Respect My Authority! (part one)

Rob's post below about George Orwell's Why I Write has inspired me to revisit one of my favorite essays, David Foster Wallace's Authority and American Usage (Or Why George Orwell's Politics and the English Language is Redundant). It's such a masterful piece of writing, and sufficiently complex, that I hope to exigesize it a bit here over the next couple of days.

Let us start with the basics... AAAU(OWGOPATELIR) (which I'll refer to from here on out at Authority... is ostensibly a book review for Harper's Magazine of Bryan Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage. The fact tht the essay is 62 pages long should tip the reader off to the fact that Wallace intends to... well... delve. And delve he does. This essay isn't so much a review as an anatomy of the Language Wars and then an encapsulation of how Garner deftly navigates said wars. Or, as Wallace himself states on the second page, to talk

"about the historical context in which ADMAU appears, and this context turns out to be a veritable hurricane of controversies involving everything from technical linguistics and public education to political ideology, and these controversies take a certain amount of time to unpack before their relation to what makes Garner's dictionary so eminently worth your hard-earned reference-book dollar can even be established[.]"

In other words... don't you know there's a war on??. And this pre-War-On-Terror essay wants to tell you about the war that is being waged day in and day out for the very language we use to communicate.

***Why You Should Trust DFW On This One***

It helps that in navigating these heady and complicated waters we have for our guide an author like Wallace. First off, he is an expert in English Language Usage. He is what his own family refers to as a SNOOT, which is to say an English Language "trekkie" of unfathomable proportions (SNOOT might stand for "Syntax Nudniks of Our Time" or it might stand for "Sprachgefuhl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance"... thank god I didn't sit at that family dinner table). He is also a professor of English and the author of three collections of short stories, two books of essays and two novels, one of which is Infinite Jest which you may have read. I have read it. I say this not to brag about navigating its thousand pages (plus endnotes!) but merely to state that this is no impartial observer of Wallace you are dealing with. I love his writing.

Well, to be more honest, I love his essays. Love them enough that I had my mom call a friend and send me a three week old NY Times Magazine because an essay of his (about Roger Federer, perhaps you read it?) appeared on the cover. His fiction is trickier. There are bits of Infite Jest that I positively adored (Eschaton, which this popular blog is named after, the sections dealing with Boston AA etc.) but ultimately, I felt cheated by its lack of ending (did I mention its over 1000 pages long?!). Or, as a friend of mine's husband put it "this book broke my heart". His short fiction collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men contains both moments of genius and real clunkers. Which is probably the sign of a true experimental spirit, but it can also grow wearying.

(If I was able to, I'd have inserted a Wallacian footnote at the end of that paragraph to discuss his biography of infinity, which I also read, and did not understand one bit but thought was beautiful nonetheless)

What additionally makes Wallace such a great guide is that, stylistically speaking, he's a genius. Wallace uses language like few others, and his style has become a bit of a trademark. Basically, how it works is that Wallace's prose style represents an almost neurotic need for exactitude in his own writing. He's on a quixotic quest to communicate objectively a subjective experience using a subjective medium, namely written language. This leads to lots of twists and turns in his language and enormous numbers of his trademark footnotes, and it also leads to some wonderful humor. One of Wallace's best devices is to take a rather technical sentence, one filled with big words like dysphemism or sesquipedelian and then throw in a very colloquial word or phrase like bat-shit insane or whatever. ("Or whatever" is itself a frequently used colloquialism in his prose).

So the great thing about this is that you have someone whose entire (constantly failing) project seems to be taming language itself writing a review of a book by someone claiming to resolve all the usage wars going on in the US. Neat, huh?

***DFW's Thesis

Unlike in DFW's other main essay about writing which seems to be eighty pages of brilliance without a thesis, Wallace, clearly lays his out in this essay. Which is that

Issues of tradition vs. egalitarianism in US English are at root political issues and can be effectively addressed only in what this article hereby terms a "Democratic Spirit". A Democratic Spirit is one that combine rigor and humility, i.e. a passionate conviction plus a sedulous respect for the convictions of others. As any American knows, this is a difficult spirit to cultivate and maintain, particularly when it comes to issues you feel strongly about. Equally tough is a DS's criterion of 100 percent intellectual integrity-- you have to be willing to look honeestly at yourself and at your motives for believing what you believe, and to do it more or less continually.

He goes on for a few more paragraphs about how being Dogmatic is infinitely easier than being Democratic and each sentence is like a little piece of gold, and you could write an entire essay about each one, and I probably will reference some of this stuff on my other blog at some point but this unpacking of Wallace will go on forever if I do all of that now. Also, I'll probably violate his intellectual property rights over the essay at some point. Or something.

Anyway, this central thesis is brilliant because its actually complicated to try to address. He must show the at-root-political nature of this debate. He must show why a Democratic Spirit is required. And he must show how ADMAU (the book he's reviewing) has said DS in spades.

What makes it extra-brilliant is that DFW is himself performing a feat of Democratic Spirit in his own essay writing. This is why he must be so self-depricating about his SNOOTitude. He must, as part of his DSness, acknowledge how others see him. And he must struggle over the course of the essay, to apply his own DSness to the Language Wars and see what can be discovered. And those things discovered is what we'll get into in future installments.

Respect My Authority! (part one)

Rob's post below about George Orwell's Why I Write has inspired me to revisit one of my favorite essays, David Foster Wallace's Authority and American Usage (Or Why George Orwell's Politics and the English Language is Redundant). It's such a masterful piece of writing, and sufficiently complex, that I hope to exigesize it a bit here over the next couple of days.

Let us start with the basics... AAAU(OWGOPATELIR) (which I'll refer to from here on out at Authority... is ostensibly a book review for Harper's Magazine of Bryan Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage. The fact tht the essay is 62 pages long should tip the reader off to the fact that Wallace intends to... well... delve. And delve he does. This essay isn't so much a review as an anatomy of the Language Wars and then an encapsulation of how Garner deftly navigates said wars. Or, as Wallace himself states on the second page, to talk

"about the historical context in which ADMAU appears, and this context turns out to be a veritable hurricane of controversies involving everything from technical linguistics and public education to political ideology, and these controversies take a certain amount of time to unpack before their relation to what makes Garner's dictionary so eminently worth your hard-earned reference-book dollar can even be established[.]"

In other words... don't you know there's a war on??. And this pre-War-On-Terror essay wants to tell you about the war that is being waged day in and day out for the very language we use to communicate.

