Saturday, January 31, 2004
(3:29 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
After such knowledge, what forgiveness?
How not to be a hack, especially under these circumstances? That is the question.
In Oxford, I complained that I was forced to write too much. I read the required texts from Blake or the Pearl-poet, then had to stop reading and set fingers to keyboard. My professors were duly impressed at my half-informed arguments, based on quarter-digested materials. Part of the reason was surely my mastery of English grammar and of the MLA documentation style, combined with my talent for inserting the token secondary source: "As C. S. Lewis notes in his..." I was only questioned when I proved too promiscuous in the use of adverbs. Could I honestly have written with a straight face that a critic "helpfully" noted something? What was it that convinced me that the best possible paper to be written over Songs of Innocence and of Experience was a straight-forward Christo-centric theodicy? Did I believe, even at the time, that the sufferings of Christ provided any consolation?
A lack of new knowledge forced me back upon unformulated previous commitments, held loosely, but still conveniently near-to-hand. Ideas, like all objects, are primordially tools, calling attention to themselves only when broken.
John Milton remains my model, in the absense of any other alternatives. (Slavoj Zizek is many things, but a model is not one of them. He's too much like my father and myself, repeating the same stories and jokes over and over.) He found Cambridge to be an intolerable distraction from his studies. In his fifth prolusion, having attained an unparalleled mastery of the entire Western tradition from a very young age, he laments being forced to speak before gaining adequate knowledge. He was already planning to write an English epic to rival the greats: Homer, Virgil, Ariosto. He would create his nation in verse, and his epic would be based on the indisputed facts that affect the entire human race. Joyce sought through a detailed accounting of a single day to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race; Milton did the same, though his single day took place in Eden rather than Dublin.
Already, when he began writing Paradise Lost, Milton's revolution was over. He had dedicated his life to the service of his nation by being a propagandist (in Latin, no less) for Cromwell's revolution, and now the old order had been reinstated. He was a relic of a past age -- one might daresay an irrelevant leftist. Old and blind, he began writing his epic, finally got around to his youthful goal of being the greatest English poet ever to live. He nearly succeeded -- he came in second place to a hack of ambiguous political and religious commitments, made famous by the London theatre scene that Milton's revolution sought to abolish.
The instructor of my Milton seminar, himself the author of three epics, said he felt that Milton was too easily satisfied with himself. His implied cosmology was inadequate, nothing compared with the intricacy of Dante's. His characters were inadequately defined, and his classical references were too intrusive. Before informing us of this, in our last class session, he showed us his paintings, for which he had used Playboy pictorials as models.
So then: How not to be a hack when I don't yet know everything? Is there an unbridgeable gap between the hack and the one who knows, or a battle in which the hack always wins?
Even after having spent ten years of his life in an intensive re-reading of the classical tradition, Milton had his daughters (doubling as secretaries) read him Ovid's creation scene from the Metamorphoses again and again, until they had it almost memorized. What was it that he thought he would learn? Did he realize, at the end, that he had set himself an impossible goal, that he knew too much? That everything had already been done before? That his very premise was a horrible mistake? It's easier to write plays, easier to create vivid characters who appear for only a moment, easier to make up your own words as you go along, easier to write cryptic sonnets with no referent -- easier not to be a real person, not to identify yourself too much with your art, just produce, produce, produce and hope for the best, as though the text appeared out of thin air.
