Published in The Core and the Canon : a national debate, September 1, 1993, pages 256-264. Edited by L. Robert Stevens, G.L. Seligmann and Julian Long (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press.)
Renaissance Quarterly Spring 1992
Shakespeares Pacifism
Sisyphus’ setting, with its flaking rock and its hot barren landscape is the last of a long series of images of hostile wastelands we have been contemplating. Barren deserts, steamy jungles, blasted battlefields, rocky islands, polar ice floes, gothic swamps, wind-swept marshes, blackened cities make up the backdrop of much modern European literature–a setting appropriate to the period that brought us World War I and II and which may yet bring us nuclear winter. Most of these demonic landscapes are symbolic, representing as we have learned, the burnt-out quality of the modern: its loss of spiritual faith, loss of intellectual and moral clarity, loss of aesthetic pleasure, loss of belief in society, the family, the self.
But this symbolic imagery of physical desolation has a literal meaning as well, one that we have not encountered much in the works we discussed. Western culture, and probably world culture as well, has been involved since the beginning of the modern period not only in its own self- destruction, but in the destruction of the earth, the environment which has bred and nursed it. In “From a Plane,” a short poem included in your miscellany of poetry, Denise Levertov recognizes from the air “the great body…torn apart/ raked and raked by our claws” –treated by us like Lear and Gloucester by their ungrateful children. (more…)
Studies in English Literature 15 (1985)
A plenary lecture to “Literature and the Arts in Western Culture.”
Stanford University March 11 1985
I first came across Candide when I was seventeen, the age of its protagonist at the beginning of the story. I can remember that simple title staring out at me from the spine of a thin volume on the musty shelves of Baron 1 s, the used bookstore that I frequented with my sidekick Weiskopf on Friday afternoons–after our last High School class and before we took the subway downtown to hear music at Jazz on the Wagon, the one place in Greenwich Village you could get into without I.D.
I had heard the name Candide before; it was known in the grapevine as one of those books–intellectual, bohemian and intimate–that our parents wouldn 1 t approve of, books with titles like You Can’t Go Home Again, On the Road, Howl and The Catcher in the Rye. I slipped the book down from the shelf, noticed the “privately printed” inscription, the mannered art-nouveau illustrations of thin bare-breasted girls, the sixty cent price, and I took it to the register.
From the opening sentence, I was entranced. Here was another Holden Caulfield, still a sincere, naive and gentle child, cruelly punishe9 for simply following his natural desires, abruptly booted from a secure nest in what was just beginning to feel like Paradise, and set adrift in a human jungle of repression, hypocrisy, violence and greed. I could relate to that heavy tale–especially since it moved along so lightly, with a little sex and a lot of laughs on almost every page. I too felt adrift in a world of wandering hands and kicks in the backside, of atmospheric H-bomb tests and classroom shelter drills, of Anne Frank and Joe McCarthy.
I finished reading the book at two in the morning on the Staten Island ferry, where we would ride back and forth across New York harbor when the jazz club was too crowded. Thereafter, Candide became another one of those few voices which confirmed my adolescent sense that I lived in a pretty screwed up place-despite the assurances of Doris Day, Dwight Eisenhower and Dr. Norman Vi.11cent Peale that middle-class America was indeed the best of all possible worlds. (more…)