Harvard University Press Blog

Who We Might Have Been, and Who We Will Become

Who among us hasn’t considered what our lives would be like if we had taken alternate paths, made different decisions? Storytellers of every stripe write of the lives we didn’t have, says Andrew H. Miller, author of On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives. As we live through a worldwide pandemic, the ideas of what might have been are even more appealing. Much like the adolescents on the verge of adulthood in Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People, Miller tells us, we wait to see what comes next.

Asked to describe yourself, you might say many things. You might mention your habits or your looks, you might point to your work or your family or the town in which you live, or the town from which you came. In any case, you would probably talk about who you are. But sometimes we think about ourselves in a very different way, focusing not on who we are, but on who we’re not. We think about the lives we might have led, the people we might have become, had things gone differently in our past. Each of us no doubt could make a list: if my parents hadn’t moved from Connecticut when I was young; if I had gone to a different college; if I hadn’t taken that one class with that one teacher; if my girlfriend hadn’t broken up with me; if my parents’ hadn’t gotten a divorce; if I had taken another job; if my wife and I hadn’t had children.…What would my life be like? What would I be like? There are so many other paths I might have taken, so many other lives I might have led, and yet I find myself here, on this fresh June day, a middle-aged man in Baltimore, behind this narrow desk, looking out at those two children playing on the shaded sidewalk under the dogwood trees as I write these words for an unknown audience.…A life so unlikely, yet inescapable.

Such unled lives have long preoccupied a diverse set of authors, from Jane Austen and Charles Dickens to Langston Hughes and Philip Larkin; they’ve preoccupied filmmakers, too, from Frank Capra to Charlie Kaufman and Greta Gerwig. Indeed unled lives have become more and more absorbing to authors, and have become a major theme in recent literature.  No doubt that when the wind slackened and the sun stood still Odysseus had some second thoughts, and Job, too, might have found things to regret. But, although it would be hard to take a census, I’m sure the number of people we are not, like the number of people we are, is on the rise. A list of living authors lately absorbed by unled lives could start with the novelist Kate Atkinson and end with the poet Rachel Zucker: Paul Auster, Julian Barnes, Rachel Cusk.…

That list would certainly include Sally Rooney. During these months of enforced seclusion, both her novel Normal People and the series based upon it have been avidly consumed and widely praised. No doubt their popularity has been due in part to the pleasure in having distracting good literature to read and good TV to watch when other satisfactions are denied.  But the distinctive resonance of the story is less obvious than this suggests. It doesn’t come from the story itself, which in its broad outlines is familiar enough: two appealing Irish protagonists, Marianne and Connell, occasional lovers and deeply intertwined companions, are perched on the edge of adulthood. They are both bored and full of promise, wondering intensely what the future holds for them: “almost no paths seem definitively closed to her,” Rooney tells us of Marianne, yet “she has no idea what she’s going to do with her life.” So too with Connell, for whom the “ultimate question” is “what to do with himself or what kind of a person he is.” They wait, breath held, for life to start, and we wait with them.

It’s this sense of time idling that I think resonates in our vacant and febrile days, these days of collapse and revolt, of economic stagnation and social upheaval. Time arrested but leaning into a precarious future; it’s the time of early adulthood, but isn’t it our time, too? “Six Weeks Later (April 2011)…Two Days Later (April 2011)”: Rooney organizes her book in time-stamped chapters, each one dated and distanced from the one before it; we drift along and, shaking our head, discover that months have passed. Similarly, she clips off each of her short, declarative sentences from the next, so that gaps yawn between them.

For us, as for Rooney’s characters, this urgent, stilled time presses on us the question of what is to come. “I wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for you,” Connell says, as the novel closes. “It’s true,” Marianne thinks, “he wouldn’t be. He would be somewhere else entirely, living a different kind of life.…And Marianne herself, she would be another person completely.” Between these two experiences—of life intensely felt but charged with uncertainty, and of the backward glance that understands life by contrasting it with lives unled—lies the novel itself. Like Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, or Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Normal People is set in a time of vibrating possibilities seen from the future, when those many possibilities have become one single past. For us, too, when we look back, what will we see? What will we have become once we emerge, individually and collectively, from this urgent and unsettled moment? And what will we not have become?

Benjamin’s Arcades at 20 Years

This month marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of the English translation of Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. Lindsay Waters, Executive Editor for the Humanities at HUP, reflects on its publication history.

I was asked to join with Howard Eiland, David Rodowick, and Bill Brown at events at Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago and at Harvard Bookstore in Cambridge last month to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the HUP publication of the translation of the book by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Here, now, it might seem easy to imagine the decision to publish not just The Arcades Project but also the Selected Writings was an easy decision. It was not. HUP has by now published 3,000 pages of the writings of Benjamin. He has become very famous in certain households, a secular saint, the most venerated literary critic in the Western world. But let’s not get carried away. Perhaps you saw Carrie Brownstein try to talk up Benjamin to Stephen Colbert on The Late Show recently, and she drew a blank from him. Benjamin is not a household name yet. People still keep using the Sprockets accent to pronounce his name: Valter Benyamin. But I still have a job, although I can easily imagine that my effort to publish Benjamin, the four volumes of the Selected Writings and The Arcades Project, might have turned out to be Lindsay’s Folly. People might have said: Waters seemed to have a promising career publishing books in economics, philosophy, and literary theory at the University of Minnesota Press. With almost no resources at his disposal, Waters, at his Little House on the Prairie, in a cinder block building hard by the wellspring of the Mississippi River, beside the bleachers where the Golden Gophers played football, did well enough. And then he came to Harvard where there were serious resources for publishing. He wasted them trying to revive a forgotten schlemihl who’d failed his PhD qualifying exams. Lindsay’s Folly and his ending, RIP.

Didn’t turn out that way. The twentieth anniversary of the publication of this huge tome might be a moment to stop and catch a breath. There is still more of his work that needs translating and editing. The hunger for his writing has only grown and grown, as Eric Banks’s essay “Walter Benjamin’s Afterlife” in the Chronicle of Higher Education of March 21, 2014, lays out how Benjamin’s name has grown since the time he died until today—grown from nearly no references for forty years to a high of 775 references in 2007. His close friends, Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem, had worked hard to keep his name alive after his death in 1940. Adorno had arranged for the publication in 1950 of perhaps his most appealing work, his masterpiece in fact, his Berlin Childhood around 1900, in a deluxe slipcase edition with the case covered with a watercolor of the River Spree coursing through Berlin in the early twentieth century. It did not sell.