***Why You Should Trust DFW On This One***

It helps that in navigating these heady and complicated waters we have for our guide an author like Wallace. First off, he is an expert in English Language Usage. He is what his own family refers to as a SNOOT, which is to say an English Language "trekkie" of unfathomable proportions (SNOOT might stand for "Syntax Nudniks of Our Time" or it might stand for "Sprachgefuhl Necessitates Our Ongoing Tendance"... thank god I didn't sit at that family dinner table). He is also a professor of English and the author of three collections of short stories, two books of essays and two novels, one of which is Infinite Jest which you may have read. I have read it. I say this not to brag about navigating its thousand pages (plus endnotes!) but merely to state that this is no impartial observer of Wallace you are dealing with. I love his writing.

Well, to be more honest, I love his essays. Love them enough that I had my mom call a friend and send me a three week old NY Times Magazine because an essay of his (about Roger Federer, perhaps you read it?) appeared on the cover. His fiction is trickier. There are bits of Infite Jest that I positively adored (Eschaton, which this popular blog is named after, the sections dealing with Boston AA etc.) but ultimately, I felt cheated by its lack of ending (did I mention its over 1000 pages long?!). Or, as a friend of mine's husband put it "this book broke my heart". His short fiction collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men contains both moments of genius and real clunkers. Which is probably the sign of a true experimental spirit, but it can also grow wearying.

(If I was able to, I'd have inserted a Wallacian footnote at the end of that paragraph to discuss his biography of infinity, which I also read, and did not understand one bit but thought was beautiful nonetheless)

What additionally makes Wallace such a great guide is that, stylistically speaking, he's a genius. Wallace uses language like few others, and his style has become a bit of a trademark. Basically, how it works is that Wallace's prose style represents an almost neurotic need for exactitude in his own writing. He's on a quixotic quest to communicate objectively a subjective experience using a subjective medium, namely written language. This leads to lots of twists and turns in his language and enormous numbers of his trademark footnotes, and it also leads to some wonderful humor. One of Wallace's best devices is to take a rather technical sentence, one filled with big words like dysphemism or sesquipedelian and then throw in a very colloquial word or phrase like bat-shit insane or whatever. ("Or whatever" is itself a frequently used colloquialism in his prose).

So the great thing about this is that you have someone whose entire (constantly failing) project seems to be taming language itself writing a review of a book by someone claiming to resolve all the usage wars going on in the US. Neat, huh?

***DFW's Thesis

Unlike in DFW's other main essay about writing which seems to be eighty pages of brilliance without a thesis, Wallace, clearly lays his out in this essay. Which is that

Issues of tradition vs. egalitarianism in US English are at root political issues and can be effectively addressed only in what this article hereby terms a "Democratic Spirit". A Democratic Spirit is one that combine rigor and humility, i.e. a passionate conviction plus a sedulous respect for the convictions of others. As any American knows, this is a difficult spirit to cultivate and maintain, particularly when it comes to issues you feel strongly about. Equally tough is a DS's criterion of 100 percent intellectual integrity-- you have to be willing to look honeestly at yourself and at your motives for believing what you believe, and to do it more or less continually.

He goes on for a few more paragraphs about how being Dogmatic is infinitely easier than being Democratic and each sentence is like a little piece of gold, and you could write an entire essay about each one, and I probably will reference some of this stuff on my other blog at some point but this unpacking of Wallace will go on forever if I do all of that now. Also, I'll probably violate his intellectual property rights over the essay at some point. Or something.

Anyway, this central thesis is brilliant because its actually complicated to try to address. He must show the at-root-political nature of this debate. He must show why a Democratic Spirit is required. And he must show how ADMAU (the book he's reviewing) has said DS in spades.

What makes it extra-brilliant is that DFW is himself performing a feat of Democratic Spirit in his own essay writing. This is why he must be so self-depricating about his SNOOTitude. He must, as part of his DSness, acknowledge how others see him. And he must struggle over the course of the essay, to apply his own DSness to the Language Wars and see what can be discovered. And those things discovered is what we'll get into in future installments.

Why I Write

Earlier this week I stumbled across a gift given to me last year by Mr. Parabasis himself: George Orwell: A Collection of Essays. Inside I found Orwell’s 1946 essay Why I Write, and found it contained many compelling thoughts relevant to last week’s conversation about the intentions and motivations of artists.

As Orwell says, “I think there are four great motivations for writing… They exist in different degrees in every writer…”

Here is what they are:

1) Sheer egotism. As he explains it, the “desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grownups who snubbed you in childhood, ect.”

2) Esthetic enthusiasm. As he says, “Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story.”

3) Historical impulse. “Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.”

4) Political purpose. As he says, “using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.”

Now, given Orwell’s body of work, one might assume that for him, number four was a prime motivator. However, he admits that “by nature… I am a person in whom the first three motives outweigh the fourth.” Totalitarianism forced him to become a political writer, as he says, “Every line of serious work I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism.”

A survey of his artistic motivations reveals that he was not driven primarily by his virtues, but by his vices. As a child, he first turned to writing to seek egotistic redemption for his social failure. As he says, “at the start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued…” He felt he could create “a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.” He continues, later, “All writers are vain, selfish and lazy…” – passages that support the arguments made by Rousseau in his Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences.

The “political purpose”, as Orwell puts it, is the only virtuous motivation he describes. He writes because “there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention…” This noble motivation is the only one he outlines that seemingly seriously contributes to the reduction of society’s suffering.

However, he says of writers, “at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that “every book is a failure,” as he says. Perhaps all men are struggle-seekers, addicted to striving after unachievable goals, believing in their hearts, as Kropotkin did, that “to struggle is to live, and the fiercer the struggle the intenser the life.”

Or perhaps it has more to do with the fact that, as Jean Anouilh said, “fiction gives form to life.” Orwell describes himself as a child “making up a continuous story about myself, a sort of diary existing only in my mind.” It seems only natural that narrative storytelling forms relaying tales of men suffering while striving for goals, would provide comfort to humans, being that we all create value in our lives by setting a goal and measuring meaning by our ability to achieve it.

Language and Freedom

In 1970 Chomsky was asked to give a lecture at a university in Chicago on “Language and Freedom.” The lecture has been published in various collections of Chomsky's work, and I recently came across it in Chomsky on Anarchism. One might think, obviously, that the talk would focus on freedom of speech, being that Chomsky is such an outspoken critic of government oppression. However, Chomsky begins the speech with a blatant admission that he sees no apparent connection between “language” and “freedom,” no connection between his work as a linguist and his work as a social advocate. As he says in his opening remarks, “What is troublesome in the title of this lecture is the conjunction. In what way are language and freedom to be interconnected?”

