel).

So what's the deal? I mean, it's not as if American intellectuals don't yearn for some space in the public eye. Barrels of ink have been spilled on the topic of public intellectuals in America, most of it having gone either to lament the lack of such public intellectuals, elegize the (real or imagined) decline of such figures, or to plot and scheme about how intellectuals can gain a greater presence in American public life. A decade ago, Florida Atlantic University actually started a doctoral program intended to produce public intellectuals (due to budget cuts it suspended admissions this fall). Clearly there are intellectuals in America who aspire to a public role, but it just isn't happening for them the way it's been happening for the French. Why?

I stumbled into an answer of sorts the other day when, unable to spend another minute reading galley proofs for a piece I'd written about recent scholarship in Irish poetry, I staggered out of my office and down the hall to see Dave Park, a colleague from Lake Forest's Communications Department. Parksie set aside his pile of end-of-semester grading, blinked wearily as I heaved myself down on his office couch, and asked me what I'd been working on. Always ready to inflict my obsessions on anyone who gives me an opening, I pulled the proofs for my article out of my bag and asked him what he thought of a paragraph where I discussed the critic Elmer Kennedy-Andews' treatment of the Irish poet John Montague. Montague was a somewhat lonely apostle of modernism in Irish poetry, and Kennedy-Andrews, I'd written, had done a good job of made a point of

tracing the influence of American poets like Hart Crane, Charles Olson, and Robert Duncan on Montague’s poetry, and he does well to draw attention to Montague’s 1974 essay “In the Irish Grain,” which he sees as a call for a more expansive, experimental poetry than was offered by British models at the time. Likewise, Kennedy-Andrews writes insightfully about Montague’s attitude to place and nation, calling him a “global regionalist"—that is, a figure concerned with the intersections of local life and the kind of international culture and history that so fascinated poets like Pound and Eliot. It’s unfortunate, though, that Kennedy-Andrews didn’t go further in exploring the connections between Montague’s interest in American experimental poetics and his aversion to the role traditionally offered to the Irish poet as the voice of the nation. After all, the American tradition that interested Montague developed in a country that offered poetry very little by way of a public role, and that therefore placed a low premium on the ability of the poet to communicate to the common reader. In choosing a formally experimental tradition, Montague was implicitly rejecting the idea of the poet as someone who spoke to a broad national audience. All the elements for an argument along this line exist in Writing Home, but the argument itself never quite emerges.

[This is from a piece called "Postnational Ireland," which will be coming out soon in Contemporary Literature]

Irish poets, I explained to the indulgent Park, enjoyed a wide national audience and a high status unknown to their American peers, but this came with a price. To retain this status, they had to conform to a certain kind of reader-friendly discourse and, more importantly, they had to write as Irish poets — that is, as representatives of national identity. Since Irish decolonization in the late nineteenth century found cultural expression (especially literary expression) before it could find meaningful political expression, there was a tradition of seeing the poet as connected to national identity. If you wrote as a nationalist, you'd have an audience and status — but the essential part of the nationalist poet, as far as the audience was concerned, was nationalism, not poetry. When Montague went in other directions, he soon found that the people weren't really all that interested in poetry per se, and wrote his way into a kind of obscurity. Not that that's bad. I mean, obscurity (in terms of visibility, and sometimes in terms of lucidity) is the place where almost all American poetry lives.

When I'd finished, Park gave me another blink, then said "Oh. Like in France." Seeing that I was slow on the uptake, he explained. Apparently, it's like this: France has made a public place for philosophy for reasons similar to those the Irish used in making a public place for poetry. That is, it became connected to national identity. It's not that philosophy was important in itself, it's that it became an expression of what it meant to be French.

One way to date the origins for this is to look at French television in the 1950s. The French were deep into a crisis of national identity, confronting their eclipse as a world power, feeling with trepidation their weakening grip on their colonies, recovering from the humiliation of the occupation and the shame of the Vichy regime, all in the shadow of a growing Anglo-American cultural hegemony. What to put on television? How to reassure themselves of the greatness of their national tradition? How to distinguish themselves from the relentlessly anti-intellectual onslaught of American pop culture? What to turn to in answer to the question "what makes us French, anyway?" Ah! Philosophy! Philosophy makes us French! We have that. We have Sartre, we have Camus, we have Voltaire and Diderot and all the rest! And so a place was made in French media culture for the public intellectual, especially the philosopher.

