Metropolitan Greetings:Allen Ginsberg Behind the Iron Curtain (from Havana to Moscow)

La Nouvelle Chute de l’Amérique portfolio (The New Fall of America)

Roy Lichtenstein (American, 1923-1997)

1992. Set of ten etching and aquatints in colors, on Velin d’Arches paper.

19 5/8 x 14 3/4 in (49.8 x 37.5 cm)

The Phillips Collection

Washington D.C.

In 1965 Allen Ginsberg travelled to East Europe, visiting Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Soviet Union, alone. Ginsberg was a prolific world traveler. Over the course of his life he traveled to some 66 countries. Whether he was travelling as a member of the merchant marine, in support of his work, or simply travelling for travelling’s sake, he kept extensive journals, chronicled his experiences, capturing political and poetic landscapes that were both ancestrally familiar, and ideologically foreign. In the United States, Allen Ginsberg had risen to near-legendary status in the popular eye and would often lead crowds in mantra-chanting sessions at gatherings such as The Human Be-In, held in the polo field of Golden Gate Park in 1967. Ginsberg was seen as a combination guru and paterfamilias of the hippies, a kind of ultimate generational advisor. He would direct much of his writing and public presence toward anti-war efforts. Refining the observational poetics he practiced in his travel writing abroad, Ginsberg travelled across the United States from 1965-71 to chronicle “the flux of car bus airplane dream consciousness Person during Automated Electronic War years, newspaper headline radio brain auto poetry…headlights flashing on road through these States of consciousness” (Fall of America 189).

His journals, published posthumously, chronicle his travels, poetic impulses, and spiritual considerations while on the road, and present readers with a well-documented perspective on the poet’s mind at work. My talk focuses upon Ginsberg’s time in East Europe, charting his observations, poetry, political dissent, and personal encounters during the height of the Cold War. More specifically, I intend to share ideas on the ways in which Ginsberg, whose mother Naomi had come to the United States from Russia, viewed himself as a world citizen, immersed himself in the environments that he traveled to, and recorded his experiences in his notebooks. I also want to shed light on the way Ginsberg’s observations informed his poetic output. Much of what I discuss draws from the somewhat recently published “Iron Curtain Journals” edited by Ginsberg biographer, Michael Schumacher, as well as the Ginsberg collection at Stanford University Libraries department of Special Collections. I also looked at critical editions and primary sources related to this trip. 

Cuba

Ginsberg’s time “behind the iron curtain” actually started in the west, in Cuba. He traveled to Cuba in January 1965 when he received an invitation from Cuba’s minister of culture to participate in a writer’s conference sponsored by the Casa de las Americas in Havana.

In Cuba, he filled hundreds of pages with observations, new poetry, dialogue, sketches, travel descriptions, dream notations and other musings that deserve a separate investigation. His time in Cuba is noteworthy because it is this trip that gave Ginsberg an inkling of the logistical difficulties and ideological tension that he would encounter in East Europe. Ginsberg’s travel arrangements were convoluted. The State Department, adhering to Cold-War era policies, did not allow Americans to fly directly to Cuba from the United States. Ginsberg would have to fly through Mexico City, and in order to return to the United States, he would have to travel to another Iron Curtain country, in this case, Czechoslovakia, before returning (Iron Curtain Journals 6). Ginsberg was initially excited, stating how “I was at last stepping on the giant bird to fly to the Island of Cuba and premonitions of Marxist Historical Revolutionary Futurity with Wagnerian Overtones lifted my heart, an abstract passion seized the airfield” (Iron Curtain Journals 7).

Initially enthusiastic about the prospect of witnessing a revolutionary government in practice, Ginsberg’s assumptions about Cuba would turn out to be incorrect. It is important to note here that criticism of censorship stood at the forefront of Ginsberg’s public life, Lawrence Ferlinghetti had faced and won an obscenity trial in 1957 for publishing Ginsberg’s book “Howl and Other Poems” and months before traveling to Cuba, Ginsberg, along with Norman Mailer and other writers, testified in an obscenity trial on William S Burroughs’ novel The Naked Lunch. Freedom of speech had always been a primary focus of Ginsberg’s work, and he felt the same level of openness must be applied to discussion of homosexuality and drug use, which were illegal in Cuba, where offenders were subject to capital punishment. 

Ginsberg was escorted around Havana by local writers and shown the nightlife of the El Vedado neighborhood. He gave poetry readings, wrote, and visited the beach. Ginsberg’s sexual encounters with the young writer Manuel Ballagas resulted in Ginsberg’s deportation and Ballagas’ imprisonment. This marks the first serious run-in with authorities over the course of the 1965 trip, and an externality of his insistence on free expression. In the journals, he writes of his expulsion from the country and shows a level of self-awareness about who might be reading his journals and the importance of keeping his contacts anonymous, something he would do while traveling in East Europe:

Three soldiers in olive green neat pressed uniforms…looking around the room. What did I have on me—the $10 for pot—that’s ok—I was moving around sort of blurrily looking for my underwear thinking— “My Notebook! Libreta de Technicos black notebook on the bed table—yesterday’s description of love scene with M. —Thank God I used his initials—but there’s still enough in there for them to get me on something political or amoral?— Will they search? (Iron Curtain Journals 150)

During his stay, Ginsberg had spoken too freely about politics and sexuality for the Cuban authorities to tolerate and was forced to leave amid the controversy. In a letter to his father, he admitted that “I committed about every infraction of totalitarian laws I could think of, verbally, and they finally flipped out & gave me the bum’s rush…it was half Kafkian & half funny” (Iron Curtain Journals 161). Elsewhere in the journal is the brief inscription “Cuban military, American military, Vietnam military- the world is a mountain of dogs,” indicating his distaste for any authority, regardless of ideological stance (Iron Curtain Journals 157). He summed up his experience to Peter Orlovsky in a letter: “Cuba is both great and horrible, half police state, half happy summer camp – mixed” (Morgan 264).

Czechoslovakia: Part I

Ginsberg arrived in Prague in February and resolved to maintain a lower profile. He stayed quietly for a few weeks before traveling to Russia and Poland, and would return back in Prague at the end of April. Ginsberg enjoyed his time in Prague, and held celebrity status among the city’s youth. He gave poetry readings at the Viola cafe, which allowed him to fund his side trip to the Soviet Union. He toured the city, museums, visited Kafka’s home and grave site, and found himself ruminating on the idea of the free spirit trapped within a totalitarian society. 

Soviet Union

March 18- My Slavic soul, we are coming home again—

once more on Red Square by Kremlin wall

            in the snow to sit and write Prophesy—

Prince-Comrades of Russia, I have

            come from America to lay my beard

            at your beautiful feet!

                                                Trembling

in the Railway Station, amazed at the

            great red train Moscova—Prague—

The train doors open to the corridor—

            A Sealed train—Lenin was a trained

                        Seal—

I’ll trade you one diamond Sutra

            for 2 Communist Manifestos—

                        I am approaching the throne.

                                                                        (Iron Curtain Journals 169)

Ginsberg’s time in the Soviet Union begins with optimism, he sees himself as coming home, to lay his beard at the feet of the nation. He goes to the circus, the ballet, the theater, and writes highly of the experiences. The journals present a narration of his travels that distill the essential features of a given scene or sequence:

In youth cafe—monk beard on a saxophone, the slow stately bounce, & the lovely echo on the clank plane. Many a youth & many a maid dancing on the wooden floor, modern lights hung from the ceiling, plastic tables, hot dogs & peas, ham & cheese, caviar & salmon, young kids in babushkas, one couple doing an Afric twist, middleaged Slavic beauties drinking sweet punch & coffee, a wine bottle at musician’s table, the band jumping and most of the dancers swaying back and forth slowly a food apart, a smart photog from a youth magazine with a giant eyed camera, the saxophonist gaunt & calm, intellectual, from behind with his sensitive fingers and delicate skull he looks like Jonas Mekas (Iron Curtain Journals 212).

 His head on encounters with authority would soon change this optimism. Authority is not only exercised in terms of who Ginsberg sees, his tour guides arranged meetings with state-approved poets like Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky, but also by who he does not see, like the poet Iosef Brodsky, who was serving a sentence of hard labor and whose poetry was denounced by authorities as “pornographic and anti-Soviet”, or who he has a hard time seeing like Alexander Yessenin Volpin, who he is able to find on his last day. Ginsberg finds out that he could have found Yessenin Volpin’s address in a common telephone book, something his tour guide was unwilling to help him with.

Ginsberg is initially taken with Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, perhaps the most popular in the Soviet Union at the time of his visit. Ginsberg provides descriptions of the poet’s physical appearance, his height and blonde hair. Ginsberg respected Yevtushenko’s oratory power in a description of a poetry reading, his command of the room, and his bulging venous neck muscles. In a drunken discussion (in broken Spanish), Ginsberg begins to talk about the two subjects that resulted in his Cuban expulsion, drugs and sexuality. The more that Ginsberg talks about drugs around Yevtushenko, the more Yevtushenko seems distant, and uninterested. In the journals, Ginsberg recounts Yevtushenko’s response, “Please Allen, I like you, I like you as a poet, but these are your personal problems, please don’t speak to me about them. They are not interesting to me, I respect you as a great man, a great poet, but these two subjects homosexuality and narcotics are not known to me and I feel they are juvenile pre-occupations, they have no importance here in Russia to us, it only disturbs my impression of you- please don’t talk to me about these 2 matters” (Iron Curtain Journals 190). Yevtushenko’s wholesale dismissal of Ginsberg’s conversation illustrates the difference in the two poet’s approaches to dissent. The two, nonetheless became familiar in a friendship that would last their whole lives, with Ginsberg returning in 1985, 20 years later for another visit.

Yevtushenko’s reticence to embrace Ginsberg’s then-controversial stances makes sense, especially considering his illustrious position within the Soviet literary sphere. At all points in the journals, Ginsberg portrays Yevtushenko as stiff and overly-serious, yet willing to include the radical American in his social circle. Yevtushenko was concerned with Soviet-specific affairs and his poems grapple with the atrocities of war. Yevtushenko navigated within a literary world under massive ideological control and would always have to be careful about his political critiques to survive. His poem “Babiyy Yar” protests the Soviet Union’s refusal to identify the Babi Yar massacre as a Holocaust site. The poem’s first line is “Над Бабьим Яром памятников нет” or  “There are no monuments over Babi Yar”. The poem denounced both Soviet historical revisionism and still-common anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union of 1961, focusing not only on the Nazi atrocities, but also on the Soviet government’s own persecution of the Jewish people (YIVO). “Babiyy Yar” first circulated as samizdat, published unofficially without state sanction.

In a sense, Ginsberg encountered some similar political risks in his early career. His most famous poem, “Howl” is a reaction to war and contains allusions to drugs, madness, and homosexuality and its publication led to an obscenity trial. Though it should be noted that the poetic atmosphere was significantly more tolerant in the United States and the horrors of the eastern front would have been much more immediate in Soviet poetics.

Yet both poems are burning missives, social critiques that invite emotional participation by the reader. Both “Babiyy Yar” and “Howl” are born from a sense of war-as-Hell. Both poets were tasked with creating art within the context of massive human and psychological devastation. The raw, instinctual, attention-getting, sorrowful language in both poems is born of the incomprehensible carnage of the Holocaust, the leveled cities in Europe, millions of civilians dead, and a new specter of atomic devastation. Indeed the “Beat experience” and Yevtushenko’s political awareness begins and ends with war.

In Moscow Ginsberg was able to meet with long lost relatives, Joe and Anne Levy, organized in part by his father and brother Eugene.  Ginsberg’s interest in Russia dated back to his boyhood, when his mother, Naomi Ginsberg, an avowed communist, told young Allen and Eugene harrowing tales of the persecution of Jews in rural Russia, stories of the pogroms and Cossacks charging on horses during village raids. He recounts the meeting with the Levys:

March 21- “The Kremlin bells are tolling on the radio midnite Moscow—and the new Soviet anthem— Da dum da da dum—I light a long cardboard filtered Bebop Kasha cigarette— and now Tchaikovsky violins—I began to see the dream life of the past flit by—They were all cousins—and Memele, my maternal grandfather, who didn’t want to fite the Czar, went off to America (he bribed his way out) in company with J’s father — and Memele got to Ellis Island, and was admitted, while J’s father was rejected in 1904, he had a bald spot on his head suspected to be woeful or diseased…And some came across in 1907 because they had been in jail for revolutionary activities…so came to America—and I alone will someday know the ghost of this tale—” (Iron Curtain Journals 181)

As they share photographs and discuss the family’s immigration, Ginsberg writes of “the expression the sad tragic aloneness never changes in half a century, surviving them the unknown descendents—[Anne] and I were sad and tears rolled down our cheeks as we came to the end, the last pictures of the unknown newly grown children in America” (Iron Curtain Journals 182). The family reunion presents layers of abstraction between Ginsberg’s lived experience and the comfort of the narrative of ancestry. One is not able to simply plug back in to one’s own family after generations. The episode brings into question the experience of children of emigres reuniting with the rest of the family and the mixed emotions that accompany such a reunification. 

Ginsberg spends much of his time in the Soviet Union lonely, many journal entries describe loneliness, and a growing feeling of alienation. His visits to state sanctioned tour stops, museums, and cathedrals leave him feeling conflicted.  He visits Nevsky Prospect, Leningrad, where he looks at statues from Gogol and Pushkin stories. He meets up with local puppeteer and unsuccessfully propositions sex, the boy preferred to trade with Ginsberg for his blue jeans and jacket. He returns to Moscow where he changes hotel rooms to gain an unobstructed view of Red Square at night and is able to extend his stay with Yevtushenko’s assistance.

Night

Red Square the Clang of Shusky Tower

            eleven times echoed from brick gothic towers

GUM blinding spotlights on Kremlin battlement

            a range of neon zooming across arched

                        display windows, 

Electricity gleaming on cobbles, electricity

            like power station cabaret of red marble

            atop Lenin’s tomb—

a lonely cop walking the asphalt street

            by the tribune—long coat & black 

            fur hat— I sit on the white bench—

orange lights in the arches of Gum say

            Gum—

A crowd gathered in the dark shade by

            Lenin’s portal to witness

the hourly goosestepping charge of the grey guard—

and rolled away like a tree when the 

            bell finished echo—

                                                            (Iron Curtain Journals 212).

His perspective begins to sour over the remainder his journey. He begins to feel profoundly alone, and comments on the restrictions of Soviet society, similar to the ideological control that he encountered in Cuba. In a public poetry reading, he amended his poem “Death of van Gogh’s ear” which had criticized the US, to include the Soviet Union as part of the global problem. He equates capitalism and communism as two faces of the same bad deal, a Sentiment that he would also describe in his poem “Kral Majales” and the collections Planet News and The Fall of America. In the journal, Ginsberg writes “The Russians are trapped in Russia” (Iron Curtain Journals 244).

His view of regular people, however, is more forgiving, he said he saw people as Soviets, but then he saw them as God. Perhaps he saw people as individually holy, part of the World Soul or atman. The human soul is a concept he explores in much of his work, like in “Howl” where he writes “Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magnanimity! Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!” He also says that in an orthodox church is the first time he sees Christ on the cross as a religious figure worthy of serious consideration.

Long avenues, old palaces, old dungeons, 

Great gardens covered with mud, an iron

fence on the Neva waters dirty ice lakes, 

where Pushkin walked in springtime drowned

his heroine pique dame, the vast open space

surrounded by old low apartments where Dostoyevsky

trembled at the eternal hole in the barrel of Czarist rifles

and left reborn, now a children’s theater with Mickey

the Red Mouse, the giant dome and malachite

columns of St. Isaac’s, Kirov’s caricature

Christ and Holy Fools with magic signs & foetus

dinosaurs illustrating scientific method on 

Mosaic floors that eye trick solid space

                                    (Iron Curtain Journals 202).

Ginsberg’s deployment of religious topics and imagery such as “Holy Fools with magic signs,” “Kirov’s caricature Christ,” and “malachite columns of St. Isaac’s” stand in stark contrast to intimations of scientific modernity, “the eternal hole in the barrel of Czarist rifles” and “foetus dinosaurs illustrating scientific method on mosaic floors that eye trick solid space.” In this journal passage, Ginsberg considers the reflections of an Orthodox-Christian moral axis buried beneath Marxist-Leninist doctrine and distills the friction between the two into a pithy entry. Yet Ginsberg was no Christian, his divine intellectual-romantic ideal of salvation is the love of the world-soul. Ginsberg’s belief in this eternal and inherent nature of reality, expressed sometimes as the dharma, was central to beat literature, and to Ginsberg’s later writing and spiritual practice. The idea that such a world-soul which permeates matter so that matter is not just physically but morally sentient relates directly to the “rebirth” of Pushkin and Dostoevsky as a children’s theater featuring a purported “Mickey the Red Mouse.” The suggestion of Disney’s Mickey Mouse satirizes the Soviet literary culture, equating it to the oversimplification and commercialization of American popular culture. Atman Dharma

Ginsberg’s belief in transcendence through repetitive chant is expressed a number of times throughout the journals, like when he chants Hare Krishna in a Cuban taxicab, “I pulled out my cybals and began singing very low OOOM OOM OOM SARAWA BUDA DAKINI VEH WANI YEH BENZA BERO TSA NI YEH HUM HUM HUM PHAT PHAT PHAT Hare Kirshna Hari Hari Krishna Krishna Hari Hari Hari Rama Hari Rama Rama Rama Hari Hari, singing easily and low for some time…it cleared my senses a bit, very useful and felt good steadying influence as we drove out thru city” (Iron Curtain Journals 153-4).^[1] An awareness of such a world-soul was likely augmented by the use of psychedelic drugs and access to the counterculture of the 1950’s and 60’s, but the concept has deep roots in poetics. This concept of the world-soul was explored by his precursor Percy Bysse Shelley in poems like Queen Mab, in which he develops the image of fairies, of “viewless beings” from which comes a portrait of the universal soul:

 “Unrecognized, or unforeseen by thee

Soul of the Universe! Eternal spring

Of life and death, of happiness and woe

Of all that chequers the phantasmal scene

That floats before our eyes in wavering light

Which gleams but on the darkness of our prison

Whose chains and massy walls

We feel, but cannot see” (Shelley et al. 50)

In the case of Orthodoxy, this “Soul of the Universe” would have been omnipresent in the grace of the divine Christian God. In the case of Queen Mab, one might speculate on whether something in Shelley (and by extension Ginsberg) was tugging him towards a Platonic-Kantian sense of some quasi-divine noumenal unifier of experience which is itself inaccessible to experience, or at least human sensory perception.

Poland and Czechoslovakia Part II

Ginsberg stayed in Warsaw for three weeks at the Europejski Hotel, first a guest of the ministry of culture, then as a tourist.  He summarizes his stay as pleasant, stating how, “I stayed alone mostly or drank with a young Rimbaud-ish Marlon Brando writer at Writer’s Union and long afternoons with editor of Jazz magazine who’d printed my poems, a Jewish good man who’d been in Warsaw Ghetto, escaped, and covered rest of war as journalist with Russian army and stood across river from Warsaw and saw the city destroyed by Germans and nationalist underground killed off” (Morgan 132). Ginsberg wrote several poems on this trip, including “Cafe in Warsaw” and “The Moments Return.” While in Poland, Ginsberg develops a list of all of the places he has traveled to since 1946 and reflects upon his time spent abroad, referring to the travels as “Marco Polonian” (Iron Curtain Journals 275). Ginsberg also visited the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz on this leg of the journey, and his writing on the matter is somewhat terse and distracted.

Ginsberg’s time in East Europe culminates upon his return to Prague where he is elected King of May, or Kral Majales, by the student population of the technical university. The celebration was the first May day celebration in 20 years, and the parading around of a prominent countercultural icon like Ginsberg with his beard and cardboard crown was likely to stir the suspicions of the authorities. Ginsberg was quickly dethroned and his disruption of what the police thought would be an otherwise orderly affair resulted in his subsequent expulsion from the country. The official rationale for his removal was the discovery of inappropriate journal entries that the secret police obtained in a stolen journal. Luckily Ginsberg anticipated as much and kept many of the names of his contacts anonymous, assigning letters as names. Unfortunately, Ginsberg’s journal from this leg of the trip was never recovered. Along with the poems, now lost to time. The poem “Kral Majales”  was written in reflection of this period of travel, written on the plane to London: 

And the Communists have nothing to offer but fat

            cheeks and eyeglasses and lying policemen

and the Capitalists proffer Napalm and money in 

green suitcases to the Naked, 

and the Communists create heavy industry but the

            heart is also heavy

and the beautiful engineers are all dead, the secret

            technicians conspire for their own glamour

in the Future, in the Future, but now drink vodka

            and lament the Security Forces, 

and the Capitalists drink gin and whiskey on air

            planes but let Indian brown millions starve…

…For I was arrested thrice in Prague,

once for singing drunk on Narodni street,
once knocked down on the midnight pavement

by a mustached agent who screamed out BOUZERANT,
once for losing my notebooks of unusual sex politics dream opinions,
and I was sent from Havana by planes

by detectives in green uniform,
and I was sent from Prague by plane

by detectives in Czechoslovakian business suits…

… And tho’ I am the King of May,

the Marxists have beat me upon the street,

kept me up all night in Police Station,

followed me thru Springtime Prague,

detained me in secret and deported me

from our kingdom by airplane.

This I have written this poem on a jet seat in mid Heaven.

The Travel Writing Origins of Ginsberg’s “Automatic Poetics”

In the journals, Ginsberg is often focused on his immediate surroundings, which are scribbled down as he apprehends the environments through which he passes. The resultant journal entry renders the process by which the perception takes place. Ginsberg reconstructs the context out of which some ordinary detail springs out of the rush of travel and catches the eye of the poet. This element of viewing informs his journals and his poetic work. His journals often contain lines and first drafts of poems, and his descriptions of quotidian scenes seem poetic, note the “strands of tall, disciplined trees” in this journal entry:

March 18, 1965 – 3:58 p.m on train Prague-Moscow-late afternoon in compartment with Czech military attaches, travelling rocking thru sunlight by the river Elbe- Hares in the fields, a warm day, the snow of black Prague streets melted in green winter fields, many strands of tall disciplined trees; a brown landscape thru which Elbe flows to empty into N Sea? At Hamburg- 

Ginsberg’s observational techniques were synthesized from William Carlos Williams’s observation of the phenomenal to identify the “true value” of objects and Ezra Pound’s impressionistic “mimesis of perception,” and informed his poetics of modernist looking. Modernist looking describes the fundamental poetic act of employing visual perception to shift or metamorphose apprehension of the phenomenal world from the quotidian to the numinous (Jackson 299). Ginsberg combined this modernist looking with an automatic form of recording, specifically tape recording. Bob Dylan had given him six hundred dollars to buy what was in 1965 an exotic technological device: a state-of-the-art portable Uher tape recorder. Absorbing and benefiting from this combination of nontraditional poetic methods of observation and composition, Ginsberg arrived at his own poetics, and put them all to use in his work The Fall of America. In writing the work, Ginsberg, driven by Peter Orlovsky through a range of shifting American environments in his white Volkswagen camper, could capture his own voice with a tape recorder and make almost instantaneous notations and representations of reality, without having to scrawl in a notebook or type on a typewriter. For Ginsberg, “auto-poesy” meant a total disregard for a logical or rational ordering of experience, in order to re-create the unimpeded flow of his mind.

Through Ginsberg’s travel journaling, the novelty of the environments he passes through, the elements out of which the world is made, are broken down into component parts, and the ordinary gestalt of perception is freshened, interrupted. The apprehended world is thus infused with poetic significance. In the limited space of the poem-world or the journal-world, these apprehended phenomenal elements ordinarily held in complex mutual dependency, elements like words, natural scenes, or points of view are suddenly reconsidered. He deconstructs the familiar along the way, and records the essential, reconstituting it into a poetic form. 

Conclusions

It is no surprise that Ginsberg encounters so much friction during his travels. The journals from this period reinforce Ginsberg’s pre-existing stature as a poet-provocateur. He is a perennial disruptor, and does not compromise his insistence on freedom of expression for any audience, regardless of ideological affiliation. He is essentially an anarchist, as he hates both the United States and East European Governments, he hates authority in any form. His childlike wonder and optimism about what communist nations might be like quickly gives way to an understanding that power expresses itself in similar ways. Whether he is in the U.S. or the U.S.S.R., Ginsberg imagines the soul triumphant against what he sees as the infernal machinery of capitalism and communism, promising freedom for those who would join him and the rest of a new visionary generation.

This stance is especially apparent in the poetry that emerges from this period of travel, and in the subsequent collections of poetry Planet News and The Fall of America, in which he personifies the national shift from one of idealistic optimism to one of beleaguered resignation. By 1968, the Tet Offensive meant the Vietnam War had taken a decisive turn for the worse. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy both frightened and sickened Ginsberg, who believed that his spiritual mentor Walt Whitman’s prophecy of America’s fall was materializing before his eyes. Indeed, Whitman warned of a time when social strife would undermine “Intense and loving comradeship…the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy…without which it will be incomplete, in vain, and incapable of perpetuating itself” (Whitman 19). This national-spiritual nadir amplified his mournful, elegiac mode which had its start even in earlier poems like “Howl.” While he remained positive and optimistic in his outward persona, poems like “Ecologue” present his growing awareness of the flaws of the counterculture’s vision. Ginsberg wrote of a fractured utopia, and ways in which America will never be able to escape itself. Many of these concepts expressed in The Fall of America would not have been possible without the perspective gained through world travel. It would be impossible for an American to begin to understand America without first seeing the rest of the world, especially Soviet-aligned nations, in a time of such ideological cleavage. The poetic style that emerged from this period of travel represents the genesis of his “auto-poesy.”

Ginsberg’s journals were intended to be a private record. When he was on the road alone he would fill notebook after notebook with whatever he felt like writing, whether that be detailed descriptions of his surroundings, conversations, summaries of daily life, drafts of new poerms, random observations, dreams, and personal encounters. In addition to any ideological reflections, the journals from this period provide a window into Ginsberg’s quiet, contemplative moments and considerations of his own mortality. In an entry, Ginsberg writes, “On this planet, I haven’t got much time—combing my hair in the mirror saw the spreading fields of white in my beard; never noticed so close before. That’s one thing beards are good for” (Iron Curtain Journals) No matter where on the globe he is, or who he is with, Ginsberg attempts to relate to himself and others on a human level, as a part of the world-soul, rather than as an American. It is this insistence on humanity that cements Ginsberg’s status as a true world citizen.