Luckily, as he continues to explain, Rousseau had already completed the task over two hundred years earlier. His Discourse on the Origins of Inequality does all Chomsky’s work for him.

The connection, in retrospect, seems genius though obvious. Here’s what it is:

1) “Nature commands every animal, and the beast obeys. Man feels the same impetus, but he realizes that he is free to acquiesce or resist; and it is above all in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of his soul is shown.” In other words, man’s freedom lies in his consciousness, which allows him to make complex moral decisions. The statement contradicts the writing of Kropotkin, who wrote in Anarchist Morality of his belief that the golden rule is a law of nature, and that “animals living in societies are also able to distinguish between good and evil, just as man does.” He cites various examples of animals in natural environments acting in ways that put the survival of the species above their own lives. Though the subject seems still officially open for debate among biologists and philosophers, there still seems to be truth to Rousseau’s statement that man’s freedom lies in his consciousness, his ability to form thoughts.

2) “…if men needed speech in order to learn to think, they had even greater need of knowing how to think in order to discover the art of speech.”

Speech and thought are interrelated. Speech is evidence of thought, therefore speech is evidence of freedom. Again, a seemingly obvious relationship in retrospect, but interesting that it was the only genuine connection Chomsky could find between the two major fields of his career.

Holden Caulfield's Elephant

Oh my, it's going hard. I'm on the fourth chapter of the Wake and while it's not too bad, I'm not making sufficent time that I can sit down and concentrate on it. Instead I read three pages or so on the bus, and then forget where I stopped and just start it over again. And so on. By this hour I tend to give in to the temptation of reading another chapter of Very Good Jeeves instead. While the Wake is a lifelong neverending project, P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories are all short, digestable, and immediately gratifying. I'd like to write more about it, but I'd like to read another chapter right now more. Nevertheless, expect a post on the topic later, particularly drawing some connections between the Wake's language and that of good ol' Bertie Wooster, and Hugh Laurie's portrayal of Bertie as the ideal reader of the Wake.

For the time being, as I'm still blogging about the first chapter of the Wake, allow me to offer for your delight a complete list of HCE acrostics for chapter one, including some but not all stretches:

Howth Castle and Environs
Hod, cement, and edifices
Haroun Childeric Eggeberth
Hic cubat edilis
How Copenhagen ended
Happinest childher everwere
Hush! Caution! Echoland!
How charmingly exquisite!
Heathersmoke and cloudweed Eire’s
Hither, craching eastuards, they are in surgence: hence, cool at ebb, they requiesce
…when Head-in-Clouds walked the earth
A hatch, a celt, an earshare
Hark, the corne entreats!
Homerigh, castle, and earthenhouse
And honey is the holiest thing ever was, hive, comb, and earwax
Have peformed upon thee, though abramanation, who comest ever
He cursed and recursed and was everseen
Humme the Cheapner, Esc,
Our old offender was humile, commune, and ensectuous
He who will be ultimendly respunchable for the hubbub caused in Edenborough

Don't Give it Away!

Gotta love the Wikipedia entry on Finnegans Wake which has a standard disclaimer under the heading "Plot Summary":

Spoiler Warning: Plot and/or ending details may follow

On the other hand, the entry does offer the choice bit of trivia that Murray Gell-Mann named quarks after a phrase jeeringly sung by seabirds from the Wake "Three quarks for Muster Mark."

Anarchist Morality

Anarchism, like Christianity, is based on the notion that men should “do to others what you would have them do to you in the same circumstances.” However, the anarchist, unlike the Christian, believes that golden rule behavior is genetically ingrained in us, and that even without a system of laws and retribution, people would naturally adhere to this doctrine because of their innate ability to sympathize with one another and their inherent desire to propagate the species as a whole.

Kropotkin, in Anarchist Morality, unknowingly reveals the underlying problem with the golden rule, a phenomenon I dub the “I would never” factor. As he says, “You see a man beat a child. You know that the beaten child suffers. Your imagination causes you yourself to suffer the pain inflicted upon the child; or perhaps its tears, its little suffering face tell you. And if you are not a coward, you rush at the brute who is beating it and rescue it from him.” – just as you would hope to be treated were you the suffering child.

But what about the abusive father? In what way can your sympathy reach out to him? Kropotkin urges complete pacifism and influence through education. As he says, “we have only a right to give advice.” The argument, however, breaks down when he advocates violence toward tyrannical rulers, using the convenient “I would never” loophole. Such violence is justified because “we ourselves should ask to be killed like venomous beasts if we went to invade Burmese or Zulus who have done us no harm.” In reference to the assassination of Alexander II, Kropotkin claims that “all mankind” recognized Sophia Perovskaya’s right to kill the Russian Czar because “it was felt that not for all the gold in the world would Perovskaya and her comrades have consented to become tyrants themselves.” This dangerous loophole invites one to ride down a slippery slope of justifying various acts of brutality toward people who have committed crimes that “I would never” commit.

The loophole also seems problematic when compared with another key element of Kropotkin’s tract: all men, whether selfish or altruistic, act out of a “quest of pleasure.” As he eloquently puts it, if you talk to “a martyr, to the woman who is about to be hanged, even just as she nears the gallows, she would tell you that she would not exchange either her life or her death for the life of the petty scoundrel who lives on the money stolen from his work-people. In her life, in the struggle against monstrous might, she finds her highest joys.” Just as Socrates reasoned that he should not escape his execution because it wouldn’t make him happy, the strive for moral behavior is just another pleasure-quest.

And so we must admit that the tyrant and the assassin bent on killing the tyrant are guided by the same innate drive. As is the abusive father. As is the petty scoundrel who lives on the money stolen from his work-people. We merely find people driven by different goals, using the same tactic to create meaning in their lives: measuring the success of one’s existence by one’s ability to achieve a certain goal.

Kropotkin’s concluding advice reveals an acute awareness of this phenomenon: “Struggle! To struggle is to live, and the fiercer the struggle the intenser the life. Then you will have lived; and a few hours of such life are worth years spent vegetating.” At first glance an inspiring conclusion, though upon further reflection, a sad statement about the completely arbitrary nature of the manner in which we artificially create meaning in our lives.

Crito

Plato’s Crito explores many issues I feel relevant to the discussion, not necessarily pertaining to the artist’s usefulness or moral relevance, but to his motivations and intentions.