Of course there had to be some existing tradition that identified philosophy with Frenchness, otherwise the gesture would have been hollow and as doomed to failure as Florida Atlantic University's embarrassingly ill-conceived program for the creation of public intellectuals. The French Revolution, though, had created a strong bond between the idea of Frenchness and the idea of philosophy. There have, after all, been few moments when philosophical thinkers took such a prominent role in the creation of a new vision of a nation-state. So there was a useable past available: the French had long identified philosophy with the nation, and now it could be made into part of an ongoing media spectacle that would assure the French public that they were special, had a great tradition, and weren't just a province of the emerging postwar American hegemony.

My favorite moment in this story actually involves the rejection of a French philosopher by a French nationalist. Charles DeGaulle is reported to have said of Sartre "he is not French." I suppose this was a right-wing politician's attempt to discredit a left-wing philosopher, a gesture sort of akin to the McCarthy-era charge that political lefties were somehow un-American. But what this really shows us is just how important philosophers had become as national figures in France. I mean, George W. Bush never even had to acknowledge the existence of Richard Rorty, much less try to discredit him as a figure of national identity.

So it's not that the Irish love poetry more than we do, or that the French love philosophy more than we do. Or at any rate it's not as simple as that. I suppose the best analogy to what happened in France and Ireland would be something like sexual fetishism. I mean, nation-states need to cultivate the idea of nationalism, and the public in a nation state wants assurance of its national identity. In France, this became associated with philosophy, and in Ireland, with poetry — much as sexual attraction can become associated with something other than the body. The movement of attraction from, say, the body of a woman to something associated with that body (high-heeled boots, to use a common enough example) is much like the movement from nationalism to philosophy or poetry we see in France and Ireland. Of course, once the association comes into being, it'll become the primary thing for some people — so just as there are high-heeled boot fetishists in greater numbers in cultures where people wear such boots than in those where they don't, there are going to be more philosophy-geeks and poetry-nerds in France and Ireland, respectively, than there are in most countries. But in both cases nationalism was the primary force, and philosophy and poetry came to prominence by (often subtle) association with the idea of national identity.

It's all started to change in Ireland, though. There are still poets, often excellent poets, peddling Irish identity — one thinks of Heaney, Boland, or Paul Muldoon in his way. But I think it's important that these are ex-patriot poets, and not young. The younger poets in Ireland don't seem that animated by the nationalist tradition any more, a sign that the old association of nationalism and poetry is coming to an end. The Irish poet Vona Groarke gets at all this when asked by an interviewer about what makes for an Irish poem:

It's easy to say what has been an Irish poem, but now that glass has been shattered, and there are so many parts of it. It used to be a rural poem, but it's not anymore. Now it's equally likely to be urban as it is to be rural... I find it quite difficult to define what an Irish poem is now, and I think that's a healthy.

I imagine it is healthy for what we might call the biodiversity of poetry in Ireland. There will be less pressure to write in a particular way. Then again, I expect we'll hear, a generation hence, a fair bit of bitching and moaning from Irish poets about their lack of a place in the public eye. It will sound, one imagines, a lot like what one hears from American poets and intellectuals now.

**

In other news, my next book will be out soon. It's called Laureates and Heretics: Six Careers in American Poetry. You can read about it at the publisher's site or pre-order it on Amazon.com.



**

In still other news, Louis Armand's out-of-print Avant-Post: The Avant-Garde Under Post- Conditions is now archived online. You can read the entire book, including my contribution, "The Death of the Critic: The Critic-Pasticheur as Postmodern Avant-Gardist" at the archive site.

Aestheticism and the Language Question in Ireland

Back in the 1990s, that magical time when the air was still scented with Derrida's eau de cologne and the prose of academic journals soared ever higher into the spheres of the mandarin, I and some of my cronies took an interest in postcolonialism. Since the venue for this was Notre Dame, much of the thinking and talking and arguing about postcolonialism had to do with Irish literature. And one of the Big Debates revolved around an age-old issue in Irish studies: the language question. The question was, specifically, this: what language was right for Irish literature?