But a two-volume selection of his essays appeared in Frankfurt in 1955, the Schriften, and two volumes appeared in English from Harcourt Brace, and that led to a major essay by Hannah Arendt in the New Yorker, which won him additional readers. However, another essay by Arendt published in Der Merkur for January/February 1968, along with an essay by Helmut Heissenbüttel, reviewed the volumes Schriften and Briefe so critically that it caused Adorno to protest for himself and Scholem that “she would make us who alone kept him above water into his murderers.” But the two volumes of Schriften found readers in Europe, including Paul de Man, who was teaching at Zurich in the ’60s and who was the person from whom I learned decisively that people should begin to learn more about Benjamin’s writings. DeMan influenced me primarily by how much he changed his critical practice after he turned against Heidegger and Benjamin replaced him as his critical lodestar. I think primarily of the way de Man seized upon what Benjamin wrote about the facies hippocratica in The Origin of the German Trauerspiel. But then I explored more and realized there was much, much more to Benjamin.

He was a veritable critical Atlantis, a buried island, a buried civilization under water in need of recovery, which it became my job to resurrect with help. When we began to talk with Siegfried Unseld of Suhrkamp Verlag about seriously publishing Benjamin in English at Harvard, just after I moved to Harvard from Minnesota in 1984, he wrote me on September 20, 1984, and gave me a proposition for a plan. In that plan, he suggested almost as an afterthought that we publish “a selection of the Passagen-Werk, which reduces the text to less than half.”

When we took the plan of Unseld for the Selected Writings and developed it, we presented it to the Harvard University Press Board of Syndics with numerous letters of support. At the Syndics discussion, sociologist Daniel Bell became its champion and fended off objections about why we should publish the writings of a homeless man who’d never finished his dissertation and never wrote a proper book. The series of the Selected Writings began to appear in 1996. There were two critical issues to solve: should we publish the entire Passagen-Werk and how should we talk about it when we presented it to the world, as an unfinished and incomplete work or as a complete work?

Since we are celebrating The Arcades—Das Passagen-Werk in English—at twenty, let me recall its inception. I can see from the HUP records that the Press made a distinct decision to publish the PW in its entirety after we got the Selected Writings moving. I cannot remember exactly how this happened, but it makes sense that it did, because doing so meant going beyond what was suggested to the Press by Siegfried Unseld, and to do so was going to take a special effort. I presented the project to the Syndics in June 1988. We had presented to them in March 1985 the preliminary plans for an edition of the selected writings of Walter Benjamin. At that time Syndic Daniel Bell had “advocated a fuller selection, one that would give a better sense of the man and all the facets of his thought.”

The discussion of the PW translation with the Syndics led the Press to commit to translate the complete book as originally published in German in 1982, and the scholarly reports provided the guidance for how to talk about the book in publishing it. The then Harvard professor T.J. Clark argued that the Press should decide to publish the book, because this decision was on the same order as Penguin’s decision, “a decade or so ago, to do Marx’s Grundrisse in English.” He added, “The comparison is not frivolous, it’s very close. In both cases we have to do with a long, unfinished piece of writing, obviously in some sense ‘work in progress,’ and difficult to translate. In both cases it is the sheer stature of the writer, and the crucial place of the text in his work, that makes it essential that the text enter the English language. In one sense, the case is even stronger with Benjamin, since the Passagen-Werk is his Capital—for better or worse.”

Tim Clark’s advice to the Press was prescient. The book turned out to be not a white elephant, a possession which its owner cannot dispose of and whose cost is out of proportion to its usefulness. That this publication would not turn out to be Lindsay’s Folly was testified to by the appearance in the New York Times for January 16, 2000, of a front-page story in the “Arts & Leisure” section by Hubert Muschamp that began this way: “Some of us don’t read fiction. We live on history, biography, criticism, reporting and what used to be called belles-lettres. We will be feasting on Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Projects for years to come.” Our book was on its way to being recognized as a modernist masterpiece, like Eliot’s The Wasteland, Joyce’s Ulysses, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Pessoa’s The Book of Disquietude, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Dylan’s The Basement Tapes—all these “unfinished” works that were as finished as their composers could make them before they died.  The debate Mike Jennings, Howard Eiland, and I had among ourselves was how to handle the unfinished nature of The Arcades. Once we published our edition, Mike argued that we should republish the book in the order that some researchers had discovered, but we decided not to do that. Stanley Cavell seems to me to have captured the truth of the matter when he declared inArtforumof the book Suhrkamp and we published: its incompleteness “strikes me as constituting its aura of modernity.” In this book, Benjamin wrote that in shopping malls he had discovered the secret history of the bourgeoisie and liberated the suppressed history that lays underneath the ideological masks. The greatest single testimony to the effectiveness of the book is a book that mimics it in its essentials, right down to duplicating the Parisian arcades with the Parisian Palais-Royal, Roberto Calasso’s The Ruin of Kasch. We did not know what we had on our hands when we began to publish Benjamin, but it turned out to be something great.

Remembering Harold Bloom

Harold Bloom, the literary critic who championed the Western canon, died at age 89 last month. Lindsay Waters, HUP Executive Editor for the Humanities, looks back on their publishing history, their friendship, and Bloom’s great contributions to the literary community.

Harold always lived at 179 Linden, New Haven. Always. “Send the book to my home address. Do you have it? Are you sure? I really need that book.” “Yes. Have it. Will do.” So it’s hard, almost impossible, to remember that he and Jeannie almost moved to Cambridge, Mass. For years no name said Yale as forcefully and clearly as Harold Bloom. I first met Harold when he and nearly the whole Yale School of Critics picked me up at the New Haven Amtrak station in 1981 so I could have lunch—not with all of them, dear God!—but with Paul de Man. Paul could drive, but he did not drive so well, as all the dents and nicks in his car made clear. Harold could not drive at all; Jeannie did. Even then it felt a lot like I was being picked up by all the Marx Brothers, everyone doing their own schtick; looking back to that moment feels funny, fills me with nostalgia.