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Whitman, Walt, et al. Walt Whitman. Viking Press, 1974.

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^[1] Ginsberg would go on to perform the Hare Krishna mantra on a 1968 episode of William F. Buckley Jr.’s television program Firing Line in an attempt to end the war in Vietnam, to which Buckley replied “That is the most un-harried krishna I’ve ever heard.” Ginsberg discusses the world-soul on the program. Link in bibliography.

The Howling Inferno: Crying Out in Anguish From Hell to America

Two Sonnets

by Allen Ginsburg

I

I dwelled in Hell on earth to write this rhyme,

I live in stillness now, in living flame;

I witness Heaven in unholy time,

I room in the renowned city, am

Unknown. The fame I dwell in is not mine,

I would not have it. Angels in the air

Serenade my senses in delight.

Intelligence of poets, saints, and fair

Characters converse with me all night.

But all the streets are burning everywhere.

The city is burning these multitudes that climb

Her buildings. Their inferno is the same

I scaled as a stupendous blazing stair.

They vanish as I look into the light.

II

Woe unto thee, Manhattan, woe to thee,

Woe unto all the cities of the world.

Repent, Chicagos, O repent; ah, me!

Los Angeles, now thou art gone so wild,

I think thou art still mighty, yet shall be,

As the earth shook, and San Francisco fell,

An angel in an agony of flame.

City of horrors, New York so much like Hell,

How soon thou shalt be a city-without-name,

A tomb of souls, and a poor broken knell.

Fire and fire on London, Moscow shall die,

And Paris her livid atomies be rolled

Together into the Woe of the blazing bell-

All cities then shall toll for their great fame.

                                    New York, Spring 1948

On October 7, 1955  Allen Ginsberg performed “Howl” in public for the first time at a poetry reading at Six Gallery in San Francisco, advertised by a postcard proclaiming: “Remarkable collection of angels all gathered at once in the same spot” (Latson 1). Two years later, the City Lights Books-published  “Howl” and Other Poems was at the center of an obscenity trial due to its depiction of illicit drugs and sexual practices. As the book’s opponents attacked its moral value, the defense assembled a team of eloquent witnesses, writers and poets who would speak to its literary worth. Describing “Howl” as “a vision of a modern hell,” poet and novelist Vincent McHugh testified that Ginsberg’s poems “derive certainly from Dante…and Dante, in turn, derives from the Odyssey, and so on into all the mythologies of the world” (Hyde 51). With support from the American Civil Liberties Union, City Lights publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti won the case, as the California State Superior court ruled that the poem was of significant social importance.

This is not the only prominent writer to link the two poets. In his introduction to “Howl” and Other Poems, Ginsberg’s mentor, William Carlos Williams, suggests that we read the poem as a Beat Inferno. For Williams, the poem is evidence that Ginsberg has “literally…been through hell” (Ginsberg  7). The experiences Ginsberg describes are “horrifying,” and for Williams, the poet himself, though he sees “with the eyes of the angels”, speaks as one of the damned, and the reader is even warned that “we are going through hell” (Ginsberg 8).

This essay seeks to re-examine Dante and Ginsberg through their seminal works, La Divina Commedia: Inferno and “Howl,” placing particular attention on the use of dramatic monologue in which speakers are speaking on behalf of themselves and their experience. The poems share a great deal, both in terms of their style and meaning. Both poems employ a tripartite structure of katabasis and ascent, and confessional monologues which invoke some moral-spiritual consideration by the reader. While their metric elements are dissimilar, the speakers in both poems explore hell and transcendence as a means to bemoan the social issues of their day, critique those responsible, and offer a way forward through the avenue of spiritual-holy love and self-discovery. Moreover, the single-word titles of both works evoke the structure, style, and meaning within.

While McHugh and Williams identified Ginsberg as a stylistic descendent of Dante, this lineage has since been buried beneath a host of scholarship which focuses on the more obvious succession: Dante to William Blake, and subsequently Blake to Ginsberg. Indeed, in the summer of 1948, Ginsberg underwent an extraordinary experience, hearing an auditory hallucination of William Blake’s voice reciting “Ah Sun-Flower” and “The Sick Rose,” accompanied by a feeling of participation in universal harmony, which he described as “the very ancient place that [Blake] was talking about, the sweet golden clime…this existence was it!” (Ramazani et al. 335). To share in this universal poetic inheritance would then connect Ginsberg to Blake’s source of inspiration, Dante. Both Dante and Ginsberg were searching for the paradisal self in an infernal world, with the Commedia and “Howl” representing the externalities of this search.

            Ginsberg wrote in a romantic tradition that honored Blake and Walt Whitman, and by extension, Dante. All of these eclectic writers share a sense of the prophetic in their combination of the poetic and religious-philosophical. The long rhapsodic lines and short chants of “Howl” are both driven by an ideal of  “a living speech, an organic metric that expresses the poet’s physiological state at the time of composition” (Ramazani et al. 336). This is certainly quite different than the controlled, consistent meter present in the Commedia.

Ginsberg’s style in “Howl” was much more frenzied and diffuse than Dante’s precise, unfolding terza rima, but his organic style is able to express concepts in a more direct, commonplace, and even internal manner, which asserts that causal language is important. In a 1994 BBC interview Ginsberg explained the need for candor in writing, the making of the private world public “very consciously following the direction of my ultimate American mentor Walt Whitman, who in 1855, in an early edition of Leaves of Grass, said that he hoped that American poets would develop in the direction of candor, kind of in an inadvertent, manipulative frankness, like spontaneous frankness…” (The Allen Ginsberg Project)

This is not to say that Ginsberg considered traditional forms like terza rima to be useless. In a 1981 class on Expansive Poetics Ginsberg taught at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of Naropa University, he discusses the rhythmic effectiveness and dynamic expansiveness of Dante’s terza rima during a discussion of Shelley’s “Hymn to intellectual beauty”:

AG: The “Ode to Intellectual Beauty” (“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”) has the most complicated stanza pattern of anything,

Student: But it doesn’t have the sense of a fixed pattern, like say…

AG: Oh, it has a fixed pattern

Student: Oh?

AG: It has a fixed rhyme, a totally fixed pattern. Yes, completely. Yes. The point of (a) fixed pattern is because you get a certain frame of reference, or a certain rhetorical, or rhythmic, or rhyme, structure. You just build up on it higher and higher, and higher, higher (like, in the end of Dante(‘s) Divinia Commedia), the cadences that he’s used in the last cantos of  (the) Paradiso, the cadences that he used in the rest of the terza rima, gets to be this repetitive ultimate orgasmic – “in te misericordia, in te pietate,/in te magnificenza, in te s’aduna/quantunque in creature e di bontate“.. I don’t know  (“In thee is munificence, in thee compassion, in thee is whatever abounds through the universe” [or, in (a) more recent, Allen Mandelbaum, translation – “In you compassion is, in you is pity/ in you is generosity, in you/is very goodness found in any creature”]). It’s like the repetitive thing that he used in the terza rima works for him to get up into an ecstatic breath and an ecstatic statement. It can be done, yes, through formal form, regular old forms. (The Allen Ginsberg Project)

The inclusion of La Commedia as the prime example of emotionally-affecting poetry speaks to Ginsberg’s fondness for Dante, and his assertion that an ecstatic-transcendent statement can be made through formal meter speaks to the power of terza rima to make some of the same forceful points that Ginsberg’s speaker in “Howl” makes. Ginsberg’s repetition of lines beginning with “who,” “Moloch!,” and “I’m with you in Rockland,”  attempts to access the same sense of  the “repetitive thing…repetitive ultimate orgasmic,” in order to drive home a point, albeit with different cadences.

This spontaneous frankness described above approaches the form of Dantean dramatic monologue, as Ginsberg’s howling positions the speaker as a character in Dante’s Hell, similar to one of the tortured souls of Minos. The more technical consideration of dramatic monologue as poetry told in the point of view of a character still holds. Indeed, as Dante descends, his encounters are composed of tales recounted to him in a confessional style, and the pilgrim’s narration is confessional as well. Both poems begin from the standpoint of the self: “I saw the best minds” and “… I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.” (Alighieri et al. 27). As such, both poems invite the reader to experience the world from the speaker’s point of view.

Yet Ginsberg is not Dante the pilgrim in this comparison, but rather Virgil, the one who guides the reader through the world he inhabits. As Dante and Virgil begin their journey in Inferno, Virgil states to the pilgrim that, “Thus for your good I think and judge that you shall follow me, and I shall be your guide” (Alighieri et al. 33). While Dante is merely passing through hell, Ginsberg is as Williams tells the reader, one of the damned. He has partaken of the horrors described and like Virgil, Ginsberg inhabits Hell, but according to Williams he goes further than Virgil insofar as he claims it as his own. This concept of speaking on behalf of one’s experience relates directly to the dramatic monologue, present in both works.

Not only is the dramatic monologue in Inferno similar to the nature of the howling speaker in Ginsberg’s poem, but the confessional-elegiac mode is also present in both works. In this sense, crying out is a shared poetic mode. Dante would have been aware of this sorrowful, elegiac mode, as he writes in his essay “De vulgari eloquentia” in which he describes three basic forms or literary styles: the tragic, the comic, and the elegiac. He describes the tragic as the “high” style, the comic as the “low” style, and the elegiac as the “style of the unhappy”: “Deinde in hiis que dicenda occurrunt debemus discretione potiri, utrum tragice, sive cornice, sive elegiace sint canenda. Per tragedian! superiorem stilum inducimus; per comediam inferiorem; per elegiam stilum intelligimus miserorum.” (Iannucci 21) As such, some combination of the comic-low and elegiac-unhappy can be applied to the dramatic monologues by speakers in Hell. This stylistic framework also relates to “Howl,” in which the speaker cries out in a similar sense of mourning, not in anger, as had become its association, but in anguish, a sense that Ginsberg describes in the 1994 BBC interview:

Jeremy Isaacs: Was “Howl” an angry poem about America?

AG: I wouldn’t say “angry”. There are certain aspects “wrathful”, in judgment, but I would say, more “exuberant”, because, you know, the ultimate part of the peroration, at the end — “I’m with you in Rockland, where you’re madder than I am” — but “I’m with you” — it’s a gesture of sympathy to a friend who’s in trouble, basically, with a certain amount of anguish in it. The ultimate accusation, really, is, “Moloch, whose name is the Mind” It isn’t, you know, out there, the all-devouring God, the destroyer God, it’s not out there, it’s our own Imagination, as [William] Blake pointed out. So “Moloch, whose name is the Mind” is hardly angry. That’s a piece of wisdom-teaching actually, something that I understood from Blake long ago. (The Allen Ginsberg Project)

However, Dante seems to place particular emphasis on the narrative progression of La Commedia, much more so than Ginsberg does in “Howl,” and closely corresponds to the outline of classical comedy (Iannucci 21). The ultimate justification, then, for entitling the poem Commedia appears to be the content, or more precisely, the movement of the narrative from a vision of moral chaos and conflict to one of peace and spiritual fulfilment, more than its “low” or “high” style.

Regardless of style, each text is dominated by the voices of Speakers, who are speaking on behalf of themselves and their experience. The tales of speakers like Francesca da Rimini, Bertran de Born, and Piero della Vigna mirror the tales that Ginsberg recounts. Yet in the sense that it only has a singular speaker, “Howl” attempts to have a larger concept of selfhood, which indicates Ginsberg’s attempt to cry out on behalf of an entire generation in a Whitmanian sense, the speaker speaks on behalf of himself, a nation, and a new world. In “Howl,” Ginsberg is certainly thoroughly distraught, given his depiction of the city, of America, and of a generation’s prospects in the post-war environment.

            Both poems are burning missives, social critiques that invite emotional participation by the reader. In order to evaluate each poem’s capacity for social critique by way of dramatic monologue, it helps to consider the context in which each text arose. “Howl” is coming out of a sense of war-as-Hell. Ginsberg was tasked with creating art within the context of massive human and psychological devastation. The raw, instinctual, attention-getting, sorrowful language of “Howl” is born of the incomprehensible carnage of the Holocaust, the leveled cities in Europe, millions of civilians dead, and a new specter of atomic devastation. Indeed the “Beat experience” and Alighieri’s political awareness begins and ends with war.

World War II, the Korean War, and eventually the Vietnam War provide a background for Ginsberg, and a broader literary movement that served as a sustained commentary on the political landscape in crisis, a world on fire. In the post-war context, Ginsberg questions the self-celebrating democratic patriotism of the 1950’s. The U.S was directly responsible for millions of deaths, and the boom in U.S. post-war prosperity mostly affected white people. Similarly, La Commedia is born from Dante’s exile, and the all-encompassing political crisis and civil war. For the Florentines, the city-state was self-contained, and may have well represented the world for most Guelphs and Ghibellines.

In the eighth bolgia of the eighth circle of Hell, Dante denounces the city of Florence in a similar manner to the way that Ginsberg denounces the American military-industrial complex in Part II of “Howl.” He grieves for his city as he writes, “Rejoice, Florence, since you are so great that on sea and land you beat your wings, and your name spreads through Hell! Among the thieves I found five such citizens yours that I feel shame, and you do not rise to honor by them…Then I grieved, and now I grieve again, when I consider what I saw, and I rein in my wit more than is my custom” (Alighieri et al. 399).  These lines explicitly connect grief in the moment of writing with the grief experienced in the penitential journey, an indication of Alighieri’s real-life frustration with Florentine political strife, and of division more generally. Denunciation of Italian cities is frequent in the Malebolge, with Bologna, Pistoia, and Siena all coming under criticism for their injustices. Perhaps Ginsberg’s model in characterizing New York-as-Hell is Dante, who, exiled from Florence, creates a divine comedy out of historical contingency, and in the process, turns the strife of his local city, into a generational voice. Similarly, Ginsberg paints a portrait of New York: “Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!/Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius!” (Ginsberg 17). Here Ginsberg is certainly grieving, as made evident in his depiction of the city. Ginsberg’s elegiac tone is in reference to the death of an American ideal, a loss of hope, rooted in the devastation of the post-war environment and in the smoggy, belching industrial landscape.

One particularly strong congruence between the poems is a consideration of the relationship between mind and body, explored through auditory imagery and the presentation of human-inhuman hybrids in the monologue of Pierra della Vigna and part III of “Howl.” In the second round of the seventh circle of Inferno is the Wood of the Suicides, in which the souls of those violent against themselves are transformed into gnarled, thorny trees and fed upon by “the ugly Harpies…who drove the Trojans from the Strophades with dire prophecy of their future woe…faces human…they utter laments on the strange trees” (Alighieri et al. 199). Here, Pierra della Vigna’s confession is itself a specific form of punishment suited to his sin, a bleeding lamentation.

The words and blood that spill from the broken branch, “as when a green log is burnt at one end, from the other it drips and sputters as air escapes: so from the broken stump came forth words and blood together,” indicate a loss of control of his mind-body faculties, chief among them speech (Alighieri et al. 201). This idea of a hybrid being crying out continues in Dante’s auditory imagery of the the mournful voices of the branches, “cries of woe,” and the concept of a human spirit imprisoned in a tree which is formed “when the fierce soul departs from the body from which it has uprooted itself” (Alighieri et al. 199-203).The uncanny atmosphere of the barren wood and the bizarre confession of the “spirito incarcerato” further establish the haunting dreamlike quality that evokes the mystery of suicide and the tragedy of della Vigna’s life. (Alighieri et al. 202).

The confession della Vigna delivers here strikes a similar tone to part III of “Howl,” especially the passage:

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the harpies of the Bronx

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss

I’m with you in Rockland

   where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed madhouse

I’m with you in Rockland

   where fifty more shocks will never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void (Ginsberg 19)

Dante’s considerations of the relationship -or division- between mind and body, and more broadly, the mobility of the physical human form within a perverse environment connect to Ginsberg’s portrayal of the immobile Carl Solomon, his fellow inmate at the Columbia Psychiatric Institute in 1949, screaming, bound by straight jacket, losing the “game of the actual pingpong of the abyss” (Ginsberg 19). Both passages even refer to the partly-human harpies as a specific tormentor. Moreover, the line on electroshock therapy, which will “never return your soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a cross in the void” evoke the Dantean consideration of undoing of the unified soul and body (Ginsberg 20).  This is the same electroshock treatment that Ginsberg’s mother would have received while held at an Asylum, which Ginsberg references in the footnote to “Howl”: “Holy my mother in the insane asylum” (Ginsberg 21).  Carl Solomon’s “Pilgrimage…in the void” leads the reader right to Dante’s pilgrimage through the underworld. This scene in the seventh circle is emblematic of all confessions in Inferno, an ironic reversal of canonical penance insofar as it brings no relief but rather mocks the sinner and intensifies his punishment. For Ginsberg, the suffering are revered and sympathized with, more so than in Dante’s poem.

This is not to say that Dante is wholly unsympathetic. In the article “Dante’s Sympathy for the Other, or the Non-Stereotyping Imagination: Sexual and Racialized Others in the Commedia,” Teodolinda Barolini considers Dante’s sympathy for the other against the backdrop of dogmatic belief-as-rejection of the other. Barolini proposes that the Commedia contains “many startlingly non-normative postures in the social and historical sphere” (Barolini 177).  The various forms of sympathy toward the other include those presented by Dante’s speakers in the form of confessional dramatic monologue. Barolini writes how in his treatment of women “stereotypes of degraded sexuality had little purchase over Dante’ imagination…In Dante’s circle of lust the name of historical specificity is Francesca da Rimini, an adulteress. She is the Commedia’s second most famous female, after Beatrice, and -like Beatrice Portinari- we would never have heard of her if not for Dante” (Barolini 181). 

In the story of Francesca, Dante writes a gendered story that places unusual value on the personhood of the speaker. Dante’s inclusion of Francesca’s dramatic monologue is significant, especially when historicizing the character, who, according to Barolini was “Dynastically unimportant, Francesca was forgotten by contemporary chroniclers…the first and most authoritative chronicler of Rimini was Marco Battagli whose 1352 work On the Origins of the Malatesta alludes to the event in which Francesca died without naming her, indeed without acknowledging her existence” (Barolini 181). In effect, Dante’s inclusion of the monologue is sympathetic, as it has preserved Francesca’s voice and has raised hers to be perhaps one of the most significant in Inferno. Beyond this, Dante’s Francesca tells a story of how she and Paolo fell in love while reading, as she recounts, “we were reading one day, for pleasure, of Lancelot, how Love beset him; we were alone and without any suspicion” (Alighieri et al. 93). Here, Francesca is not only the protagonist, but a reader rather than a fornicator, and a speaking agent, rather than a forgotten voice. Indeed, it is Paolo who stands aside her, weeping silently. For Barolini, this portrayal allowed Francesca to achieve “dignity and prominence- a celebrity- that in real life she did not possess” (Barolini 182). 

Like in Inferno, “Howl” offers sympathy to its subjects as the poet recalls the many tormented and underrepresented host of beings who inhabit the modern Hell. Most noteworthy among them is the institutionalized Carl Solomon, for whom the poem isdedicated. Like Dante and Virgil, Solomon is Ginsberg’s companion in the underworld, and sympathizes with his roommate at Rockland as he cries “ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time” (Ginsberg 16). In this sense, the speaker is speaking on behalf of those who are voiceless, a sympathetic portrayal of a tragic fate of real people. One could produce entire books on Ginsberg’s role in the unveiling of homosexuality to the reading public. Both poems then include considerations of these real people, friends and foes, who are immortalized as they are tormented, lonely and without comfort, from Hell to America.

One primary difference here is that Dante places individuals that he pitied or detested in Hell, as the pilgrim states in Canto 5, “After I had heard my teacher name the ancient ladies and knights, pity came upon me, and I was almost lost” (Alighieri et al. 91). Whereas Ginsberg’s Hell is more all-encompassing, with all people subject to the “fascist national Golgotha” (Ginsberg 20). Ginsberg places friends and foes alike within this context, and all but those culpable are to be pitied.

Indeed, Dante is far more critical of the damned when he considers their acts to be especially morally bankrupt, increasingly so as he descends through the levels of Hell. This gradation of punishment correlates to the cosmology of Dante’s Hell. As the pilgrim encounters the speakers in the ninth bolgia, he encounters the Ghibelline Mosca, “one who had both hands cut off, lifting the stumps into the murky air so that the blood soiled his face” (Alighieri et al. 439). Mosca, the last of the five florentines mentioned by the pilgrim to Ciacco, murdered Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti on Easter Sunday, 1215, a killing which represents the origin of the division of Florence into Guelf and Ghibelline factions and the beginning of the city’s destruction (Durling 447). The pilgrim jeers at Mosca, “And I added: ‘and the death of your clan’; so that he, piling grief on grief, walked off like a person mad with sorrow” (Alighieri et al. 439) To verbally attack one of the damned does indicate some lack of sympathy on Alighieri’s part, at least to those who do not align with his particular moral compass.

 This combination of madness and sorrow continues again in Dante, with the monologue of Bertran de Born, who cries out his confession:

“‘Oh me!’…‘Now see my wretched punishment, you who go still breathing to view the dead: see if any is as great as this. And that you may take back news of me, know that I am Bertran de Born, he who gave the young king bad encouragements. I made father and son revolt against each other: Achitophel did no worse to Absalom and David with his evil proddings. Because I divided persons so joined, I carry my brain divided, alas, from its origin which is in this trunk. Thus you observe me in the counter-suffering’.” (Alighieri et al. 439)

This example of the sowing of strife provides a particularly striking conclusion to the Canto, and the only instance of the word contrapasso or “counter-suffering,” which de Born enunciates while holding his severed head in his hand (Alighieri et al. 439).  The disseminators of civil discord are mutilated in ways that match their mutilation of the body politic. Given Alighieri’s distaste for division, the reader is invited to sympathize with de Born only insofar as a sort of pity, which Dante might have viewed as justice for his eternal damnation.

Comparing these two poems’ monologues leads inevitably to some consideration of their rough structural correspondence. In what appears to be the lone piece of scholarship linking Ginsberg and Dante, independent scholar Jeffrey Meyers lists overlapping thematic and structural elements of “Howl” and The Divine Comedy, indicating that section I, a long series of laments about chastisements and tortures, and section II, a condemnation of the materialistic and repressive society symbolized by the Canaanite fire god Moloch, are Ginsberg’s Inferno (Meyers 89). By this logic, Moloch is clearly Ginsberg’s equivalent of Lucifer, relegated to the lowest circle of Hell. Meyers considers section III, Ginsberg’s homage to catatonia and Carl Solomon, to be a portrayal of institutionalization as passing through Purgatorio. Finally, the “Footnote to ‘Howl,’” also written in 1955, represents “a modern riff on the sacred theme of holy living” (Meyers 89).

As such, Ginsberg begins his Paradiso with fifteen repetitions of “Holy!,”  a mantric chant which echoes the biblical “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of Hosts: the whole earth is full of his glory” in Isaiah 6:3 (Meyers 89). Both works then have a hopeful resolution in the promise of salvation, either intellectually or spiritually. For Dante, this is the ideal presented by Beatrice, for Ginsberg, an idiosyncratic list of all he considers sacred: parts of the body, his friends, his mother, music, the city, places from Arkansas to Tangiers, time, the sea, the desert, hallucinations, faith, mercy and charity.

These resolutions of infernal katabasis indicate shared intimations of a Judeo-Christian moral axis, either at the center of the work, in the case of the Commedia, or for Ginsberg, deployment of religious topics and imagery like Golgotha, “Holy,” “Moloch,” and even “saintly motorcyclists.” Perhaps for Ginsberg, the motorcyclists (Hell’s Angels?) represent some sort of libertine sexual salvation that might pre-empt gay liberation movements to come.

Yet Ginsberg was no Christian, so some other divinity must be considered. More central to a comparison of the two poems is Ginsberg’s Beatrice, his divine intellectual-romantic ideal, the love of the world-soul. Ginsberg’s belief in transcendence through repetitive chant is expressed in its nascent stages through his repetition of “Holy” in the footnote. Ginsberg’s belief in this eternal and inherent nature of reality, expressed sometimes as the dharma, was central to beat literature, and to Ginsberg’s later writing and spiritual practice.^[1] An awareness of such a force was likely informed by the use of psychedelic drugs and the counterculture of the 1950’s and 60’s but the concept has deep roots in poetics. This concept of the world-soul was explored by his precursor Percy Bysse Shelley in poems like Queen Mab, in which he develops the image of fairies, of “viewless beings” from which comes a portrait of the universal soul:

 “Unrecognized, or unforeseen by thee

Soul of the Universe! Eternal spring

Of life and death, of happiness and woe

Of all that chequers the phantasmal scene

That floats before our eyes in wavering light

Which gleams but on the darkness of our prison

Whose chains and massy walls

We feel, but cannot see” (Shelley et al. 50)

In the case of Dante, this would have been the grace of the divine Christian God. In the case of Queen Mab, one might speculate on whether something in Shelley (and by extension Ginsberg) was tugging him towards a Platonic-Kantian sense of some quasi-divine noumenal unifier of experience which is itself inaccessible to experience, or at least human sensory perception. The idea that such a world-soul which permeates matter so that matter is not just physically but morally sentient relates directly to the previously discussed entrapment of the human soul in a tree’s body or the soul of Carl Solomon, which Ginsberg describes as interred in Rockland in the lines “I’m with you in Rockland/where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul is innocent/ and immortal it should never die ungodly in an armed/ madhouse” (Ginsberg 19).

Regardless of which holy form resides in the noumenal realm, both writers find salvation for their subjects, with the pilgrim ascending in Paradiso, and with Ginsberg’s depiction of the soul, destroying Rockland:

I’m with you in Rockland

where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof

they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself        imaginary walls collapse

O skinny legions run outside          O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here

O victory forget your underwear

we’re free

            In this final section of his dramatic monologue, Ginsberg imagines the soul triumphant against all the infernal machinery of Rockland and America, promising freedom for those who would join him and the rest of a new visionary generation. Both poets incorporate dramatic monologue into their works to portray the plight of the damned, who cry out in anguish from Hell to America. Yet both poets provide an attainable avenue of hope and light: love. Presented in the Dantean ideal of paradisiacal Beatrice and the Ginsbergian “Holy forgiveness! mercy! charity! faith! Holy! Ours! bodies! suffering! magnanimity! Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!” In both the path to an intellectual, hard-won salvation through love comes through critical examination of the self, understanding of humanity, and subsequent ascension through various states (Ginsberg 22). Yet in order for one to be saved, one must first pass through Hell.

Bibliography

Alighieri, Dante, et al. Inferno. Oxford University Press, 1996.

