We’re at that point when authority becomes the stuff of every moment. Since the law is all over the news these days, and Shakespeare is on the reading list, what better topic to consider and keep reconsidering.

Who makes the law? Is it Pepin, as Christopher wonders, or Mathew Arnold by other means. Congress is now taking time to put together legislation on the body. How would such authority be weilded in this sense? Any law written by Congress comes with pretty hefty weight. We know that such things can be combed together pretty quick and with not a lot of consideration. What would these actions look like? What’s the rationale?

At the White House, the president’s chief spokesman, Scott McClellan, said the proposed legislation fell within Mr. Bush’s desire to “build a culture of life.”

“In instances like this case, where there are serious questions and doubts raised, the president believes that our society and our laws and our courts ought to be on the side of presumption in favor of life,” said Mr. McClellan.

Huh?

Christian reminds me in class that I’ve been a little light on British Literature. But I’m really wondering whether Monday night creative writing will ever meet again? I’m sure it will. However, it seems as if a while has passed since “nature” has presented us with a hole.

As to BL, the point was raised at the end of a discussion on George Eliot whether she was too hard on the silly novelists in her excursions against the popular conventions of her time. Eliot, aka Mary Ann Evans, had a thing for generating fiction that reflected close perception and representation of reality, a close scrutiny of human action, and a sense that “experience” was important to the development of character (both in her fictions and in real life). This is why she and Mill have a lot in common about “convention” and culture and a concern with “development” itself, as did Blake.

For a look at some of these issues see Logan’s “George Eliot and the Fetish of Realism” 2002 Studies in the Literary Imagination(TL).

The question, however, of her critique of the women writers of her time and their “fluff” was put in class in the context of market ecology. That is, Eliot is attempting to impose her will on readers and writers. But what if the market calls for the fluff against which she writes, if indeed it is fluff? Isn’t she trying to stiffle choice and strangle the market? As a market related analysis, this point of view emphasizes the market itself rather than the human values that drive those markets. Markets don’t exist outside of human context. It also assumes that since the market exists, it must be a good thing. I have no opinions about any of these issues. The important question for me is why Eliot brings her powers against the conventions in the first place and the reasoning (and resonance) behind her critique. How is her critique “moral” or “demonic” in terms of Blake? And how does her critique develop ideas we’ve been following about “nature,” individuality, and social change?

We’ve jumped into discussions of nature in British Literature and talked a lot about the opposition of civilization and nature and connected this to certain associations of value. Isaiah’s response to Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell goes directly to this notion of value–the tossing off of “culture and sophistication” for a purer approach. In the course we do a lot of back and forth between the 18th century and the present and “look for” Blake in the present. But it isn’t an easy thing to do because of the complexity of rhetorical analysis, media, and the assumptions we make about truth, belief, and reason.

For example, a reader on Time’s Person of the Year issue writes

Bush’s determination and steadfast personality are what makes this President special. There is no pretense or sophistication about him. He is authentic.

“Authenticity” is associated with non-sophistication. The translation is President Bush is “closer” to his “nature” than the cityslickers who are corrupted by society, those overcome by pretense, sophisticated coffees, athiesm, and the chains that Rousseau referred to. This is, regardless of politics, a powerful image, a fixture of Americanism and the tendencies we’ve been discussing.

The subject is not what is real or what is truth here, but what we buy.

In this little hypertext essay I formulate a reading of Anna Barbauld’s poem A Summer Evening’s Mediation. It’s what I would call a “personal response” because the poem dramatizes something in my own experience about the notion of time. But it’s from the poem that an elongated reading develops on certain issues that can be asserted as Romantic, a label I’m uncomfortable with but have to use because of the tradition of literary study. So we go with Romanticism in Britlit 2.

We started class last evening with introductory discussion and some comment on Barbauld and a few ideas that we will be concentrating on for the remainder of the semester. But it’s always a good idea to return to the discussion and draw more out of it via “contemplation” or “reflection.” The ideas are huge and complex and draining.

Romanticism as a Concentration on Values
Generalizing a set of writers across a substantial amount of time is dangerous, but if we take Barbauld and Blake we can outline values with which these authors engage. What does Barbauld value in Mediation. Who carries the action of the poem? Contemplation. What does Contemplation do? Contemplation flies into space and goes as far as the imagination allows in “her” journey. But contemplation isn’t necessarily considered “logical,” “rational,” or “methodological.” Contemplation is free to fly, to roam. Freedom to think can therefore be called a value in the poem, which, of course, can be linked as a notion to the Big Ideas of the day (and to ours), as in the freedoms souht through revolution. But is Barbauld’s a special kind of freedom? The freedom to think beyond the known, perhaps, to think beyond restriction, especially those permitted by the cultire for women? We’ll see the same thing in Blake, a sense of liberation brought on by the freedom to let the mind go, to move beyond conventional restrictions, such as those permitted by standard written or artistic forms.