But back to that moment: I’d been picked up by Chico, Harpo, Zeppo, and Groucho, but my lunch date was with de Man. Still, there they all were—Paul, Harold, Geoffrey Hartman, the heart of the group, missing only Hillis Miller—in a car driven by Renee, Geoffrey’s wife. So they picked me up and drove Paul and me to lunch, not at cozy Naples Pizza, a favorite of Yale Comp Lit, but at Mory’s, a place that might have been as comfortable as Naples when it originated in 1849. Was de Man trying to impress me by taking me to “the tables down at Mory’s”? That was not like him, but who knows? Maybe. The rest of them disappeared. How perfect! I’d already published the new edition of Paul’s Blindness and Insight. Paul and I were in business together. We’d met in Chicago and Minneapolis before. I remember during our lunch at Mory’s asking him about Hans Robert Jauss, for whose book he had just written the introduction for the THL series. I asked him if he thought Jauss, whom I was about to publish, was the equivalent of Erich Auerbach. He tried gently to lower my expectations. In fact, de Man’s introduction had itself been a subtle skewering of Jauss. I did not know Paul so well, as well as I’d come to know him. And I had no idea how close de Man was to Bloom.

Harold’s name was synonymous with Yale for me as a humanities editor from the University of Minnesota Press—Harold, as I said, not a member of the Bush family or William F. Buckley, Jr., author of once-famous God and Man at Yale and then famous for his TV show Firing Line, and a hero to my mother, a conservative Catholic. A few years later, after Paul had died in 1983, I had business with Harold. This would have been 1987, the year Harold gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures and dallied in false surmise, to use a Miltonism, the false surmise being that he might move to Harvard. He negotiated for months with Derek Bok, Harvard’s president, and then decided against moving. I would experience the complications of negotiating with Harold several times. Nothing was too small to fuss over. But the very chance that he might move and the fact that he was delivering the Norton Lectures at Harvard helped make the year 1987–1988 a very exciting one for many of us in Cambridge. Those lectures, after touch-and-go negotiations with Harvard University Press director Arthur J. Rosenthal, a publisher as exciting in his own behavior as Professor Bloom, became the book Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (HUP, 1989). What we did not know when Bloom delivered the lectures, and what he probably did not know himself then, was that the book would be the trial run, the off-Broadway tryouts, for what would become his most famous book of the more than fifty books he wrote: The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994).

When he accepted the commission to deliver the six Norton Lectures, Harold told Derek Bok that he would not take up the residency at Harvard normally required of the Norton lecturer. “I told them I’d come up for one day only for each lecture over the course of six weeks.” But, having bargained Bok into an arrangement that would see him at Harvard for only six days, Harold in effect moved up to Cambridge for the entire academic year! He was everywhere. We could not get rid of Harold. If the mountain would not move to Bloom, Bloom moved his mountainous self and enterprises with him for a year.

Why is The Western Canon so like Ruin the Sacred Truths? “I write only one book,” before lapsing into deli talk from the Lower East Side: “It is like a very long sausage. I cut off so much here and so much there.” This was, as I said, the trial run for the Broadway show. Harold delivered his pre-Broadway performance at Harvard’s great Memorial Hall, the building constructed to honor the Harvard grads who had died in the Civil War. Think of The Western Canon as Paradise Lost and Ruin the Sacred Truths as the “brief epic” Paradise Regained.

Keep in mind that picture of the Yale Critics crammed into a car—making room for one another to fit—because, although Harold Bloom might seem like the ultimate lone literary superstar, he was, I’d contend, and that is the point of this remembrance of him, always a team player, someone who thrived best when he struck up alliances with others, and those others did not need to be like-minded to become enlisted in his work. Michael Dirda wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “Bloom has always been, to echo Kipling, a cat that walks by himself” (Oct. 11, 2019), but I beg to differ. In fact, he ground out much more sausage, if you will, when he had others around him to spice it up.

For all his weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth—all his kvetching about the ruination of the American academy—he kept at his lectern until the end, until just before he died, in fact. Inside the university he had lifelong relations with many, and especially with some. I bring as evidence for what I am contending information about two special people in particular, Paul de Man and Angus Fletcher. He loved John Hollander and Richard Rorty, and he admired Mark Edmundson and David Bromwich. He did not have much use for some famous colleagues. Some had no use for him. I have somewhere a list of the people in the department who voted to deny him tenure. He was unusual, and he had a taste for the unusual. For example, he was inspired by Victoria Nelson, someone whose work I introduced him to, and he was devoted to her books and supported my publishing two of them, one of which, The Secret Life of Puppets (2002), won the MLA prize for best book in comp lit despite the author’s lack of professional credentials.

He would have been categorized by many as a literary theorist, especially since helping to develop the books Deconstruction and Criticism (1979) and Romanticism and Consciousness (1970). But he was not, I’d contend, a theorist like his great friends de Man and Fletcher, and he acknowledged this repeatedly. He was a lover of poetry with a photographic memory. He was also a critic, one who could say what he loved and why, like Pauline Kael and Greil Marcus. He was what Nelson George calls “a hanging critic,” someone who would condemn what he did not like, as he did Edgar Allan Poe, Tom Wolfe, Jorie Graham, and J. K. Rowling, to name some of those he strongly criticized.

But his connections with Paul and Angus were deeper, abiding, and loving. Harold writes in The Western Canon about how the “long, frequently irascible relationship between Quixote and Sancho is the greatness of the book” (131). This captures the relationships between Bloom and de Man and Bloom and Fletcher. Bloom was hardly a solitary. He was not Hamlet, standing alone on the battlement. As he said, he was Falstaff at loving war with Hal.

Harold always maintained that there was one person superior to him in his generation, and that was Angus. They’d met when they were each starting graduate school in English at Yale in September 1951. As he tells the story, Harold wandered disconsolately into the lounge of the Hall of Graduate Studies at Yale, where he heard a “vigorous performance of Béla Bartók’s Sonata for Piano. Sitting down, I listened to its percussive splendor being played by a yellow cowlick bobbing up and down behind the piano.” Beneath that cowlick was “a splendid Scottish youth,” as he wrote in a foreword to the Princeton edition of Fletcher’s Allegory (2012). In one of the two books Bloom published in 2019, he gave repeated testimonials to Angus’s friendship and mind. He wrote, “Of all the literary critics of my own generation, I was always most allied to Angus. I cannot accept that he is gone” (Possessed by Memory, 343). In this book he praised Angus for being in tune with the natural world. There is truth to this. But I believe the deeper reason for their ongoing friendship was that Angus was much more of a thinker than Harold ever was, and that in their nearly daily phone calls to discuss each other’s writing, Angus pushed and probed and forced the fanciful Bloom to make his writing walk on the earth and engage in argument. Harold wrote a stunning blurb to describe Angus for the cover of his HUP book Colors of the Mind: “He is an Orphic seer, a curious universal scholar of Renaissance vintage, a fusion of the best traits of Northrop Frye and Kenneth Burke, his true peers.” This tribute sounds great and stirring, but it misses the way Angus continually sliced through Harold’s verbiage. No wonder Angus loved Harry Frankfurt’s book on bullshit! I, too, had the experience of Angus’s continually and sharply cutting through my waffling. I am sure he tried to cut through Harold’s, too. And if those books of Harold’s speak to general readers, as it is clear many of them do, it is, I’d contend, because of how Angus in effect edited them working over the phone with Harold.