Many of the literary people kicking around Dublin in Yeats' day felt that Ireland should throw off the shackles of the English language imposed by the colonizer, and take up the Irish language. The fact that there was no such thing as a single, official Irish language, but rather a cluster of different dialects no one of which was dominant, was often swept aside. As was the question of who, on the overwhelmingly English-speaking island, would write or read the new literature. Yeats hedged: he was too deeply invested in English to get out, and decided that Irish content in English-language poetry would do the trick (this was during his early, Celtic folklore phase). Others went the Irish language route. Still others, like J.M. Synge, decided to catch the true sounds and rhythms of Irish English — although Synge didn't think his own, urbane speech was the real thing. He trekked off to Wicklow and listened to the servants through a hole in the floorboards to get the true sound of things for his play Riders to the Sea, or so the story goes.

So we jawboned, we grad students, in the coffee shop, between bites of the excellent Irish soda bread stockpiled at Notre Dame to generate ethnic sentimentality among students who would, someday, be potential donors. How were we to feel about the language question? Had Yeats taken a wrong turn? Was the revival of the Irish language practical? Was it a tool of decolonization? Did the movement to revive the old language imply an ethnic essentialism that was ultimately untenable? The latter position was the popular one. We'd all read Brian Friel's play Translations, which made the point. And we stood in awe of Seamus Deane, then the king of Irish studies at Notre Dame, whose Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature set out to show that Irish literature was a palimpsest of different languages — Irish, Latin, Norman French, English — written haphazardly over one another. If there was a graduate student position on the language question, I suppose it was something like "we're all in favor of cultural decolonization and the preservation and prestige of the Irish language, but we're too hip and postmodern to believe the Irish language represents the truth about the nation, which is of course hybrid, like all good things ought to be, according to those sages upon whose partially-understood words we hang." And so we munched our soda bread and nodded sagely as the cheers echoed faintly from a football arena that still hosted a winning team.

As it turns out, we'd missed a whole other angle on the question. Like most American academics who talk about Irish lit, we'd followed too closely the canon-making apparatus of Irish nationalism. I've blogged before about how the idea of literary nationalism came to dominate the canon of Irish writers, lifting those who foregrounded cultural nationalism and decolonization to high status and relegating others (including most of Ireland's more modernist and experimental poets) to obscurity. And despite some good research on the issue, most of us still haven't found a way to expand our horizons. It was while I was working on a bit of my own horizon-expansion today that I came across an aspect of the lrish language question that I'd never seen before.

It was in the works of George Moore, who most definitely did not fit the bill as nationalist, anti-colonial writer, that I found this new angle. (New? well, new to me). Moore, who came from a Catholic landowning family in County Mayo, was a late Victorian figure (born 1852, died, I think, 1933), and is best remembered as a kind of hanger-on of the French Impressionist painters, and a fringe figure in the Aesthetic movement of London in the 1890s (he didn't spend much time in Ireland after his childhood). His Confessions of a Young Man, a memoir of his Parisian exploits, is probably the book of his most read, though I'd hardly call it canonical — especially not on the Irish Lit syllabus.

Moore bought into the whole program of aestheticism: art was to be for art's sake, and it was set against what aesthetes saw as the ugliness and irredeemable unpleasantness of the world of utility, industry, and bourgeois moralism. It seems unlikely that such a figure (an absentee landlord to boot!) would much care about the language question that so obsessed Ireland's literary nationalists. Like most aesthetes, he looked on ordinary politics and nationalism as beneath the true artist's concern. But he did have an opinion on the language question: he was strongly in favor of the revival of the Irish language. His reasons had nothing to do with nationalism, though, and everything to do with the aesthete's disdain for business, utility, and mere information. The Irish must revive their language, he argued in "Literature and the Irish Language," or be condemned to use a language irredeemably befouled by utility. "From universal use and journalism," he said (we must imagine the word "journalism" spat out in contempt), "the English language in fifty years will be as corrupt as the Latin of the eighth century." The Irish language, here, is a refuge from an English scarred and made ugly by its very usefulness. The Irish language, then, becomes not a part of the war against imperialism, but rather the war against English utilitarianism and industrialism — a war conducted, in this instance, not on behalf of the proletariat, but on behalf of beauty.