Romanticism as a Cultural Tendency
What do writers prioritize in their works? Do they prioritize a fascination with inventiveness, freedom, intuition, emotional reaction, imagination, with the profits of mysticism, with working and playing beyond the boundaries, with people as cultured, as savages, as team players? Do they ask questions in their work about what is humanly possible, what can be done vs what should be done? The slogan “Be all you can Be” is a particular Romantic expression or shares an exuberance about human potential and capacity with certain ideas expressed by certain writers in the period, a sort of “spirit of the time.” It appeals to us; it could be an advertising trick; but as an expression of something having to do with the human self it is “true.” That is, Huygens, a successful demonstration of inventiveness, mathematics, and imagination is “about “expanding the human horizon.” We see farther through Huygens. We’re seeing the surface of Titan. We’re, therefore, through Huygens following the same path that Barbauld imagined in her poem. Wow. She used pure contemplation whereas we can build the craft to go there.

Romanticism as Politics
Some people when told what to do do the opposite. The teenager aches for age, while the old man laments his brittle bones. Youth, age, ignorance, innocence, experience, what we lose as a consequence of life–all play out in the work of the Romantics. Thus Romanticism plays with certain aspects of the human condition. We get old. Is this something to envy or fight? We don’t know. Should we use our brains to learn as much as we can and shed the restrictions of not knowing? We live in collectives. Should we shape those collectives on Utopian or on more pragmatic or “naturalistic” models? The revolutionaries of France and America all brought the enlightenment view of Modeler, Dreamer, and Maker to their work of shaping their collectives. It is for this reason that the struggle continues because, in the political view of People, we are yet Romantics and all the decisions we make about war in other countries, the spread of democracy, and the economy are all influenced by decisions and documents pulsed into our lives by the fathers and mothers.

What is the significance of the map in Heart of Darkness. Maps are interesting. Plots, paths, mazes, architectural plans, story boards, flow charts, maps of space, the topolologies of things, metaphoric space all, the mind’s conceptions on paper. They charm. Marlow says:

“Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, ‘When I grow up I will go there.’ The North Pole was one of these places, I remember. Well, I haven’t been there yet, and shall not try now. The glamour’s off. Other places were scattered about the hemispheres. I have been in some of them, and . . . well, we won’t talk about that. But there was one yet — the biggest, the most blank, so to speak — that I had a hankering after.

“True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery — a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness. But there was in it one river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land. And as I looked at the map of it in a shop-window, it fascinated me as a snake would a bird — a silly little bird. Then I remembered there was a big concern, a Company for trade on that river. Dash it all! I thought to myself, they can’t trade without using some kind of craft on that lot of fresh water — steamboats! Why shouldn’t I try to get charge of one? I went on along Fleet Street, but could not shake off the idea. The snake had charmed me.”

Here Marlow observes the map, an image in memory, and then builds off of its surface. The river “resembles” the snake and thus it takes on greater significance than as a mere shape on the flat map surface.

The map follows Marlow throughout his story but in different ways, and the readers reference to this kind of space will or can change, moving from the word map to the word “narrative” space. (Is it significant that the crew to whom he tells the story is also charmed, drawn in–he is an idol after all?) After crossing the Channel, he describes the city:

“A narrow and deserted street in deep shadow, high houses, innumerable windows with venetian blinds, a dead silence, grass sprouting right and left, immense double doors standing ponderously ajar. I slipped through one of these cracks, went up a swept and ungarnished staircase, as arid as a desert, and opened the first door I came to.”

Marlow get’s his commision then leaves on a French steamer. He describes the passage this way:

“I watched the coast. Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you — smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, ‘Come and find out.’ This one was almost featureless, as if still in the making, with an aspect of monotonous grimness. The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist. The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam. Here and there greyish-whitish specks showed up clustered inside the white surf, with a flag flying above them perhaps. Settlements some centuries old, and still no bigger than pinheads on the untouched expanse of their background. We pounded along, stopped, landed soldiers; went on, landed custom-house clerks to levy toll in what looked like a God-forsaken wilderness, with a tin shed and a flag-pole lost in it; landed more soldiers — to take care of the custom-house clerks, presumably. Some, I heard, got drowned in the surf; but whether they did or not, nobody seemed particularly to care. They were just flung out there, and on we went.”