If Harold argued with Angus, he argued just as much with Paul de Man. De Man loved Walter Benjamin; Harold did not—he loved Walter Pater. In a story Harold told me in 1996, he recounted how once upon a time he ran into Paul at the Yale Coop. Harold was teaching Freud that day and was carrying five or six books by Freud to his class. Paul laughed at him when he saw him juggling the stack of books, and asked: “Why are you carrying the contents of the Sterling Library to your class?” Paul was carrying one slim book of Walter Benjamin’s essays! Paul laughed at Harold for being so devoted to Freud, not that he disbelieved Freud, but he thought all Freud said was common sense. What really upset Harold about Paul was the way he taught and how he created magic circles of acolytes around himself. There was something mystical and mystifying about his teaching style that caused students to grant him some inexplicable control over them. He complained to me that he loved Paul but did not love his effect upon me: for too long I did not understand that I was too devoted to him.

When people rose against de Man after the discovery that he had written for a collaborationist newspaper in 1942, and then others kept coming forward to attack him with more sensational charges, Harold never disowned him. He remembered Derrida calling him to tell him dramatically that “we must fight” to save our friend’s reputation. What Bloom said to me was that he’d have nothing to do with such fights. “What happened is between the soul of our late friend and God, if there is a God. I consider the attacks on him to be an offense and obnoxious. My thought is that nothing in the attacks is untrue and none of it matters. The wild publications reveal a certain astonishing lack of responsibility.”

I remember that when Adam Begley wrote a profile of Harold for the New York Times Magazine and I was quoted as having a favorable opinion of Harold, a Harvard colleague wrote to tell me he was surprised to read that. I knew that many people were suspicious of Harold. I had my own questions about some of his work, but in the battle about literature and politics that emerged in the 1980s and has continued unabated, I was always on his side. He remained a true friend to my best friends de Man and Fletcher, and he revered and supported other friends and authors Miriam Hansen and Victoria Nelson. He was a champion of literature. I will miss him.

Who Needs an Author?

In his new book Author Unknown: The Power of Anonymity in Ancient Rome, classicist Tom Geue asks us to work with anonymity rather than against it and to appreciate the continuing power of anonymity in our own time. Here, he discusses the history—and strength—of anonymous works of literature.

Back in the roaring ’20s, I. A. Richards, the plucky young father-to-be of modern literary criticism, did an experiment with his students at the University of Cambridge. He started circulating poems neat—shorn, that is, of any complementary information about who they were by, when they were written, etc.—and got his students to write responses to them. He then collated, synthesized, and analyzed everything to produce the classic book Practical Criticism (1929): an incredible snapshot of how a particular set of educated young things in 1920s Britain tended to talk about poetry.

Richards found that his flock were more or less beholden to pallid and predictable stock responses, fumbling to find any meaningful aesthetic language to formulate their experience of the “words on the page” in all their particularity. This empirical horror prompted Richards to start an educational crusade to transform students’ aesthetic sensibility. And thus—so they say—the discipline of modern English was born.

Something about this Cambridge don’s innocent little sport with anonymizing poems and probing reader response always fascinated me. I fantasized myself back into one of those classes, a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed guinea pig scurrying to impress the prof: how intimidating it would have been to make something of all those high-flown yet completely unprovenanced words; how hard it would have been to face them down and pick them apart without the idea of an author or a date guiding my gut. But I also found it strange, because the poor students’ colorless responses to these poems under conditions of laboratory duress didn’t seem to do any justice to my own enthused experience of the authorless.

As a teenager, then a twenty-something wannabe intellectual with literary pretensions, I read and loved a lot of “classic” literature, and “classics” usually came with famous authors included. But some of the most moving poetry I found during these formative years, the words that really filled me up, were actually by no one. Bella Ciao, the haunting monologue of a nameless Italian partisan facing death, a poetic emblem of the anti-fascist international left, had no author; nor did the rough-and-ready rum songs of early colonial Australia cited by Robert Hughes in his gripping story of the genesis of convict colonialism, The Fatal Shore; nor, I found in the course of my university studies, did the early masterpieces called the Iliad or Odyssey, which everyone only pretended had an author called “Homer” so they could write essays on “him.”

These works were not temporarily deprived of their authors in the name of a pedagogical game, then restored to them swiftly after—as if literature without source were incomplete, licensed only for the carnival of the criticism lab. No, they never needed authors in the first place. Not only that: they were partly beautiful because they were name free, not in spite of it. The Iliad and Odyssey seemed so much bigger the moment I found out they were probably a collective product built over time, by everyone, anyone, and no one; just as Bella Ciao’s dying partisan directing their own burial under a beautiful flower floored me all the more because the song was without a single origin, indeed came already imbued with the shared mourning of a whole people, unhinged from the conditioning of the individual. Anonymity could serve the art.

And so, over time, I wanted to work out if and how the lack of name and uncertainty of date could actually help (rather than hold back) the literature of ancient Rome coming down to us under its own mysterious circumstances. Hence Author Unknown. The book treats a host of primarily anonymous literary texts from the first few hundred years of the Roman principate. For most of their history, these texts have fallen victim to a form of classical scholarship which is scared of the dark: a scholarship obsessed with resolving, or at least approximating answers to, the questions of authorship and date, as a prerequisite to handling the texts in meaningful ways. What’s more, in the kind of big-name culture of authorship we have inherited from the ancients, this anonymous literature has often been a target of simple benign neglect born of quasi-patrician snobbery: why read that two-bit unknown imitator of Virgil, when you can read VIRGIL?!

My project in Author Unknown: The Power of Anonymity in Ancient Rome is an attempt at resisting this deep-set cultural habit of looking for the author and disparaging the work when one can’t be turned up. I try to redeem some of Latin literature’s minors to show that they are actually majors, many of them wonderful artifacts that depend on their anonymity to achieve certain stunning special effects. These works pack a punch because their authors will always be unknown. I. A. Richards wouldn’t have known what to do with them.