For those unfamiliar with the story, Socrates, wrongly condemned to death, sits in his cell awaiting execution, and is visited by his friend Crito, who desperately wants to help him escape. When Crito reveals his primary motivation – the fear that people will think he didn’t try hard enough to save his friend – he steps right into a very deep and complex exploration of whether men should act in accordance with the opinion of the many – an issue highly relevant to any artist interested in genuine communication with his audience.

As Socrates says, “Why, Crito, should we care about the opinion of the many? Good men, and they are the only persons who are worth considering, will think of these things truly as they happened.”

He later continues with a more direct examination of the plight of the artist: “Was the disciple in gymnastics supposed to attend to the praise and blame and opinion of every man, or of one man only – his physician or trainer, whoever that was?” The answer is clear: please you trainer, not the audience. For if man “disobeys and disregards the opinion and approval of the one, and regards the opinion of the many who have no understanding,” he will suffer evil.

Crito has a good rebuttal: “the opinion of the many must be regarded, as is evident in your own case, because they can do the very greatest evil to anyone who has lost their good opinion.” And as Socrates later adds, “the many can kill us.” But his response to the dilemma is this: “not life, but a good life, is to be chiefly valued.” And, after a complex description of why he cannot escape because he feels it’s morally wrong, he concludes: “neither will you nor any that belong to you be happier or holier or juster in this life, or happier in another, if you do as Crito bids.” Thus reveals the self-serving nature of Socrates’ decision – it makes him happy.

These issues are relevant to the difficult dilemma facing the artist who strives to appeal to the masses while simultaneously remaining true to himself. Socrates would seemingly advise to not play to the groundlings, though one could make the case that it is in fact the artist’s job to entertain, and whether or not his drama professor would approve of the work, he has succeeded if the audience walks away entertained. Rousseau would most likely agree with the latter argument, viewing art as idle intellectual distraction, generating an elite culture exchanging “ideas” and “tastes” that aren’t in any way morally beneficial to society.

Which side would Oscar Wilde fall upon? What would he advise for the artist who finds himself in a time when, as Rousseau says, “the greatest masterpieces of dramatic poetry are condemned, and the noblest musical productions neglected?” Would he agree with Rousseau that the artist “will lower his genius to the level of the age, and will rather submit to compose mediocre works, that will be admired during his lifetime, than labour at sublime achievements which will not be admired till long after he is dead?” Would Wilde advocate highly formal non-naturalistic art forms, as he does in The Decay of Lying, if there were no audience for it? If such creations had no potential to win the artist the audience’s good favor?

The Decay of Lying

We continue our ongoing conversaion on the usefulness and morality of art (or lackthereof) by answering Herx's call for more missives on the topic with Oscar Wilde's Decay of Lying.

It's not a long piece, and it's very funny, and I highly recommend that anyone with twenty minutes to half an hour of free time check it out. It's also, delightfully enough, phrased as a dialogue between two friends.

Wilde's central points are these: lying is in decline, the mask is more interesting that the face, the real world is anathema to art, art's only duty is to itself (and, perhaps, to beauty) and (most interestingly but irrelevant to our conversation) nature is shaped by art, rather than vice versa.

You can imagine, then, what Wilde's attitudes are towards ideas of usefulness or virtue... he has no patience for them:

The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us, or affects us in any way, either for pain or for pleasure, or appeals strongly to our sympathies, or is a vital part of the environment in which we live, it is outside the proper sphere of art.

And later on he distills his argument to two key precepts:

Art never expresses anything but itself. It has an independent life, just as Thought has, and develops purely on its own lines. It is-not necessarily realistic in an age of realism, nor spiritual in an age of faith. So far from being the creation of its time, it is usually in direct [54/55] opposition to it, and the only history that it preserves for us is the history of its own progress.

And:

All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals. Life and Nature may sometimes be used as part of Art's rough material, but before they are of any real service to art they must be translated into artistic conventions. The moment Art surrenders its imaginative medium it surrenders everything. As a method Realism is a complete failure, and the two things that every artist should avoid are modernity of form and modernity of subject-matter.

There's a lot more to read and enjoy here, but one could call Wilde the anti-Rousseau, just as radical and didactic, but taking an absolutely opposing opinion. Worth adding into the mix, methinks. And it's hilarious to boot.

Of course, I find it hard to agree wholeheartedly with Wilde... his view (like Rousseau or Gardner's even) is far too narrow for my tastes. With Rousseau I suppose the question to ask is... well, yes, but what about the rest of human experience that isn't practical? and to Wilde the question to ask is well, yes, but why bother making art then?

Hunka Weighs In

On our recent conversation about utility and morality in art, that is. Apparently, our blog was only accepting comments from blogspot members, something which I have now fixed, so anyone can comment, including anonymously!

In the meantime, read George's thoughts here. I'll (with any luck, and if the temp job today isn't too demanding) have posts up both here and on my blog about all of this.

Thanks Rob and Herx for propelling such a great conversation!

UPDATE: Some thoughts of my own on the subject can be found here, at my other blog. I'll be posting a literary reaction, on Oscar Wilde's The Decay Of Lying

Stay Where You Are

Tying together the uses of art and Joyce, I present Joyce on “pity and fear” and his defense of “static” art. Eat your heart out Aristotle. I have a feeling George will like this better than Gardner. This is written when Joyce was 21 and had just escaped Dublin for Paris:

Desire is the feeling which urges us to go to something and loathing is the feeling which urges us to go from something: and that art is improper which aims at exciting these feelings in us whether by comedy or by tragedy. Of comedy later. But tragedy aims at exciting in us feelings of pity and terror. Now terror is the feeling which arrests us before whatever is grave in human fortunes and unites us with its secret cause and pity is the feeling which arrests us before whatever is grave in human fortunes and unites us with the human sufferer.

Use/Nonuse of Art, Books, Ice Cream

Comment thread time: Rob’s recent post on Rousseau gave me a lot to think about in terms of the usefulness and purpose of “art," or lack thereof. Dare I suggest that it might be fun if folks who are reading the blog wanted to recommend any other books or writers on that subject, or just sound off about it.

