[A lecture to freshmen on the last day of a year-long class in “Literature and the Arts in Western Culture” at Stanford University–June 3, l986]

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)

fortunate senex

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…)

5

The Backstretched Connexion:

Youth and Age

in The Shepheardes Calender

This chapter proposes an interpretation of The Shepheardes Calender which places the debate of youth and age at the work’s core. Spenser used both the thematic content and the formal structure of this minor bucolic convention as the central shaping principle of his major pastoral work. Such emphasis was particularly appropriate, first because pastoral’s rural settings on the periphery of civilization correspond to the peripheral states of the human life cycle, and second, because pastoral’s projection of dual worlds inspires debate-like comparisons of perception and judgment.

But Spenser did not simply reprocess these essential elements of the pastoral tradition. Rather he modified and enriched his conventional models by disclosing the debate of youth and age through the viewpoint of a narrative persona, a viewpoint which shifts in the course of the poem from identification with youth to identification with age. That is to say, Spenser used the pastoral debate of youth and age as a means by which to externalize the inner conflicts of past and future, of regression and maturation, endemic to adolescence. By patterning his series of eclogues with a phased succession of such debates, Spenser allowed the reader to participate in the reversal of perspective that constitutes the subjective transformation of boy into man. Moving from premises about the psychology of pastoral and about the philosophy of debate laid down previously, this chapter arrives at the conclusion that The Shepheardes Calender–a product of its author’s youth and addressed to youthful readers-has as its deepest unifying subject the life stage of youth itself. (more…)

Columbia Spectator