 

 

A Very Hippo Holiday with Edward Lear

Edward Lear wrote some of the best-loved poems in English, including “The Owl and the Pussycat,” and has captivated the imagination of readers, young and old, for generations. As a holiday treat, we asked Sara Lodge, author of Inventing Edward Lear to reflect on Edward Lear as a Christmas poet.  

Edward Lear is an apt character to think about at Christmas-time. His nonsense books, most famously Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets (1871), which contains ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’, were published in December to catch the Christmas gift market. And Lear associated himself with the spirit of the season. Lear’s first, anonymous book of illustrated limericks for children, A Book of Nonsense (1846) announces on its title page that:

There was an old Derry down Derry, who liked to make little folks merry;
So he made them a book, and with laughter they shook
At the fun of that Derry down Derry.

As Vivien Noakes points out, Derry down Derry was ‘one of the fools of the traditional English mummers’ plays’. Mummers’ plays were a practice dating from at least the eighteenth century and probably linked to much older festivals and masques – they were traditionally staged at Christmas time by itinerant groups of actors who were not professional players but were drawn from the local community and were often raising funds for food and drink to celebrate the season. In the Buckinghamshire mummers’ plays, ‘Hey Down Derry’ or ‘Don Derry’ has a particular function. He is the announcer of the performance whose arrival signals its beginning. He calls on the assembly to make room for the entertainment, sometimes also pretending to sweep bystanders back with a broom that he carries for this purpose. In some versions he is the Fool, but in others he is Father Christmas.

It is telling that Lear invokes this figure on the title page of his Book of Nonsense, dancing with an audience of children who are jumping in the air or turning handstands. He is announcing his own entertainment at its commencement, like the Christmas mummer of old. In fact Lear in 1846, when he published A Book of Nonsense, was only thirty-four. He was not an old Derry down Derry at all. But as a figure who promised mirth to children, like Old King Cole, Old Mother Hubbard or Old Mother Goose, Lear was placing himself within a tradition that was extremely old. It is noteworthy that Lear refers to his authorial alter ego as ‘making’ children a book. This book is a hand-crafted object. Lear has ‘made’ it in a sense that only an artist-author can claim to do who has both written the text and drawn the illustrations. It has the hallmarks of a personal gift, even when sold in a commercial bookshop. Lear’s persona as the dancing Derry down Derry is part of that gift. Lear places his alter ego in the midst of his nonsense not as an author in the commercial sense but as a figure for the emotional transaction, beyond words, that the season invites.

James T Fields of Boston in his collection of sketches of eminent contemporaries Underbrush (1877) described Edward Lear, ‘Nonsense-Poet’ thus:

if you chanced, a few years back, to go to Farringford about Christmas time you would have been likely to find a tall elderly man, in enormous googles, down on all fours on the carpet, and reciting in the character of a lively and classical Hippopotamus new nonsense verses to a dozen children, amid a roar of laughter…

It is easy to picture the sixty-something Edward Lear, with his super-strength glasses to combat myopia, larking about at Christmas on all fours in Alfred Tennyson’s home on the Isle of Wight. One imagines that this ‘classical’ Hippo, inspired by its Greek name, may wallow in the Hippocrene, spring of the Muses. Most of Lear’s poetical works, from his nonsense verses to his illustrated alphabets, started their life as gifts: sung or recited at friends’ houses, enclosed with letters, or laid on a hotel table at lunchtime to delight bored holidaymakers. They have never lost the quality of gifts: and Lear’s comic persona ­– needy, funny, anxious, boisterous ­– is an integral part of the offering he presents.

 

Lear sketched endless caricatures of himself in letters to friends. In them, his body is always risible. In his twenties, he depicts himself as a lanky, blundering string-bean, blown away with his umbrella in a high wind. In later life, his self-caricature is small (he is the same size as slugs, snails and frogs), bearded, myopic with a plum-pudding belly and thin legs that stick out like a bird’s. Often, he is off the ground. Like Charlie Chaplin or Harold Lloyd, he gets into comic scrapes. One of the most important things I realised, in producing an account of Lear, was that – just as Charlie Chaplin is not identical with his most memorable character, The Little Tramp – Edward Lear is not identical with his self-caricature. The small, ‘minor’ figure who consorts with molluscs is a performance. The real Lear was tall, a well-read intellectual with serious ambitions and an extraordinarily large and varied social, cultural and political network. In tracing Lear’s intellectual life, I was constantly surprised by the strength and depth of his connections. He set Swinburne, Shelley, and his friend Tennyson’s verse to music; he was a self-elected member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with strong views on John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Ford Madox Brown. He was influenced by American artists including Frederic Church and Alfred Bierstadt. And, as a naturalist and natural history painter, he moved in scientific circles that included Charles Babbage, Joseph Hooker, and the Darwins.

When living in San Remo, which he did from 1871 until his death, Lear preferred a quiet Christmas, often refusing invitations. Raised a dissenter in religion, he valued simplicity in expressions of faith and his sensitive ear and mind disliked the ‘bother’ of big parties. Lear’s ‘sudden reversions’ from gloom to cheer, his equal and opposite desires for lively company and silent solitude, are to me the essence of December and the contradictory moods it can inspire. In appreciating this complex man, who so ardently seeks the reader’s sympathy and was all his life committed to greater tolerance amongst ‘humanbeans’, I gained greater understanding of my own frequent switchbacks as a writer from delight to despair and back again. One of Lear’s early limericks features a lady ‘Whose folly/ induced her to sit in a holly’. She tears her dress and grows ‘melancholy’; but the limerick is designed to amuse, converting her tear or tears into a smile we can join in. Whether you are approaching the holiday season with a grin or a groan – or both at once – Edward Lear has his arm in yours.

Frankenstein, Born January 1, 1818, Still Alive

Today marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, one of the most haunting and enduring works ever written in English, and arguably our greatest tale of horror. Below, Susan Wolfson and Ronald Levao, whose widely celebrated annotated edition of the novel we published in 2012, reflect on Shelley’s creation, Frankenstein’s “Creature,” and the work’s lasting cultural legacy.