The best book on this subject I’ve read is John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction. Gardner is unapologetically in favor of moral fiction, but by that he does not mean didactic fiction. In fact, the way he defines “moral” fiction or art is the book’s brilliant point. He explains by way of a Norse story (I paraphrase): Middle-earth was always on the verge of being overrun by trolls and other forces of chaos and darkness. Every year Thor would circle round the Earth beating them back with his hammer. But Thor would get older and each year the circle of light on which men and gods would live would get smaller. And eventually, they will be overrun. In the meantime, Thor keeps hammering away and the hammer is Art. I like this formulation as it is a big tent—it can encompass art that has a message (“Killing people won’t make you happy!”), art that perfectly articulates some facet of existence, art that stretches your ability to think/feel (tragically or comically), and even art that inspires you to go out and do something about some inequity of the world.

That being said, the book is best before it gets into examples of specific authors writing at the time Gardner wrote his book. Gardner’s taste is often frustratingly conservative and there is much to disagree with. Still, his overall point is sound. Things are bad enough on this earth that there’s no reason to make things worse by spreading nihilism, sadism, and meanness under the cover of artistic license, which, incidentally, is why I hate the movie of A Clockwork Orange.

What books/essays/writers/thoughts do you think are worth checking out on the subject? Any takers?

Wrunes and Wreedles

Joyce breaks the fourth wall/page to give a kind of apologia in the below passage, which I think concerns the impossibility of decoding the secrets of the world, the mind, and the Wake itself. A bit sad, but Joyce points out there’s a lot of joy to be had telling stories anyhow.

But the world, mind, is was and will be writing its own wrunes for ever, man, on all matters under the ban of our infrarational sense fore the last milchcamel, the heartvein throbbing between his eyebrowns, has still to moor between the tom of his cousin charmian where his date is tethered by the palm that’s hers. But the horn, the drinking, the day of dread are not now. A bone, a pebble, a ramskin; chip them, chap them, cut them up always; leave them to terracook in the muttheringpot: and Gutenmorg with his cromagnom charter, tintingfast and great primer must once for omniboss step rubrickredd out of the wordpress else is there no virtue more in alcohoran. For that (the rapt one warns) is what papyr is meed of, made of, hids and hints and misses in prints. Till ye finally (though not yet endlike) meet with the acquaintance of Mister Typus, Mistress Tope and all the little typtopies. Fillstup. So you need hardly spell me how ever word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical reading throughout the book of Doublends Jined (may his forehead by darkened with mud who would sunder!) till Daleth, mahomahouma, who oped it closeth thereof the. Dor.

Cry not yet! There's many a smile to Nondum, with sytty maids per man, sir, and the park's so dark by kindlelight. But look what you have in your handself! The movibles are scrawling in motions, marching, all of them ago, in pitpat and zingzang for every busy eerie whig's a bit of a torytale to tell. One's upona thyme and two's behind their lettice leap and three's among the strubbely beds. And the chicks picked their teeths and the dombkey he begay began. You can ask your ass if he believes it.

The “book of Doublends Jined” is the Wake, as the first sentence of the book is the end of the last sentence of the book, though naturally there are other meanings: “Doublends” is one of the many puns on “Dublin,” which I take here to mean joining the chaos of Dublin together into a whole—a similar trick to the beautiful last passage of the Dubliners story “The Dead”:

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

The book also is joining double-ends in its union of opposites such as death and rebirth, and man and woman, often literally. Nothing like a bit of Joycean smut. I’m not ashamed to say that when I get lost in this book, it’s a relief to push forward and come upon a naughty bit. Those parts are not so difficult to decipher.

Me and Alan

Now for a complete departure from what I've been reading, I've decided to take up Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's seminal graphic novel From Hell, which details their version of the Jack the Ripper killings intertwined with the birth of the twentieth century in Western Civilization. The book has just returned to print after having been out of print for some time. The new edition contains maps, multiple appendices and at least one "deleted scene" in the back. It's cover price is a hefty $35, but at our online store, it can be bought for a mere $26.

Alan Moore is widely regarded as one of (if not the) greatest graphic novelists around. So far I've found his reputation to be a bit overblown. Watchmen is a truly great work of art, it simultaneously encapsulates and destroys the superhero myth by taking it seriously and makes almost any post-Watchmen effort at super hero mythologizing almost redundant, if not downright impossible. But V For Vendetta is a terrible bit of Leftist poppycock, in which Moore casts himself as V, the brilliant terrorist mastermind, and the reader as Evie the passive citizen of an increasingly right-wing world who must be reeducated (even through torture) by none other than... V himself. V's complete control over events in the novel (he has a master plan including his own death which gets executed without the slightest hitch) robs the novel of all dramatic tension or suspense. Add in that there are no compelling characters and one of the main characters in the second half speaks in a phonetically rendered think Brogue, and you have a not-particularly-enjoyable read. It's one of the few books I've ever read where its (mediocre) film adapation is better.

And League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a fun lark (with amazing artwork) and clever, but not much else.

But From Hell is considered by just about everyone a masterpiece. Second only, perhaps, to Watchmen. A work that combines Moore's ideosyncratic fascinations without succombing to them entirely. Is this true? Or is Moore's genius so uneven that it's only fully realized in one great work?

So far, I think it's going pretty well (I'm a few chapters in). Eddie Campbell's artwork is extraordinary, referencing Victorian Woodcuts in simple (often deliberately opaque) black and white drawings. So far, we have almost certainly met Jack The Ripper, and his face has yet to be shown (his section of the book is done POV). The extensive notes in the back are fascinating for learning how deeply researched and sourced the book is, although checking them constantly interrupts the pleasures of engaging in the story. As per usual, Moore is telling the story kaleidoscopically, and so it's hard to tell what, if anything, is going on thus far. We've jumped all over time and gotten two stories. The first is about a young man who gets married and has a child with a shopgirl only to ripped from the hands of his beloved because he is, in fact, the prince of England traveling incognito, while the second details very swiftly the first fifty years of William Gull (who they're indicating wildly is JTR), his ascent as a doctor and his entrance into the Masons.

Along the way we've been treated to digressions on Masonry and the History of Architecture, not to mention faux Spiritualism and a sex scene only slightly less graphic than what you'd find in an R. Crumb book. So... so far, so good. A touch of humor, a touch of horror, a touch of true crime.

Let's see what's next.

Rousseau's Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences

Each artist much deal with Rousseau’s Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences in his own way.

Any cogent analysis of the document must first begin with an examination of how Rousseau defines and distinguishes between moral and immoral behavior.

According to Rousseau, in an ideal society, each man would be, “attentive only to the obligations of humanity and the necessities of nature,” spending his whole life, “serving his country, obliging his friends, and relieving the unhappy.” Men should be “resolute and vigorous,” should seek, “magnanimity, equity, temperance, humanity, and courage,” as well as “military discipline,” while working “unanimously for the happiness of mankind,” and studying “valour, prudence, and justice.”

