David Foster Wallace. Consider the Lobster

The intimacy of the whole thing is maximized at home, which of course is where most lobster gets prepared and eaten (although note already the semiconscious euphemism "prepared," which in the case of lobsters really means killing them right there in our kitchens). The basic scenario is that we come in from the store and make our little preparations like getting the kettle filled and boiling, and then we lift the lobsters out of the bag or whatever retail container they come in ... whereupon some uncomfortable things start to happen. However stuporous a lobster is from the trip home, for instance, it tends to come alarmingly to life when placed in boiling water. If you're tilting it from a container into the steaming kettle, the lobster will sometimes try to cling to the container's sides or even to hook its claws over the kettle's rim like a person trying to keep from going over the edge of a roof. And worse is when the lobster's fully immersed. Even if you cover the kettle and turn away, you can usually hear the cover rattling and clanking as the lobster tries to push it off. Or the creature's claws scraping the sides of the kettle as it thrashes around. The lobster, in other words, behaves very much as you or I would behave if we were plunged into boiling water (with the obvious exception of screaming). A blunter way to say this is that the lobster acts as if it's in terrible pain, causing some cooks to leave the kitchen altogether and to take one of those little lightweight plastic oven-timers with them into another room and wait until the whole process is over ("Consider the Lobster," pp. 247-48).

The psychology of jokes helps account for part of the problem in teaching Kafka. We all know that there is no quicker way to empty a joke of its peculiar magic than to try to explain it -- to point out, for example, that Lou Costello is mistaking the proper name Who for the interrogative pronoun who, and so on. And we all know the weird antipathy such explanations arouse in us, a feeling of not so much boredom as offense, as if something has been blasphemed. This is a lot like the teacher's feelings at running a Kafka story through the gears of your standard undergrad critical analysis -- plot to chart, symbols to decode, themes to exfoliate, etc. Kafka, of course, would be in a unique position to appreciate the irony of submitting his short stories to this kind of high-efficiency critical machine, the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty. Franz Kafka, after all, is the story writer whose "Poseidon" imagines a sea god so overwhelmed with administrative paperwork that he never gets to sail or swim, and whose "In the Penal Colony" conceives description as punishment and torture as edification and the ultimate critic as a needled harrow whose coup de grace is a spike through the forehead (David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster [Back Bay Books, 2006], "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness," pp. 61-62.)

(I'm really sorry that it was only upon news of his untimely death that I picked up David Foster Wallace's brilliant, eclectic, and subversive collection of essays -- partly because it's ghoulish, but more partly because I've not had the past decade to get to know him better. At any rate, I think these essays are terrific: typically, "Consider the Lobster," which was supposed to be a review of the Maine Lobsterfest for Gourmet magazine, turns into an inquiry into animal cruelty, just as "Up, Simba," a remarkably prescient essay on the 2000 Presidential campaign of John McCain, turns into a manic meditation on the ways in which such campaigns strip human beings of their humanity. Among other things, the remaining essays hang out in Las Vegas at an annual porn awards event (same theme) and review Bryan Garner's Dictionary of Modern American Usage in order to distinguish levels of usage from Standard English. There's also a review of Tracy Austin's memoir, in order to ask how and why a tennis star can play so smart and sound so dumb. But he's terrifically disturbing too: it's like watching an extremely intelligent version of an 18th century scientist dissecting the nerves, ganglia, vessels, and innards of our post-modern society in search of the soul / truth, only to find it exasperatingly elusive and, inevitably, out of reach. His other collection of essays is A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and yes, I know, he's most famous for his 1000-page + novel Infinite Jest, which I'm still working up the courage [and looking for the time] to read. Maybe next summer.)

C.S. Lewis. The Discarded Image

In modern, that is, in evolutionary, thought Man stands at the top of a stair whose foot is lost in obscurity; in this [Medieval Model], he stands at the bottom of a stair whose top is invisible with light (pp. 74-75).