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Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus was published January 1, 1818, and since then has never been out of print, or out of range. The range is more than the book: it is a fable and a language. On December 21, 2017 (the darkest night of the year), Nancy Pelosi, Minority Leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, denounced the recently passed unilateral tax bill this way: “It’s a Frankenstein. Anybody who’s familiar with Frankenstein knows it was… a monster that was created… Do you know the ending of Mary Shelley’s story?” she exclaimed. “The monster comes back to destroy.” Her reference needs some nuance: Frankenstein was the creator, not the creation. And the creation was not “a monster,” but deemed so on the basis of a physical appearance outside or beyond the normative range. And the Creature (let’s call him) was abandoned and abused, and miserably lonely, before he became a vengeful destroyer. Such reservations aside, we can marvel at the readiness of the reference, needing no footnote 200 years on: who is not “familiar with Frankenstein”?

The novel main-titled Frankenstein told a terrific tale, tapping the idealism in the new sciences of its own age, while registering the throb of misgivings and terrors. The publication of 1818 was anonymous, from a down-market press. It was a 19-year-old’s debut in print. She proudly signed herself “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley” when it was reissued in 1823, in sync with a stage confection at London’s Royal Opera House in August—running for nearly 40 nights in this debut. Scarcely a month goes by now without some development earning the prefix Franken-, a near default for anxieties about or satires of new events.

The dark brilliance of Frankenstein is both to expose “monstrosity” in the normal and, conversely, to humanize what might seem monstrously “other.” When Shelley conceived Frankenstein, Europe was scarred by a long war, concluding on Waterloo fields in May 1815. “Monster” was a ready label for any enemy. Young Victor Frankenstein begins his university studies in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. In 1790, Edmund Burke’s international best-seller Reflections on the Revolution in France recoiled at the new France as a “monster of a state,” with a “monster of a constitution” and “monstrous democratic assemblies.” Within a few months, another international best-seller, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, raged against “the monster Aristocracy” and cheered the American Revolution for overthrowing a “monster” of tyranny. Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, called the ancien régime a “ferocious monster”; her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, pointed out that the system of monarchy was an “artificial monster,” a “luxurious monster,” and its despots a “race of monsters in human shape.”

The language of “monster” had another stage, with heightened interest in the era of the rights of man, when large populations of human beings were systematically brutalized. With much controversy, and against the lobbying of wealthy plantation owners, England outlawed participation in the slave trade in 1807; but slavery in its colonies was legal until 1833. (Frankenstein reaches its third and most popular edition in 1831). Who was a “monster”? Abolitionists saw the capitalists, investors, and slave-masters as the moral monsters of the global economy. Defenders of slavery cast the Africans as monsters: subhuman, improvable perhaps by conversion to Christianity and disciplined work, but a threat, especially the men, if freed. “In dealing with the negro,” ultra-conservative Foreign Secretary George Canning lectured Parliament in 1824, “we are dealing with a being possessing the form and strength of a man, but the intellect only of a child. To turn him loose in the manhood of his physical strength…would be to raise up a creature resembling the splendid fiction of a recent romance.” The reference was transparently Frankenstein, not only the novel but also the recent stage-plays, which stripped the Creature of the eloquent and moving language Mary Shelley wrote for him, and rendered the familiar or cinematic tradition: a mute, lumbering, physical threat.

“A Masterpiece of Scholarly Production”

In the spring of 2016 we published a major new edition of Emily Dickinson’s verse, the only extant volume of Dickinson’s complete poems that distinguishes between those she delicately preserved in her storied fascicles and those she treated with somewhat less care. Painstakingly edited by Dickinson scholar Cristanne Miller, the book is also the first annotated reading edition of Dickinson’s poems, as well as the first edition to include the alternative words and phrases Dickinson wrote on the pages of many of the poems she retained.

To have produced such a lovely and invaluable resource is its own reward, but we’re nonetheless extremely pleased to share that the Modern Language Association of America has named Miller’s volume co-winner of its biennial MLA Prize for a Scholarly Edition. The prize committee’s citation for the book reads:

Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them is a masterpiece of scholarly production, from layout and design to content. Cristanne Miller demonstrates how engaging with the materiality of the poems leads to new knowledge about the poet and her work. The care and attention given to the intricacies involved in Dickinson’s textual productions are striking. The clean presentation of the poems on the page allows readers to see the alternative phrasings with ease, and the introduction presents a welcome overview of Dickinson’s writing practices and the ways in which her work has been edited in the past. This outstanding edition helps make clear the complexity of Dickinson’s habits and how they have affected our understanding of her poetry.

From the beginning, we recognized the value of placing this edition alongside the open access Emily Dickinson Archive (EDA), on which we’d partnered with Amherst College, Harvard’s Houghton Library, the Boston Public Library, the New York Public Library, and a host of other institutions. On our website, we produced an index to Miller’s volume from which one can jump directly to the high-resolution images of the fascicles presented at EDA, allowing readers not only to read Dickinson’s poems “as she preserved them,” but actually to see those preservations themselves.

Our congratulations to Cristanne Miller on this well-deserved recognition for her wonderful work.

Loebs New and New Again

June saw the publication of four new Loeb Classical Library volumes, a batch consisting of two revisions to earlier works and two new additions to the corpus. Below, General Editor Jeffrey Henderson introduces the offerings.

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Following the release in fall 2016 of the extraordinary Early Greek Philosophy in nine volumes (LCL 524–532), the Loeb Classical Library catalog for spring 2017 resumes a more typical pattern: two volumes of works new to the Library and two replacement volumes, one each of Latin and Greek. Yet this catalog is not so typical in longer historical perspective: each volume in its own way exemplifies significant adjustments to James Loeb’s original plan for the Library that have been developed over the past half-century in order to preserve the viability and maintain the vitality of his vision for new generations of readers.

Loeb aimed “to include all that is of value and of interest in Greek and Latin literature” and so imagined a moment when the Library would be complete, which almost came to pass in the 1970s as a solution (however unwelcome) to the financial challenges of that era. Instead, there were prospects for a new dawn: the roster of works that count as valuable and interesting is not an immutable or finite canon, but one that changes and expands in each successive generation. Nor are existing volumes immortal, as even the most solid ones inevitably grow outdated in one way or another. And so, the LCL embarked on a massive revaluation project to grade each existing edition for retention, revision, or replacement, and to add such new editions as would likely be received as valuable and interesting. Accordingly, new authors and works continue to be added, but revisions and replacements appear at an equal pace: over 25% of the Library’s editions have already been revised or replaced, and in many cases expanded by adding lesser-known or fragmentary works.