“Idleness” is to be feared. The “effeminate and cowardly” are to avoided. “Every useless citizen should be regarded as a pernicious person.”

The only questionable virtue he describes is military discipline, which could be coupled with the obligation of man to serve his country – elements which receive much emphasis in the tract. Rousseau argues that the arts and sciences breed an idleness and fear of military involvement that frequently leads to the downfall of nations. Though this notion may be correct, his argument directly contradicts his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, written five years later, where he states, “Hence arose the national wars, battles, murders, and reprisals which make nature tremble and shock reason, and all those horrible prejudices which rank the honor of shedding blood among the virtues.” The matter becomes confused when you take into account the argument that military conflicts, and the systems that perpetuate their continuance, are in a sense, morally wrong. And unnatural, as Rousseau argues when he writes, “more murders were committed on a single day of fighting and more horrors in the capture of a single city than were committed in the state of nature during whole centuries over the entire face of the earth.”

However, in general, what Rousseau describes as “moral” seems to be in congruence with tenets preached by most religions and philosophies of the world – that people should devote themselves to the reduction of suffering. And here we find the troubling issue with which every artist must grapple. As Rousseau says, “We do not ask whether a book is useful, but whether it is well-written. Rewards are lavished on wit and ingenuity, while virtue is left unhonoured.” The arts, according to Rousseau, are motivated by vanity, pride, the desire to please one another, and encourage a society obsessed with luxury.

The desire to please one another is a curious one, opening the worm-can of complexities that is the audience/artist relationship. Rousseau speculates on what an artist would do if living in an age when “the greatest masterpieces of dramatic poetry are condemned, and the noblest musical productions neglected.” Answering a question that circulated through the blogosphere in the past year, he predicts that the artist “will lower his genius to the level of the age, and will rather submit to compose mediocre works, that will be admired during his lifetime, than labour at sublime achievements which will not be admired till long after he is dead.”

As for the vain pursuit of fame and luxury that frequently accompanies whatever seemingly noble justifications an artist may have for his work, Rousseau relays this advice: “Let us not covet a reputation we should never attain, and which, in the present state of things, would never make up to us for the trouble it would have cost us, even if we were fully qualified to obtain it. Why should we build our happiness on the opinions of others, when we can find it in our own hearts?”

And he concludes with a declaration especially relevant in our country’s current fame-obsessed atmosphere: “We must learn to be content without envying the fame of those celebrated men, whose names are immortal in the republic of letters. Let us, instead of envying them, endeavor to make, between them and us, that honourable distinction which was formerly seen to exist between two great peoples, that the one knew how to speak, and the other how to act…”

Rousseau’s arguments are difficult for the modern artist. One could certainly respond with talk about the lack of absolute morality, a notion which he brazenly dismisses. One could claim he merely replaces one method of finding satisfaction in life – the pursuit of fame, luxury, and acceptance – with an equally arbitrary goal – the reduction of mankind’s suffering – similarly allowing men to artificially create meaning by setting a goal and measuring the significance of their existence by the extent to which they can achieve it. However, these rebuttals leave me feeling like Ivan Karamazov. When Ivan learned that Smerdyakov used his cold, rationalist worldview as a justification to murder his father, Ivan spiraled into the depths of insanity, hallucinating conversations with the devil. Similarly, when I look deep into the eyes of the suffering created in a world with no absolute morality, I am even more certain of the existence of pure evil. Consequently, upon reading Rousseau’s Discourse, I conduct a long examination of my motivations and intentions as an artist, as all others should.

New Project

We're going to be doing a cross blog project between this and my other blog, Parabasis, starting in January. Details can be found here. Hope you'll all participate!

The Marketplace of Revolution : Post Mortem

Breen’s book significantly illuminates various aspects of the American Revolution. The most important lesson is that our country was founded by several disparate groups uniting and gaining political power through their mutual addiction to luxury, an unprecedented phenomenon.

The prologue to the “path to revolution” tale, consequently, begins in the 1740’s. To recap, during this decade the colonists began furiously importing and consuming British goods. No single reason can explain this puzzling change in commercial activity, though some factors include a mysterious surge in nationalism that swept the British Empire, economic prosperity due to King George’s War (the American Theater of the War of Austrian Succession), the continuance of vendue sales which allowed less wealthy colonists to acquire luxury goods, and the opening of numerous “Scotch shops” in the Chesapeake region in which country-dwelling colonists could exchange tobacco for imported luxury items.

This commercial trend continued and escalated during the French and Indian War – the true catalyst for the conflicts of the next three decades. The British acquired France’s Canadian colonies (at the urging of Benjamin Franklin, who assured them through a meticulously-argued pamphlet that colonial union and rebellion was a distinct impossibility), which necessitated a unique plan to finance the security of the newly-acquired American empire. The solution came from soldiers who served in America, who brought home tales of extravagant American luxury.

Parliament enacted the Stamp Act in 1765. The colonies, already suffering a post-war depression and holding suspicions that the English viewed them as second-class citizens, reacted violently. They formed rioting mobs, which tore down houses of government officials while burning their images in effigy. The merchant community united to develop a historically unprecedented tactic – the non-importation movement. They created this malicious plan to cripple England’s impoverished working class, while serving their own interests to unload previously un-sellable merchandise and hopefully reduce their debts to British sellers. Parliament called Benjamin Franklin to testify in the matter, and in a performance completely reversing his argument of ten years earlier, he testified that American colonists would continue to unite together in opposition of the legislation.

Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, only to replace them with a new attempt at the same financial strategy: the Townshend duties (a tax on goods such as glass, paint, paper and tea). Colonists, outraged, banded together to generate lists of British items they would not buy, signing their names as a public show of solidarity. Merchants, now unwilling to take the reigns of resistance, suffered coercion and punishment by extra-legal authorities if they dared to sell any enumerated items. Slowly over the course of 1769 and 1770, the merchants were coerced into signing non-importation agreements, which consequently hurt them economically. When the New York merchant community, eager to end non-importation, publicized the results of a poll showing that the majority of the city’s residents desired an end to the boycott, the results were speedily and falsely discredited by the movement’s supporters.

The colonist’s coercion of the merchants lead to their intended goal in March, 1770, when Parliament repealed all the Townshend duties except for one on tea. Colonists, eager to resume feeding their luxury addiction, rushed back to the marketplace, consuming 300,000 pounds of tea a year, Townshend duty included.