To look out on the night sky with modern eyes is like looking out over a sea that fades away into mist, or looking about one in a trackless forest -- trees forever and no horizon. To look up at the towering medieval universe is much more like looking at a great building. The 'space' of modern astronomy may arouse terror, or bewilderment or vague reverie; the spheres of the old present us with an object in which the mind can rest, overwhelming in its greatness but satisfying in its harmony. That is the sense in which our universe is romantic, and theirs was classical (p. 99).

Whatever else a modern feels when he looks at the night sky, he certainly feels that he is looking out -- like one looking out from the saloon entrance on to the dark Atlantic or from the lighted porch upon dark and lonely moors. But if you accepted the medieval Model you would feel like one looking in. The Earth is 'outside the city wall'. When the sun is up he dazzles us and we cannot see inside. Darkness, our own darkness, draws the veil and we catch a glimpse of the high pomps within; the vast, lighted concavity filled with music and life (pp. 118-19).

Historically as well as cosmically, medieval man stood at the foot of a stairway; looking up, he felt delight. The backward, like the upward, glance exhilarated him with a majestic spectacle, and humility was rewarded with the pleasures of admiration. And, thanks to his deficiency in the sense of period, that packed and gorgeous past was far more immediate to him than the dark and bestial past could ever be to a Lecky or a Wells. It differed from the present only by being better. Hector was like any other knight, only braver. The saints looked down on one's spiritual life, the kings, sages, and warriors on one's secular life, the great lovers of old on one's own amours, to foster, encourage, and instruct. There were friends, ancestors, patrons in every age. One had one's place, however modest, in a great succession; one need be neither proud nor lonely (C.S. Lewis. The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge University Press, 1964, p. 185).

(About once every five years I find myself re-reading CS Lewis's luminescent account of the medieval world view, in order to remind myself of why I became a medievalist in the first place. Elsewhere he contrasts the modern view of darkness, which is pervasive except where it is interrrupted by sunlight, to that of the middle ages, which regarded night as but a temporary shadow cast by the earth in the path of the sun -- a shadow cast upon a lawn on a sunny day. Increasingly, however, I've had my misgivings about this happy cosmology. In the final chapter, CS Lewis responds to what seems to be the only possible objection: that it's not true. (To which he replies that we have created an alternate model of the universe for our own age ["nature gives most of her evidence in answer to the questions we ask her" (p. 223)].) But there is something unnerving and finally wrong about this comfortable hierarchical arrangement, in which God is in the heavens and all is right with the world -- "the rich man in his castle, / The poor man at his gate, / He made them, high or lowly, / And ordered their estate." It's always been CS Lewis's argument, like Milton's, that we only find true freedom once we discover our true place in the universe -- that Satan, in contrast, was free only to jump off a cliff. But try telling that to the peasantry, the vast majority of the medieval populace, the 90% who lived like animals in grinding obscurity and poverty, no more valued than their cattle -- try telling them that, having found their place at the rich man's gate, that only then were they truly free. It's a self-satisfied, rich man's vision of life that seeks to preserve the status quo -- a stay against confusion, as Robert Frost once said of rhyme; but a stay against liberty and equality as well.)

Ingrid Rowland. Giordano Bruno: Philosopher, Heretic

"Mercury: [Jove has] ordered that today at noon two of the melons in Frather Franzino's melon patch will be perfectly ripe, but that they won't be picked until three days from now, when they will no longer be considered good to eat. He requests that at the same moment, on the jujube tree at the base of Monte Cicala in the house of Giovanni Bruno, thirty perfect jujubes will be picked, and he says that seven shall fall to earth still green, and that fifteen shall be eaten by worms. That Vasta, wife of Albenzio Savolino, when she means to curl the hair at her temples, shall burn fifty-seven hairs for having let the curling iron get too hot, but she won't burn her scalp and hence shall not swear when she smells the stench, but shall endure it patiently. That from the dung of her ox fifty-two dung beetles shall be born, of which fourteen shall be trampled and killed by Albenzio's foot, twenty-six shall die upside down, twenty-two shall live in a hole, eighty shall make a pilgrim's progress around the yard, forty-two shall retire to live under the stone by the door, sixteen shall roll their ball of dung wherever they please, and the rest shall scurry around at random. Luarenza, when she combs her hair, shall lose seventeen hairs and break thirteen, and of these, ten shall grow back within three days and seven shall never grow back at all." (from Bruno's Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast; Rowland, p. 17)