Here all the ideas are rushing in, a continual developing, developing, compounding, detailing and focusing of ideas introduced at the story’s top. The enticement of the unknown, the fascination.

“Come and find out.”

“Come and find out.”

The land is made to speak. To whisper, to entice. Is this the sublime? “‘This one,'” Marlow says, “‘was almost featureless, as if still in the making, with an aspect of monotonous grimness.'” All maps have borders, as does experience, edges that give contour to perceived space. But borders also have to be crossed, the expansive space they mark off penetrated. Recall that earlier the narrator has already indicated that Marlow’s stories are “inconclusive” (1961), their edges difficult to determine.

Even so, and if this makes sense, there’s Kutz. “‘His,'” according to Marlow, “‘was an impenetrable darkness.'” On the day of his death Marlow enters the pilot-house with a candle. He’s already observed that looking at Kurtz on the couch was like looking down at a man from a great height in a place where the light can’t touch (2010). The language is interesting. “‘One evening coming in with a cadle I was startled to hear him say a little tremulously, ‘I am lying here in the dark waiting for death.’ The light was within a foot of his eyes.'”

He dies. The description of the death, the change, goes this way:

“Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. Oh, I wasn’t touched. I was fascinated. It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror — of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge?”

There’s that fascination again. But is the veil a border, an edge reserved only for the eyes of the perceiver, especially when it comes to death. In a way, the light comes too late, or hovers off at too great a distance. Marlow Marlow remains in the mess-room and gives emphasis to optics:

“I remained, and went on with my dinner. I believe I was considered brutally callous. However, I did not eat much. There was a lamp in there — light, don’t you know — and outside it was so beastly, beastly dark. I went no more near the remarkable man who had pronounced a judgment upon the adventures of his soul on this earth. The voice was gone.”

Charms, charms, charms.

With Conrad, Beowulf comes full circle. This is a big statement and one that won’t go fully supported in these next few posts on British Literature. But I think it’s fair to say that the reader can distinguish between the text of Beowulf and Conrad’s text in the way they approach a “sense” of history, and why this matters to both.

Does the sense of history have to do with time or space or both? We can talk of a historical space: a time ago with panoramic quality, depth of field. To know it all we have to do is penetrate, as Marlow in Heart of Darkness penetrates the wilds. Yesterday. Is a week ago “history”? Actions past that still influence. For Conrad the “sense of history” is articulated in the exposition of Heart if Darkness, mentioned both by the narrator and Marlow. The narrator envisions it as something glorious. “We looked at the venrable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs forever, but in the august light of abiding memory. And indeed nothing is easier for a man who has, as the phrase goes, “followed the sea” with reverence and affection, than to evoke the great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Themes. The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea” (1959). Water is the carrier, a foundation and a path that “tells,” reminds, bring in the story of the past.

Marlow on the other hand break through that surface or romaniticising of the past. He’s fascinated and fearful of it. “I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago — the other day. . . . Light came out of this river since — you say Knights? Yes; but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker — may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday” (1960). He goes on:

“Imagine the feelings of a commander of a fine — what d’ye call ’em? — trireme in the Mediterranean, ordered suddenly to the north; run overland across the Gauls in a hurry; put in charge of one of these craft the legionaries — a wonderful lot of handy men they must have been, too — used to build, apparently by the hundred, in a month or two, if we may believe what we read. Imagine him here — the very end of the world, a sea the colour of lead, a sky the colour of smoke, a kind of ship about as rigid as a concertina — and going up this river with stores, or orders, or what you like. Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages, — precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink.”

Still further: “‘They were conquerers, and for that you want only brute force–nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the eakness of others” (1961).

This interpretation, a personal judgment, comes from Marlow’s experience, which he will soon get into. He will tell a story of “personal history,” whose greater context is the great “historical space” of Leopold’s holdings in the Congo, a colonized, economic “space in time”

Metaphorically, Marlow, described as an idol and gesturing like one, draws in the notion of darkness and the savagery of the characterized wilderness (past as place). This reminds me, of course, of Tennyson’s Idylls, of the time before the order-bringing of Arthur, the world brought to waste and disorder in the narrative of that story.