The idea of systematic revision was already in the air when General Editor Eric Warmington decided to revise Heseltine’s edition of Petronius in 1969 (LCL 15), as soon as the relaxation of obscenity laws in the US allowed (the UK had acted a decade earlier), and the de-bowdlerization of the Library has continued apace. Similarly for archaic or otherwise dated styles: Edmonds’ 1912 edition of the Greek Bucolic Poets, among other outdated features, claimed allegiance to the “fain/twain school” and used regional dialect or “colloquial suburban” to represent characters in the mimes, is virtually unreadable today and was finally replaced in 2015 by Neil Hopkinson’s fine and pellucid Theocritus. Moschus. Bion (LCL 28). By contrast, Way’s 1913 edition of Quintus Smyrnaeus (LCL 19), though it features a very stilted iambic pentameter translation, was deemed in the Loeb assessment of 1991 not to warrant replacement on the grounds that such a translation is “what this poetaster deserves” and that the existence of Vian’s sound text was “hardly sufficient to justify a new edition of this boring writer.” But here, as often, times and tastes have changed, so that Hopkinson’s replacement of the Way edition is scheduled to appear next year.

Many other factors come into play when deciding whether to revise or replace an edition, for example the existence of a better critical edition on which to base the text, the quality and currency of the scholarship, the level of annotation, or the adequacy of the front and back matter; the first volume of de Melo’s Plautus (LCL 60) has a 120-page Introduction versus the 8 pages offered by its predecessor, a decision prompted largely by the lack elsewhere of a similar overview for Anglophone readers.

Both new editions in the spring 2017 catalog contain works from the second century AD: the first volume of Michael Trapp’s edition of Aelius Aristides’ Orations (LCL 533), and Christopher P. Jones’ Apologia, Florida, and De Deo Socratis of Apuleius (LCL 534), which together with the Metamorphoses (LCL 44, 453) complete our coverage of that author’s genuine works. Although this era of the “Second Sophistic” was exceptionally prolific on both the Roman and the Greek sides, intellectually and artistically rich and varied, and crucially important in the transmission of classicism, it had been for the most part the preserve of specialists until a recent renewal of interest began to equip the rest of us to understand and appreciate its riches. These works by Aelius Aristides and Apuleius, two of the most distinctive and celebrated figures of their time, join other recent and forthcoming additions by Philostratus (LCL 521) and Galen (LCL 523, 535, 536) to help fill out our picture of an important era.

The other two volumes for spring 2017 replace existing volumes, which are thus retired from both the print and the digital Library: Emlyn Jones’ and Preddy’s new Plato, volume I (LCL 36) replaces Harold North Fowler’s edition of 1914, and J. C. Yardley’s new Livy, volume IX (LCL 295) replaces Evan T. Sage’s edition of 1935. The decision to revise or replace differs in each individual case and then depends on finding the right editor to (re-)do both text and translation. In both these cases, replacement was surely merited. Fowler’s Plato lacked a solid foundation for revision: its text had long been superseded, its translation was dated and often inaccurate, its 10-page introduction was minimal and unhelpful, there were no explanatory notes, and Phaedrus does not belong with Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. (Phaedrus is now slated to be included with two other dialogues on love and literature, Lysis and Symposium, in a forthcoming replacement of LCL 166.) Emlyn-Jones and Preddy, who had recently replaced our edition of Plato’s Republic (LCL 237, 276), were happily ready to repair these deficiencies, and continue to assist us in our long-term efforts to update our twelve volumes of Plato.

An even more massive replacement project is inaugurated by Yardley’s new volume of Livy, whose complete LCL edition is currently in fourteen volumes. Livy presents a special challenge insofar as his monumental History of Rome begins with the city’s foundation and continues down into his own era in the age of Augustus, thus requiring editorial expertise spanning multiple historical periods. Hence our original edition, begun in 1919 and completed in 1959, was divided among four editors: B. O. Foster for Books 1–22 (LCL 114, 133, 172, 191, 233), Frank Gardner Moore for Books 23–30 (LCL 355, 367, 381), the aforementioned Evan T. Sage for Books 31–42 (LCL 295, 301, 313, 332) and his collaborator on volume XII Alfred Cary Schlesinger for Books 43–45, etc. (LCL 396, 404). Each of these volumes is a product of its time, and needs updating for various reasons. Yardley’s LCL volumes of Livy’s third and fourth decades, based on Briscoe’s new critical edition, initiate our efforts to convey Livy’s meaning to the Anglophone reader more uniformly and accurately, with much fuller annotation in line with current scholarship. (We began with the fourth decade while we awaited the publication of the final books of Briscoe’s edition of the third.) Yardley, a veteran translator of Livy, is just the right scholar to set the overall tone for this undertaking, and even as his new LCL volumes will replace Sage’s, so too will replacements for the existing LCL volumes by Foster, Gardner Moore, and Schlesinger follow in due course.

Jazz and the Literary Imagination

The often-heard cliché that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”—which has been variously attributed to Thelonious Monk, William S. Burroughs, Frank Zappa, Martin Mull, Laurie Anderson, and Elvis Costello, among others—seems to take for granted that it’s ludicrous to use one expressive medium to comment on or respond to another. But such cross-media encounters can actually be remarkably generative. As but one example, literary scholar Brent Hayes Edwards points to African American literature, which has taken shape in relation to music from its very inception. What Edwards shows in his latest book, Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination, is that the pollination has gone both ways, “an unending back-and-forth between a music that hovers at the edge of language, on the one hand, and a writing that strives for the rhythmic propulsion, emotional charge, and melodic contours of music, on the other.”

In Epistrophies, Edwards comes to terms with this foundational interface by considering the full variety of “jazz literature”—both writing informed by the music and the surprisingly large body of writing by jazz musicians themselves. Here’s a bit from the book:

The term jazz literature tends to bring to mind writing influenced by music. But this other sort of jazz literature—that is, writing by musicians—includes an enormous range of work, including not only autobiography but also music criticism, history, interviews, philosophy, fiction, poetry, drama, technical and instruction manuals, liner notes, and magazine and newspaper articles. Aside from autobiographies this work has received little attention from scholars of either literary studies or jazz studies, but it seems to me that this corpus must not be dismissed as a curiosity. It should be understood, instead, as a persistent impulse. Whether in Sun Ra’s “cosmo-myth rituals” or in Ellington’s “social significance” suites, one encounters again and again an approach to aesthetics that resists any easy distinction between “writing” and “music,” instead viewing both as components in a broader sphere of art making and performance.