Barolini, Teodolinda. “Dante’s Sympathy for the Other, or the Non Stereotyping Imagination: Sexual and Racialized Others in the Commedia.” Critica Del Testo, XIV, no. 1, 2011.

“BBC Face To Face Interview, 1994 (ASV#21).” The Allen Ginsberg Project, 27 Oct. 2019, allenginsberg.org/2011/11/bbc-face-to-face-interview-1994-asv21/.

Buckley, William. “The Avant Garde.” Firing Line, season 3, episode 18, WOR-TV, 1968.

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Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and Other Poems. City Lights Books, 2001.

Hyde, Lewis. On the Poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Univ. of Michigan Press, 1999.

Iannucci, Amilcare A. “Dante’s Theory of Genres and the ‘Divina Commedia.’” Dante Studies, with the Annual Report of the Dante Society, vol. 91, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973, p. 21.

Latson, Jennifer. “Allen Ginsberg Howl Reading in San Francisco: Oct. 7, 1955.” Time, Time, 7 Oct. 2014, time.com/3462543/howl/.

Meyers, Jeffrey. “Ginsberg’s Inferno: Dante and ‘Howl.’” Style, vol. 46, no. 1, 2012, pp. 89–94.

Ramazani, Jahan, et al. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. W.W. Norton, 2003.

Senior, Matthew. In the Grip of Minos: Confessional Discourse in Dante, Corneille and Racine. Ohio State University Press, 1994.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, et al. Percy Bysshe Shelley: the Major Works. Oxford University Press, 2009.

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^[1]Ginsberg would go on to perform the Hare Krishna mantra on a 1968 episode of William F. Buckley Jr.’s television program Firing Line in an attempt to end the war in Vietnam, to which Buckley replied “That is the most un-harried krishna I’ve ever heard.” Ginsberg discusses the world-soul on the program. Link in bibliography.

The Careers of Jianware: Song-Dynasty Ceramics via a Tea Bowl With “Hare’s Fur” Glaze

The Fujian stoneware bowl is not immediately recognizable as a tea bowl, and to identify it as such required a quick glance at the placard, which also indicated a few other necessary pieces of information. The bowl was made in the 12th-13th century, in Fujian province, and was made with a special glazing technique known as “hare’s fur” (兔毫盞).  Not knowing exactly what this meant, I decided to look a little closer.

As I walked around the bowl, I was first drawn to its simplicity, it looked almost like a modern cereal bowl that I had seen on sale at Target recently, but a few more moments of observation revealed a greater sense of history and a greater inherent beauty. The stoneware bowl in question illuminates the broader category of Song Dynasty ceramics, or ceramics produced from the 10th century to the 13th century which feature a very straightforward shape and are characterized by multichromatic, subtly-hued glazes.

Unconsidered, the tea bowl is almost forgettable. I nearly walked past it as I perused the Cantor Museum’s ceremonial objects gallery. In comparison to the other objects in the display case, the mottled tea bowl looks relatively commonplace, unassuming. It takes a few moments to be drawn in by the “hare’s fur” pattern, which does, in fact, resemble the fine down of a rabbit or other woodland creature. The bowl contains two primary hues, a brown ochre that is featured on the lip of the bowl, and a deep blue-black at the center pit of the bowl. Between the two primary hues is the pattern, which creates a pleasing gradient between the lip and the pit. The pattern contains streaks of brown ochre which seem to melt into successive layers of the deep blue tone, almost as if the entire bowl is melting into itself. The “hare’s fur” pattern suggests a sort of dynamic liquidity, almost as if the glaze is still fresh and waiting to be fired.

From the Cantor museum placard, one can gather that the bowl falls into a larger category of “Jianware,” (建窯) or high-fired brown and black glazed ceramics that were first made during the Han dynasty (202 BC- AD 220) and reached their “golden age” during the Song, Jin, and Yuan dynasties from the 10^th through the 14^th centuries (Cantor). The museum placard also indicates an essential feature of the bowl’s aesthetic, and relationship to the earth, that the burnished brown color is derived from iron oxides that are common in the earth and were used not only to color the glaze, but also for the painted decorations underneath a clear glaze. This information imbues the artifact with an entirely new significance, and brings up a new set of questions regarding its geological origins. The bowl is very much of the earth, the natural oxides representing an essential step in the preparation of the “hare’s fur” glazing technique.

To guard against potentially overlooking the rich history of the tea bowl, it helps to expand the set of questions we can ask about an object and simultaneously expand our expectations for the object. How can one begin to understand ceramics through one object? Ceramics are some of the most complicated works of art, with myriad glazes, decorative types, kilns, and firing temperatures. This complicated corner of art history is only made more complex when paired with Chinese history. A remarkable feature of Chinese civilization is its continuity. Spanning thousands of years, the historical and archaeological record of Chinese culture is staggering. To account for the vast range of Chinese ceramics in a single research paper is nigh-impossible. How can one begin to understand Chinese history through one artifact? This paper, and the broader study of material culture represents an attempt to unravel a small portion of this immense history through the focused investigation of a single object, a Jianware bowl. 

Some anthropological scholarship is useful in developing a more nuanced understanding of the object in question, and for creating a vivid story to surround the tea bowl.  In his article, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” anthropologist Igor Kopytoff states how, “In doing the biography of a thing, one would ask questions similar to those one asks about people: What, sociologically, are the biographical possibilities inherent in its ‘status’ and in the period and culture, and how are those possibilities realized?” (Kopytoff 66). Like all artifacts, the tea bowl contains many biographies, and has lived multiple lives since it was first fired back in the 12th or 13th century. The possibilities that Kopytoff describes are, perhaps, unknowable, but we can attempt to develop a rough chronology and biography based on its contemporary culture. To address Kopytoff’s questions, we must first gain a clearer understanding of the context surrounding the bowl’s production and aesthetic. To gain such an understanding, I employ some of Kopytoff’s interrogations as a theoretical framework and incorporate more general information about Song ceramics to get closer to the object at hand. 

Kopytoff asks, “Where does the thing come from and who made it?” (Kopytoff 66). While the bowl is not stamped with a monicker, we can glean from its aesthetic, certain standard practices which allow us to get a little closer. To better understand the production of the object, it helps to first understand the nature of the labor that went into crafting ceramics in the Song era. These ceramics are not isolated artifacts. They may look simple but there exists a very complicated technique behind the finished products. The entire process of crafting ceramics employs the whole body of the craftsman and indeed, the whole community. Each piece embodies a practical biography of the people involved in its production, and every step of its production is filled with the maker’s blood, sweat, and tears all mixed together. The production of a ceramic object requires cooperation on many levels, and the combined strength of labor and intelligence shapes the product. In the case of Song Dynasty-era ceramics, each piece represents the efforts of a group of specialized workers, who most likely trained together for a long time, so that they might work as one (Benn 147). As the manifestation of a community effort, every pottery work represents the result of unified will, teamwork, and organization under the regional organization of the dynasty.

Kopytoff’s question of  production by one individual might then be broadened to consider the efforts of an entire community. However, one craftsman’s touch is still evident in the bowl, as one can clearly observe the distribution of the glaze around the base of the object. The bowl was fired resting on its foot ring, which is left unglazed. The potter would have held the foot ring and dipped it into the glaze mixture, swirled it around, and the position of the fingers left indentations. This fingerprint is not so much a signature, but rather a piece of evidence of human contact with the unfinished product, and the labor involved with its production.

A similar Song Dynasty tea bowl with “Hare’s Fur” styling in the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibits the typical “pooling,” or thickening, of the glaze near the bottom. The “hare’s fur” patterning in the glaze of this bowl resulted from the random effect of phase separation during early cooling in the kiln and is unique to this bowl. In fact, no two bowls have identical patterning. This phase separation in the iron-rich glazes of “blackwares” was also used to produce the well-known “oil-spot” and “partridge-feather”(雪鷓鴣盞) glaze effects (Valenstein 33). The bowl also has a dark brown “iron-foot” ring which is typical of this style. It would have been fired, probably with several thousand other pieces, each in its own stackable saggar, in a single-firing in a large dragon kiln. One such kiln, built on the side of a steep hill, was almost 150 metres in length, although most Jian dragon kilns were shorter than 100 metres (Yang 83). The fact that Jianware glazes were made with iron oxides indicates some feature about Chinese mining and mineral processing techniques, that the Chinese must have developed sophisticated techniques for working with iron by this time.

The essential ingredient of all pottery is clay, baked to a degree of hardness, which varies based on the temperature and length of the firing process and on the clay itself. There different levels of sophistication associated with different types of ceramics, thus soft earthenware is fired at a lower temperature (about 800 C) than are stoneware and porcelain, which require a temperature of about 1300C (Cantor). Why did this advanced state of technology occur in China and not in some other area of the world? According to a wall placard in the Cantor gallery, two factors are paramount: the availability and exploitation of certain types of clay, and the Chinese skill in building kilns capable of reaching the temperatures required for making vitreous ceramics (Cantor). The latter was an offshoot of the technology that allowed for the production of elaborate ancient ritual bronzes. China is perhaps the most important location in the history of ceramic art, and its impact on the ceramics of other places can hardly be overemphasized, and the aesthetics of different kinds of Chinese porcelain have inspired ceramic imitators the world over. The simplicity, straightforwardness, and subtlety of Song-ware give them a very contemporary feel and still serve as an inspiration to potters today.

According to Cherise Tong, a specialist in Chinese ceramics and works of art at Christie’s auction house, Jianware pieces generally feature dark glazes, the decoration is usually abstract, and the finest examples have “partridge feather” glaze, which are simply brown flecks in the glaze, radiating evenly and harmoniously from the center of the bowl, outward (Tong). Indeed, such patterns are caused randomly as excess iron in the glaze is forced out during firing. Otherwise, the principal motifs would be floral, often a lotus, peony, or hibiscus. Such effects were frequently praised in poems and other works of the Song and later periods by famous scholar-bureaucrats such as Su Dongpo. Even the Song emperor Huizong 宋徽宗 (1082-1135) declared that black was valued for tea bowls and those with hare’s fur markings were the most superior (Baoping).

 In terms of specific geographical origins, it would be hard to locate the object with any more specificity than the region- Fujian province. There were, however, primary kilns where Jianware was produced, so it is possible that this specific bowl came from one of them. In his book Chinese Ceramics, historian and former secretary to the Oriental Ceramics Society W.B.R. Neave-Hill provides an expansive account of different eras of Chinese Ceramics, including Jianware. Neave-Hill states that Jianware bowls can be traced to three primary kiln sites, identified by historian of Chinese ceramics James Marshal Plumer, located “some thirty miles north of Chien-ming [Jian-ming] in Fukien [Fujian] province in south-east China” (Neave-Hill 83). Regardless of whether a westerner can really “discover” something that has been used by locals for millenia, the most influential producer of blackware tea bowls were the Jian kilns in Jianyang, Fujian, where ceramics are still being produced in traditional hillside kilns.

Jianware potteries birthed in these kilns were highly regarded, and some Jianware bowls were inscribed before firing with the words “imperial tribute” (供御), indicating these specific bowls were made for the use of the court (Baoping). Apart from the Jian kilns, Jizhou (吉州) in Jiangxi was another most famous producer of blackware tea bowls during the Song-Yuan period. The Jian potters made only bowls, as the entire province of Fujian “was a tea drinking country, where tea was grown in the surrounding hills” (Neave-Hill 83). According to Robert fortune, who visited China to source tea to ship for the East India Company, the tea of Wu-i Shan was the finest black tea in China. He took seeds and shrubs of this tea to the Himalayas. Jianwares have many graduations and variations of glaze due to the kiln conditions- which the potters learned to control with skill, using different parts of the hill-side kilns for a variety of effects. Plumer identifies seven distinctive shapes of [Jianware] bowls (Neave-Hill 164).

Kopytoff considers this transformation of an object’s identity when he asks “What are the recognized ‘ages’ or periods in the thing’s ‘life,’ and what are the cultural markers for them?” (Kopytoff 66). The individual object must be considered as a component part of the larger production of pottery in Fujian province, as it is emblematic of a regional style of products that come from a specific community supply chain. From beginning to end, the production of ceramics is a local process, almost like a family process, united in one goal. A city cooperating to make this process happen, with hundreds of steps, complicated tools, at the same time is harmonious and smooth. From the very beginning of the process, from the crushing of earth and stones into clay powder, to the point where it is made on wheels or molds, to the perfection of the shape, to the point when the bowl would then be glazed or brought to artists who give their own regional aesthetic interpretations, each time the bowl passes from one state of completion to the next, it transforms and attains new significance.

Ceramics are poetic and elemental, an art of clay and fire. Pottery begins with clay -earth and water- coaxed by the potter’s hands. The way the potter uses the leverage of gravity, the wheel’s inertia and centrifugal force, the adjustment of strength to shape an entirely new form out of force and skill are all based in chance and years of mastery. Then, days of labor came to life in the fire, which was extremely difficult to control, and was dependent upon the will of the fire- or of the heavens, as buddhist monks might suggest. In its transformative potential, the process of high-temperature firing is, in a sense, like nirvana.

In considering the “career” of the object, Kopytoff asks, “What has been its career so far, and what do people consider to be an ideal career for such things?” (Kopytoff 66). Because it is so well-preserved and ended up in a private collection and then at the Cantor Museum, it is likely that the tea bowl was part of a ceramic connoisseur’s collection. The collection and appreciation of Chinese ceramics is well-documented, and the exhibit placard states that “By the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) [Jianware’s] popularity had waned, but they continued to be admired in Japan where they are known as temmoku wares and are associated with the tea ceremony” (Cantor). Such a description of the international appeal of the tea bowl speaks to the artifact’s multiple biographies. Not only was it most likely used for daily tea rituals in China, it was most likely also then collected and admired later on in Japan, or elsewhere, as the bowls became more and more coveted.

            This question the bowl’s career also makes us consider the different periods of connoisseurship and academic investigation, from Lu Yu’s Classic of Tea, to Wen Zhenheng’s treatise on “superfluous things” and the language surrounding burgeoning conceptions of connoisseurship, to the temmoku connoisseurship in Japan. Tea has seen many different changes in the history of China. The origins of tea drinking in East Asia are not well documented, but scholars assume that the spread of its consumption is due to its medicinal effects as a stimulant of the mind and body (Pitelka 20). The daily habit of sharing and drinking tea also reinforces sociability, which may have led early drinkers to pick the native broad-leaved evergreen bushes (Camellia sinensis) to create a medicinal brew that promoted alertness and represented a soothing, agreeable way to entertain guests (Pitelka 20).  The first major scholarly work was the monumental book The Classic of Tea by Lu Yu of the Tang Dynasty (ca. 733-803), Chinese tea master and writer, a sage of tea, and primary contributor to Chinese tea culture. Lu Yu’s writing represented an absolute dedication and attention to every aspect of the production and preparation of tea to get the most effective and pleasurable effects (Pitelka 20). Friend and poet Huangfu Zheng wrote of Lu Yu’s arcadian ethos in his poem, “The Day I Saw Lu Yu off to Pick Tea”:

The Day I Saw Lu Yu off to Pick Tea

A Thousand mountains will greet my departing friend,

When the spring teas blossom again.

With such breadth and wisdom,

Serenely picking tea—

Through morning mists

Or crimson evening clouds—

His solitary journey is my envy.

We rendezvous at a remote mountain temple,

Where we enjoy tea by a clear pebble fountain.

In that silent night,

Lit only by candlelight,

I struck a marble bell—

Its chime carrying me

A hidden man

Deep into thoughts of ages past.

One particularly striking aspect of the bowl’s biography is its place within the broader landscape of tea ritual and ceremony in the Song Dynasty. Such a consideration brings up the social and aesthetic significance of the tea ceremony. The Song Dynasty was one of the most culturally-rich periods in the history of China, where literati and scholar-bureaucrats cultivated aesthetic practices and trends of powerful societal significance. Among these aesthetic trends were tea brewing, flower arranging, painting appreciation, and incense burning- all regarded as fashionable pastimes that gave rise to the phrase “The Four Arts of Life” (Shiner 100). Indeed, the bronze braziers used to burn incense were forged using some of the same kilns and techniques as ceramics.

Song Dynasty-era tea drinking was markedly different from earlier styles of tea drinking, and from modern tea brewing. While the primary tea-brewing technique during the Tang Dynasty was to grind tea cakes into powder and then boil the resultant powder in a pot before ladling it into a tea bowl for drinking, the tea contending of the Song feature a whipped-tea method. This consisted of the grinding of the tea cake, which was expensive and luxurious in its own right, into fine powder, placing the powder in a bowl, pouring boiling water into the bowl from a ewer (usually also made from ceramic), and whipping the mixture with a whisk. The tea contest partly consisted of comparison of the color and duration of the resulting tea froth. The whiter the froth of the whipped-tea the better (Neave-Hill 83). As such, Jianware bowls were obviously well suited for tea contests. Since the desired froth was white, black-glazed tea bowls were a natural aesthetic compliment. Commoners also drank tea more frequently during this time, as vendors gathered in Buddhist temple complexes and in urban marketplaces (Pitelka 19). From the royal court to commoners the popularity of tea contests led to the large-scale manufacturing and appreciation of Jianware bowls across the empire.

            A similar aesthetic appreciation for tea ceramics came about during the Ming Dynasty, when a specific language and protocol for connoisseurship and material life emerged in Wen Zhenheng’s Treatise on Superfluous Things. In his book Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China, which dissects Zhenheng’s treatise and the broader material culture of early modern China, Craig Clunas describes how, “There was clearly a Ming readership for lists of things” (Clunas 49). Zhenheng’s treatise indicates an emergent formality surrounding the tea ceremony and the Four Arts of Life, which was later carried over to Japanese society in Temmoku connoisseurship.

Temmoku connoisseurship represents what is perhaps the most significant career of  Jianware bowls, and perhaps this specific bowl. Temmoku is the Japanese word for Song Dynasty Jianware, and refers more specifically to a mountain between China’s Zhejiang and Anhui Provinces (Pitelka 18).  In his book Temmoku: A Study of the Ware of Chien Plumer recounts the origins of the phrase:

“Temmoku…carries us back to T’ien-mu Shan,  a holy mountain which gave its name to the black tea bowls of [Fujian]. [Jian]…the Chinese name, conjures up a mountainous region, little changed in a thousand years, where the anonymous potters of Song made the great yet humble [Jianware]. Dahen, a Japanese monk (Shayo Daishi), visited the monastery on T’ien-mu Shan, the mountain of the Eye of Heaven, early in the thirteenth century and took part in the formal and solemn Sung Zen Buddhist tea ritual in which a bowl of powdered tea was prepared and the bowl passed from mouth to mouth in contemplative ceremony. Returning to Japan in 1228 he took a Jian tea bowl with him and the bowls since then have been called after the mountain ‘tea-moku’. (Plumer 16).

Jianware bowls found their way to Japan through a variety of means. As tea contests were also introduced to Japan, so came the Jianware. For example, among ceramics from the Yuan dynasty Shin’an shipwreck, Jianware bowls were found (Mingliang). Diplomacy was another channel through which Jianware entered Japan. In 1406, the early Ming emperor Yongle bestowed ten Jianware bowls to Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, the third shogun of the Ashikaga shogunate who ruled from 1368 to 1394 during the Muromachi period (Mingliang). The spread of Jianware also followed the spread of  Buddhism from China into Japan, and the many Japanese monks who travelled to practice at monasteries in China also brought chinaware back to Japan (Benn 19). The dissemination of Jianware from China to Japan may have acted as an archaeological preservative, bestowing new significance to the wares as the centuries passed.

From period to period, the bowl remained the same object but with different and perhaps greater psychological or sentimental significance. As it changed hands and crossed borders, the history of the bowl became exponentially more complex and worthy of consideration. This global appreciation also brings up questions of this individual artifact’s story. Was the bowl from the Cantor traded? Gifted? Handed down from one generation to another? It is hard to know with certainty.

Such a consideration also relates to the practical use of the object over time. Kopytoff addresses the concept and development of use-value in his article, when he asks, “How does the thing’s use change with its age, and what happens to it when it reaches the end of its usefulness?” (Kopytoff 66). In terms of the bowl’s initial practicality, it would have likely been used to drink tea, perhaps in a competition. In more technical terms, Jianware bowls’ lustrous black glazes and thick bodies help retain heat without burning the fingers of the beholder. The simplistic forms and minimalistic decorations of Song Dynasty wares reflect the aesthetics of subtlety and restraint celebrated in the period, and could be appropriated for contemporary living. The tea bowl looks like it could most likely still be used today, or at least it appears to be in nigh-pristine condition. As the bowl was first made, it was probably intended for regular use, but as it became more highly desirous as a collectible, both as a Temmoku ware and as a museum piece, it became abstracted from its original usefulness, if not entirely useless, at least as a drinking vessel. It is likely that it spent a majority of its career upon a shelf and only maintains historical, aesthetic, and emotional significance. Now it resides next to so many other ceramic vessels in the Cantor, but gives modern tea drinkers and scholars plenty to consider.

Modern scholarship on Jianware bowls is surprisingly robust. During a symposium on Jianware from Jizhou and other kilns and two accompanying exhibitions held by the Shenzhen Museum in February 2012, much discussion was devoted to the interaction between ceramics, tea cultures and Chan/Zen Buddhism (Baoping) The Shenzhen exhibitions and symposium were a breakthrough in research of Chinese pottery that built upon a resurgence of interest on the topic during the 1990’s, typified in an exhibition in 1996 of Jianware and other blackware ceramics organized by the Sackler Museum at Harvard University titled “Hare’s Fur, Tortoiseshell, and Partridge Feather: Chinese Brown- and Black-glazed Ceramics, 400-1400.”  Newer books like Morgan Pitelka’s Spectacular Accumulation and James A. Benn’s Tea in China: a Religious and Cultural History –both of which were published by the University of Hawai’i Press in 2015- indicate that the appreciation of Jianware is alive and well.

As a self-described “tea-head” who frequents Hidden Peak tea house in Santa Cruz and keeps a stash of at least five different varieties of pu-erh tea at his desk, this investigation of an object history is particularly meaningful. I typically drink my tea from small “pinming” (品茗杯) cups and a Yixing style brownware teapot in the “gong-fu” (功夫茶) style. Examining and considering this tea bowl has led me to try drinking  powdered and whipped tea from a ceramic bowl that I threw and glazed, and attempt different methods of historical and ritualistic tea preparation. While my ceramic work does not embody the arcane knowledge of the Jianware masters and my tea preparation would not win any contests in an imperial court, I know that I can always find a moment of peaceful ascension from drinking a cup of tea, just like those who picked the buds off of evergreen bushes (Camellia sinensis) thousands of years ago.

Appendix A: Note from Cantor Site:

Tea Bowl

12th century-13th century

12th-13th C.

Asia, China

4 1/2 x 4 1/2 in. (11.43 x 11.43 cm)

By (primary)- Artist unknown

Medium: Stoneware with “hare’s-fur” glaze (Jian ware)

Credit Line: Mortimer C. Leventritt Fund

Accession Number: 1949.23

Provenance- Fujian

Keywords- ceremonial objects

Use broadly for articles associated with or used in any context that may be considered a ceremony. [January 1995 related term deleted, was “leading staffs”. November 1994 related terms added; related term deleted, was “ceremonial sword

Bibliography

Baoping, Li. “Tea Drinking and Ceramic Tea Bowls: An Overview Through Dynastic History.” China Heritage Project – Australian National University, vol. 29, Mar. 2012.

Benn, James A. Tea in China: a Religious and Cultural History. University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2015.

Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” The Social Life of Things, 1986, pp. 64–92., doi:10.1017/cbo9780511819582.004

Mingliang, Xie. “The ceramic connoisseurship of the Song people and issues related to the distribution of Jian ware tea bowls” Taida Journal of Art History, Vol. 29, 2010.

Mowry, Robert. Hare’s Fur, Tortoiseshell, and Partridge Feather: Chinese Brown- and Black-glazed Ceramics, 400-1400, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Neave-Hill, W. B. R. Chinese Ceramics. St. Martin’s Press, 1976.

Pitelka, Morgan. Spectacular Accumulation. University of Hawai’i Press, 2015.

Plumer, James Marshall. Temmoku; a Study of the Ware of Chien. Idemitsu Art Gallery, 1972.

Shiner, Larry. “Art Scents: Perfume, Design and Olfactory Art.” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 2015, doi:10.1093/aesthj/ayv017.

Smith, Pamela H. Entangled Itineraries: Materials, Practices, and Knowledges across Eurasia. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019.

Thiel, Albert Willem Rudolf. Chinese Pottery and Stoneware. Thomas Nelson, 1953.

“Tea Bowl.” Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University, 2020, cantorcollection.stanford.edu/objects-1/info?query=mfs%20all%20%22hare%27s%20fur%22&page=3 .

Tong, Cherise. “The Beauty of Song Ceramics.” Christie’s Chinese Ceramics & Works of Art, Christie’s, Mar. 2015, www.christies.com/features/The-Beauty-of-Song-Ceramics-5802-3.aspx.

Valenstein, Suzanne G. A Handbook of Chinese Ceramics. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988.

Yang, Meili. Art, Archaeology & Science: an Interdisciplinary Approach to Chinese Archaeological and Artistic Materials. Sussex Academic Press, 2016.

Through Being “Cool”: Hard Bop at the Crossroads of Stylistic Evolution and Social Revolution

“In [John Coltrane] we heard our own search and travails, our own reaching for definition… Trane was our flag” -Amiri Baraka

Studying the musical practitioners and associated stylistic schools of a particular historical era leads to a more nuanced understanding of the socio-political milieu to which they belong. Be it through protest songs, spirituals, jazz, Motown or pop, music provides those studying the history of the civil rights movement and the broader struggle for freedom with unexpected contexts that serve as useful points of comparison and understanding. In the case of hard bop[1], a subgenre of jazz which found its expression between 1955 and 1965, a new type of racially-affirming music became a medium for socio-political and ethno-musical expression and emerged in contrast to the popular contemporary forms, cool jazz and west coast jazz. Hard bop’s practitioners used the music as a form of critical self-examination and self-assertion, not just in terms of their sound, but of their position within the overarching racial struggle that dominated the American cultural landscape during the post-war midcentury. Hard bop blended popular musical forms of the time, primarily bebop, rhythm and blues, blues, and gospel music. From a musical standpoint, hard bop synthesized the radical chromatic forms and virtuosic ideals of bebop while incorporating many traditional elements.