Or think of a decent young citizen in a toga — perhaps too much dice, you know — coming out here in the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his fortunes. Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him — all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination — you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.” (Conrad 1960)

The Roman in this conception moves from order to chaos to order. That’s the (grand) historical narrative with lots of paths in between. As an aside, we have two Romans–the real Roman who walked who knows when and the Roman of Marlow’s story. Which is the impostor?

Here’s an idea: I’d like one or more of the students who have had both brit lit courses, or anyone else who feels the impulse to untangle this problem, to write a paper (or weblog post) comparing/contrasting the Wanderer (Anglo Saxon) and Tennyson’s In Memorium. Both works deal with loss and images that engage the world in that context. This is the kind of stuff I think about on the drive home, by the way. That’s how exciting of a person I am.

Then we have this from Arnold:

Let us therefore, all of us, avoid indeed as much as possible any invidious comparison between the merits of humane letters, as means of education, and the merits of the natural sciences. But when some President of a Section for Mechanical Science insists on making the comparison, and tells us that “he who in his training has substituted literature and history for natural science has chosen the less useful alternative,” let us make answer to him that the student of humane letters only, will, at least, know also the great general conceptions brought in by modern physical science; for science, as Professor Huxley says, forces them upon us all. But the student of the natural sciences only, will, by our very hypothesis, know nothing of humane letters; not to mention that in setting himself to be perpetually accumulating natural knowledge, he sets himself to do what only specialists have in general the gift for doing genially. And so he will probably be unsatisfied, or at any rate incomplete, and even more incomplete than the student of humane letters only.

“. . . forces them upon us all . . .” What would Mill say about this? How does he mean “force”?

Then from Huxley:

We cannot know all the best thoughts and sayings of the Greeks unless we know what they thought about natural phenomena. We cannot fully apprehend their criticism of life unless we understand the extent to which that criticism was affected by scientific conceptions. We falsely pretend to be the inheritors of their culture, unless we are penetrated, as the best minds among them were, with an unhesitating faith that the free employment of reason, in accordance with scientific method, is the sole method of reaching truth.

Thus I venture to think that the pretensions of our modern humanists to the possession of the monopoly of culture and to the exclusive inheritance of the spirit of antiquity must be abated, if not abandoned. But I should be very sorry that anything I have said should be taken to imply a desire on my part to depreciate the value of classical education, as it might be and as it sometimes is. The native capacities of mankind vary no less than their opportunities; and while culture is one, the road by which one man may best reach it is widely different from that which is most advantageous to another. Again, while scientific education is yet inchoate and tentative, classical education is thoroughly well organized upon the practical experience of generations of teachers. So that, given ample time for learning and destination for ordinary life, or for a literary career, I do not think that a young Englishman in search of culture can do better than follow the course usually marked out for him, supplementing its deficiencies by his own efforts.

But for those who mean to make science their serious occupation; or who intend to follow the profession of medicine; or who have to enter early upon the business of life; for all these, in my opinion, classical education is a mistake; and it is for this reason that I am glad to see “mere literary education and instruction” shut out from the curriculum of Sir Josiah Mason’s college, seeing that its inclusion would probably lead to the introduction of the ordinary smattering of Latin and Greek.

Nevertheless, I am the last person to question the importance of genuine literary education, or to suppose that intellectual culture can be complete without it. An exclusively scientific training will bring about a mental twist as surely as an exclusive literary training. The value of the cargo does not compensate for a ship’s being out of trim; and I should be very sorry to think that the Scientific College would turn out none but lop – sided men.

This idea of “lop-sided” suggests an approximate view of human potential–can a person be lop-sided. But there’s a critical issue happening between Arnold and Huxley, an idea that is beginning to see it’s completion from Hobbes (the notion of materialism) to the very essays we’re dealing now.

Here’s another paper idea: given Huxley and Arnold and Darwin, why the continual fight over evolution, science, and religion in education?

Here’s an email sent by N.D., a student in BL. I asked her if I could share it here because I think she brings up some valuable points given our last discussion on April 1st and the issues we’re covering in the Victorian section. She agreed to this so here’s the email, with comments following:

This is a message sent out into cyber-space to throw my ideas out into some universe so they are part of the mix. This message doesn’t necessarily need to be answered; that take takes up more of your valuable time. This is a message in a bottle, written for the sake of writing & collecting my thoughts concretely in definite words in the hope that maybe once this is done that phrases of ideas will stop bouncing, swirling inside my head.