Edwards makes his way through studies of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Mary Lou Williams, among others, to consider the uses and implications of jazz writing for artists we tend to think of primarily as composers and improvisers. Here’s Edwards again:

Although all the chapters shuttle between jazz and literature, it is not by coincidence that the first is devoted to Louis Armstrong, in an attempt to take account of the apparent parallels or shared predilections across his work as a singer, an instrumentalist, and a writer. To read and hear Armstrong this way—or Duke Ellington, or Sun Ra, or Mary Lou Williams, or Henry Threadgill—is to shift the fringe of contact between music and language by noting that black musicians so often insist on working in multiple media, not as autonomous areas of activity but in conjunction, insistently crossing circuits, rethinking and expanding the potential of each medium in the way it is like and unlike the other. It is also to insist that the provocation goes both ways: from music to literature, from literature to music.

The book’s title itself points to one of these flowing episodes of provocation. There’s a famous 1941 composition by Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke called “Epistrophy”—the title refers to a literary device in which a word or expression is deliberately repeated at the end of successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or verses—that Amiri Baraka alluded to decades later with his poem “Epistrophe,” which, not for nothing, never once employs its namesake’s namesake literary device. From a bebop standard, to a Black Arts poem, to Edwards’s dazzling new work of criticism—“Epistrophy” to “Epistrophe” to Epistrophies—consider that architecture well-danced.

On Literary Chronology

This month brings the publication of A New Literary History of Modern China, a volume that amasses 161 essays by 143 authors under the editorship of David Der-wei Wang. Intended for readers interested in understanding modern China through its literary and cultural dynamics, the book follows the similarly conceived New History of French Literature, New History of German Literature, and New Literary History of America. Below, HUP Executive Editor for the Humanities Lindsay Waters considers the organizational principle linking all four.

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It might be worthwhile to talk about the Chinese literary history in terms of the series of literary histories that began with Denis Hollier’s New History of French Literature in 1989, because, although the volume devoted to the literatures of those who speak and write Chinese is the first book in the series to be devoted to a non-European tongue, the set-up and the goals of all the books in the series have some things in common. First, they are literary histories organized chronologically.

When we decided to organize the French literary history chronologically, I confess we were risking appearing to be too cute, looking like we were playing around. As the originator of the form we used for that book and for this one and the German and American volumes, Denis Hollier, wrote in the manifesto document to launch the French book, dates had “become the symbol of useless knowledge.” The time we began that book was the heyday of Deconstruction, literary theory, French and American feminisms, the birthing-time for Cultural Studies, ideologiekritik, so the recourse to dates offered us an organizing device that constituted “the least ideological way to reintroduce an historical dimension into the study of French literature. Dates [would be used] with some irony, a mostly rhetorical device which could encourage each contributor to focus on detail and give sharpness and specificity to each article. The devise [was] intended to work against pedestrian historicism.”

But, really, why dates? At this moment, so distant from the time of the original decision, I am tempted to say that our winking and smirking about dates concealed from us, all of us roughly from the class of 1968, that the date 1968 meant a great deal to this generation of researchers, just as September 11, 2011, means much to a later cohort. Dates, originally bits of useless knowledge, come to mean something. They can become what Walter Benjamin had called “focal points,” in his early essay “The Life of Students,” where he calls them “burning points” (Brennpunkt), something that concentrates events in a “kairos” or “monad,” thus shattering the historical continuum and the bare inventory of atomic facts, interpreting the past from out of the highest energy of the present, as Nietzsche puts it. In French literary history, just as in Chinese literary history, “assigning dates is far more problematic” the further back you go, as John Benton explains in “Entering the Date,” his contribution to A New History of French Literature. And as contributor Sandy Petry writes of the year 1789 in the same volume, “As the fall of the Bastille is a reality that became a representation,” so the falling of the Twin Towers has become a representation. The long-term impact of the name of the year “1968” was more decisive in our choice of dates as our organizing device than we could fathom. No one in China doubts the significance of dates, especially those of “May 4th,” or “1949,” or “June 4th.”

We use the dates not to assert continuity of French, German, American, or Chinese literary history, but to scramble it up. It is clear now, nearly thirty years after the appearance of the NHFL, that France is so unified a country that our deconstruction of it could not break it into pieces. It is the case that, on the contrary, the Chinese people, although they have lived for millennia held together and apart by the tribute system, have never had the sort of unity the French have had. Few peoples in the world have except primitive tribes. The effort to unify sinophone culture is a new thing, the very thing that is the subject of this book, that you can witness in the actions of the people who inhabit this book and engage in every sort of struggle to modernize China.

So, the dates that this book makes you aware of are important because, as Cognitive Science professor Edwin Hutchins writes in his book Cognition in the Wild, “the identification of a landmark is a highly interactive process.” That sounds abstract, but it is the opposite of abstract. Think of the effect of bases on ballplayers. And identifying landmarks is a process that the readers of the book are invited to participate in. Readers of previous books in this series have found that, because of the way the books are constructed, they become involved in them. Aiming to read one or two essays, they have gotten caught up in an ongoing flow from which they find it difficult to extricate themselves.

As Arthur J. Rosenthal, then the Director of HUP, said at the outset of this adventure, these books are not reference books. They’re not to be used like Google and Wikipedia, extracting free-floating facts, like stopping for a burger at the McDonald’s drive-by window. To put it differently, the readers of this book are not invited to be gravediggers exhuming a bit of knowledge, a bone here, a skull there, as in Hamlet. Rather they are invited to consume food to live in the present. Communion is the goal, not communication. This is the difference between the atomism Bertrand Russell celebrated and the holism that Henri Bergson promoted.

In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin sought to immerse his readers in the felt life of nineteenth-century Paris just at the time the Eiffel Tower was being raised, stunning many and horrifying many others. This way of writing cultural history is what Benjamin called “historical materialism.” How does that history work? It sidesteps the mere communication of information. He explained: “To put to work an experience with history—a history that is originary for every present—is the task of historical materialism. The latter is directed toward a consciousness of the present—which explodes the continuum of history.” This is the operation of “kairos,” as opposed to chronos, history a la Nietzsche, Bataille, and Hollier. Such history writing is directed to people who live in the present, provoking in the readers an experience in the fullest sense, what he called “Erfahrung.” When this history works, the past explodes into the present. The alternative form of history writing delivers up a continuum in a neat inventory, history reified. What the new history hopes to precipitate is an experience in which the pulse of the past is felt in the present.