Jazz can certainly be understood as a language of dissent, and to incorporate jazz into the narrative of civil rights and Black Power, as well as the broader stories of intellectual and avant-garde culture during the cold war, we can develop a better understanding of the relationship between the music and cultural life. Bass player Milt Hinton stated how, “[Jazz musicians] were miles ahead of everybody else…musicians have been integrating way before society decided to do that” (Sandke 7).  Hinton’s assessment speaks to the deeply embedded, interdependent nature of this complicated relationship between black musicians and the broader racial atmosphere of the United States. This relationship is prismatic, and represents a way of looking at the civil rights movement, rather than a way of summing it up. In terms of temporal scope, this paper concerns itself primarily with the moment of a transition from one phase of jazz to another, and its corresponding socio-political implications. The transition in question is from cool jazz and West Coast Jazz, to hard bop starting during the mid-1950s.

In terms of defining hard bop’s overall sound, one can identify a few ideas which differentiate the genre from cool jazz and normal bebop. In hard bop, drummers in accompanist roles play with somewhat more intrusive activity. Tone qualities are dark, weighty and rough. The forms of the compositions are less frequently identical to pop tune forms than the forms for bop tunes are, and the chord progressions are more frequently created fresh by the musicians rather than being borrowed from pop tunes (Gridley).  By comparison with much of bop repertory, there is somewhat less of the start-and-stop quality that leaves the listener off-balance; there is a more solemn mood projected, part of which seems to originate in a raw, hard-driving feeling that pushes relentlessly with an emphasis on consistent swinging. By comparison with the earliest bop piano accompaniments, hard bop comping has more variety in rhythms and chord voicings (Gridley). In contrast, cool jazz players used slow vibrato, light weight, soft, dry tone qualities, and showed marked deliberation and exceptional economy in their improvisations. Much of this music avoided high notes and loud playing and sounded subdued by comparison with bebop and hard bop. In a sense, the political implications of each genre mirrors its tonality, with cool jazz embodying non-confrontational constraint and hard bop representing a more driven, insistent music that demanded its freedom from convention.

As for its effectiveness as a form of political and social critique, many works of hard bop were both inspired by and expressions of the unfolding civil rights movement. Through their sonically evocative pieces, hard bop practitioners promulgated a vision of a viable alternative future centered around conceptions of freedom, collective action, and improvisation. Such an emphasis can also be found in the rhetoric and action of the civil rights movement. Some of the relationship between jazz and the civil rights movement was more direct. Jazz artists gave dozens of benefit concerts for the freedom movement, for the NAACP, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Urban League, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Liberation Committee for Africa, and so on (Saul 10). One such example came in 1963, when CORE organized two benefit shows at the Five Spot Cafe, a jazz venue in New York City. The gigs featured a host of prominent musicians and music journalists and happened only a month after the church bombing in Birmingham. Ultimately, hard bop was not a purely political music, and as an overall genre, it is far from cohesive or singular. Despite its diffuse applicability, the freedom-driven moral mission and ethnic appeal put forth in many works of hard bop served as a musical mirror for a rapidly-transforming America to better understand itself in the midst of its ongoing racial and moral crises.

The emergence of hard bop overlaps almost perfectly with the efforts of the civil rights coalitions, from the successes of the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the fracturing of its liberal-left elements around the Black Power slogan and the subsequent decision to address nationally entrenched economic inequalities. This temporal overlap with what we might refer to as the civil rights movement indicates some shared essence between the two phenomena. The umbrella of Hard Bop includes numerous musical embodiments of and odes to the freedom movement, among them: Max Roach’s We Insist: Freedom Now Suite, Randy Weston’s Uhuru Africa, Oliver Nelson’s Afro-American Sketches, John Coltrane’s Alabama, and Charles Mingus’ Fables of Faubus. Hard bop tied together different aesthetics and ethics, “the style of soul and the mandate of soul… at the least [hard bop] hoped to evoke a new mobilization of black energy; at the most it aspired to galvanize a larger ‘freedom movement’” (Saul 3). Regardless of whether the successes and failures of the civil rights movement define the effectiveness of hard bop as a political tool, there was an attempt to develop an art form that was undeniable in its conviction, and forceful in its search for new social possibilities. The fact that many of the tensions addressed by hard bop and the broader freedom movement were not resolved speaks to the kind of cultural pressure under which they operated.

Jazz historian Scott Saul argues that the connection between hard bop and civil rights was more than a fact of cultural coincidence, and instead considers hard bop to be “a musical facet of the freedom movement—an extension particularly of the idea of direct action into the realm of structurally improvised music” (Saul 6). Here Saul identifies hard bop as a sort of aural alter-ego of the civil rights movement, as opposed to a soundtrack. He goes on to develop the relationship, arguing that hard bop, with its sense of spontaneous interplay, collective groove and driving rhythmic elements, “modeled a dynamic community that was democratic in ways that took exception to the supposedly benign normalcy of 1950s America” (Saul 6). Both movements certainly challenged a society struggling to reconcile its democratic ideals with an increasingly bureaucratic order and a history of white domination. Both movements were part of an emergent mass critique of post-war American culture that championed collaborative freedom and creative spontaneity over administrative control and collective security. The music itself embodies the spirit of the civil rights movement, which stimulated thousands of Americans to protest and attempted to infuse American political life with grassroots action and shared decision making, especially among student groups like SNCC and the eventual New Left.

Hard bop’s stylistic elements and overall sound drew largely from its predecessor, bebop. Bebop was part of a new generational responsiveness to the northern city, particularly 1940s New York. From 1940-45, Bebop, or simply bop, exploded into being, shaped by the frenetic utterances of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Coleman Hawkins, Bud Powell, and others, many of whom would later be grouped into the hard bop camp. This moment was crucial for the evolution of American music and for what Ralph Ellison called, “a momentous modulation into a new key of musical sensibility; in brief, a revolution in culture.” (Rampersad 138).  Bebop represented a new aesthetic consciousness in the wartime and post-war era. At the same time, bebop was a reaction to the commercially viable forms like swing that were controlled by white-owned record labels, radio stations, and big bands. This was not the first example of white influence over jazz, as Dixieland jazz and ragtime often saw white musicians given prime billing in live events. Any discussion of appropriation here becomes difficult, as jazz music carries considerable socio-political baggage that has accompanied it for its entire existence. Jazz has, inevitably, fallen prey to the racial divisions that affect the rest of American society, even though its improvisational and collaborative elements might suggest otherwise.

In his 1967 book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Harold Cruse considers this history when he describes a “whole history of organized duplicity and exploitation of the Negro jazz artist—the complicated tie-in between booking agencies, the musicians’ union, the recording companies, the music publishers, the managers, the agents, the theater owners, the night-club owners, the crooks, shysters, and racketeers” (Cruse). Indeed, the white public developed a taste for black music as far back as the colonial period and in turn, black musicians incorporated European-derived musical forms. The broad public acceptance of minstrelsy, gospel choirs, ragtime, and eventually jazz all attest to a cross-cultural interest in African-American music. According to jazz musician and writer Randall Sandke, “African-American music has maintained many distinctive qualities, it has always absorbed many hybrid elements” (Sandke 9).

Musically, both bebop and hard bop relied on an aesthetic of speed and displacement, on oft-ostentatious virtuosity dedicated to a forceful reorientation of perception, though in hard bop, one might favor power over speed. Every instrument incorporated a sense of dynamic movement (DeVeaux and Giddins 68). Drummers like Art Blakey and Max Roach no longer thumped the bass drum four beats per bar, substituting instead the flickering pulse of hi-hat and ride cymbals. In bebop, bassists did not simply walk time, they provided harmonic counterpoint to the soloists and even struck out melodic lines to lead songs. In hard bop, bassists like Charles Mingus defined the sound of the genre. Thelonious Monk, Horace Silver, and other pianists replicated the core emphasis on soloing from bebop, which discarded the “full-bodied approximation of an orchestra for a series of jagged chords and horn-like, linear solos” (DeVeaux and Giddins 68). The forceful, uninhibited edge of bebop and its successor dissolved any notion of passive musicians who would not assert their own sound on their own terms. Both bebop and hard bop comprised of what Baraka called the “willfully harsh, anti-assimilationist sound…a fresh, open method for contemporary reinterpretation of the Afro-American musical tradition- one that drew its strength from the blues tradition, which automatically made it the antithesis of the florid viciousness of the swing style” (Jones 181-82). Baraka’s theoretical framework of bebop as an antithesis to swing also applies to hard bop as an antithesis to the respectable, non-confrontational, cool jazz, which had become a new stage for white artists to receive preferential treatment from the broader music industry and popular media.

On November 8th 1954, jazz pianist and composer Dave Brubeck was in a hotel room in Denver on a nation-wide tour with Duke Ellington’s band. By his own admission,

“at seven o’clock in the morning, there was a knock on my door, and I opened the door, and there’s Duke, and he said, ‘You’re on the cover of Time.’ And he handed me Time magazine. It was the worst and the best moment possible, all mixed up, because I didn’t want to have my story come first. I was so hoping that they would do Duke first, because I idolized him. He was so much more important than I was…he deserved to be first.” (PBS).

Brubeck had just become only the second jazz musician, after Louis Armstrong to appear on the cover of the revered Time magazine, despite the music having flourished for nearly four decades. In a matter of years, Brubeck would create one of jazz’s most commercially viable records with Time Out and the catchy hit, “Take Five.” His quartet was already a big draw on the college campus circuit for their take on an airy, smooth, and innovative jazz style that emerged from bebop that can be grouped into the bebop subgenre cool jazz, more specifically, West Coast Jazz.  The choice of Brubeck over a black contemporary and figurehead like Ellington both fueled his ascent and served as a bleak reminder of white dominance over popular music at the time. 

Episodes like this, along with the broader commercial success of white-dominated cool jazz and West Coast Jazz musicians defined the socio-cultural context, which had a reciprocal relationship to the political context of white supremacy in the United States. At the same time, the mid-1950s can be seen as the starting point of a radical reconsideration on both fronts. By any measure, the mid-1950s is a crucial period in the history of jazz and the beginning of an especially charged period in race relations in the United States. By the mid-1950s a particularly dramatic change in the racial climate was taking place. The practitioners of hard bop, whose intention to restore to jazz its ethnic emphasis and reinstate its valid separation from and anarchic disregard of white popular forms, distanced themselves from the pacific moods of cool jazz and West Coast Jazz. 

In the musical context, new forms of politically-informed jazz began to emerge. In what was once heralded as a sphere of racial cooperation and collaboration, with “the 1949-50 Miles Davis Birth of the Cool band as its most vibrant symbol…the remainder of the decade saw a considerable and definitive reassertion of ethnicity by black musicians” (DeVeaux 547). This musical assertion paralleled and participated in the broader civil rights movement. Specific episodes from the civil rights movement became the basis for new politically-motivated compositions. One such song was Charles Mingus’ “Original Faubus Fables,” which was written as a direct protest against Arkansas governor Orval E. Faubus, who in 1957 summoned the National Guard to prevent the integration of Little Rock Central High School by nine African American teenagers. The lyrics below are a testament to the overwhelming sense of absurdity and frustration that accompanied the moment:

Oh, Lord, don’t let ’em shoot us!
Oh, Lord, don’t let ’em stab us!
Oh, Lord, no more swastikas!
Oh, Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan!

Name me someone who’s ridiculous, Dannie.
Governor Faubus!
Why is he so sick and ridiculous?
He won’t permit integrated schools.

Then he’s a fool! Boo! Nazi Fascist supremisists!
Boo! Ku Klux Klan (with your Jim Crow plan)

Name me a handful that’s ridiculous, Dannie Richmond.
Faubus, Rockefeller, Eisenhower
Why are they so sick and ridiculous?

Two, four, six, eight:
They brainwash and teach you hate.
H-E-L-L-O, Hello.

“Fables of Faubus” originally appeared on Mingus Ah Um (1959), although Columbia Records found the lyrics so incendiary that they refused to allow them to be recorded. In 1960, Mingus recorded the song for Candid Records, lyrics and all, on Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus (DeVeaux and Giddins).

Another such example is John Coltrane’s “Alabama,”  written in response to an attack by the Ku Klux Klan on the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963, that killed four African-American girls. Coltrane was inspired by Martin Luther King’s speech, delivered in the church sanctuary three days after the bombing, and patterned his saxophone playing after it (Verity). As “Alabama” unfolds, Coltrane shifts his tone from one of mourning to one of strength and determination, mirroring the King speech, which escalates in intensity as he shifts from the killing to the broader civil rights movement (Verity). The work sheds its subdued mood to surge forward towards a tone of resolved determination for justice. Coltrane’s work was so impactful, in part, because he was not an activist in the traditional sense, “He didn’t address rallies or openly lobby the White House. Instead, he let his music speak for itself, as in “Reverend King,” his (and Alice’s) 1966 homage to Martin Luther King Jr. that features the squawking notes so emblematic of Coltrane’s later work. Coltrane was making a statement with the song because many black activists viewed King with distrust for his emphasis on nonviolence and his willingness to work with whites” (Nisenson 68) In the polarized politics of the 1960s when  “some black radicals tried to portray King as an Uncle Tom, it [Coltrane’s song] had great significance” (Nisenson 68). In Coltrane, both blacks and whites could find someone who constantly took chances with his music, and captured society’s widespread anger at racism, the emergent Vietnam War, and other wrongs. With varying degrees of intensity, precision, and historical specificity, these works of hard bop indicate the reciprocity between cultural life and political life, how music can mirror and inspire a popular movement.

As a descriptive subgenre, hard bop errs on the side of inclusiveness. Most music historians and musicians agree upon its diffuse nature and acknowledge the amount of mutuality between hard bop and its contemporaries. Scott DeVeaux, a jazz historian at the University of Virginia, argues that hard bop, at least in its title, represents an “unfortunate blanket term that strains to cover the gospel-influenced popular hits of Cannonball Adderley and Horace Silver, the “experimental” music of Mingus and Monk, as well as much that could more simply be called bop” (DeVeaux 547).  Here, DeVeaux identifies the difficulty in defining musical genres and the challenges that come with using such descriptors to investigate a historical period.  In any chronicle of a musical movement, there are stylistic chapters or moments, which exist within the broader, overarching framework. This is certainly the case with jazz, yet by assuming that a particular moment in the history of a popular music exists not as an isolated phenomenon, but as part of a broader network of overlapping contexts, it becomes much more difficult to pin down specific causative details (DeVeaux 547). In tracing the stylistic development of one genre, or in this case sub-genre, to the next, one quickly recognizes that musical style is osmotic and only represents one narrow part of the historical equation, and that racial, political, and economic ramifications begin to pop up. How is this moment of transition to be understood within the larger trajectory of jazz and civil rights? Is it a coherent progression? This understanding of jazz places clear constraints on our historical inquiry. As does using sonic artifacts to illuminate the complicated social history of the 1950s and 60s. Many questions arise as to the effectiveness of using music as an oral history. Is the use of oral or musical data valid in historical reconstruction and understanding? If so, how can a specific type of oral or musical data (songs, performers, stories, entire movements) be used to examine the dynamics of a specific period? There are limits to this kind of inquiry too. We cannot know for certain, the intention of artists and musical practitioners, but musical works provide us with a sort of primary source documentation of emotions and cultural expressions, indicative of the moment in which they arose.

The titles of these songs and albums certainly speak to a more Afro-centric jazz, as the vocabulary of hard bop is at all points steeped in lingo, and conveyed common experiences of black Americans, by black Americans, for black folk the world over. For example, some of the most popular hard bop tracks and albums are as follows:

Horace Silver and the Jazz Messengers – “The Preacher”

Jimmy Smith- “Back at the Chicken Shack”

Lee Morgan- Cornbread

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers – “Moanin’”, “Dat Dere”

Herbie Hancock – “Watermelon Man”

Hard bop’s common language and use of “the hip” represented an abstraction that rejected the white hipster, and the rest of the riff-raff that had plagued bebop and cool jazz, embracing what Eric Lott describes as “a closed hermeneutic that had the undeniable effect of alienating the riff-raff and expressing a sense of felt isolation, all the while affirming a collective purpose—even at the expense of other musicians” (Lott 599). This sense of re-ethnicizing is present in hard bop’s imaginative reinvention of jazz’s foundation in the blues and in the gospel music of the black church. Its practitioners expressed a renewed desire to explore these roots in a contemporary form, a “music of roots and vision, new-time religion built out of old-time religion.” (Saul 3). In reinventing roots music, Hard Bop’s emphasis on the common past could address the turbulent present, embodying the concept of looking forward to a future free from the tumult of the American racial landscape.

Hard bop looked into the past and future simultaneously, and used the lessons of history to conceptualize a future based on freedom. Hard bop recast many ideas from bebop with infusions of traditional styles, yet was always forward-looking in its emphasis on freedom, its inventiveness, and its eventual impact on new forms like free jazz. This sense of looking through time present in hard bop represents an almost compulsive desire by musicians to revisit and recast their own history and define the balance between the music’s debt to the past and legacy to the future, maintaining agency over the posterity of the art form, including where it came from, where it was going, and its cultural staying power. What are the commonalities of the struggle for freedom, and what did freedom mean for both for the freedom rights movement and hard bop practitioners? For the civil rights movement, freedom was to be expressed in legal and social terms, in the landmark court cases and legacy of numerous collective organizing and community building projects from organizations like SNCC and CORE.  For hard bop, freedom was expressed and asserted in aesthetic terms, a freedom from established musical modes which represented the crucible of a new form of jazz, free jazz, which cast aside the very notion of music theory to embody a purely emotive expression.  

One particular album that encapsulates the relationship between hard bop and the civil rights movement comes from drummer and composer Max Roach. Roach, a pioneer of bebop, is generally considered alongside the most important drummers in history and worked with many famous musicians, including Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Abbey Lincoln, Charles Mingus, Billy Eckstine, Stan Getz, Sonny Rollins, and Eric Dolphy. Inspired by a wave of sit-ins that swept from a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, to other points in the segregated South, Roach decided to develop the 1960 album We Insist! The Freedom Now Suite. The album was initially supposed to be a longer choral work, to be performed on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, but the project was developed more quickly in response to the urgency of the civil rights agitation of early 1960 (Saul 93).  The work represents the ambition of Roach and his collaborator, popular singer-songwriter Oscar Brown Jr. to compose a retrospective work of black history that connected to the moment in which it was released. Indeed, the cover of the album features a photograph of three students at the Greensboro sit-ins, in which the students look directly at the camera with assertive facial expressions.

We Insist! opens with tracks like “Driva’ Man” and “Freedom Day” that explore the experiences of slavery and emancipation. In doing so, Roach links the historical to the contemporary freedom struggle in the American South and across the globe, reflected in songs like “Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace” and “Tears for Johannesburg” (Saul 93). The album posits a more direct political statement, and represents a rejection of and striking musical counterpoint to cool jazz. This is informed, in part, by the title of the work; the point of the music was to insist, not to make a point obliquely. We Insist! tells the story of the freedom struggle with a sense of urgency, strength, and necessary confrontation. The album also posits a sense of collective struggle and collaboration, as Roach’s drumming stands side by side with the vocals of his wife-to-be Abbey Lincoln whose singing is featured throughout. A highlight is the extraordinary “Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace” where Roach and Lincoln improvise together. Lincoln whispers, wails, moans, and screams while Roach caresses, then pummels his kit. What is noteworthy about the piece is the nimble way in which he approaches the question of the evolution of black identity, adopting musical personas and shedding them as one piece transitions into the next.

We Insist! was not a commercial success and received mixed reviews from contemporary music critics. Many praised the album’s ambitious concept, but some critics found it to be too controversial. Nonetheless, Roach vowed after its release that he would never again play music that is not socially relevant and told Down Beat magazine, “We American jazz musicians of African descent have proved beyond all doubt that we’re master musicians of our instruments. Now what we have to do is employ our skill to tell the dramatic story of our people and what we’ve been through” (Keepnews). This lukewarm reception to the album illustrates the difficulties in and political stakes involved with performing in the late 1950s and early 1960s for the artist committed to the civil rights movement. Overall, hard bop musicians shared a sympathy with the civil rights movement and a desire to make music that drew upon and publicized the black community’s “deep reserves of joy, defiance, and self-respect…all of these artists participated in the broader cultural movement to rediscover and reconceptualize the ‘roots’ of the black experience” (Saul xii).

Jazz in the fifties created one of the most profound effects on culture at large since the twenties. Although the Eisenhower era seemed to be one of calm and conformity, beneath the surface was a vortex of anger and discontent. Hard bop represents one of the most obvious symbols of this new surge in nonconformity. The heightened political and social messages present in hard bop expressed the larger significance of jazz within the emerging civil rights movement and broader countercultural landscape. Hard bop represented a tilt away from the subdued sound of cool jazz, and focused more instead on Afro-centric experimentalist aesthetics as an attempt to “reinvent roots music so that it could address the urgencies of the present and suggest a future beyond the crisis that the civil rights movement had so effectively dramatized” (Saul 3). Hard bop’s emphasis on overtly political and international themes can be seen as a reflection of the “global surge in black consciousness and solidarity” (Saul 210). The sound that accompanied this more overtly political tone was harder and heavier than its predecessors. The emergence of new genres is, in a sense, revolutionary, in which periods of conceptual continuity are interrupted by periods of revolutionary activity. The emergence of hard bop represented such a form of artistic revolution that can be seen as a sort of forerunner or accompaniment to political change.

Bibliography

Baraka, Amiri. Blues People: Negro Music in the White America. Morrow, 1963.

Cruse, Harold. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. Morrow, 1967.

DeVeaux, Scott, and Gary Giddins. Jazz. W.W. Norton Et Company, 2009.

DeVeaux, Scott. The Birth of Bebop: a Social and Musical History. Univ. of California Press, 2009.

Gridley, Mark C. Clarifying Labels: Cool Jazz, West Coast and Hard Bop, http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/DATABASES/TRA/Clarifying_labels.shtml.

Hester, Karlton E. From Africa to Afrocentric Innovations Some Call “Jazz”. Vol. 3, Hesteria Records & Publ. Co., 2001.

Lott, Eric. “Double V, Double-Time: Bebop’s Politics of Style.” Callaloo, no. 36, 1988, p. 597., doi:10.2307/2931544.

Monson, Ingrid T. Freedom Sounds: Civil Rights Call out to Jazz and Africa. Oxford University Press, 2010.

Nisenson, Eric. Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest. Da Capo Press, 1995.

Peretti, Burton W. Jazz in American Culture. Ivan R. Dee, 1997.

Rosenthal, David H. Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music 1955-1965. Oxford Univ. Press, 2010.

Rampersad, Arnold. Ralph Ellison a Biography. Vintage Books, 2008.

“Rediscovering Dave Brubeck | The Man | With Hedrick Smith.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, http://www.pbs.org/brubeck/theMan/classicBrubeckQuartet.htm.

Sandke, Randy. Where the Dark and the Light Folks Meet: Race and the Mythology, Politics, and Business of Jazz. Rowman & Littlefield, 2014.

Saul, Scott. Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties. Harvard University Press, 2005.

Verity, Michael. “Jazz and the Civil Rights Movement.” ThoughtCo, Aug. 22, 2019, thoughtco.com/jazz-and-the-civil-rights-movement-2039542.

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[1] Also known as “post-bop” or “funky jazz”

Towards a Musical Modernity: Jazz in the Iranian Context and Imagination (1925-1979)

The notion of modernity is central to the study of twentieth-century Iran. One of the most significant cultural aspects of modernity is that of the aesthetic, and few forms of music embody the modernist aesthetic quite like jazz does. The history of jazz and jazz-adjacent musical forms in Iran is intimately tied to the advent of modernity. While jazz played a relatively marginal role in Iran’s musical and socio-cultural landscape, it found some receptive audiences, and its impact on the imagination of Iranian thinkers and musicians as an expression of dissent is significant. Iran also represented a proving ground for emergent hybrid forms of jazz music that combined traditional elements with established modes. Iran’s radical shifts in political affiliation have shaped its musical landscape and as such, jazz became a representation of the West, modernity, and eventually, “Westoxification.”

From 1925 onwards, the two Pahlavi Shahs sought to modernize Iran by force, and forms of criticism could be met with harsh retribution. As a part of this modernization effort, Iran’s leaders sought to control elements of popular culture, including music. During the reign of the Pahlavi Shahs, jazz was largely, if not singularly perceived as a Western music, and the implications surrounding such perceptions of Western music changed with each regime. Under Reza Shah, the regime tended to compare Iran’s cultural milieu to that of Europe, while the regime of Mohammad Reza looked to the United States as the primary source of Western ideas (Breyley 299). This constant comparison and importation of “modern” values was not popular among many Iranians. Indeed, as a result of ongoing imperialistic interference by Britain and the United States, many Iranians resented the unequal distribution of wealth and the perceived theft of the nation’s resources by outsiders.

In the period from 1925 to 1953, the term “jazz” was applied to nearly all popular music of the West. Reza Shah’s regime, seeking to demonstrate Iran’s “modernity” imported selected aspects of Western popular and musical culture, but did not actively promote jazz as part of this effort, as the regime did not view jazz as sophisticated or respectable (Nikzad 64). As such, jazz did not fall in line with the regime’s particular vision of Iranian modernity and was of marginal popularity and cultural significance.

By the 1950’s the Cold War context had fully began to make its way into Iranian statecraft. The election of Mohammad Mossadq as prime minister in 1951 reflected a growing disenchantment with and rejection of the West. Mossadeq’s oil nationalization program contributed to his widespread popularity and stoked the fears of the Shah and the United States. In the CIA-backed coup of 1953, the United States reinforced the Shah’s supremacy and a new distrust of the West by the people of Iran. Mohammad Reza welcomed much of the cultural soft power promoted by the United States at this time, and simultaneously restricted what he saw as backwards left-wing revolutionary agendas.

The coup established a new relationship with the United States that permeated all echelons of cultural activity in Iran, as U.S. citizens began to work in the oil, education, media, arts, and other industries. Such migrants to Iran lived privileged lives and authorities catered to their cultural tastes, marking them as new objects of resentment for some Iranians (Breyley 306). The U.S.-backed regime did not actively promote jazz, but was tolerant of its performance and production in select cases. During this time, it was American jazz musicians living in or visiting Iran who enjoyed considerable freedoms in their practice, whereas Iranian jazz musicians encountered active resistance from the state. Musicians who were seen as promoting dissent through their music faced almost certain persecution by SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police force, either in the form of arrest, imprisonment, torture, or even execution (Breyley 300). In this case, jazz was not singled out as a specific musical form to be suppressed, but any music that could be deemed offensive to the regime was at risk of punishment.

