Sometimes the better you knew somebody, the more impossible any real talk became.--Damon Galgut, Arctic Summer (124)
Memory itself was like another kind of echo, everything duplicating endlessly, in shadow versions of itself. (127)
[W]riting showed his own failings to him. The struggle that was involved was a demeaning and dutiful one, a matter of grinding craft rather than lofty art. Not that he was a fake; his interest had always been real. But he saw in others a hunger, a voracious need to comprehend or capture life by transforming it into a language, which he didn't share. (320)
In “What is a Classic?,” the novelist and critic, J.M. Coetzee insists, while flirting with the idea of the survival of the literary fittest, that classics sustain and survive ongoing scrutiny in the long run from a variety of perspectives, which may include – judging by Coetzee’s practice -- their creative re-writing. Such ongoing scrutiny is certainly a necessary condition on the being of a philosophical classic; one may suspect it is a kind of performative requirement for a classic.
In his essay, Coetzee identifies four features that enable a work to become a classic. While in context, he does not speak of philosophy the features carry over to a considerable degree (and, in general, philosophy is often on Coetzee’s agenda): (1) the work needs to be studied and discussed in small circles, relatively untouched by the general public’s fashion; (2) one can become an advanced student in a discipline based on some kind of competent engagement with canonical works; (3) there needs to be ongoing learned commentary or criticism; (4) the existence of a form of advanced emulation through creative imitation or reworking. In addition, Coetzee implies (5) that a work only counts as a classic if it can, eventually, catch the interest of a wider audience beyond the most advanced professionals.
As an aside, one may doubt that (4) occurs in philosophy. It’s probably not a good strategy to try to get a monograph published, following Kant’s architectonic in the first Critique. Even so, here’s an instance of (4) within recent professional philosophy: an important essay in the recent revival of analytical metaphysics is, O'Leary-Hawthorne & Cortens (1995), “Towards ontological nihilism.”[1] Given its provenance in Syracuse’s philosophy department it is no surprise that it generously mentions the dominant figure of that department, Jonathan Bennett, of the last third of the twentieth century. But as it turns out, the rhetorical and argumentative-methodology is deeply indebted to Bennett's Rationality—a work familiar to Hawthorne and Cortens (recall here and here). This fact could go unnoticed because Bennett’s Rationality is not mentioned in their piece.[2]
A classic instance of (4) is Zadie Smith's homage to Howards End [sic], On Beauty. In fact, while I had seen images of the Merchant Ivory film, I only read Forster's novel after being inspired to do so by reading Smith's novel first. A more complex case of (4) is Damon Galgut's Arctic Summer, which tells the post-Howards End-life of E.M. Forster (primarily the events surrounding the writing of Maurice, published posthumously 1971 and A Passage to India (1924), but also Alexandria: A History and a Guide and Pharos and Pharillon) as a novel. To complicate matters, Arctic Summer is also the title of an unfinished work by Forster, and another writer, Cavafy, has more than a walk-on presence. One could grow dizzy fast if one tried to map the relationships amongst original and copy in this novel--words and lived experience strain at the law of identity.
It would be misleading to treat Galgut's novel only philosophically, but we should also guard against the other risk -- facilitated by its sensual craft -- of ignoring its philosophical profondity entirely. Under "cover of Plato," (39) -- caves, shadows, homo-erotic love, and all that -- we can take a second look at the second quote; the nature of identity is at the heart of matter. Self-identity is paradigmatic identity (A=A), of course, but in memory the second A is also not quite the first A because -- to adopt Humean terms -- force and vivacity fade away in echoes. If the second A is epistemically indistinguishable from the first, feel free to generate a Sorites-style series of As, in which the the dividing line between the force and vivacy of the first and last A is insensible at any given moment in the series. To assert A=A even in its shadowy-nth-iteration, is to falsify experience; to embrace fakery, that is, the inability to recognize the significant difference between original and copy. (The previous is not an argument to leave logic behind in one's aesthetics; logic is a necessary pre-condition to aesthetic judgment!)
To capture life by words, when the desire of comprehension is a consequence of need, is doomed to failure. One might object that if lived experience is already linguistic then there is no gap. Undoubtedly some people inhabit a fully linguistic world. But Galgut's novel shows that there is another, more childlike immersion in life, fully sensual and -- miraculously -- intuitive (in Spinoza's sense) that is not opposed to knowledge, but more knowing than the falsifications afforded by language.
One might think, then, that Galgut indicts the writing lives of novelists and philosophers alike; all these can exhibit are the shortcomings of authors (most keenly to the author). For, we try capture by words and in doing so always transform the matter (even if we maintain form). In Arctic Summer there are more than a few hints that knowledge is an obstacle (see first quote above) not a goal.
Even so, the novel is also a defense of the "grinding craft" against the "lofty" visions of genius imposed on us by society and our own endlessly recycled images, popular among false philosophers. It is a rejecton of "smallness of soul, a narrowness of the heart," which undermines even the loftiest "ideals" (295; the context is the British racialized, colonial/imperial project). Such spirited craft may also be a consequence of need, of course, but it is not guided by such hunger, but by the internal demands of craftsmanship. Craft is easily devalued by knowing types (craftiness is not a term of praise), but even Plato defends its nobility and necessity at times. That philosophy is a daily grind is, of course, one of the core commitments of these near-daily digressions.
In reflecting on the nature of a classic, I was reminded of Prospects & Presumptions, Julia Neugarten's homage to Jane Austen. (Neugarten is a bold young Dutch novelist writing in English.) The slender novella has a preface by the author. She writes, "Writing, I discovered, was one half discipline and one half lack of self-consciousness." Craft and immersion indeed make up the writer's life, but if the laws of arithmetic would allow it, I would add another "half:" the embrace of fate.
[1] Philosophical Studies, 79(2), 143-165. One further notable feature of this paper is the positive engagement with Bradley—then relatively unusual in analytical philosophy.
[2] Another example is Azzouni, Jody. 1999, 2001. "Numbered paragraphs: An essay on aesthetics." In The Lust for Blueprints, 71-91. Providence, RI: The Poet's Press, which is modelled on and critically engages Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.
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