"The stupid, insensitive idolaters had no reason to laugh at the magic and divine religion of the Eygyptians, who in every cause and every effect, according to the principles appropriate to each, contemplated divinity, and knew how to obtain the benefits of Nature by means of the species that are in her womb: just as she gives fish from sea and river, wild animals from the desert, metals from mines, fruits from trees, so from certain parts, certain animals, certain beasts, certain plants, there are offered certain destinies, powers, fortunes, and impressions. Hence the divinity in the sea was called Neptune, in the sun, Apollo, in the earth, Ceres, in the desert, Diana, and so differently in the other species, all of which refer back to a god of gods and wellspring of all ideas that exists above nature. That god, being absolute, has nothing to do with us, but inasmuch as he is communicated through the effects of nature and is more intimate to them than nature herself, if he is not nature per se, certainly he is the nature of nature and is the soul of the soul of the world...." (from Bruno's Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast; Rowland p. 166)

"It is truly, O most generous Sir [Sir Philip Sidney], the work of a low, filthy animal nature to have made oneself the constant admirer, and to have fixed a solicitous attachment upon or around the beauty of a woman's body. Good God! What more vile and ignoble vision can present itself to a clear-sighted eye than a man, brooding, afflicted, tormented, sorry, melancholy; who waxes now cold, now hot, now boiling, now trembling, now pale, now flushing, now in a pose of perplexity, now in the act of decisiveness, a man who spends the best season and the choicest fruits of his life distilling the elixir of his brain toward putting into thought and writ and sealing in public monuments those endless tortures, those grave torments, those reasoned arguments, those laborious thoughts and those bitter desires addressed to the tyranny of an unworthy, imbecilic, foolish and sordid smut?" (from Bruno's dedication to the Heroic Frenzies; Rowland, p. 175)

"It happens that, against every reason, state, and nature, human law and consequently the true order of Almighty God instilled in all things, the bonds of nature lie unbound, and by the suggestion of misanthropic spirits and the ministry of hell's Furies (who fan the flames among nations rather than bringing peace, and insert the sword of dissent between those who are most closely joined, selling themselves as Mercuries descended from heaven among their tricks and their many pretenses), it has come to the point that humanity quarrels most of all with itself, and is more contested by itself than by any other living creature, and that the law of love that is spread far and wide lies everywhere neglected, which derives not from some evil demon but certainly from God the father of all things, so that it is in harmony with all nature, and teaches a general philanthropy by which we love even our enemies, lest we become like brutes and barbarians, and are transformed into his image who makes his sun rise over good and bad, and pours out a rain of grace upon the just and the unjust. This is the religion that I observe...." (from Bruno's 120 Articles against Mathematicians and Philosophers; Ingrid Rowland. Giordano Bruno: Philosopher / Heretic. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, p. 207)

(Although the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1600 for his reservations about the nature of Christ, transubstantiation, and the Virgin Mary, among other things, he is often considered today as a martyr for science. Like Copernicus, he turned his back on the Ptolemaic, geocentric universe and its implicit hierarchies in behalf of a heliocentric universe. But more than that, he believed in a multiplicity of worlds -- that our earth and sun are no different from an infinite number of solar systems presided over by an infinite God, who has been worshipped by many religious traditions. Stressing Bruno's neo-Platonism, Rowland's biography draws on a rich wealth of materials; more of her literate, readable, fascinating essays on figures of the Italian Renaissance, first published in the New York Review of Books, are collected in From Heaven to Arcadia. (Incidentally, I take no particular pleasure in reproducing Bruno's misogynistic diatribe, which he wrote in response to Sidney's anxious love sonnets in Astrophil and Stella -- it's Bruno's attempt to persuade Sidney to seek out the love of God instead. For the roots of this anti-feminist tradition, see especially Francis Utley's The Crooked Rib.) At any rate, I thought this was a fascinating story of a Dominican monk who sought to free his God from the constraints of his age, and who was killed for his troubles. His books were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1603. 400 years later, during the papacy of John Paul II, the Catholic Church expressed its sorrow for Bruno's death.)