Jazz found a receptive audience under Mohammad Reza Shah’s regime. Jazz was popular with many pro-Shah Iranians, who viewed the musical form as a reaffirmation of their special connection to the United States. Alternatively, the inherent creative disobedience of jazz music and its role in the underground made it popular among some leftist dissidents. Much of the commercially viable popular music at the time carried traces of jazz. Two such practitioners of this jazz-inflected pop are singers Farhad (www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5eNaqX_g0o) and Dariush (www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpDXSyH9Ye4), whose works employ trace elements of jazz piano, brass, and guitar.

Jazz and other popular musics of the West influenced a form of hybridized national and cultural expression when fused with Iranian art and music. Such hybridity is present in the jazz-adjacent works of Iranian artists Vigen Derderian, Googoosh, and Hassan Golnaraqi. Golnaraqi’s evocative track “Mara Beboos” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s3pL4FKwoqU) which contains some of the downtempo style of jazz guitarists like Django Reinhardt.

Known colloquially as the “Sultan of Jazz,” Vigen Derderia was perhaps the most commercially successful star of the era. Vigen began his career in the early 1950’s in the cafés and nightclubs of Tehran, and developed a smooth “crooner” pop style that was deemed acceptable to the Shah’s cultural requirements. While Vigen’s music does not sound explicitly like jazz as many Western audiences know it, it is reflective of some of the most Westernized music in the post-war period. He is often compared with Elvis Presley, and like “The King,” he appeared in popular films. Vigen’s musical work is emblematic of jazz in Iran. There exists a complex relationship between Western and non-Western traditions, as the Western elements and aesthetics of Vigen’s music are inexorably tied to the non-Western (Breyley 307). His stage demeanor, hairstyle, costumes and album design are all decidedly non-Western, but contain currents of Western popular forms of music like swing and early rock and roll, both of which contain jazz-derived rhythmic and harmonic elements.

Some colorful YouTube commentary on a video of Vigen’s music sheds light on the complexities in understanding diasporic jazz and the problems of discussing jazz as a generalized form. In the comments section of one of his major hits “Lalai” (Lullaby) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpB5Enr3iaI), two commenters engage in a debate about whether Vigen’s music should be called jazz:

Kadkhoda Ahvazi: “this was not a jazz singer and he never sang even one jazz song” [translated from Persian]

Nasir Delshaad: “WHAT DIFFERENT [DOES IT] MAKE WEATHER HE WAS CALLED KING OF JAZ OR KING OF POP, HE WAS THE BEST IN HIS [PROFESSION]”

Challia25: “Sir, between pop and jazz it makes no difference, don’t take it so seriously” [translated from Persian]

These commenters encapsulate the struggle in defining whether one of Iran’s most prominent musical figures should be grouped into the broader umbrella of jazz. Whether or not he deserves the nickname “Sultan of Jazz” is beside the point, perhaps attempting to generalize or sort all music into restricted individual genres is a fool’s errand.

New Iranian pop music also incorporated this notion of hybridity. Following the advent of television in Iran during the late 1950’s, stars like Googoosh and Fereydun Farrokhzad began to enter the musical fold. While seen as primarily Westernized, such artists incorporated elements from a myriad cultural contexts including Turkish psychedelic, Arabic, Indian, Latin American, and Eastern European styles (Breyley 309). While jazz had contributed to the mainstream pop of these other influences, and therefore found its way into Iranian music through transitive relation, it remained in the minority of musical popularity. It was reserved for some left-wing intellectuals who would frequent Tehran’s small clubs and cafés in search of contact with the more creative side of the West, which would have been, in this case, those traveling “the hippie trail,” or the overland journey taken by members of the hippie subculture and others from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s between Europe and South Asia, primarily through Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal. As such, elements of jazz, beat, and folk mixed with traditional musical forms (MacLean).

During the Cold War, the United States employed jazz as a “sonic secret weapon,” in which American jazz performers would visit other countries to transmute American cultural practices (Belair). In 1956 the U.S. state department sent bebop trumpeter and bandleader Dizzy Gillespie to perform in the oil city of Abadan, kicking off a regional strategic tour of cultural dissemination stretching across the Middle East, Asia and Eastern Europe (Von Eschen). Subsequent campaigns were led by jazz giants like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Benny Carter, Harry Edison, and others (Breyley 308). These cultural ambassadors would have attracted young fans as well as foreigners who were working in Iran. These tours in turn influenced American musicians like Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, whose composition ‘Isfahan’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2U1MGX8SLU) was certainly impacted by the Persian musical forms which they gleaned on their tours.

The emergent musical dialogue between the two countries was instrumental in the development of new forms of jazz. One particularly noteworthy jazz practitioner who embodies the cultural osmosis between Iran and the United States was Lloyd Miller. Dr. Miller is known for his research work on Persian music, is fluent in Persian, can play 100 instruments in 15 jazz, ethnic and world music traditions, and holds a doctorate in Persian studies. During the 1950’s and 60’s, Miller played Iranian instruments with top jazz artists in Europe like Don Ellis and Eddie Harris, and often played at the famous Blue Note in Paris, where he sat in for Bud Powell to play with Kenny Clark. Miller learned Persian art music formally under the Iranian master Dariush Safvat, who was also living in Paris at the time (Breyley 311). Miller lived in Iran for six years, absorbing the music of the country and blending it with his own jazz practice. During the 1970s, Miller even hosted his own prime-time main network jazz show on NIRTV in Tehran, “Kurosh Ali Khan and Friends,” where he performed under a pseudonym Kurosh Ali Khan (https://youtu.be/5Oegi6LlG90?t=328). The show featured improvisational performances by mostly unknown Iranian artists. (JazzScope).

Dr. Miller’s magnum opus, aptly titled “Oriental Jazz” elegantly fuses traditional American bebop, hard bop, cool jazz, and big band forms with traditional Persian instruments like the tar, zarb, and santur, 6/8 time signatures, and microtonal scales, all cornerstones of traditional Persian music (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=478hfvZ9Tqw). As Miller seamlessly melds Persian instrumentation and modes with American jazz, his music showcases the dialogue between the two. When one first sees the album art and title, there is almost an expectation that the music will be a stiff, buttoned-up imitation of Iranian music, indeed the application of the term “oriental” already implies a certain degree of cultural appropriation. Upon hearing tracks like “Gol-e Gandom,” “Amber Eyes,” and “Hue Wail,” the listener is immersed in a swirling, kaleidoscopic dreamscape of jazz-fusion. The style is not necessarily academic, but contains an ineffable sophistication and clear evidence of the work that Miller put in to learn and play these native instruments from players in Iran.

Miller describes his successful dialogue between jazz and Iranian music as less of a blending and more of a meeting, stating how, “I’d play this Iranian stuff with the Arab oud and Turkish clarinet and Vietnamese flat harp, and we’d play some jazz things with [Western] instruments. So instead of trying to play jazz on [Persian instruments], or trying to play Persian music on Western instruments…I played those instruments…not blended at all. They met, and went side by side” (Breyley 311). Miller’s concept of “side by side” music reflects the aversion to fusion or contamination shared by the supporters of the Golha radio program, discussed below.

“Oriental Jazz” was part of a body of work that kicked off the genre of “spiritual jazz.” Stylistically, spiritual jazz is marked by a mixture of jazz with approximations of ethnic music styles (often a blend of styles evocative of African, Indian, and East Asian musical traditions), religious music of non-Christian traditions, and the ecstatic, transcendental aspects of Free Jazz. Other practitioners of “Spiritual Jazz” include John Coltrane, Alice Coltrane, Pharoh Sanders, Sun Ra and His Solar-Myth Arkestra, and Dorothy Ashby. All of these artists participated in a musical movement that saw jazz artists striking out beyond jazz’s constraints, be it chord changes, predetermined tempos, or “standard” melodies, striving toward freedom and spiritual transcendence amidst the great cultural tumult of the 1960’s.

One of jazz-harpist Dorothy Ashby’s most critically-acclaimed albums takes a cue from Iranian cultural heritage, reflected in the title of the 1970 masterpiece: “The Rubaiyat of Dorothy Ashby: Original compositions inspired by the words of Omar Khayyam, arranged and conducted by Richard Evans.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdmAM0abahs). Ashby’s downtempo harp and vocals represent a mannered, lush, and cinematic listening experience, with lyrics supplied by the notoriously inaccurate Fitzgerald translation of Omar Khayyam. The record is self-consciously philosophical, with a grandiosity and mystical sensibility present in the works of other spiritual jazz or soul jazz practitioners.

By the mid-fifties, some of Iran’s urban intellectual communities expressed their concerns about a perceived lack of appreciation and taste for singularly Persian art and music. Such communities saw the emergent popular music as infected by Western, Arabic, Turkish and other influences, which included jazz (Breyley 308). Such fears prompted Davud Pirnia to develop a music program on national radio called Golha or “Flowers,” a reserved space to play authentically Persian music with no sense of cultural interference. Such a narrow goal is nigh impossible to achieve, but nonetheless Pirina established a newfound appreciation for certain new forms of Iranian music that came out of an interdependent musical atmosphere. Golha represented an accumulation of musicians who improvised in the Motrebi or “light-urban” form of music style, lyricists and composers, and some proponents of the Westernized style who emphasized harmony and fixed-meter works (Breyley 308). In many ways, Golha became part of the “back to roots” movement that played a significant role in the revolution.

Lloyd Miller played a role in the ideological preservation of “uncontaminated” Iranian music during this time. His master, Dariush Safvat returned to Iran out of an intensified concern about the Westernization imposed by the Shah’s regime. As such, he established the Centre for the Preservation and Propagation of Iranian Music in Tehran in the late 1960’s. Miller was awarded a fulbright scholarship in 1970 to move to Iran, where he promoted the Centre and its concerts of both traditional art music and jazz. As Miller recalls “[The Centre] wanted to promote the thinking that “Iranian music was going down the tube, it’s the fault of westernization, it’s all the fault of America and its crummy culture and let’s get the Yankees outta here…I didn’t mean it that way, but all these guys were left-wing and loved me ragging on America, and how our music was destroying theirs. I wrote about how great Safvat was saving traditional music” (Nikzad 67)

Additionally, an English-language Iranian magazine article about his television show “Kurosh Ali Khan and Friends” published in the late 1970’s quotes Miller, or “Kurosh” as saying that the United States’ musical landscape was “riddled with union dictatorship, hoods, fakes and swindlers” (JazzScope). Such an ideological position is reflective of a contradiction at the center of Miller’s position in Iran as a jazz practitioner, as Miller enjoyed many of the privileges of being an American in Iran in the 1970’s. Miller was sheltered from, if not immune to the very real and ever-present threat posed by SAVAK, which many Iranian dissidents and aspiring experimental musicians would have faced. Miller enjoyed unprecedented freedom of expression in public contexts while Iranians themselves could only practice and perform their music in private.

For those Iranians who feared cultural colonialism and gharbzadegi (westoxification), jazz represented a prime example of American decadence and moral rot. Critics of the West argued that musical traffic only flowed from West to East, and along with it came the ills of Western society (Milani 831). Indeed, Iranian socio-political critic Jalal Al-e Ahmad declared the West morally and aesthetically bankrupt, as it celebrated what he called the “primitive art of Africa” (Milani 832). This trend of aligning jazz music with the primitive extended to Egypt, where writer and ideologue Sayyid Qtub argued that:

“The American is primitive in his artistic taste, both in what he enjoys as art and in his own artistic works. “Jazz” music is his music of choice. This is that music that the Negroes invented to satisfy their primitive inclinations, as well as their desire to be noisy on the one hand and to excite bestial tendencies on the other. The American’s intoxication in “jazz” music does not reach its full completion until the music is accompanied by singing that is just as coarse and obnoxious as the music itself. Meanwhile, the noise of the instruments and the voices mounts, and it rings in the ears to an unbearable degree… The agitation of the multitude increases, and the voices of approval mount, and their palms ring out in vehement, continuous applause that all but deafens the ears” (Qutb).

Such vehemently racist attacks on jazz were popular, as other thinkers in Iran conflated jazz with westoxification. Indeed, Ayatollah Khomeini and his ideological circle approved and appropriated those views, promulgating anti-modern thought as a function of ecclesiastical doctrine. As thinkers like Al-e-Ahmad provided the ideological underpinnings to the 1979 revolution, it follows that jazz would come under direct censorship and suppression under the new regime. Jazz could not be publicly performed or commercially recorded in Iran between the 1979 revolution and the mid-1990’s (Breyley 313). As such, there exists a complex relationship between the free form musical medium and the totalitarian regime. I hope to touch on the significance of such a frenetic and improvisational art form in the context of a highly regulated society.

In terms of defining an aesthetic modernity, jazz represents one of the most salient art forms in the minds of Iranian thinkers and experimental musicians. Most often, jazz represented a form of dissent, and was perceived as being purely of the West. Jazz also represented a significant pillar of the cultural Cold War, employed by the United States as an overture of the superpower’s aesthetic sophistication, with Iran as one of the proving grounds for the so-called “Sonic secret weapon.” While it did not enjoy the same mainstream success as it did elsewhere, jazz made an impression upon Iranian popular music during a unique moment of cultural osmosis. This musical dialogue also presented the West with traditional Persian music as a new form of inspiration, which sparked the development of new experimental forms in the United States. As for its role in the 1979 revolution, jazz was categorized as an object of resentment by the intellectuals behind “Westoxification,” who attacked the musical form indicative of the moral rot of the West, and of modernity.

Bibliography

Belair Jr., Felix. 1955. ‘United States Has Secret Sonic Weapon – Jazz’. New York Times, 6 November.
Breyley, G.J. “Jazz in Iran since the 1920s.” Jazz and Totalitarianism, by Bruce Johnson et al., Routledge, 2017, pp. 297–324.
Collier, James Lincoln. 1978. The Making of Jazz: A Comprehensive History. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Devlin, Paul. 2015. ‘Jazz Autobiography and the Cold War.’ Popular Music and Society 38 (2): 140-159.
“Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy.” Music in America’s Cold War Diplomacy, by Danielle Fosler-Lussier, University of California Press, 2015.
Kajanova, Yvetta. Jazz from Socialist Realism to Postmodernism. Peter Lang, 2016.
MacLean, Rory (2008), Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India, London, New York: Penguin Books, Ig Publishing.
Milani, Abbas. Eminent Persians: the Men and Women Who Made Modern Iran, 1941-1979. Syracuse University Press, 2008.
Nikzad, Ramtin. 2013. “Music Side By Side: An Interview with Lloyd Miller.” B’ta’arof: A Magazine for Iranian Culture, Arts & Histories 2: 64-67.
Qutb, Sayyid. “The America I Have Seen: In the Scale of Human Values.” CIA.gov, Central Intelligence Agency, 1951, http://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/3F/3F56ACA473044436B4C1740F65D5C3B6_Sayyid_Qutb_-_The_America_I_Have_Seen.pdf.
Von Eschen Penny M., Satchmo Blows up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, Harvard University Press, 2006.
http://www.jazzscope.com/OJ.html

In a Sentimental Mode: The Literary and Philosophical Strains of Dissent in Alexander Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow

“Be my witness, kind traveler, be my witness before the world, with what a heavy heart I obey the sovereign will of custom” -Alexander Radishchev

The act of travelling nearly always lends perspective. Be it a vacation, a work trip, aimless wanderlust or nomadic activity, traveling provides the sojourner with unexpected novelties that serve as useful points of comparison. In the case of Alexander Radishchev, the fictional written account of an anonymous traveler became a medium for political and literary expression. His most famous work, the travelogue Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, served as a form of critical examination, not just of the locations between two cities, but of the Imperial Russian political and social landscape during the twilight decades of the 18th century. Radishchev’s Journey represented a combination of popular literary forms of the time, primarily sentimentalism and advice literature. From a philosophical standpoint, his Journey was unique, synthesizing ideals of duty and liberty from both the French and German enlightenments, while refuting many of the ambient ideas regarding natural law and subsequent natural rights. As for its effectiveness as a form of political critique, Radishchev’s sentimental travelogue falls short. While emotionally compelling, the work fails to promulgate a cohesive and singular vision of a viable alternative that would have been applicable in the Russian empire at the time. Despite its flaws, the enlightenment-driven moral mission and humanitarian appeal put forth in Radishchev’s work served as a mirror for a rapidly-transforming empire to better understand itself in the midst of the moral crisis of serfdom. Like most journeys, Radishchev’s came at a high price.

Radishchev operated primarily within the mode of sentimentalism, a literary form popular in Europe at the time. By the middle of the eighteenth-century sentimentalism displaced classicism, the previously predominant literary mode. Classicism viewed the individual as a “Molecule within a particular hierarchically constructed social system (a hero in a tragedy, a gentle shepherd in an idyll, a military commander or ruler in an ode)” (Altshuller 94). Descriptive rather than normative, Sentimentalism asserted a new depiction of the individual, offering detailed depictions of the inner worlds of characters, who were often ordinary people concerned with romantic and intellectual experiences.  A pioneer of this emergent literary form was Laurence Sterne, who published two interconnected novels – The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760-7) and A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768) – in which he developed meticulous portraits of the inner lives of his characters. Sterne’s elaborate investigations saw pages upon pages dedicated to the description of the slightest spiritual experience, feeling, or observation. Sterne’s Sentimental Journey is the namesake of the genre and seems to have influenced Radishchev a great deal, as Radishchev’s Journey also takes the form of a sentimental travelogue. Other early sentimentalist works include Samuel Richardson’s works Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady (1747-8), Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) (Altshuller 94).

The philosophical stylings of sentimentalism elevated the importance of the individual, who was depicted as an independent personality “of value in and of itself…not acting under the influence of duty or its surroundings…defining its own fate and behavior” (Altshuller 94). Indeed, Sterne’s characters generally disregard social rules and are beholden to their whims and moods. The prototypical sentimental hero is often a lonely one, whose constant attention to the inner life leaves such a character feeble and vulnerable in the face of an alienating external world. Such gloomy depictions of a given external reality draw a sharp contrast to the oft-idyllic and peaceful internal reality of the individual. Such literary developments began to make their impression upon Russian literary circles toward the end of the eighteenth century, just as Western philosophical trends found their way into the minds of educated elites, and eventually the two coalesced in Radishchev’s Journey. Sterne and Richardson were widely translated into Russian in 1790, and other sentimentalist writers were widely read as early as the 1780’s (Altshuller 95-96).

While Radishchev’s Journey falls squarely within the bounds of literary sentimentalism, it is also undoubtedly political. To understand how well-suited sentimental travelogues were for political critique, one must first consider the body of political discourse, advice literature, which preempted and influenced Radishchev’s literary-philosophical project. During Catherine’s reign, the advice literature exploded, with over three times more books published than during the previous century combined (Whittaker 143). This practice of advising monarchs through the medium of odes, plays, sermons, histories, and open letters represented a popular trend in Europe in the eighteenth century. This critical and didactic emphasis found expression in Radishchev’s sentimental travelogue. The enlightenment sensibility present in advice literature established the need for a literarily-ordained moral guideline in the minds of readers. Catherine was privy to this type of political consciousness, as she read widely, and many writers issued their counsel to her through the form of advice literature. Catherine understood that politically-motivated authors of advice literature sought to “point out the defects of the present form of government and its vices” (Whittaker 143). Advice literature represented a viable channel of communication between ruler and ruled, and Catherine understood its necessity in molding a society mindful of new moral laws, and the principles of good governance. However, Catherine’s nominal acceptance of political critique was short lived.

By the 1770’s and 1780’s, Catherine’s attempted portrait of enlightened rule had begun to disintegrate. The Pugachev rebellion, war with Poland and Turkey, and the failure to deliver a code of law all caused writers to begin to doubt the empress’ commitment to the ideals of her early reign. As such, advice writers practiced some degree of self-censorship by writing about ideal kingdoms, as opposed to writing about Russia directly, or wrote privately (Whittaker 146). Radishchev, who published the Journey during the tail end of the era of acceptable advice literature, seems to have undertaken many of the same political dictates that other writers promulgated in their “mirrors” for monarchs. Both popular enlightenment philosophy and advice literature were concerned with political and moral issues, and Radishchev, in his portrayal of powerful individuals in different episodes, sought to facilitate a genuine dialogue between the ruler and the ruled, one that might have resulted in the abolition of serfdom. It was not to be. The ripples of the French Revolution made their way east. The potential for widespread peasant revolt disturbed Catherine, who began to denounce her critics and tighten her grip on the exchange of ideas. It was the unfortunate timing of the Journey’s publication that resulted in Radishchev’s sentencing and subsequent banishment to Siberia.

Radishchev’s timing placed him in the nexus of enlightenment philosophy, advice literature, and sentimentalism. His work represented an amalgamation of these multiple intellectual streams. Were he to have published too long before or after 1790, his Journey would have taken a completely different form. Born in Moscow in 1749, Radishchev would have read European literature and philosophy while he studied initially at the St. Petersburg School for Pages, then at the University of Leipzig in 1766-71, where Catherine sent him along with twelve other students to obtain a legal education (Altshuller 104). Radishchev read voraciously during his time in Leipzig, where he developed a fluency in Aristotle, Plutarch, Plato, Lucretius, Montesquieu, Locke, Milton, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Diderot, Mably, and Rousseau, many of whom he credited for the “sweetness of elevated thoughts” (Clardy 38). He returned to Russia to work in the state Senate, then as a military procurator, and finally at the custom house of St. Petersburg, where he was a director (Altshuller 104). In his successful career working for the state, Radishchev likely formed strong opinions about Russian society and government, no doubt influenced by his education at Leipzig. Such ideas, combined with those present in advice literature, found expression in his literary work.

Radishchev’s relatively disjointed and amateur literary career developed in parallel, and began with stylized letters and diaries. His earliest literary works, which date from the 1770’s include, “Diary of a week” (“Dnevnik odnoy nedeli”), comprised of a sentimental recounting of his separation from his friends, and drew heavy stylistic influence from Sterne. Radishchev’s early writing style represented what he knew, his language a “strange amalgam of the sentimental, archaic Church Slavic with civic-journalistic vocabulary” (Altshuller 104). This cobbled-together stylistic form became the cornerstone of Radishchev’s writing, as his Journey is replete with archaisms, or old-fashioned linguistic mechanisms.

Radishchev’s brand of sentimentalism contained obvious currents of advice literature and his unmistakable political consciousness assumed form in his early work. Most Russian sentimentalist writers, like Karamzin, weren’t politically critical. Radishchev on the other hand, employed the advice literature mode as early as 1782, when he completed his work Letter to a Friend Living in Tobolsk. In his essay, Radishchev considered the significant role that Peter the Great played in the development of the Russian nation. He pointed out that this dynamic leader was rightly called great, for his personality and achievements “gave a purpose to so vast an empire” (Clardy 141). Radishchev went on to say that Peter could have been even more outstanding if he had “established individual liberty and… yet there is no example, and perhaps until the end of the world there will be none, of a monarch voluntarily yielding up any part of his power” (Clardy 141). This critique of the monarchy is quite soft, but represents the nascent dissent that would later emerge in Radishchev’s work, and would come to define his place within the Russian literary canon.

As his writing career progressed, Radishchev’s technical ability remained relatively limited. During the 1780’s Radishchev composed his principal work, which Mark Altshuller argues was a difficult process, as “[Radishchev] was not only devoid of any great artistic gift, but also had a feeble grasp of the rules of composition” (Altshuller 105). This difficulty is reflected in the work’s structure. The book is fragmentary, divided into episodic vignettes, verses, sketches, meditations, and dream sequences. The titles of each section reflect the names of towns and posting stations between St. Petersburg and Moscow: Sofia, Lyubani, Novgorod, Zaytsovo, Gorodnya, Peshki, and others (Radishchev xi). These places indicate the progress of the traveler, yet they have no bearing on the content of each episode.

During this time, a specific tragic episode in Radishchev’s life may have enlarged his capacity for sentimentality, his outlook, and his writing style. In 1783 his wife Anna died after giving birth to their third son, Paul. The death of his wife immediately plunged Radishchev into “grief and desolation” (Clardy 43).  He felt himself helpless in what he considered to be a wicked society, an outlook which is reflected in his portrayal of his surroundings and society. Out of this despondency came his 1789 work, Life of Fedor Vasilevich Ushakov. The work represents a devout outpouring of the heart in which the life of Ushakov is refracted through Radishchev’s own moods and mental state. This work, along with the Journey, are clear examples of the emotional sensitivity that Radishchev has become known for. In a tone that resembles Rousseau’s Confessions, Radishchev said at the beginning of the Life, “I seek in this my own consolation and would like to unfold before you, dear friend, the inmost recesses of my heart.” (Clardy 43). Here, Radishchev employs a sentimental-confessional mode, which fuses sentimentality into the essence of the work. Radishchev’s literary style is decidedly rooted in the detailed expression of real emotional states from the start. Such emotions certainly impacted the overall moral mission of his projects, and provided relatable avenues for his readers to better understand and sympathize with the problems at hand. This emphasis on real emotions indicates that his work is not a mere imitation of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, as some literary critics argue.

In terms of social protest and political satire, Radishchev went far beyond anything attempted by Sterne. Radishchev’s Journey is at all points concerned with diagnosing societal ills in Russia. His tone is far more cynical and angst-ridden, perhaps influenced by the desolation in his soul following the death of his wife. Where the English writer makes his points by “subtle touches, persiflage, intimate conversation with the reader… Radishchev harangues his audience with passionate conviction, virtually bludgeoning him into acquiescence” (Lang 132). This is not to say that Radishchev’s approach to social justice was entirely effective. The subjectivity and emotional affect present in Radishchev’s work seem to qualify the rationality of any appeals he makes. His Journey is rife with emotional outbursts, like in the chapter “Zaytsovo,” where the traveler narrates an argument with a local governor in which, “[the governor’s] conceit I met with equanimity and calm; his show of power, with steadfastness; his arguments with my own…but finally my agitated heart poured out all that was pent up in it. The more subservience I saw in those who were standing around, the more impulsive my speech became” (Radishchev 102). Here, and in nearly every other chapter of the Journey, Radishchev is moved to tears or engages in some impulsive outburst. While these are natural effects of human passion, and Radishchev’s emphatic defense of justice is admirable, the emotional quality of his critiques would not have endeared him to the people capable of making any real, substantive changes in policy. As such, sentimental travelogue was not particularly well suited for effective political critique, but it was popular, and was widely read. Well aware of the popularity of the genre, and of the tradition of advice literature, Radishchev most likely recognized the disruptive potential of his work, and was well aware of the precarious publishing environment, reflected in his anonymous publication of the work.