In 1773, when Parliament passed the Tea Act in an attempt to bail out the struggling East India Tea Company, colonists once again resisted, refusing to buy or even unload the merchandise. In Boston, colonists decided to throw the tea into the sea. Parliament’s response was the Boston Port Act. Colonial response was the First Continental Congress, which agreed on a complete trade embargo with Britain.

Breen’s tale ends here, but the road to revolution was not at this point inevitable. It would slowly become so with the outbreak of violence in 1775, and King George’s rejection of the colonists’ Olive Branch Petition (coupled with his declaration of a state of rebellion in America) later that year. Then, in 1776, in move designed specifically to boost military recruiting efforts under the guise of a moral cause (much like the Edict of Milan and the Emancipation Proclamation), independence was declared. Thus, we have our country, founded on a very morally ambiguous and economically complex movement that was our revolution.

Choice Bits, First Chapter, Part One

The below excerpts from the first chapter of Finnegans Wake made me smile.

The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself promptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes.

He addle liddle phifie “he had a little fife/wifey” note the acrostic ALP for Anna Livia Plurabelle, HCE’s wife.

A prayer:
Stay us wherefore in our search for tighteousness, O sustainer, what time we rise and when we take up to toothmick and before we lump down upown our leatherbed and in the night and at the fading of the stars! For a nod to the nabir is better than wink to the wabsanti.

Hootch is for husbandman handling his hoe. Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you’re going to be Mister Finnagain! Comeday morm and, O you’re vine, Sendday’s eve and, ah, you’re vinegar! Hahahaha, Mister Funn, you’re going to be fined again!

Behove this sound of Irish sense. Really? Here English might be seen. Royally? One soverign punned to petery pence. Regally? The silence speaks the scene. Fake!
So This Is Dyoublong?
Hush! Caution! Echoland!
How charmingly exquisite!

Nice norse puns:
Mutt. –Ore you astoneaged, jute you?
Jute. – Oye am thonthorstrok, thing mud.

Right rank ragnar rocks and with these rox orangotangos rangled rough and rightgorong. Wisha, wisha, whydidthat? Thik is for thorn that’s thuck in its thoil like thumfool’s thraitor thrust for vengance. What mnice old mness it all mnakes!

More to come...

The Marketplace of Revolution Chapter 8: Bonfires of Tea

The final chapter of Breen’s tale takes us from May, 1773, when Parliament passed the Tea Act, through the convening of the First Continental Congress in September, 1774.

Breen provides a curious statistic on colonial tea consumption: between 1770 and 1773, the Townshend tea duty still in effect, colonists consumed 300,000 pounds a year. In other words, for those three years, colonists were more than happy to pay a tax on tea.

The Tea Act, consequently, seemed to be a completely legitimate method of aiding the ailing East India Tea Company, by allowing them to sell their excess tea directly to the Americans, avoiding duties and wholesalers who raised prices. However, colonial reaction was vehemently anti-Tea Act. When the tea arrived, in most port cities it was either turned back, or confiscated by officials who placed it in storage to prevent its sale. In Boston, however, the Sons of Liberty, who controlled the docks, refused to unload it, and crown officials and tea agents refused to send it back. So it sat untouched until December 16, when colonists spent the day throwing it into the sea.

Tea non-importation agreements were made. Subscription lists were created and signed. Tea was confiscated and brought to common areas to be burned in enormous bonfires.

In spring of 1774, Parliament passed the Boston Port Act, which closed the Boston Harbor until the city reimbursed the East India Tea Company for the loss of its property.

Then, in September, The First Continental Congress convened, and on October 1st, reached an agreement on certain resolutions: Importation of all English goods would cease as of December 1. Consumption of all English goods would cease as of March 1. Exportation of all goods to England would cease September 1. And of, course, to ensure the execution of these provisions, the Congress created a Continental Association, whose responsibilities included monitoring the economic behavior of the colonists, coercing and punishing those who broke the agreement.

The rest, actually, is history.

Bitter Enough

I am finding writing about books very difficult. I don't know if other writers for this site (or readers for that matter) are having this experience, but my difficulty goes like this: Books are waaaaay too vast for me to write a good short essay about, the best you can hope for is to attach to some thread and ride it in an interesting way. At the same time, when I get really into a book, i read it at too fast a clip to write a in-progress think-through of the book, the way Herx and Rob have done so thoughtfully and fascinatingly.

This becomes even more true when I'm reading a book as not-plot-driven as James Baldwin's Another Country. Don't get me wrong... I loved this book and I'm still mulling it over. But I'm struggling to explain to you why, dear reader, I think it is worthy of my love.

The world's already bitter enough. We got to try to be better than the world.

Another Country tells the story of a group of friends whose stories are brought together by the suicide of Rufus Scott, a black jazz drummer living in New York City. The first ninety pages or so of the book are told from Rufus' perspective, detailing the final night of his life and, through memory, spiralling off into in depth looks at seminal moments over the past few years of his existence. After those pages, the perspective changes between various members of the group-- Rufus' white friends Cass (a novelist's wife), Vivaldo (an aspiring writer), and Eric (a bisexual actor living in Paris). Interestingly enough, the one main character whose head we don't get to live inside is Rufus' younger sister, an aspiring blues singer named Ida. And along the way we get glimpses at an array of vivid side characters-- Cass' husband (and Vivaldo's high school English teacher) Richard, Eric's french lover Yves, a slimy producer named Ellis, Vivaldo's absolutely hateful ex-girlfriend Jane etc.

The narrative of the book progresses in a likewise fashion throughout. A character has a moment-- a conversation, a drug experience, sex, a night at a club, whatever-- and that moment is analyzed thoroughly both within the character's head and through Baldwin's unpacking of that character's experience. This in depth analysis leads through the slippery paths of memory to other like moments throughout the characters history. The book moves forward and backwards through time easily-- it's the kind of book where Eric will be asked to come to dinner by his lover Yves and in between the asking and the answering is twenty pages detailing their first night together with a kind of emotional and intellectual acuity that's almost impossible to imagine, let alone describe.

In the book's 430 pages people meet, people fuck (it would be hard to call it lovemaking), people fall in and out of love, do drugs, chain smoke and drink a truly staggering amount of alcohol. I'm pretty sure that there is at least one alcoholic beverage consumed for each page of the novel. And in between these moments-in-miniature, we get the intertwinings of race, gender, sexuality and class in a bold way that few authors are really capable of. By exploiding these moments, Baldwin is able to reveal how social reality shapes experience, and as his various characters struggle (and largely fail) to be better than this world, the weight detail of human experience leaps off the page and threatens to overwhelm the reader.