I have become possessed by this British Literature class. I do not say this to “suck up” to the teacher because I do find that to be a most despicable quality is a person. I do state this because I find myself physically affect by the class discussion, internally conflicted and shaking with adrenalin. I beat up on my brain trying to figure it all out, angry with myself as I struggle with ideas that challenge my values, my focus and my self-worth. You say I have a modern outlook. Of course I do; my parents, my surroundings, my whole life is modern. I value the individual because individuals make up the rabble. It is the individual’s choice to follow the rabble or to strike out on their own and risk being perceived as crazy. Lack of action is also a choice and having a choice is acting as an individual.

I have really battled with the question of who is the best we can study. My first instinct was to say the maters of technology & science. What is the use of studying a slew of self-indulgent white men, how could that possibly help me? What about Bill Gates, who dropped out of college to start Microsoft & influence how most people work day to day. What about the scientists who created the ability to grow food in the most desolate & unfertile of areas? Even Oprah, the one named wonder, has become a multimedia powerhouse even though she was an overweight, not conventionally attractive black woman. Are these people the best of the best, the ideals of modern society?

But science and popular culture always changes and one notion keeps nagging me: There is nothing new to say. I have seen it time & time again in this class. I am certainly not going to believe what you tell me is the best, that is your opinion. Why else is there so many religions, so many schools of thought and so may types of government. I can study all philosophy and decide who fits in with my ideals, but my ideals are certainly not yours. Also, I can think of no other way to strengthen your own argument that what you believe is the best that to study everything you can to challenge yourself with as many ideals as possible.

So I have no answer, and I am back where I started but at least I have but it down on paper and thrown it in the mix; my message in a bottle.

N. D.
A struggling British Literature student

Thus far, the dominant texts that we’ve discussed in BL are Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Mill’s On Liberty. The other surrounding texts keep coming back as well. The issues: creativity and form, the idea of authority in decision-making, the individual and society, the human conception of order, widespread technological and cultural and industrial revolution, and the democratization (the rise of the demos) of society. The approach: how do the texts “reveal” contemporary culture, make us more aware of what’s going on “now.”

But what’s sparking N.D’s question above? In a beginning discussion of Matthew Arnold I introduced his idea, drawn from The Function of Criticism in the Present Time, concerning the aims and ends of human conduct focused on education. In Literature and Science he brings up the issue this way:

Some of you may possibly remember a phrase of mine which has been the object of a good deal of comment, an observation to the effect that in our culture, the aim being to know ourselves and the world, we have, as the means to this end, to know the best which has been thought and said in the world. A man of science, who is also an excellent writer and the very prince of debaters, Professor Huxley, in a discourse at the opening of Sir Josiah Mason’s college at Birmingham laying hold of this phrase, expanded it by quoting some more words of mine, which are these: “The civilised world is to be regarded as now being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a common result, and whose members have for their proper outfit a knowledge of Greek, Roman and Eastern antiquity, and of one another. Special local and temporary advantages being put out of account, that modern nation will in the intellectual and spiritual sphere make most progress, which most thoroughly carries out this programme.”

Now on my phrase, thus enlarged, Professor Huxley remarks that when I speak of the above-mentioned knowledge as enabling us to know ourselves and the world, I assert literature to contain the materials which suffice for thus making us know ourselves and the world. But it is not by any means clear, says he, that after having learnt all which ancient and modern literatures have to tell us, we have laid a sufficiently broad and deep foundation for that criticism of life, that knowledge of ourselves and the world, which constitutes culture. On the contrary, Professor Huxley declares that he finds himself “wholly unable to admit that either nations or individuals will really advance, if their outfit draws nothing from the stores of physical science. An army without weapons of precision, and with no particular base of operations, might more hopefully enter upon a campaign on the Rhine, than a man, devoid of a knowledge of what physical science has done in the last century, upon a criticism of life.”

The italicized parts are what are generating the controvercy. Taken at face value what is “the best that has been thought and said in the world” and why is the end of education knowledge of ourselves and the world. In Arnold, the question isn’t whether he disagrees with Huxley about “what” should be learned in school, but to what degree the liberal arts should incorporate the sciences of the day. Here’s how Arnold characterizes the overall question:

More than this, however, is demanded by the reformers. It is proposed to make the training in natural science the main part of education, for the great majority of mankind at any rate. And here, I confess, I part company with the friends of physical science, with whom up to this point I have been agreeing.