When Catherine II ascended to the throne she issued numerous liberalizing laws, ukases, one of which allowed for individual citizens to establish printing presses for the publication of nearly any topic with only “nominal censorship” (Altshuller 109). As such, in 1789 Radishchev established such a printing press, printing and publishing 650 copies of his Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow in 1790. When the St. Petersburg Chief of Police and official censor, Major-General Nikita Ryleev, received for inspection the manuscript of an anonymous work A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow, the text seemed harmless enough. At first glance the book appeared to consist of travel sketches collected on the road between the two cities. This dismissal of the seemingly innocuous medium of travelogue makes sense, especially when the critiques of the state and monarch are broad-based and cloaked in allegory. Although Radishchev attempted to tackle the sufferings of mankind, the bogus pedigrees of nobility, the alarming vision of abuse of labor under serfdom, his work ultimately did not contain any especially subversive ideas, save for its discussions of peasant rebellion and its defense of the execution of Charles I by Oliver Cromwell, both of which lack political tact. The print run of the Journey sold well, and was most likely read in the drawing rooms and salons of St. Petersburg or Moscow. His bookseller Zotov, wanted him to publish more (Altshuller 109). The major topics that Radishchev explored in the Journey, namely state power, serfdom, governmental reform, and literary problems, must have all weighed heavily on the minds of the intelligentsia at the time.

Why sentimental travelogue? Radishchev likely understood the inflammatory nature of his work as he did not include his name in the publication, and staggered the releases of his work. This awareness of the precarious publishing environment indicates that Radishchev exercised some degree of self-censorship in the undertaking of his project. It seems unlikely that he published his Journey due to the trendiness of the genre, or for expressly commercial purposes. His moral mission was too strong, and he already enjoyed a relatively successful career working for the custom house.  It follows that he used the genre of sentimental travelogue to soften or mask his critique of the state. Moreover, Sentimentalism was particularly well-suited to express the depth of his moral and emotional conviction. Whether intentional or not, Radishchev struck at the foundations of autocratic rule and its self-perceived eternal verities. The Journey uses the medium of sentimental travelogue to oppose “the evils of despotism, slavery and serfdom, outmoded laws, religious persecution, disgraceful prison conditions, and the severity of military service…it is therefore quite understandable why Catherine was so incensed at its flood of eloquence” (Clardy 46). Radishchev’s Journey emphasizes subjective discussions of personal experience and sentiments, of manners and morals, and repetitively employs these modes to make an evocative, yet shielded criticism of the existing structures of power in Russia.

            The Journey also represents an encapsulation of various philosophical trends of the day. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the Russian nobility adopted the philosophical and literary modes of Western Europe. Yet only a minority of literary works embodied the major intellectual values of the enlightenment, and still fewer advocated for an assimilation of those values into public life, namely the abolition of serfdom and solidification of individual rights. In terms of its representations of natural law and the application of enlightenment philosophy, Radishchev’s work is unique, and represents a divergence from contemporary thinkers, namely Rousseau. Radishchev’s concept of natural law had a philosophical-theological foundation as it proceeded immediately from the author’s belief in man’s reasoning ability, but ultimately depended upon the will of God. His concept of natural law sets forth, in short, “an eternal law which is the exemplar of God’s law, and it is by this divine standard that all human law is to be judged and accepted or rejected” (Clardy 68). Radishchev interpreted natural law as being that law which conforms to the natural order of the universe, which is grounded innately within the nature of man, and which is independent of man’s creation.

Radishchev’s characterization of the divine throughout the Journey establishes his belief that God is the eternal creator and preserver of the universe, the first truth and origin of natural law. In the chapter “Torzhok,” Radishchev states how “God will ever be God, perceived even by those who do not believe in Him” (Radishchev 167). He goes on to criticize those who attempt to apply crude anthropomorphic qualities to God, in this case governments who act on behalf of the divine, stating that “The real offender against God is he who imagines that he can sit in judgement on an offense against Him. Is it he who will be answerable before Him ” (Radishchev 168). As such, Radishchev indicates that individuals are endowed by God with their natural rights. Considering this argument for the existence of and primacy of God, Radishchev’s concept of natural law and right is not in harmony with the natural rights defined by thinkers like Mably and Rousseau, who ascribe a great deal of natural freedoms to the individual. The opening lines of Rousseau’s The Social Contract read, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” (Rousseau 156). In the chapter “Zaytsovo,” Radishchev makes his own proclamation about how man is born into the world, stating how, “Every man is born into the world equal to all others. All have the same bodily parts, all have reason and will. Consequently, apart from society, man is a being that depends on no one in his actions” (Radishchev 102). While the two descriptions of birth seem similar at first, Radishchev only indicates that all men are equal, not that all men are free. Radishchev’s assessment supports his critique of serfdom, but indicates that man is always beholden to some authority, be it God or an enlightened benevolent monarch.

A far cry from Rousseau’s conception of natural freedom, Radishchev’s idea of natural law is much closer to that of Russian theologian Theophan Prokopovich, who argued that natural law is ordained by God alone. In his sermons, Prokopovich argued that “The highest authority comes from nature, thus from God since He created nature. The first authority comes from the human agreement; since the natural law written by God in the human heart requires a strong defender, and conscience prompts us to seek him, we must see God as the cause of authority. Therefore, people should submit to the authority; disobedience is a violation of the natural law. Not wanting authority is wanting the destruction of humankind. Disobedience to authority is disobedience to God” (Прокопович 1.245). Representative of early enlightenment thought in Russia and Germany, Prokopovich’s interpretation of natural rights is decidedly more restrictive than Rousseau’s as it deifies authority and condemns any individual who would act in defiance of God’s will, which would in this case manifest as the Tsar’s will.

The predominant thinkers of the French enlightenment asserted that what is proper is determined exclusively by society, a concept best encapsulated by Rousseau’s 1762 treatise, The Social Contract. In the text, Rousseau aimed to set out an alternative to the stratified class state guided by the common interest of the rich and propertied who impose unfreedom and subordination on the poor and weak. In such an alternative society, Rousseau claims:

“So that the social pact not be a pointless device, it tacitly includes this engagement, which can alone give force to the others—that whoever re-fuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body; which means nothing else than that he shall be forced to be free; for such is the condition which, uniting every citizen to the fatherland, protects him from all personal dependency, a condition that ensures the control and working of the political machine, and alone renders legitimate civil engagements, which, without it, would be absurd, tyrannical, and subject to the most enormous abuses.” (Rousseau 166).

 

As such, each person will enjoy the protection of the common force while remaining as free as they were in the state of nature. This concept of the general will, the collective will of the citizen body taken as a whole, represents the source of legitimacy in society and is willed by all citizens. Jesse Clardy writes that, “One never finds in the French philosopher’s work the idea that there is a law of God which justifies disobedience to the general will of the people” (Clardy 69). Perhaps because of an absence of the divine, Radishchev felt that such a philosophy would lead ultimately to a tyranny similar to that which existed in the state of nature.

Radishchev had a more pessimistic view of man in the state of nature than Rousseau. He presented his unease with the concept of man’s inherent reason as the sole moral guide in the chapter “Kresttsy,” where he described a father’s education of his child, in which, “Leaving [the child’s] reason free to guide [his] steps in the paths of learning, [the father] was even more anxiously concerned for [the child’s] morals” (Radishchev 115). Later in the work Radishchev argues against Rousseau’s vision of man in the state of nature asking, “What are man’s rights in the state of nature? Look at him. He is naked, hungry, and thirsty. He appropriates everything he can seize for the satisfaction of his needs. If anything tries to stand in his way, he removes the obstacle, destroys it, and takes what he wants. If, on the way to satisfy his needs, he meets his like, if for example, two hungry men try to satisfy their appetite with the same food, which one of them has the greater right to it? The one who takes it. Who takes the food? The stronger one” (Radishchev 146). Rousseau’s concept of natural rights was clearly present in Radishchev’s thinking, but relating to sensibility only, as Radishchev’s characterization of man in the state of nature denotes a definitive break with the French philosopher. Radishchev’s philosophical and stylistic borrowings from the west were therefore selective; he considered many of the same philosophical questions, but came to different conclusions.

This is not to say that Radishchev’s consideration of natural law represents a wholesale rejection of French enlightenment thought. He adopted points from thinkers like Montesquieu and Voltaire, who also protested against intolerance, injustice, and irrational despotism. Radishchev’s protests against irrational despotism are clearly present in chapters like “Tver,” where he describes despotism through an allegorical iambic verse, called “Liberty: An Ode.” In the verse, Radishchev characterizes a despot as, “A horrible monster, hydra-like, with a hundred heads…it tramples upon the earthly powers, and stretches its head up toward Heaven, which it claims as its native home. It sows false phantoms and darkness everywhere, it knows how to deceive and flatter, and commands all to behave blindly…[Tyrannous] power calls this monster Revelation; reason calls it Deceit…religious and political superstition, each supporting the other” (Radishchev 196). Here, Radishchev’s mythic allegory indicates a once-removed critique of despotic rule, its deception of the people based in self-affirming religious and political superstition. Radishchev’s allegorical critique is similar to Montesquieu’s view of tyranny in his 1748 work The Spirit of the Laws, in which he argues that, “When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner” (Montesquieu 163). Here, a similar concept of self-affirming tyranny is present. Montesquieu’s critique is emblematic of the enlightenment efforts to establish social and political relationships on as rational a basis as possible. Radishchev and Montesquieu share this condemnation of despotism and the advocate for the emancipatory development of the individual’s relationship to the world, and to fellow individuals.

These writers and thinkers employed reason as a new basis for social organization, and created a directive for change that derided superstition, tradition, irrationality, and arbitrariness. Yet despite the popularity of advice literature, few Russian writers and thinkers directly challenged the sovereign. Indeed, the Russian elite lacked the motivation or the gumption to transform the diffuse values of the enlightenment into a cohesive program that might be implemented, nor did they see the monarchy as particularly problematic. Radishchev’s particular brand of sentimentalism was therefore a response to the strict empiricism of the enlightenment, perhaps even verging on romanticism. Laying aside the radical French philosophers’ argument that all ideas are derived empirically, Radishchev retained the principle that certain ideas are innate. In the chapter “Kresttsy,” Radishchev describes a man giving his son a lecture about morality before his departure to join the military. The father says to the son: “Work with your mind…and the quest for truth or facts, and reason will rule your will and passions. But do not imagine…that one can crush the roots of the passions…planted by nature itself in our sensuous organism” (Radishchev 118). Here, Radishchev indicates that despite the appeal of rationalism and empiricism, the passions are always within the individual, and are somehow beyond the individual’s control. The concept of pure rationality mastery of the passions being a power reserved for God alone.

Many of Radishchev’s criticisms of serfdom are based upon the inalienable value put on the individual’s dignity and worth, what he calls “the inviolable human rights of a fellow being” (Radishchev 99). It was the individual, in his view, who was responsible for the functioning of society. In the chapter “Chudovo,” the narrator talks to a serf working on a Sunday and remarks how the serf is, “Dead to the law, except perhaps in criminal cases. A member of society [a serf] becomes known to the government protecting him, only when he breaks the social bonds, when he becomes a criminal! This thought made my blood boil. Tremble, cruelhearted landlord! On the brow of each of your peasants I see your condemnation written” (Radishchev 48). Here, Radishchev does not seem as concerned with the nature of the toil than with the lack of civil representation that the serf has, indicating Radishchev’s insistence upon the rights of the individual. Clardy writes that of all the Russian writers in the eighteenth century there are “none more outstanding in his demand for the abolition of serfdom than Radishchev. He undertook a study of Russian society and government, which led to the publication of a bitter condemnation of serfdom…Radishchev presents, therefore, political ideas which effectively challenged the scientific aspirations of his time and the ensuing disruptions of society. (Clardy 87). As a result of such philosophical steadfastness, Radishchev lost his fortune, his civil service career, jeopardized his family’s welfare, and eventually lost his life itself. His work represents a genuine attempt to write a comprehensive political philosophy with universality and necessity, not merely a study of affairs as they existed in Russia.

The Western European socio-political environment was so different than in Russia, that the political implications of such eighteenth-century “enlightenments” were largely theoretical, as the majority of the population did not and could not take part in any significant change. By the end of the eighteenth century however, such transformations began to foment, as expressed in Radishchev’s work. Radishchev and other Russian elites wanted to leverage Western ideas to create what Marc Raeff describes as, “A new social reality and a new type of man” (Raeff, Origins, 154). In any case, Radishchev, whose existential framework was determined by his education in Leipzig and personal tragedy, adapted Western ideas in his Journey in hopes of developing a nation free of the moral failings of state authority and serfdom.

In the work, Radishchev is also critical of state authority. In the chapter “Spasskaya Polest” he describes in vivid detail, a ruler who is literally blinded by opulence and by the flattery of his subordinates. His directives are not carried out by his deceptive officials, and his subjects suffer in poverty. The author offers a solution fitting the spirit of the enlightenment- the wanderer Pryamovzora, or Truth, removes the cataracts from the Tsar’s eyes, and the deceit is resolved (Radishchev 73). In the author’s view, if the monarch will seek the truth, a natural and proper order will emerge in the state. This commentary contains an encoded portrayal of Catherine II and her circle of sycophantic favorites like Count Potemkin. Such descriptions represent the most overt criticisms of the monarch, but Radishchev also describes the abuse of authority by local officials, such as in “Chudovo” where a local commander refuses to assist in a maritime rescue operation, where he could easily intercede and save the lives of innocent people (Radishchev 51). Only at the last second does the stubborn, reluctant officer decide to help. While critical, neither episode really advocates for a transformation of the system, and Radishchev seems to be more concerned with reforming or un-blinding the powers that be than establishing entirely new forms of administrative power by force, or at least not yet.

Despite his reformist tendencies, one cannot deny the utopian element present in Radischev’s work, reflective of eighteenth-century thought at large. Radishchev’s work was utopian in the sense that he believed in the possibility of creating a new social reality as part of a comprehensive rational system with God as the first truth and source of natural law. This was perhaps nurtured by the legacy of Peter the Great, who influenced many Russians eager to transform their immediate reality, thinking, and selves. Radishchev describes utopia as inevitable in “Tver,” specifically in “Liberty: An Ode,” where he concludes the allegory with a vision of the future in which, “Humanity will roar in its fetters, and, moved by the hope of freedom and the indestructible law of nature, will push on…And tyranny will be dismayed. Then the united force of all despotism, of all oppressive power will in a moment be dispersed. O chosen day of days” (Radishchev 201). This utopian element imparted a sense of naïveté and didacticism to his writing style and further detracted from the effectiveness of any latent political critique, as those capable of implementing any meaningful reform would have most likely felt threatened by Radishchev’s vision.

            Given its placement within the broader trajectory of dissent in Russia, Radishchev’s work is unique. Unlike other contemporary works that condemn the cruelty and monstrosity of the system of serfdom in eighteenth-century literature such as Fonvizin’s The Minor, Novikov’s satirical journals, or Krylov’s Spirit Post, Radishchev pays a great deal of attention to the practical consequences of unnecessarily cruel exploitation. He argues that serfdom is harmful to the state for moral, practical, economic and other reasons. In the chapter “Gorodnya,” he hints at the threat of the wrath of the peasantry and prophesizes active rebellion in which, “The slaves weighted down with fetters, raging in their despair, would, with the iron that bars their freedom, crush…the heads of their inhuman masters, and redden the fields with [their] blood” (Radishchev 209). In Radishchev’s view, the oppressed would be justified in doing so, as such an institution violates natural law, and the new leaders that would arise out of such a rebellion would “be of another mind and without the right to oppress others” (Radishchev 209). Under serfdom, the peasant, “dead to the law,” is not entitled to legal protection and has the right to rise up against laws that only protect the masters. This is not to say that Radishchev advocated for an immediate, widespread popular revolution. On the contrary, he considered the best possible resolution of political problems to be an improvement of the existing autocracy, a reduction of the abuses of power that he describes and attempts to rectify in his anecdotal policy prescriptions in the Journey.

Alexander Radishchev was a man with a moral mission, a reformer, a humanitarian. He envisioned the grand potential of the enlightenment project, and his Journey served to condemn those elements impeding its actualization. Other practitioners of Sentimentalism, advice literature, and the enlightenment philosophy of West Europe certainly impacted his work, but the mélange of literary influences coalesced into a style entirely his own. As for the effectiveness of its political critique, the Journey was limited. To a great extent, the democratic potential of Sentimentalism is due to its celebration of equality on an emotional basis. Unfortunately, the emotions of common people are not typically taken into account in matters of policy and statecraft. While his impassioned critiques of serfdom and irrational despotism are compelling, Radishchev failed to deliver a specific path forward, only a diagnosis and a vague appeal for reform. Did Radishchev realize how critical he was, and was he naïve to believe that a monarch would listen to moralistic advice literature that was so popular at the time? Yes, but he did see himself as an agent of change, and he did leave us with a comprehensive diagnosis of the moral turpitude of his day. Perhaps if he had written a Journey from Moscow to Siberia, his travelogue may have been less than sentimental.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

Adams, Percy G. Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2015. Web.

Altshuller, Mark. “The Transition to the Modern Age: Sentimentalism and Preromanticism, 1790–1820.” The Cambridge History of Russian Literature, edited by Charles Moser, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 92–135.

Baudin, Rodolphe. “The Public Self and the Intimate Body in Radishchev’s Letters from Exile.” Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes 50.3 (2008): 297-324. JSTOR. Web.

Clardy, Jesse V. The Philosophical Ideas of Alexander Radishchev,. New York: Astra Books, 1964. Web.

Lang, David Marshall. The First Russian Radical: Alexander Radishchev, 1749-1802. London: Allen & Unwin, 1959a. Web.

Lindstrom, Thais S. A Concise History of Russian Literature. New York University Press, 1978.

McConnell, Allen. A Russian Philosophe, Alexander Radishchev, 1749-1802. The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1964. Web.

Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat. The Spirit of the Laws. Hafner, 1966.

Powers, Elizabeth. Freedom of Speech : The History of an Idea. Lewisburg Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 2011. Aperçus Web.

Raeff, Marc. Origins of the Russian Intelligentsia: the Eighteenth Century Nobility. Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970.

Raeff, Marc. Russian Intellectual History; an Anthology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966. The Harbrace Series in Russian Area Studies Web.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, et al. The Social Contract ; and the First and Second Discourses. Yale University Press, 2002.

Sterne, Laurence. The Works of Laurence Sterne. B. Blackwell, 1926.

Феофан Прокопович, Слова и речи, Санкт-Петербург: При Сухопутном Шляхетном Кадетском Корпусе, vol. 1, 1760, vol. 2, 1761, vol. 3, 1765, vol. 4, 1774.

Wachtel, Andrew, and Ilʹja Ju. Vinickij. Russian Literature. Polity Press, 2011.

Wirtschafter, Elise Kimerling. The Play of Ideas in Russian Enlightenment Theater. Northern Illinois University Press, 2003.

Yarmolinsky, Avrahm. Road to Revolution, A Century of Russian Radicalism. American ed. New York: Macmillan, 1959. Web.

 

 

 

A Bird in the Bush is Worth One in the Ear: Thoreau, Perception, and Avian Auditory Co-Presence

“Music is perpetual, and only hearing intermittent” – Journal, February 8, 1857.

Regrettably, Henry David Thoreau did not own a tape recorder. Were he alive today, he might be found with microphone in hand, producing amateur recordings of ambient sound. However, he did record sound, perhaps the deepest source of his veneration of the natural world, in writing. Pre-empting the fields of soundscape ecology, Thoreau engaged in novel forms of sonic perception which reveal a disciplined ear that was open to the vibrations of an ordered, harmonious cosmos. Thoreau’s attentiveness to ambient sound, especially his extensive writings on bird song, reveal his unique ability to perceive the component particulars of a given environmental soundscape. His written descriptions of sonic phenomena signal a development beyond his early transcendentalist consideration of sound as a singularly spiritual correspondence, toward a balance with a more empirical, universal method of recording. In studying his method of deep listening and subsequent written representation of sound, we can trace Thoreau’s development of multiple eco-acoustic theories, including a synergistic view of subject-object orientation, acoustic niche theory and human-animal co-presence, all of which reveal a rare ear open to the sonic possibilities produced by the birds of Concord.

Readers of Thoreau know that he was an astute observer of all natural phenomena. His writings, especially his journals contain valuable records of his findings, etched out in exquisite descriptive detail. As such, Thoreau is today considered one of the first major interpreters of nature in American literary history, a patron saint of environmentalists. However, he was aware of the limitations of his activity as a naturalist, indeed of the limitations of the human perception and language he used to record his collections. In a Journal entry from November 20, 1857 he noted that, “Here I have been these forty years learning the language of these fields that I may better express myself” (Searls 479). In recognizing the limitations of the written word, Thoreau correctly identifies sound, “the language of these fields,” as something distinct and worthy of his attention. This natural language requires learning, or a special type of listening to gain access, possible only if the observer prepares the whole self to perceive it. In Thoreau’s words, “The body, the senses, must conspire with the mind. Expression is the act of a whole man” (Cramer 92). This consideration of the whole man indicates a balance between the mind of an empiricist and the invigorated imagination of an inspired poet. Perhaps this combination of perceptual techniques allowed Thoreau to more regularly hear the perpetual music of the natural world.

The “I” and the Ear: Developing the Technique and Learning to Hear

Before investigating Thoreau’s writings on sound, it is essential to first understand the component parts of Thoreau’s philosophy, which would have impacted the way in which he perceived his natural environment. To do so, one must investigate his transcendental inheritance. One can find some of the early development of Thoreau’s sonic philosophy in the writings of Emerson, who was a towering figure in the polymath’s life in Concord. Thoreau, often described as Emerson’s empirical opposite, moved gradually beyond the core of what Emerson put forth in his seminal 1836 work, Nature, which identified nature as man’s spiritual counterpart, arguing that natural phenomena contained both spiritual and material significance (Emerson 8). Ultimately, Thoreau developed a greater ability to integrate self and nature, whereas Emerson was rooted in the human perspective. In his 1844 essay Experience, Emerson describes a synchronic connection between the perceiver and the perceived, in which, “Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself” (Emerson 210). While this synthesis seems to suggest a human-natural co-presence as a mode of being and as a sense of being, the idea that the object “falls successively” into the subject creates a distinct hierarchy of the perceiver over the perceived. This stab at the concept of subject/object synthesis signals Emerson’s understanding of a universal cosmic vocabulary, where humans and natural phenomenon are intertwined, but Emerson’s understanding is invariably rooted in the experience of the human, whereas Thoreau’s is considerably more open.

In Experience Emerson goes on to consider how, “The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place…let us treat the new comer like a travelling geologist, who passes through our estate, and shows us good slate, or limestone, or anthracite, in our brush pasture. The partial action of each strong mind in one direction, is a telescope for the objects on which it is pointed.” (Emerson 211). Emerson’s subject is a hungry one, a subject that consumes the world around it, subjugating it to the sense-world of the perceiver. For Emerson, a lecture or a bird song might reveal to the listener the inner essence of his own perception, the listener’s “good slate.” This is not to discount Emerson’s mode of perception; indeed, he recognizes the ability of external objects to serve as an unexpected teacher, which must be listened to or perceived attentively, without too much interference. However, his mode of perception nearly always favors the human consumer.

There is no doubt Emerson’s thought left an indelible impression on Thoreau’s mind, although after 1850, Thoreau’s approach to nature became markedly empirical. A growing commitment to exact observation saw more lists and solidly descriptive text emerge in the Journal (Searls 139). While Emerson’s primary consideration was how nature might subserve humanity, Thoreau realized a different epistemological aim. Thoreau’s intention was to define, with words and rough data-collection, nature’s structure both spiritually and materially, for its own sake, and in a form that was as close as he could get to nature’s own language.

What set Thoreau’s mode of perception apart from Emerson’s? Ecocritic Lawrence Buell claims that Thoreau’s turn to the empirical represented his ability to overcome not only the limits of his classical education and his early transcendental idealism, but also an intense preoccupation with himself, his moods and his overall identity (Buell 172). Buell states how, “this narcissism he surmounted by defining his individuality as the intensity of his interest in and caring for physical nature itself.” (Buell 172). In his enthusiastic studies of Thoreau’s auditory capabilities, musicologist John Titon further develops this claim, arguing that Buell overlooks the way in which Thoreau’s listening body “integrated self and nature…it was not so much a surmounting of narcissism as an understanding of the relations between self and environment by means of listening and co-presence” (Titon 146). Here, Titon underlines the unique role of the notion of co-presence and of auditory economy at play in Thoreau’s writing. Thoreau was aware of the multiple acoustic agents of any environment, all jockeying to define their sonic niche: different species of birds using different calls to identify their kin, the drones of crickets or “dreaming toads,” even human sounds of the deep cut made their way into Thoreau’s ear. How would Thoreau make sense of such a heterogeneous orchestra? To develop his ear more wholly, so as to pick apart the components of this sonic tapestry, Thoreau needed to cast off his early mentor’s influence and develop a mode of perception all his own. He did so in his shift to the empirical.

Thoreau describes this shift in the Journal, where on September 2, 1851, he considers “A writer, a man writing [as] the scribe of all nature – he is the corn & the grass & the atmosphere writing.” (Cramer 92). Here Thoreau is constructing a new model of literary perception in which he is not merely recording nature or taking its dictation, but what Sharon Cameron describes as Thoreau’s desire to “incarnate [nature’s] articulating will” (Cameron 47). This empirical shift indicates a new openness to whatever aspects of the sonic environment present themselves to the perceiver. Thoreau’s new mode of sonic perception was one that rejected common listening habits, described in a Journal entry from March 30, 1853 where, “the walker does not too seriously observe particulars, but sees, hears, scents, tastes, and feels only himself” (Searls 193). Thoreau’s receptivity to bird song, his ability to listen and truly hear, was not just brilliance; it represented a technique that required practice, a form of sonic meditation, and a hyper-awareness of sonic environment. This was likely an outgrowth of his lifelong note taking, a highly industrious practice, a competence of the whole self, and a complete knowledge of particulars. His writings following 1850 feature even more detailed records, lists, sketches, and written meditations, all distillations of his sauntering in which he would often lose himself in these particulars.

Lost indeed, Thoreau seems to have encountered limitations to a purely objective approach. In a Journal entry from August 19, 1851, Thoreau indicates his frustration with this new approach, writing that, “I fear that the character of my knowledge is from year to year becoming more distinct and scientific; that, in exchange for views as wide as heaven’s cope, I am being narrowed down to the field of the microscope. I see details, not wholes nor the shadow of the whole. I count some parts, and say, ‘I know.’ The cricket’s chirp now fills the air in dry fields near pine woods” (Cramer 89). This is not to say that Thoreau completely abandoned his poetic transcendental roots in his shift to the empirical, quite the opposite. This awareness of the limitations of pure objectivity was likely useful for Thoreau, who seemed to develop a hybrid approach that incorporated both poetic and empirical gestures.