Of course in contrasting a utilitarian English against an unsullied Irish language, Moore works with a notion of Ireland as pre-modern, and even as mythical and irrational — an idea put about in the nineteenth century by Englishmen like Matthew Arnold to justify the imperial project — their argument being something like "we, the dull but rational Anglo-Saxons, are here to help, not exploit, you amusing, poetic, impractical Irish!". It's not the first time such notions of an anti-rational Ireland were turned around and used against things English. Much of the Celtic Revival was nothing but a taking of English imperial descriptions of the Irish and, rather than discarding them, re-valuing them — the Celticist argument being something like "we're irrational and mythic, sure, but that's why we're better than you!". Until this morning, though, I'd never seen such notions turned around to quite this angle before: the Irish language as a weapon of the aesthete in his war on modern utility.

On the Sign of the Earthward Pointing Thumb

This just in from Jeffrey Bershaw, whose sentiments echo those in a number of messages I received about "The Worst Living Irish Writer"/"The Decay of Twilight"/"The Decadent of Moyvane":

Mr. Archambeaux,

Oh, oh! Your review made me laugh and then a sentence or two later, I'd laughed again. After reading scathing reviews, however, I often wonder why people write them. Why spend the energy to write about something one doesn't enjoy? Unless, of course, one enjoys writing scathing reviews.

Thanks, anyway, though. Fun read. I like your writing. One day, I'll check out your poetry. When I do, I wonder if I'll like it, too.

Best regards,

Jeffrey B.

And voila, my attempt at a response:

Hey There, Bershaw

Great question! About writing negative reviews, that is. I mean, a lot of people think it is mean-spirited to say something bad about a book of poetry, although curiously enough people don't seem to mind it when a movie gets ripped by a critic. I suppose some of the logic of this apparent contradiction goes like this:

A movie reviewer is payed to give advice to potential consumers, so his loyalty is to the viewer, and he should only be nice to the film,and by extention the film-maker, when the film deserves it. But a poetry critic isn't getting paid, or if he is, it isn't much (true! I tend to get crappy token payments for some of my reviews, like maybe 50 bucks, and most I do for free) (*A parenthetical note to editors: Thanks for the fiddy! Really! I'll take what I can get...). Moreover, there's hardly any audience for poetry, and if you're in an actual bookstore you can sneak a peek into the book and decide for yourself. Consumer advice hardly enters into the matter. So why say something negative about a book of poems, if it isn't to serve the reader (much) or make (much) money?

Good questions! In my own case, I'll say this: most of the time when I'm asked to review books, and all of the time when I go to an editor suggesting a review of my own volition, I review books that I find interesting. But I suppose it is important to note that what I find interesting can be different from what I love. Usually I do love (okay, usually I like) the book in question. But when the Keltoi people sent me Fitzmaurice's book and asked me to review it, things were different. I thought it was lousy poetry, but the particular way it was lousy was interesting to me.

Here's how -- I teach Irish lit sometimes, and read a lot of it, and know some writers over there, etc., and one of the things I'd been interested in was the development of a kind of postcolonial nationalist poetry tradition in Ireland. It's all a bit more complicated than that, but you get the idea. You can see it grow and change over the course of the period of Irish lit I teach: roughly: 1880-now. And you can see it become less well adapted to the local conditions: what ws once liberating becomes confining (again, there are all kinds of variations and contradictions involved, but let this serve for shorthand). You can even see new traditions being born. In my review of Fitzmaurice's book I even named a few people whom I see, in my deeply-flawed crystal ball, as inventing a new Irish poetry. But the book Keltoi sent me seemed like the last gasp of an old tradition. Watching Fitzmaurice trying to write in that tradition was like watching someone triy to play a bassoon with a worn-out reed.