And the conversations! My friend Charles told me that the conversations people have in this book are like the kind of conversations you wish you could have, and he's absolutely right. There's a kind of straightforwardness, an emotional rawness and honesty. It's the kind of book where a white man tells his black girlfriend that race doesn't matter and she responds that's cause you're white. Which sums up about all that needs to be summed up about that conversation.

Another Country strikes a note of despair throughout, even in the happy moments, the characters seem about to fall apart. But it's a kind of beautiful despair, a kind of requiem for America in the mid twentieth century-- its potential, power, beauty, violence, possibility and pessemism all on display. And narratively, as I said, it's not about plot, it's about detail. In the play I directed recently, George Hunka's In Public one of the characters longs for a world where we can revel in the history and potential of a gaze, a moment of contact under a restaurant table, a touch. Another Country realizes that goal with a kind of reckless abandon that at times threatens to turn tiresome. Or perhaps overwhelming is a better word. For these are not happy people, and they are living unhappy lives and trying their hardest and consistently failing. It's not a pleasant world to inhabit for a few weeks, but it is our history and-- more than we would like to admit-- our present as well.

Hottentots, Comanches, Edomites, and Bygmester Finnegan

The person who is dreaming the contents of Finnegans Wake is this guy. His name is H.C. Earwicker, innkeeper, husband to Anna Livia Plurabelle, and father to Issy, Shem, and Shaun. Sometimes Joyce talks about him directly, but as this is a dream, Earwicker becomes other people and is often woven into the text with acrostics on the letters HCE, as if to register his consciousness permeating the dream. So for instance in the first 10 pages you’ll find :

"...brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation to Howth Castle and Environs."
"...this man of hod, cement, and edifices"
"...like Haroun Childeric Eggeberth..."
"Hic cubat edilis," latin for "Here lies the Magistrate." His wife is represented in the next sentence in her own acrostic "Apud libertinam parvluam" or "with the little freedwoman."

HCE is to be found in various father figures. For instance on the first passage in the book (quoted below in Return to Moocow), he is Adam, Tristram (sort of), St. Patrick, Isaac, Parnell, and Noah. Tonight I reread the first 10 pages with delight where HCE seems to take the form of the Duke of Wellington and (great name here) Finn MacCool.

Finn MacCool is the anglicized name of the mythical Irish hero Fionn mac Cumhaill. Naturally for a dream, he is confused with Tim Finnegan, of the song “Finnegan’s Wake.” Drunk old Finnegan in that song falls from a ladder to his death, and here Finn takes a mighty and fatal fall himself. Seeing as Joyce describes him as a literal giant, his fall is huge, and prompts that hundred-letter-plus word
(Bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-
ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur-
nuk!) to describe his mighty crash. In the fluid dreamstate, the enormity of the fall is confused with that of Adam and Eve's, and also, I think, of Humpty Dumpty’s. Just like Adam, Tristram, Finnegan, and the rest it seems the dreaming HCE has had a “fall” of his own. What it is, and is it more than that vague guilt one sometimes feels in dreams? We shall see. Won’t we?

The Marketplace of Revolution Chapter 7: Making Lists - Taking Names

1767. One year after the repeal of the Stamp Act. Charles Townshend develops a new scheme for lowering the taxes of the English ruling class while making the colonists assist in financing a standing army in America. The Townshend Revenue Acts – taxes on goods including glass, paint, paper and tea – was passed by Parliament.

Colonial response was significantly different than response to the Stamp Act. There was no violence in the street, as there was in 1765, and strangely, for some reason, the merchants were not so eager to take the reigns for non-importation. The movement this time originated with the consumers. In town meetings in various cities across the continent beginning in the fall of 1767, colonists generated lists of goods they would refuse to buy, signing their names for publication. The intention, as it was during the Stamp Act Crisis, was to cripple England’s poor manufacturing workers, giving them incentive to support the American cause.

Leading merchants refused to sign non-importation agreements until March, 1768, beginning with Boston, followed by New York and Philadelphia. Southern merchants stalled until the summer of 1769. During these two years, Americans formed hundreds of groups to monitor merchant activity. Names of merchants who refused to sign non-importation agreements, or who broke their non-importation vows, were publicized and vilified. They were called, “Enemies of American Liberty; their Names will be made public; their Companies avoided; and every Stigma fixed upon them to make them despicable.”

Guilty merchants were coerced to perform public confessions before crowds of people. One merchant who took out of storage imported items he earlier promised not to sell was consequently described as a “vile Ingrate” and a “Reptile and Miscreant.”

And yet little or no blame seemed to fall upon the consumers. George Mason of Virginia said it best: “Experience [has] too fully proved that when the Goods are here, many of our People will purchase [them], even some who affect to be called Gentlemen. For this purpose, the Sense of Shame & the Fear of Reproach must be inculcated & enforced in the strongest Manner; and if that can be done properly, it has a much greater Influence upon the Actions of Mankind than is generally imagined. Nature has impress’d this useful Principle upon every Breast: it is a just observation that if Shame was banished out of the World, she wou’d carry away with her what little Virtue is left in it.” – this from the man who refused to sign the Constitution until it contained a Bill of Rights – an act that, oddly enough, ostracized him from the dominant political community.

These facts illuminate the entirely non-democratic nature of the non-importation movement. In fact, at one point New York merchants, desiring an end to non-importation, conducted a poll on whether New Yorkers desired an end to the movement. The poll numbers, which they quickly published, indicated that a clear majority desired a resumption of importation. However, these figures were quickly, cleverly, and violently discounted by supporters of non-importation.

By the summer of 1769, members of the British cabinet realized Townshend’s plan would simply not work. In March, 1770, Parliament repealed all the taxes, except for one on tea. This partial repeal was accepted by the colonists, which proceeded to quickly flock back to the marketplace.

Crisis averted, though not resolved. The difference of opinion communicated in the Declaration of Rights and Grievances passed by the Stamp Act Congress (which said Parliament had no right to tax the colonists without their consent) and the Declaratory Act of 1766 (which said Parliament HAS the right to tax the colonists) still remained. Three years later, Parliament would act once more, and we shall see, in the final chapter, how the Tea Act would lead to the eventual resolution of this difference of opinion through military violence.