In fact, the gestures in question denote an observer who defies binary categories of individual acoustic representation, and the text itself is generally hybrid, oscillating between didactic “manifesto” aims and empirical scrutiny. Thoreau’s complex, detailed, and even contradicting moments are akin to the auditory opacity of a wandering mind, unable to focus completely on a bird sound or some other natural element. By willingly becoming lost in a sonic environment, Thoreau thereby unlocks a new method of sonic perception, effectively rendering his mind empty and open, ready to be swept away by sonic particulars and their subsequent poetic or spiritual evocations.

This concept of losing oneself in an environment can be found in more modern acoustic study, especially in the work of John Cage, an American experimental composer and sonic artist. Cage wrote how “[You] should be ready for a new experience, and the best way to be ready for a new experience is to be attentive and empty. By empty is meant open — in other words, the like and dislike of the ego doors should be down. And there should be a flow so that the experience of listening can come in” (Kostelanetz 235). Here the similarity between Thoreau and Cage’s sonic philosophy is striking. Both were interested in allowing the untrammeled language of nature to unfold, without infusing too much of the human will into the listening process.

Thoreau’s language was a listening language, not meant to define with authority, but to describe, letting the world take him along for the ride. In his essay Poethics, Gerald Bruhns develops a crucial distinction between using words to grasp the world and using them to inhabit it, and considers John Cage’s interpretations of Thoreau to do so. Cage says how “Reading the Journal, I had been struck by the twentieth-century way Thoreau listened. He listened, it seemed to me, just as composers using technology nowadays listen. He paid attention to each sound, whether it was ‘musical’ or not, just as they do; and he explored the neighborhood of Concord with the same appetite with which they explore the possibilities provided by electronics.” (Cage ix). Cage correctly identifies Thoreau’s ability to disintegrate a sonic environment into its particulars. For Thoreau, the difficulty came not in the perceiving; he was well trained in this. It was transposing natural sonic artifact in a manner that would not anthropomorphize the sound to a significant degree. If Thoreau was always in the business of learning the language of nature, he was also responsible for translating it for an audience that did not have such eco-linguistic access.

The Human-Animal Language: Linguistic Co-Presence through Bird Song

In his 1991 work, The animal that therefore I am, Jacques Derrida suggests that ‘The idea according to which man is the only speaking being… seems to me at once displaceable and highly problematic. Of course, if one defines language in such a way that it is reserved for what we call man, what is there to say?” (Derrida 116). Here Derrida hints at a human-animal linguistic co-presence, in which language should be, and is liberated from its strictly human connotation. He then attempts to rectify the faulty mechanisms of human language by placing possibility at the core of language, stating how “If one reinscribes language in a network of possibilities that do not merely encompass it but mark it irreducibly from the inside, everything changes. I am thinking in particular of the mark in general, of the trace; of iterability, of différence. These possibilities or necessities, without which there would be no language, are themselves not only human.” (Derrida 117). The possibilities described by Derrida contain linkages to Cage’s modes of attentive listening, wherein the observer is “Ready to hear what there is to hear, rather than what [s/he] thinks there’s going to be to hear” (Kostelanetz 237). By placing openness and attentiveness at the core of one’s listening, the observer then attains a state of what Charles Junkerman describes as a condition of “auditory disponibilité.” (Junkerman and Perloff 52). Unlike word-bound speech and writing, sounds have the ability to communicate directly, in what Thoreau calls a language “without metaphor” (Walden 411). Thoreau attempted to infuse his writing with this language without metaphor, a sort of economical prose, which only took stock of the necessary, self-evident elements of his thought and his surroundings.

Few examples illustrate Thoreau’s impartial, yet undeniably imaginative representations of nature better than his written descriptions of bird song. In a Journal entry from May 3, 1852, Thoreau recounts a sonic environment, where he hears “the first brown thrasher, -two of them. Minott says he heard one yesterday, but does he know it from a catbird? They drown all the rest. He says cherruwit, cherruwit; go ahead go ahead; give it to him, give it to him; etc., etc., etc. Plenty of birds in the woods this morning” (Searls 132-3). Here Thoreau is truly nature writing itself, indicating the presence of multiple sonic actors, considering what today we call acoustic niches, and the transcribing of the sonic characteristics of bird song itself. In doing so, Thoreau taps into multiple senses of observation, and defines multiple forms of sensorial experience, establishing a dichotomy between the song described and the cognitive effects it provokes. Thoreau uses human language to describe the rhythm and cadence of the bird song. The text connects to the reader, who is invited mentally to perform the songs described on the stage of the mind, and experience them, once-abstracted, on a cognitive-sensorial level. This transmutation appeals to the reader’s creative intelligence, promoting the virtual reproduction of the act of listening. Thoreau thus allows us to travel to the woods without moving, to give us a clue of what to listen for on our next jaunt into the forest.

The primary presentation of bird song in Thoreau’s text is as an interjection, a piece of supporting evidence. However, there are moments where Thoreau dissects the sound, anthropomorphizing it through its transformation into written language, integrating it into a human-animal hybrid language. In a passage from Walden, Thoreau describes, “For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard the forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefinitely far; such a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable plectrum, the very lingua vernacula of Walden Wood, and quite familiar to me at last, though I never saw the bird while it was making it. I seldom opened my door in a winter evening without hearing it; Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer, hoo, sounded sonorously, and the first three syllables accented somewhat like how der do; or sometimes hoo, hoo only” (Walden 263). In describing bird song as an essential aspect of the lingua vernacula of Walden Wood, Thoreau unveils the existence of hybrid and co-dependent sonic realities, in which bird song is normally withdrawn into the mélange of background noise or overshadowed by human noises.

Thoreau found music in the natural world, it was his muse and his endless source of free entertainment. In a Journal entry from June 22, 1851, Thoreau recounts that, “I awoke into a music which no one about me heard…To the sane man the world is a musical instrument” (Shepard 44). American modernist composer and musical theorist Charles Ives writes how Thoreau’s susceptibility to natural sound “was probably greater than that of many practical musicians…Thoreau was a great musician, not because he played the flute but because he did not have to go to Boston to hear ‘the symphony’” (Ives 77). Ives’ assessment of Thoreau rings true, especially when reading passages of the Journal where Thoreau was deeply moved by common bird songs. Perhaps his favorite winged performer was the common wood thrush, of which he writes fondly. On June 22nd, 1853, Thoreau wrote how, “As I come over the hill I hear the wood thrush singing his evening lay. This is the only bird whose note affects me like music – affects the flow and tenor of my thought – my fancy and imagination. It lifts and exhilarates me. It is inspiring. It is a medicative draught to my soul. It is an elixir to my eyes and a fountain of youth to all my senses.” (Cramer 192-93). This description, while admittedly poetic, indicates a powerfully evocative communion with nature. For Thoreau, this song is not only a natural artifact, for it also retains much of the spiritual significance that both he and Emerson articulated in their transcendentalist visions. He goes on to write how, “[the wood thrush] changes all hours to an eternal morning. It banishes all trivialness. It reinstates me in my dominion – makes me the lord of creation – is chief musician of my court…All that was ripest and fairest in the wilderness and the wild man is preserved and transmitted to us in the strain of the wood thrush. It is the mediator between barbarism and civilization. It is as unrepentant as Greece.” (Cramer 193). The music he describes provides the reader with an opportunity to join him on a dynamic and synesthetic exploration.

Unlike Wordsworth, Keats, and Coleridge, Thoreau does not solely use birds as a romantic-symbolic mode. He does not profess an American “Nightingale”, and keeps his writing more rooted in the real, remaining generally focused on relaying the sonic environment. However, he does describe bird song in a poetic form. In a Journal entry from May 17, 1853, Thoreau draws a comparison between his beloved wood thrush and history’s most famous poets, stating how, “The wood thrush has sung for me sometime. He touches a depth in me which no other bird song does. He has learned to sing and no thrumming of the strings or tuning disturbs you. Other birds may whistle pretty well but he is the master of a finer toned instrument. His song is musical not from association merely – not from variety but the character of its tone. It is all divine – Shakespeare among birds and a Homer too.” (Walden Woods Project). Furthermore, in a Journal entry from April 2, 1852, Thoreau describes numerous acoustic actors in a single sonic environment. He writes, “The sun is up. The air is full of the notes of birds, – song sparrows, red-wings, robins (singing a strain), bluebirds,- and I hear also a lark, -as if all the earth had burst forth into song. A few weeks ago, before the birds had come, there came to my mind in the night the twittering sound of birds in the early dawn of a spring morning, a semi-prophecy of it, and last night I attended mentally as if I heard the spray-like dreaming sound of the midsummer frog and realized how glorious and full of revelations it was” (Searls 120-21). Here Thoreau evokes the prophetic voice of birds, but only as a semi-prophecy. He recognizes the limitations of the romantic-symbolic mode as if to say that the poetry of Keats on the nightingale, Browning on the thrush, and Shelley on the skylark are all splendid, and all evoke charismatic metaphor, but are the birds really singing for us? Nevertheless, Thoreau was clearly moved by bird song, and his descriptions of it indicate his oscillation between the empirical and romantic.

Thoreau was also preoccupied with the effects that bird song produced on the human ear, and the broader effects that sound had on its surroundings. On February 20, 1857 he pondered, “What is the relation between a bird and the ear that appreciates its melody, to whom, perchance, it is more charming and significant than anyone else? Certainly, they are intimately related, and the one was made for the other. It is a natural fact. If I were to discover that a certain kind of stone by the pond-shore was affected, say partially disintegrated, by a particular natural sound, as of a bird…I see that one could not be completely described without describing the other. I am that rock by the pond-side” (Searls 438). This relationship between the bird and the ear, in which one cannot be fully described without the other, in which they are complimentary, indicates a profound awareness of human-bird co-presence. The listener needs the subject as the singer needs the audience. Instead of a classic subject/object-oriented view, Thoreau takes the co-present, or synergistic view. When he writes “I am that rock by the pond-side” he indicates that the subject and object complete each other, that they are harmonious, part of a larger being, that of the cosmos. Listening is therefore not an activity purely of the individual mind, which represents one’s immediate reality, but an immersion in an acoustic environment that mobilizes all of the instruments of the mind and perception, thereby challenging a long dominant dualism of subject/object orientation. The act of listening is rooted in co-presence, a fact which Thoreau explored, whether he realized it or not.

Thoreau was nature writing itself; he was tuned in. The song of nature was his symphony, the wood thrush, his first chair. Sometimes it is hard to think of the Journal as anything other than a sweeping romantic life project. Why bother taking down all this information? Modern readers are lucky that someone so attuned to the cosmos happened to take notes. Among the final lines of Thoreau’s Journal include his admission that, “All this is perfectly distinct to the observant eye, and yet could easily pass unnoticed by most” (Cramer 438). Over the course of his life he used that observant eye, but his scrutiny was at the same time auditory. In fact, all of his senses were used to drink up the particulars of any given environment. His life’s business was paying attention to experience, finding wonder in it, and recounting it either in his Journal, his published works, or his public oratory. Thoreau developed a grand and unifying vision which recognized a reality he called “the frame-work of the universe.” (Walls 300). Thoreau’s astute sense-perception afforded him privileged access and understanding of this framework, especially in terms of his perceptions of sonic environment. Concepts like co-presence and acoustic niche theory are outgrowths of Thoreau’s insights, which have been recognized and documented by scientific and philosophical communities, many of whose practitioners are undoubtedly Thoreauvians.

Bibliography

Buell, Lawrence. New England Literary Culture from Revolution through Renaissance. Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Buell, Lawrence. “Sound Commons for All Tition.” The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau, pp. 171–193.

Cage, John. M: Writings: ’67-’72. Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1973.

Cameron, Sharon. Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau’s “Journal. University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Derrida, Jacques, and Marie-Louise Mallet. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Fordham University Press, 2008.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, and Jeffrey S. Cramer. The Portable Emerson. Penguin Books, 2014.

Ives, Charles, and Howard Boatwright. Essays before a Sonata: the Majority, and Other Writings. Norton, 1999.

Kostelanetz, Richard. Conversing with Cage. Routledge, 2003.

Krause, Bernie. Great Animal Orchestra. Profile Books Ltd, 2012.

Mynott, Jeremy. Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience. Princeton University Press, 2012.

Perloff, Marjorie Gabrielle., and Charles Junkerman. John Cage: Composed in America. The University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Sherman, Paul. “The Wise Silence: Sound as the Agency of Correspondence in Thoreau.” The New England Quarterly, vol. 22, no. 4, 1949, p. 511.

Shultis, Christopher. Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the Experimental Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Poetry and Music. 1993.

Thoreau, Henry David, and Damion Searls. The Journal, 1837-1861. New York Review Books, 2009.

Thoreau, Henry David, and Jeffrey S. Cramer. I To Myself: an Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau. Yale University Press, 2012.

Thoreau, Henry David, and Jeffrey S. Cramer. Walden. Yale University Press, 2006.

Thoreau, Henry David. The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals. Dover, 1967.

Titon, Jeff Todd. “Thoreau’s Ear.” Sound Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2015, pp. 144–154.

Walls, Laura Dassow. Henry David Thoreau: a Life. The University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Zhao, Shanyang. “Toward a Taxonomy of Copresence.” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, vol. 12, no. 5, 2003, pp. 445–455.

 

Perceiving Materiality: Balzac’s Social Realism and the Marxist Connection in Père Goriot

Honoré de Balzac writes in his 1835 novel Père Goriot, “Money is life. If you have cash, you can do anything” (Old Man Goriot 205). Balzac, who was intimately acquainted with the hierarchy of wealth in Restoration society, revealed the veiled contours of wealth and its inevitable implications on the lives of men and women, most notably their material realities. With his sociological eye, Balzac depicted the effects of wealth disparity with an authenticity and evocative power that few empirical analyses have been able to match. Balzac’s stylistic approach, social realism, identified and personified the love of money, which was the root of life in Paris at the time. His literary realism uncovered the importance and preponderance of economic realities over feelings and ideas. However, it was not money alone that was of central importance to Balzac; it was the appearances that could be obtained with money, the destinies that could be unlocked by real material things and the power they signified. Balzac’s literary realism had a profound effect on the founders of Communism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who shared this material fixation, as one could not live in the tumultuous industrial age without recognizing the effects of the media of exchange. Despite some theoretical divergence, the emphasis on materialism presented in Père Goriot contains links to the broader philosophical materialism that ultimately shaped a central aspect of Marx’s theory, historical and dialectical materialism.

Balzac’s work embodies an all-encompassing preoccupation with the material, where money and its manifestations compose the structure and meaning of La Comèdie humaine. In the social and physical world Balzac creates, the beginning and end of all feelings, beliefs, and mores is gold and its subsequent material benefits. This distinct cognizance of economic and social realities in La Comèdie humaine is strikingly similar to the necessary and universal emphasis on economics and the material in the works of Marx and Engels. In the preface to the 1888 English translation of The Communist Manifesto, Engels identifies the fundamental proposition which forms the nucleus of the work, stating that, “In every historical epoch, the prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis upon which is built up, and from which alone can be explained the political and intellectual history of that epoch, that consequently the whole history of mankind…has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes” (The Communist Manifesto 5). This systematic approach to human history carries a Balzacian resonance, in which the prevailing mode of economic production and its material implications comprise the social substructure, the motor that puts the whole of society into motion.

It is no secret that both Marx and Engels were fans of and influenced by literary realism. Karl Marx, who praised “the present splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers” in an article for the New York Tribune on August 1, 1854, stated that realistic novelists’ “graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together” (Marx in New-York Tribune 1854- “The English Middle Class”). For Marx and Engels, realism represented not only a trend in literature, but a formidable achievement in the world of aesthetics. Engels, who developed a definition of realism in an 1888 letter to Margaret Harkness in London, argued that, “Realism, to my mind, implies, besides truth of detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances” (1888 Letter).  This emphasis on truth and realistic representation of environment was not intended to merely copy reality but represented an aesthetic tool to infiltrate and reflect the essence of a phenomenon, social, historical, or otherwise. Literary realism made it possible to reveal the traits of a particular temporal context.

It follows that Marx would view language, and subsequently literature, as a reflection of particular social conditions and relationships. “Language,” wrote Marx, “is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness…language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity of intercourse with other men… Consciousness is therefore from the beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all” (The German Ideology 19). This view indicates Marx and Engels’ belief that social relations, class antagonisms and the conditions for the development of human individuality, have significant bearing on literary consciousness, determining its nature and development.

Balzac’s world is saturated with the contradictions between the exploitative capitalist system and the humanist ideals so lauded by Parisian society. This contradiction is reflected in the trajectory of the young social climber, Eugène Rastignac, who “Like other noble souls…first wanted to succeed on merit alone…[and] was soon side-tracked by the need to make the right connections” (Old Man Goriot 29). Rastignac’s forked path to material and social success is rife with moral dilemmas. The young man is nearly always pulled in multiple directions by filial piety, Vautrin’s temptations, the beckoning comforts of high society, his sense of idealism, his increasing understanding of Goriot himself, and ultimately, his love of Delphine, which is material in nature.

Engels too described Balzac’s brilliance as a novelist in the 1888 letter and highlighted a specific fondness for Balzac’s treatment of economic and material details. In the letter, Engels states that Balzac gives the reader, “A most wonderfully realistic history of French society…in economic details, (for instance the rearrangement of real and personal property after the Revolution) …I have learned more [from Balzac] than from all the professed historians, economists and statisticians of the period together” (1888 Letter). Engels’ appraisal of Balzac bears a striking similarity to Marx’s article in the New York Tribune, written 34 years prior. The similarity of their praise indicates the profound impact that Balzacian social realism had on the two thinkers. Balzac was so appealing to Marx and Engels precisely because of his truthfulness of depiction, his concrete historical approach to the events and characters described, and his emphasis on the importance of material reality.  Here in the 1888 letter, the mention of the material, in this case personal property, accentuates the commonality of materialism in the thinking of all three writers.

Balzac’s realism represents a vast accumulation of real and realistic, people, cities, houses, furniture, clothing and currencies, all of which are interrelated. Indeed, trousers are not merely trousers; they are signifiers of social status and carry significant metaphorical weight, not to mention golden “Louis d’or” coins. Upon receiving much needed funding from his family members, Eugène felt as if, “The world belonged to him! His tailor had already been summoned…Rastignac had understood the influence that tailors exercise over the lives of young men… Eugène found his to be a man who understood the paternal side of his trade, seeing himself as the link between a young man’s present and future… ‘I know’, he said, ‘two pairs of his trousers that made matches worth twenty thousand livres per year’” (Pere Goriot 88). Here, Balzac is unambiguous in establishing the primacy of belongings and the power they signal. Eugène’s immediate plan upon receiving an infusion of cash is to acquire new trousers, so that he might be seen in them and make a match worth twenty thousand or more livres per year.  Balzac is aware of the magnificent power of trousers, of material, of what something as quotidian as trousers can do for their wearer.

Whether intentional or not, Balzac’s descriptive satire of this avaricious social reality effectively condemned the moral rot of capitalist society. It is no question that bourgeois society produced Balzac, who despite his own class position, was capable of transcending his particular environment to view society as a whole to produce a true and vibrant picture of real life. Balzac’s development of individual character traits, best exemplified by the inhabitants of that respectable boarding house La Maison Vauquer, reflects typical aspects of the character and psychology of the class milieu to which they belong. In the very beginning of Goriot, Balzac states that “This drama is neither fiction nor romance. All is true, so true that we may each recognize elements of it as close to home, perhaps even in our hearts” (Old Man Goriot 4). While aspects of the story are almost certainly fictionalized, Balzac signals to the reader that he communicates his ideas not by didactic philosophizing, but through vivid images of the real, which represent a clear understanding of the dynamic interchange between people, classes, and socioeconomic forces, which are intended to affect the reader with their artistic expressiveness. All this well describes the standard explanation of Balzacian realism, that there is an external reality, independent of the text, that Balzac does a good job of reflecting. A more interpretive reading acknowledges that realism is not necessarily a translation of a pre-existing reality but a manifestation of that reality itself; it is, in a sense, the experience itself.

This is not to say that Balzac was any sort of proto-Marxist revolutionary. Despite the fact that Marx and Engels were deeply convinced that realist literature must reflect the deep-lying, dynamic processes of a particular epoch, which Balzac does, Balzac does not necessarily promulgate progressive ideas or defend the interests of the progressive forces in society. In fact, Balzac was deeply entrenched in the social relations of the day. He was a legitimist, a royalist, and wrote for money (Lyons 146). The serialization of his work was based on an urgent need to make money, money to pay for his expensive material tastes that he had cultivated as part of his integration into Parisian high society. Balzac, a self-described reactionary and monarchist, is less concerned with the overthrow of the existing system than are Marx or Engels. In his 1888 letter, Engels wrote how “Balzac was politically a Legitimist; his great work is a constant elegy on the inevitable decay of good society, his sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinction. But for all that his satire is never keener, his irony never bitterer, than when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he sympathizes most deeply – the nobles. And the only men of whom he always speaks with undisguised admiration, are his bitterest political antagonists, the republican heroes of the Cloître Saint-Méry” (1888 Letter). Despite his admiration of the “republican heroes,” Balzac’s intentions are not those of the provocateur. He does not seem as focused on where things may be going; rather he is singularly fixated on illustrating how things are in Restoration society with as much detail as possible, showing it all to the reader, the good the bad, and the ugly.

Balzac’s ability to depict genuine passions and the multiple facets of the human character generates a portrait of Parisian material life that exposes the suffering and the absurdity of humans operating under capitalist relations. Balzac’s bourgeois society is hostile, and rife with collusions, alienation, and tragedy. Perhaps the ultimate tragedy is personified in the life of the eponymous character of the novel, old Goriot himself. Identified by his mercantile title, “the vermicelli dealer,” Goriot represents the socioeconomic prime directive of post-revolutionary France: accumulate capital and spend it on material items that denote social significance. As Balzac introduces the character, he describes that, “Goriot arrived fitted out with an opulent wardrobe, the magnificent trousseau of a merchant with the means to treat himself on retiring from trade. Madame Vauquer had admired eighteen cambric shirts, whose exquisite quality she found all the more remarkable for the two pins joined by a fine chain, each set with a huge diamond, that the vermicelli dealer wore on his shirt frill” (Old Man Goriot 17-18). Goriot’s opulent possessions, namely clothing and gilded trinkets, are meant to be shown off, to indicate his social stature, emblematic of the materiality in Balzac’s world.

The tragic nature of Goriot’s life is inexorably tied to the material, and his degeneration over the course of the story is at all points based in material circumstances. This idea is best exemplified by the transformation of his most prized possession. As he unpacks his belongings at La Maison, Goriot reveals “a platter and a small dish with two kissing turtle-doves on its cover…the first present my wife ever gave me, on our anniversary…It cost her every penny of her maiden’s savings…I would rather scrape a living from the earth, with my bare nails than part with this” (Old Man Goriot 18). Later, Eugène secretly observes Goriot as he shapes “a silver-gilt platter and what looked like a tureen…into ingots…Old Goriot contemplated his handiwork sadly, tears trickled from his eyes” (Old Man Goriot 33). In a powerful display of what Engels called “rearrangement of real and personal property” in his 1888 letter, this transformation of sentimental artifact into material commodity is symbolic of deeply emotional sacrifices one makes to acquire cash, in this case intended for Goriot’s grasping daughters. Balzac intentionally tugs at the reader’s heart strings, not to sensationalize, but to indicate the reality of these kinds of sacrifices, which are also made by Eugène’s family, all to acquire new material goods to keep up appearances and ascend to the next rung of the social ladder. The objectivity and realism of Goriot’s story speak to Balzac’s focus on the material, and the broader human experience of suffering and endless striving in pursuit of capital.

The material emphasis in Père Goriot contains links to the historical materialism espoused by Marx and Engels, but the two are not entirely similar. Materialism is a difficult concept to pin down, and this paper will consider two definitions. The first is a standard definition, a preoccupation with material rather than intellectual or spiritual things. This is the definition that is most pertinent to Balzac’s aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Or is it? The second, a philosophical definition, is the doctrine that the only thing that can be said to truly exist is material substance. In this philosophical definition of materialism, one can identify the idealist/materialist split that dominated much of nineteenth-century philosophy. Broadly, idealism, which takes the process of thinking as the primary ontological reality, is opposed to materialism or naturalism, which sees matter and its movements as the primary ontological reality.

Much like his philosophy, Marx’s relationship with materialism is rife with contradiction. To call Marx a “materialist” is misleading, as he is concerned, like Balzac, with conditions of material reality, but he is not an ontological materialist in the philosophical sense. Marx was profoundly influenced by a Hegelian conception of rationality in which logic equates to ontology, and in which ontology thus equates to mind (Marx Engels Reader xx-xxi). To call Marx a pure materialist, or an ontological materialist who believes that the world is ultimately material and nothing more, would be false. Marx wished to take no position on the ultimate question of reality, rather his position was more pragmatic; he wished to address the real concerns of human beings (Megill 8). What really concerns human beings is not “What is the nature of reality,” but rather “How are we to engage the social and natural world that surrounds us?” (Megill 8). Marx is therefore concerned with material reality as well.

For Marx, Engels, and other nineteenth-century thinkers, history, change, and consolidating the sheer volume of systematic knowledge became of central concern. Marx suggests that “we see how consistent naturalism or humanism differs both from idealism and materialism and is at the same time their unifying truth. We also see that only naturalism is capable of comprehending the process of world history (Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic and General Philosophy- Early Writings 389.) In dealing with this contradiction, Marx indicates that he has drawn from both sides of the material/ideal split, that man has a material nature but he also has a thinking nature. This empirical feature of humanity indicates a reconstitution of the split. Many intellectual historians argue that Marx was a synthesizer of ideas, that he was not an original thinker and merely incorporated ideas that came to him from elsewhere. Indeed, Marx’s historical materialism comes largely from Hegel’s dialectic, developed in History of Philosophy.  There is some validity to this criticism, but one must not ignore the breadth and applicability of the synthesis itself (Megill 36). Marx’s broader project was to bring together, in one way or another, the disparate parts of human knowledge. In nineteenth-century literary figures, especially Balzac, one can also identify a similar vein of synthesis, whose aim was to create a stylistically unified and broad-ranging description of his immediate material and psychological reality.