His agreement comes in the form of defining literature as all-inclusive of traditional Roman and Greek “letters” and the writings of scientists, such as Newton. It would be somewhat presumptive, without having read both Huxley and Arnold on the issue, to agree or disagree with Arnold’s characterization, but suffice it to say at this point that similar discussions go on today pertaining to the question what should be taught in school, what should people know, and what forces play a roll in determining answers and strategies. As Arnold writes earlier in C&S,

The question is raised whether, to meet the needs of our modern life, the predominance ought not now to pass from letters to science; and naturally the question is nowhere raised with more energy than here in the United States. The design of abasing what is called “mere literary instruction and education,” and of exalting what is called “sound, extensive, and practical scientific knowledge,” is in this intensely modern world of the United States, even more perhaps than in Europe, a very popular design, and makes great and rapid progress.

Here Arnold touches on the question of “modernity,” a question that will come up in the next century, when “modernism,” “modernity,” and other related issues will surface in other ways, especially in Kafka. What should modern people be doing with their brains–the lit or the science? Of course, the more moderate of us will claim that we should fall somewhere in the middle, but both Huxley and Arnold would consider such a position naive. Nevertheless, I made the question personal in class, asking people for pointed examples of what is “best.” Milton, calculas, engineering, or “Survivor”? The answer came back to personal choice (a modern view of human nature, as it has come to us), and this is where N.D.s question comes to the fore. But the problem is the extent to which an “individual” can choose. What are our options: and is individual choice an illusion? Many students in BL aren’t in the course because they wanted to study Mill. Someone else determined that their degree plan should involve some literature. It wasn’t I who decided that criteria. It was someone else, but who was it? We know an answer: someone with presumptive “authority,” or some body of experts who decide for others what they “will” do to make an accomplishment. Should the focus be lit, science, social science, business (which some see as the thrust of globilization)?

Choices. They are problematic. Currently, it’s Kerry vs. Bush. Two choices with immediate consequences.

Choices. Science or lit? In class we will work through the consequences of Arnold and Huxley. We will ask the question: we have facts assuredly, but who teaches us what to do with them?

Choices. We can split the atom. We can slice and segment the gene. But what do we do with this power? Again, Shelley resurfaces. And there’s Blake (and thus Milton) always peering from behind the wall of the past to judge or laugh at us.

In Online Intro to Lit the issue of The Tempest as “experiment” or “test” concerning human nature has come up. Prospero takes choice people, breaks them into groups on an island, then waits for the true colors to show themselves: who’s honest, who’s not; who will betray, who will remain loyal. That’s the essence of the test.

Seems to me that this is at the heart of reality programming, or its theory. “Survivor,” which I’ve never watched, subjects a group to various conditions, then waits for the story to develop–the fundamental question: who, by nature, has the skills to pass the test. (Scripted, staged, controlled, whatever.)

So, the issue would be take the current administrations’ principles and place them on island and wait for the “natural” leader to show up. This is the nature/nurture, civilization/barbarism question at its most raw. We know what Hobbes would say. What would Dick Cheney say?

This speech by Benjamin Disraeli gives a good entrance into certain issues we might want to take into consideration as we move into tech and cuture issues in English Literature, especially concerning cultural movements, such as Chartism. I urge the BL students to read it and follow the hypertext links. I’ll have more to say about basic political party issues in a few days.

Two views of the Chartist movement, from different points of view, from Marjie Bloy of The Victorian Web:

Bronterre O’Brien, Operative, 17 March 1839

Universal suffrage means meat and drink and clothing, good hours, and good beds, and good substantial furniture for every man, woman and child who will do a fair day’s work. Universal suffrage means a complete mastery, by all the people over all the laws and institutions in the country; and with that mastery the power of providing suitable employment for all, as well as of securing to all the full proceeds of their employment.

Archibald Alison, “The Chartists and Universal Suffrage”, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine September 1839

The working-classes have now proved themselves unworthy of that extension of the Suffrage for which they contend; and that, whatever doubts might formerly have existed on the subject in the minds of well-meaning and enthusiastic, but simple and ill-informed men, it is now established beyond all doubt, that Universal Suffrage in reality means nothing else but universal pillage… What the working-classes understand by political power, is just the means of putting their hands in their neighbour’s and that it was the belief that the Reform Bill would give them that power, which was the main cause of the enthusiasm in its favour, and the disgust of the failure of these hopes, the principal reason of the present clamour for an extension of the Suffrage.