So I thought there was some interesting significance to the ways the book sucked. (Who am I to say it sucked? Another good question! Man, if I didn't have a job, I'd try to answer it too. For now I'll just say that my usual working assumptions on these issues come from David Hume's "Of the Standard of Taste" — don't be put off by the old-school title — and Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction, though the two works aren't really compatible). And I wrote the review because I thought people who are into Irish lit, that being the crowd that reads Keltoi, would be interested. All of this is a bit hard on Fitzmaurice, the hapless poet, I guess, although when you put your book out there you've got to be willing to take some honestly-intended knocks. (So, yeah, Jeffrey, I know, you're going to read my book, and if you honestly think it blows in interesting ways, I guess I'll have to take my lumps too, which I'm sure is easier said than done). I guess I didn't have to post a link to the review on my blog, but if there's any other audience beyond the Irish-lit crowd who'd be interested, my guess is that it would be people who read my writing — a crowd that would fit in a small enough space, I know.

I suppose there's a lot more to say if we look at the Big Picture. We could talk about the idea of professionalism and disinterested evaluation, and the limitations of those ideas, and the form of the book review, and the strangely low ratio of negative reviews to postive reviews. But this about does me in for the time being, what with the new semester banging on my office door, behind which I cower.

So I hope that answers your question. I'm hoping I don't come off as an ogre out to smash egos for the hell of it. And anyway: Fitzmaurice wrote so many poems about how the critics just won't get him that part of me thinks he'll just feel confirmed, if he ever stoops to read the piece.

P.S. There's no x at the end of Archambeau, though it'd be cool if there were.

Best,

Bob

The Worst Living Irish Poet, or The Decay of Twilight

Snappy titles, eh? But why two titles for a post consisting of only a few sentences, you ask? Well, the titles are actually alternate versions of "The Decadent of Moyvane," which is what I chose to call a little piece I wrote for Keltoi about a peculiarly Irish form of poetic degeneration. Irish poetry is alive and kickin', sure, as any look into a book by Mairead Byrne or Randolph Healy or Catherine Walsh or Trevor Joyce will tell you, but good gawd there's a lot of crap generated over there by the Dead Hand of Tradition. Anyway, check out the Archambeau take on the decay of an old Irish tradition over at e-Keltoi. They've even got a print-friendly PDF you can get to from here. Slainte!

As if We Were Not Surrounded: Irish Matters

Many, many are the ignominious humiliations. There are, in fact, two points of ignominy for me to acknowledge. Firstly, it is my sad duty to report that the Philadelphia Traveling Team trounced the Chicago and North Shore Croquet Association, sweeping us in this weekend's tournament, despite our home-field advantage. Let sackcloth and ashes be my fate this day.

Also, Mike Begnal writes in from Ireland to point out that my open letter to Stephen Burt on British experimental poetry seems to imply that Begnal has perpetuated the myth that there is no Irish experiemtal poetry. What I'd hoped to do, in citing an article by Begnal, was to show how Begnal was one of a very few critics willing to break the news about Ireland's experimental poetry. Back in the 90s, almost no one wrote about poets like Trevor Joyce, Billy Mills, Randolph Healy, Catherine Walsh, and Geoffrey Squires. Things have started to change, and Begnal's had something to do with it. Begnal's got an interesting piece on this up on his blog, B’Fhiú an Braon Fola.

In other Irish experimental poetry news, Geoffrey Squires has a new book, Lines, out from Shearsman. In a gesture of great generosity and practicality (given the difficulties in getting small press books across the Atlantic), Shearsman has made it available as a free download. Lines is of a piece with Squires' earlier work, which means it is lean, abstract, informed by phenomenology, and that it sounds a lot like Beckett's sparer writing.

Squires gives you only a few words per page, and the experience of moving slowly, page to page, looking at all that white space, is important because much of Squires' work is about the large proportion of our being that isn't conscious or verbal -- the white spaces surrounding our verbal, conscious core. My favorite moments in his poetry are those in which we suddenly sense that there has, all along, been more going on around us than we have noticed -- when we understand, retrospectively, what we've been unconsciously registering all along. In Lines, for example, we proceed along with some Becketting stammering, never quite making a full statement, until we turn the page and come to the following line:"as if we were not surrounded." It sits there alone on the page, just radiating a kind of unheimlich sensation. All of our introverted Beckettian brooding over the previous pages, we feel, has been going on while we didn't notice the forces gathering around us.