Like Marx, Balzac understands the connection between material and psychological elements, and ultimately ascribes more significance to the material. In Goriot, materiality is inevitably tied to psychological impact, best expressed in sentimental material artifacts, which represent the material/ideal synthesis. Balzac describes the scene at Goriot’s deathbed, where the old man reaches a hand towards his chest, grasping for his locket and “Uttered plaintive, inarticulate cries, as an animal does when in terrible pain…Eugène went to fetch the plaited chain of ash-blonde hair, presumably belonging to Madame Goriot. On one side of the locket was engraved ‘Anastasie’ and on the other ‘Delphine’: a mirror image of his heart… As he felt the locket touch his chest, the old man let out a long, deep sigh of such contentment…one of the last echoes of his sensibility” (Old Man Goriot 249-50).  The locket, like the silver gilt platter, indicates the unquestionable power of material possessions saturated with emotional significance. Without the locket, Goriot cries out like an animal, as a fundamental piece of his humanity is contained within the trinket, no doubt an indication of Balzac’s emphasis on the material.

As far as materialism is concerned, the largest divergence between Balzac and Marx/Engels rests in the agency of the human in relation to material reality. Balzac’s materialism is a bourgeois materialism, in which sensuous material reality affects the human observer through the medium of the senses, which stir up emotional and psychological effects. Here, the external world is the active element, a dynamic force that impresses itself upon the receptive mind. Balzac’s characters are not static observing beings, but dynamic forces that react to the environment around them. Upon receiving money from his family, Eugène’s near-suicidal disposition transforms instantaneously. Balzac describes that, “As soon as a few notes slide into a student’s pocket, an imaginary pillar of support rises up inside him. He walks taller than before, senses a fulcrum giving him leverage…yesterday timid and humble, he would have cowered under a shower of blows; today he has it in him to punch a Prime Minister” (Old Man Goriot 88). The profound impact that money and its potential have upon Eugène’s psychology in this scene is astounding. Furthermore, material circumstances impress themselves upon human agents, exemplified when Balzac writes that “[Eugène’s] last remaining scruples had vanished the previous evening when he found himself in his new rooms. Now that he enjoyed the material benefits of wealth…he had shed his provincial skin and smoothly made a move that pointed to a promising future” (Old Man Goriot 199). Such is the nature of the intersection between class, personal ambition, and materiality, a cash nexus where shallow values are quickly abandoned in favor of material comforts.

The crucial distinction between Balzac’s materiality and historical materialism is in Marx’s view that the human position in society is not purely that of an observer, but that of a force that impacts the world, and changes history through the negating or overturning of existing systems through dialectical progress. In The German Ideology, Marx writes that “the first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus, the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature…the writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men” (The German Ideology 149). For Marx and Engels, the passive bourgeois materialism will indeed be naturally superseded by the active part of history, the technical, production-oriented transformation of the world by human agency. Balzac himself was a thorough observer of reality, perhaps his view of this subject/object problem was influenced by his activity as an observer (Mortimer 99). Balzac’s characters, like their author, are not concerned with changing the external world, as they have seen the grizzly consequences of the revolution. Rather, Balzac’s Parisians seem more concerned with navigating a Paris that he describes as inordinate, disorganized, and chaotic, almost to an absurd degree.

Balzac describes nearly all his characters as operatives in the frenetic striving for social ascendance but does not characterize them as shaping history in the same manner that Marx and Engels do. These characters are so fixated on obtaining money and objects to climb the social ladder that they become passive actors in the broader trajectory of society, the historical materialist project that Marx is so concerned with. The characters are idealistic; Balzac describes “the Parisiennes who now fulfilled [Eugène’s] dream of ideal beauty [and] the uncertain future of this large family, one that rested on his shoulders…fueled his desire to succeed and tripled his yearning for distinction” (Old Man Goriot 29). The primary activity of Balzac’s Parisians is not to shape the world, but to allot their efforts to secure the material aspects necessary to appear as though they have ascended to a higher social class. Balzac’s moneyed classes only wish to see and be seen, like peacocks, showing off their plumage, content to trot about the palace grounds and peck at scraps of “the obvious material delights of Paris” (Old Man Goriot 28). Regardless of the characters’ lack of history-making praxis, Balzac’s emphasis on materiality parallels that of Marx and Engels, who placed the materialist conception of history at the center of their project.

Père Goriot is a masterful and accurate display of materialistic Parisian life, where “love is essentially vainglorious, shameless, wasteful, flashy, and false” (Old Man Goriot 199). In this central novel of La Comèdie humaine, we have come to identify and isolate the components of Balzac’s social realism, an interpretive tool which enabled the transposition of the author’s acute perception of social reality. Indeed, Marx and Engels identified social realism as a truthful and authentic method of encapsulating the struggles of a particular temporal context. Balzac’s realism amounts to a capacity for re-counting the same reality formulated theoretically by Marx and Engels and designates a clear implication of the primacy of materialism. Despite some theoretical divergence, all three writers ultimately shared this material fixation, and developed their works around this nucleus. In the words of Engels, “[Balzac] describes how the last remnants of [la viellie politesse française], to him, the model society gradually succumbed before the intrusion of the vulgar moneyed upstart…how the grand dame whose conjugal infidelities were but a mode of asserting herself in perfect accordance with the way she had been disposed of in marriage, gave way to the bourgeoisie, who horned her husband for cash or cashmere; and around this central picture he groups a complete history of French Society” (1888 Letter). The cash or cashmere of the vulgar moneyed upstart are personifications of Balzacian materiality, the glittering gilded focal point that illuminates the entire edifice of La Comèdie humaine.

Bibliography

Balzac Honoré de, et al. Old Man Goriot. Penguin Books, 2011.

Bellos, David, and Ronnie Butler. “Balzac and the French Revolution.” The Modern Language Review, vol. 79, no. 4, 1984, p. 944.

Clark, Priscilla P. The Battle of the Bourgeois. Didier, 1973.

Engels, Friedrich. “Engels to Margaret Harkness In London.” Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1888, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1888/letters/88_04_15.htm.

Fracchia, Joseph, and Thomas M. Kemple. “Reading Marx Writing: Melodrama, the Market, and the ‘Grundrisse.”.” The German Quarterly, vol. 70, no. 3, 1997, p. 285.

Heathcote, Owen. Balzac and Violence: Representing History, Space, Sexuality and Death in La Comédie Humaine. ser. 23, Peter Lang, 2009.

Lyon-Caen, Boris, and Thérenty Marie-Ève. Balzac Et Le Politique. C. Pirot, 2007.

Lyons, John D. The Cambridge Companion to French Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Marx, Karl. Early Writings. Penguin Books in Association with New Left Review, 1992.

Marx, Karl. “The English Middle Class.” Marx Engels On Literature and Art, www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1854/08/01.htm.

Marx, Karl, and Frederic L. Bender. The Communist Manifesto. Norton, 1988.

Marx, Karl, et al. Capital: a Critque of Political Economy. Penguin Books, 1991.

Marx, Karl, et al. The Marx-Engels Reader. Norton, 1978.

Maury, Lucien. Balzac: Opinions Sociales Et Politiques Suivi De Pensées Diverses. Stock, 1941.

McLaughlin, Kevin. Writing in Parts: Imitation and Exchange in Nineteenth Century Literature. Stanford University Press, 1995.

Megill, Allan. Karl Marx: the Burden of Reason (Why Marx Rejected Politics and the Market). Rowman & Littlefield, 2002.

Mehlman, Jeffrey. Revolution and Repetition: Marx/Hugo/Balzac. University of California Press, 1977.

Mortimer, Armine Kotin. For Love or for Money: Balzac’s Rhetorical Realism. Ohio State University Press, 2011.

Nelson, Brian. The Cambridge Introduction to French Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Pugh, Anthony R. Balzac’s Recurring Characters. University of Toronto Press, 1974.

Tilby, Michael. Balzac. Longman Group Limited, 1995.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Prescient Praxis of Parable: Marx’s Theory of History in Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle

It is essential to view Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle within a historical context, both in terms of when he wrote and in terms of how he portrays historical development within the play. Brecht, undoubtedly a committed Marxist, intends to utilize Marx’s theory of history as a means of forcing the viewer to reckon with his or her preconceived notions of how humans and history interact. Brecht presents multiple temporal realities in a non-linear format and ultimately infuses the play with Marx’s conception of human societal progress away from estrangement through a dialectical-practical method.

In order to discuss Brecht’s work, it is first necessary to understand Marx’s theory of history, both in terms of its philosophical origins, most notably Marx’s inheritance of the hegelian dialectic, and its theoretical component parts that appear in The Caucasian Chalk Circle. Although Marx intended to develop a holistic theory of history and developed the “materialist conception of history” in which he attempted to assert a unified, rational, and scientifically oriented account of human history, he was ultimately unable to develop an all-encompassing theory. Instead, Marx developed multiple fragmentary views of history. This is not to say that these fragmentary views of history were entirely separate from each other; on the contrary, the theories are largely interdependent.

The first aspect of Marx’s theory of history is an anthropological interpretation. Marx develops the concept of history as a process of humanization and naturalization in which history is directed towards man developing the potentiality of his being and becoming fully human while simultaneously becoming more united with humanized “nature”. Marx argues that this human development will arise out of the current state of affairs that is largely characterized by self-estrangement. In 1844, Marx developed a criticism of political economy in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. The manuscripts describe some of the fundamental elements of Marx’s anthropological theory of history including: man’s coming-to-be and future communism as goals of the historical process, the characterization of man as a social being, as well as a comprehensive depiction of the concept of man’s “self-estrangement”, which plays a central role in the theory. In the manuscripts, Marx identifies and describes four main aspects of the estrangement of labor:

1. The fact that “labor is external to the worker…that therefore does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy… ” (Early Writings 326). The worker feels disconnected from his activity and as such, the relationship of labor to the act of production within labor leads to alienation in the mind of the worker.
2. The relationship of the “worker to the product of labor as an alien object that has power over him” (EW 327). This relationship creates hostile opposition between the worker and the “sensuous external world, to natural objects”, an opposition which is the root cause of the other estrangements.
3. Estranged labor “estranges nature from man and estranges man from himself, from his own active function, from his vital activity…from his species” (EW 328). Marx goes on to explain how the animal is immediately at one with its life activity, and that humans make this life activity an object of his will and consciousness. As such, man is a species being “i.e. his own life is an object for him”. The object of labor is therefore the objectification of the species-life of man and estranged labor divorces man from his species-being. This self-estrangement makes man’s human essence and natural potential alien to him.
4. Estranged labor also leads to the estrangement of man from man. Marx notes that because man is estranged from his individual specifies-being, “each man is estranged from the others and that all are estranged from man’s essence” (EW330). Marx later notes how estrangement is realized and expressed only in man’s social relationship to other men.

Estrangement, which Marx links to the current bourgeois mode of production, restricts man from fully becoming man and realizing the full wealth of his being. Only upon becoming conscious of this estrangement and transcending it, is man able to develop in accordance with his productive forces and truly express his species-being.

Marx characterizes man as “not merely a natural being: he is a human natural being…a being for himself…a species being, and has to confirm and manifest himself as such both in his being and in his knowing” (Marx Engels Reader 116). Marx places particular importance on the concept of man’s coming-to-be, and puts it at the center of his anthropological conception of history. To Marx this humanization is an end goal in man’s historical development and coincides with the inevitable realization of an un-estranged society. In the 1844 manuscripts, Marx explicitly describes the linkage between man’s coming-to-be and history when he states how “man too has his act of coming-to-be–history–which, however, is for him a known history, and hence as an act of coming-to-be it is a conscious self-transcending act of coming-to-be…history is the true natural history of man” (MER 116-117). By categorizing man’s coming-to-be as a natural historical process, Marx thereby confirms the conscious self-transcending act, man’s practical-critical activity, as a central component of historical development.

A second aspect of Marx’s theory is history as praxis or activity. Marx develops the bulk of this interpretation of history in The German Ideology, The Grundrisse, and in his contribution to the Theses on Feuerbach. Marx’s 1845 contribution to the Theses on Feuerbach represents his philosophical and practical rationale to break with Hegel, Feuerbach, and philosophy at large. Marx instead focuses his efforts on an analysis of modern capitalist society from this point on. In his first point in the text, Marx states how Feuerbach mistakenly “regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical manifestation…[and] he does not grasp the significance of ‘revolutionary’, of ‘practical-critical’ activity” (EW 421). In this passage Marx criticizes Feuerbach’s dismissal of praxis as a “dirty-judaical manifestation”, as Feuerbach equates all practical activity to the dishonest market practices of Schacher (a term for haggling with a negative Jewish connotation). Marx deplores the mode of social behavior that was present in the market and implied in Schacher, and rejects Feuerbach’s conception that praxis and Schacher were inseparable. The passage also elucidates Marx’s view that ‘practical-critical’ activity plays an important and dynamic role in history. Marx further elaborates this position in the third point of the text when he argues that “the coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice” (EW 422). Again, Marx criticizes Feuerbach for not considering the act, the ‘revolutionary practice’, as a fundamental element of historical development. This emphasis on praxis marks a shift away from his initial anthropological thinking, but does not represent a complete break. Marx still entertains Feuerbach’s humanistic language, and still considers man’s coming-to-be as a vital aspect of historical progress.

In The German Ideology, Marx remains consistent with his prior humanism when he states how “the first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus the first fact to be established is the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature…the writing of history must always set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men” (MER 149). Here Marx describes the connection between history and the action of living human individuals citing the actions of human beings as making history, a current that runs throughout his work. Later in the text, Marx goes on to define history as a series of historical acts including: the production of the means to satisfy human needs, the production of new needs, the production of the family, and finally the production of co-operation. Here Marx frames the development of history in the context of human activity. This is congruent with the anthropological view of history because both views use the process of man’s coming-to-be through his labor which he states is the self-confirming essence of man, but indicates that praxis itself takes precedence.

In his 1844 manuscripts, Marx states how “the real, active relation of man to himself as a species-being… is only possible if he really employs his species-powers-which again is only possible through the cooperation of mankind and as a result of history…” (EW 386).  Here Marx emphasizes the concept of the real active relation of man to himself, again bringing attention to the importance of the act in the development of history. Marx states how praxis is necessary in the creation of a society that is fully developed which produces man in all the richness of his being. Marx argues that in creating this society “the resolution of the theoretical antitheses themselves is possible only in a practical way, by virtue of the practical energy of man” (EW354). To Marx, the resolution of these antitheses must be practical because it is not merely a problem of knowledge, but a real problem which philosophy and other theoretical investigations are unable to solve.

The overlap between the anthropological and praxis-oriented theories of history is clear, especially when Marx continually references man’s relation to his species-being. The praxis-oriented view of history seems to have the same goals of man’s coming-to-be and future communism, but places particular emphasis on the active process itself whereas the anthropological view is more, if not excessively, metaphysical.  The anthropological and praxis-oriented views of history are also linked by Marx’s interpretation of labor as a process of productive consumption. According to Marx, labor “creates the material elements for the development of the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose labor also therefore appears no longer as labor, but as the full development of activity itself” (Grundrisse 325). Marx uses labor to connect the concepts of the development of rich individuality and the development of activity itself, characterizing labor as productive consumption which enables the satisfaction of current needs and increases the productive potential of labor. This productive potential aligns with the development of history as it leads man to develop the potentiality of his being through active labor.

Marx’s theories of history are personified and fully expressed through the dramatic works of Brecht. In The Caucasian Chalk Circle, Brecht shows that historical social change can be reflected, inspired and made accessible through fable to the audience. Brecht’s progressive presentation of historical development indicates his preference to subvert the dominant capitalist paradigm. Brecht’s Chalk Circle provides a unique opportunity for the spectator to stand outside of linear temporal reality. No longer a passive audience member, Brecht’s critically engaged observer is able to observe the montage of changing epochs, able to juxtapose the “Old World” and the new, and ultimately able to glean some philosophical lesson from the experience to share with his or her own immediate community. This format of “Epic Theater” enabled Brecht to provoke the viewer into considering Marx’s theories, and in this case, his anthropological and praxis-oriented views of history.

Brecht’s jumbled chronology invites the reader to consider the social relations of the community in each distinct socio-historical context, compare them, and acknowledge the contradictions present in each. The comparison of the land dispute portrayed in the prologue and almost all of the disputes portrayed in the “old world’ story indicate Brecht’s preference for the resolution described by the former. The peaceful resolution of a land dispute under a communist plenum runs counter to the often violent and arbitrary legal process outlined in the rest of the play. There is no doubt that Brecht intended the prologue to serve as an ideological counterweight to the rest of the play, something for the viewer to keep in mind as one observed the arbitrary and cruel rulership of the Prince, the Governor, and Azdak, whose character is more nuanced and benevolent, but unavoidably corrupt. This notion of mismanagement of the community by its elites further signals Brecht’s proletarian sympathies.

Brecht’s characterization of the “old world” as backwards indicates his preference for progress and modernity, for a future guided by the science of dialectical-historical development. By juxtaposing the “old world” and the “new”, Brecht wants to draw our attention to the fact that things have indeed gotten marginally better, history has developed and improved the lives of all those involved in the peaceful resolution of the post-war land dispute. In terms of Marx’s theory of history, the public plenum that Brecht portrays in the preface represents an active relation of species being to species powers insofar as the cultivators win the land for use, which only comes about from the cooperation of mankind and the logical result of history, which has developed since the “old world” that is expressed in the rest of the play. There are multiple dimensions to the word “develop” here, as it implies not only a sense of temporal passage but also of a net growth in social decorum, which is augmented by the structural juxtaposition against the  traditional “feudal” order, which is consistently characterized as oppressive and tyrannical.  Brecht’s portrayal of historical development mirrors Marx’s in the sense that the development of the old world into the new will only occur through what Marx describes as the real active relation of man to himself, actualized in the plenum that occurs in the prologue.

The moral framework that Brecht introduces in The Caucasian Chalk Circle is ultimately defined in Marx’s terms of social utility and production, and follow Marx’s theories of historical development. For both Brecht and Marx, historical development represents a process of both anthropological development, or actualization and expression of the species-being, and practical activity. Any sense of progress in the play relates back to this historical model first put forth by Marx. In the prologue, the land goes to the party most likely to put it to good use, to develop it in accordance with the growing collective’s species-being. In Grusha’s case, this utility oriented morality is most clearly expressed by the actions she takes to make the child her own, which indicate her social utility and her seizure of the “means of production”. Grusha’s intersession and adoption of the child represents a direct expression of her species-being, of her motherliness.

Grusha’s sacrifices and peril, her crossing the bridge and her engagements with the ironshirts, all develop her “productive” capacity, as she “produces” her own sense of motherhood of the child. At the conclusion of the fateful chalk circle scene, Grusha states how she is unable to tear the child from the circle in fear of hurting him, indicating the true heart of a mother. In response, Adzak formally appoints Grusha as the new mother, stating how “In this manner the court has determined the true mother” (CCC127).  It is Grusha’s practical activity, or in this case, the lack of harmful action towards the child, that ultimately cements her identity as a mother. This final sentencing accords with Marx and Brecht’s social utility-oriented moral framework and anthropological-practical model of historical development.

In The Caucasian Chalk Circle human activity is the object of inquiry, not merely taken for granted as a function of the plot. It is Grusha and Azdak’s radical actions that propel the play forward, each one overturning the status quo in some manner. Grusha’s praxis is present in her intercession with the child. She interrupts the natural lineage of the royal family to claim the child as her own, and has in this sense created history on her own. Azdak co opts the legal-juridical framework and introduces his own brand of arbitrary sentencing. Brecht describes Azdak’s period of judging as “a brief golden age, almost an age of justice” (CCC128). Considering the fact that Grusha and Azdak are the only characters who exhibit praxis and develop in accordance with their species-being, perhaps society at large is not yet prepared for a full-fledged “age of justice,” hence the “almost” that modifies the singer’s narration. For both Brecht and Marx, the actions of these two characters represent a taste of what is possible for a more modern society developing under proper conditions with the proper actions taken by all individuals of the community.

The conclusions of the legal disputes in both eras of the story indicate Brecht’s approval of Marx’s developmental theory of history, and Marx’s theory as a whole. The legal outcomes of both trials reject estrangement, which restricts man from fully becoming man and realizing the full wealth of his being. Grusha and Azdak both “invent” history by disrupting the normal progression of “feudal” society, they reject the bounds placed upon them by their class, and reject the ruling paradigm. By overturning the pre-existing structures of authority, they are effectively staging a revolution of their own, advancing the historical dialectic that Marx puts forth in his theory of history. Even the trial of the chalk circle represents a practical resolution of two antithetical agents. Two individual humans physically pull on the child to resolve the dispute, only one can win, just as the dialectic propels Marx’s praxis oriented theory of history.

The legal outcomes of the play are also congruent with Marx’s view of history as a series of historical acts, which appeared in the excerpts from The German Ideology mentioned above. Azdak, Grusha, and the collective farmers are responsible for the production of means to satisfy human needs, the production of new needs, the production of the family, and finally the production of co-operation, especially the last two. As Marx frames this development in the context of human activity, it is congruent with his anthropological view of history, as both views use the process of man’s coming-to-be through his labor which he states is the self-confirming essence of man.

In the closing scene of the play, the singer neatly summarizes the moral of the story, which ultimately affirms the anthropological and practical aspects Marx’s theory of history. The singer states how “what there is shall go to those who are good for it, children to the motherly, that they prosper, carts to good drivers, that they be driven well, the valley to the waterers, that it yield fruit” (CCC 128). By allowing “what there is” to go to “those who are good for it,” Brecht’s form of justice negates estrangement and allows for both Grusha and the collective farmers to fulfill their species-being. Only upon becoming conscious of estrangement and transcending it are the characters of the play able to develop in accordance with their productive forces and truly express their species-being, be it as a mother, or a farmer. These final lines of the play neatly summarize Brecht and Marx’s position, and leave the reader or viewer with a pithy reminder of the moral-historical model expressed over the course of the play.

It is only fitting that Marx’s philosophy should find its expression in the practical act of theater, especially Epic Theater, the necessarily political form of artistic consciousness that forces the viewer into a critical, analytical frame of mind. Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle seems to posit the inevitability of progress, and the central role that humans have in the historical process. Things will develop over time, and humans will be the ones engaged in the practical activity. For Epic Theater practitioners like Brecht, historicization is necessary to show that the human being is determined by and determining of its social and physical circumstances, as Marx describes in his theory of history. Brecht considers questions of progress and rightful ownership, and invites the audience to realize the larger forces and dynamics at work in society. Marx’s theory of history ultimately equipped Brecht with the proper tools to investigate how humans participate in history, an especially pressing question in the post-war environment.

A Spectacle of Virtue: The Performative Morality of Nobility in Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro

The notion of a morally superior nobility is one often promulgated by those with enough power to do so. In the case of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, Mozart’s characterization of Count Almaviva makes it clear to the viewer that any class-ordained morality is false, and holding such powerful members of society accountable for their shortcomings requires the power of public scrutiny. This is notably illustrated as Suzanna emerges from the closet during the finale of Act II. Any sense of the Count’s morality erodes and his duplicitous nature becomes clear as he grovels for forgiveness. Mozart’s orchestral treatment of this moment underscores this revelation made possible by Suzanna and the Countess, who band together to hold the Count to task.

The Count would prefer to coerce and threaten those below him behind closed doors, where there is no threat to his public perception, where he feels as though he can use the pressure of his feudal position to get what he wants. It takes the “publicizing” effect of Suzanna’s presence to force the count to act with any sense of virtue. When facing the count alone, both Suzanna and the Countess are unable to bring him to a state of level-headedness. The Count only shows regret upon the exposure of his tyrannical activities, any attempt at reconciliation is merely contingent upon whether he has been outed yet. In a similar vein, this same publicizing effect is present when Figaro requires the public to force the hand of the count to marry the two lovers. The Count is obviously preoccupied with his public perception, and when in public, he is accountable to his pride. It is important to note that his change of heart, whether authentic or not, does not occur when he believes that he is alone with his wife and the unidentified captive in the closet. The Count only asks for forgiveness for his deeds when there is more than one person in the room and his honor is at stake.  It is also worth noting that Suzanna, the object of the Count’s unrestrained sexual desire, is able to leverage his infatuation against him, thus channeling his emotional outburst into an apology to his wife. Suzanna knows that she has sexual power over the Count, but is only fully equipped to use it alongside the Countess.

Mozart’s use of duet and ensemble emphasize the power that Suzanna and the Countess possess upon joining their efforts. As the Count recognizes that he has been had, he sings to his wife and his intended concubine, “I beg your pardon, but playing such jokes is cruel, after all.” In the same breath in which he asks for forgiveness, he accuses the two women of playing a cruel joke, indicating his unwillingness to accept responsibility for his reckless threats and accusations. In response, Suzanna and the Countess sing in a duet, “Your foolish acts deserve no pity.” The two women are of different social classes indeed, the Countess is Suzanna’s mistress yet the two are able to force the hand of the most powerful male character in the opera. If only for a moment, the two women, two sopranos, stand on equal footing and support each other to confront a man who had drawn his sword with murderous intent only moments before. This unification of two opposing social classes, two voices, into one indicates Mozart’s support of égalité and denotes his broader deference to enlightenment principles and the characteristic intellectual concerns of his time.

Mozart masterfully incorporates the orchestra into this “Giudizio Trio” which marks the emotional center of the Opera. The sheer musical tumult of this number does not employ heavy brass or percussion, but is nevertheless sonically rich, and reinforces the deeply emotional tone of the libretto. The finale is scored by a palpable rising tension, with the three-four “allegro spiritoso” establishing an atmosphere of anxiety and disorder.  This vigorous musical moment mirrors the Count’s jealous accusations and the Contessa’s phrase, “Ah! Blind jealousy, what excesses you bring about!” The orchestral tension and the Count’s tirade snap like a taught string as the door to the closet swings open, foiling the Count’s rage-fueled momentum. This shock acts as a sort of punctuation, with sparse orchestration as the strings plod along in a hushed piano. As the scene progresses, the music becomes more passionate and confident, emulating the confidence of Suzanna and the Countess, who having successfully humiliated the Count are able to gain the upper hand.

Mozart wanted to make opera more realistic and human. This imperative is especially clear in Le Nozze di Figaro, where the oppressive power dynamics between the count and his subjects. This is a central theme of the play, that all humans, men and women, high and low-born, are fallible, especially the nobility. Mozart gives proletarian viewers hope. By shedding light on the Count’s abusive tendencies through public spectacle and solidarity, those oppressed members of the household are able to trick him into acting in a respectable manner commensurate to his title.