On Trollope's 'The Bertrams' and "understanding"

For an assignment in my 1859/60 seminar, we were to track a word throughout our reading of Trollope's The Bertrams. Wonderful novel, hardly ever read anymore. The assignment was fruitful, I think. Here are the results.

The Bertrams and “understanding”

    I chose to track some derivatives of “understanding” in The Bertrams since Trollope, it seems to me, shoos his characters through the plot primarily by means of a repetition of attempts—and often failures—by Trollope’s characters to understand/to know/to acknowledge the hearts and minds of their comrades and also, critically, of themselves.  I began searching recurrences of “understand,” more often than not finding the word in a negative mode e.g. “could not,” “cannot,” “will not,” “did not,” “do not,” or “hardly” understand etc. Other slight variations on this theme did catch my eye, however, and I tried to include a few in my catalogue such as “…he might not know his own mind….she hardly knew her own mind” (137).

    Thus we have a knowledge-problem spawning much pain and confusion for our lovers and friends. Though sometimes rendered brilliantly comic (as when Miss Todd and Adela visit Mrs. Leake) misunderstanding usually leads to suffering. And Trollope all the while gives us the sense that this suffering—by “stricken harts” and stricken hearts—is needless. In other words, this complex pain could have, indeed, should have, been avoided if George had tried harder to understand the complexity of Caroline; if Old Bertram had better known his own nephew’s character, or recognized better his own miserliness; if Arthur would have actually looked and actually understood Adela’s deep unswaying love (a love that had always been there for him); if Caroline had recognized her own capacity to love George, and her own need to be loved. This profound inability to know, to understand, to acknowledge one’s self and one another I actually do not find to be resolved by the end of the novel. Our lovers do find each other, do find a kind of understanding with one another. Recognition scenes, after all, are not absent from this very English tragicomedy: “Caroline Waddington had once flattered herself that that heart of hers was merely a blood-circulating instrument. But she had discovered her mistake, and learned the truth before it was too late. She had known what it was to love…” (445). But one senses from Trollope’s novel an inevitability: that to live is to suffer, to struggle, and to misunderstand.

    Two characters, Trollope’s heroes, escape this somewhat tragic condition: Adela and Miss Todd. Adela, “pure, true, and honest” always understood Arthur, and always understood herself. Similarly, the Falstaffian Miss Todd sees through the deceptions and misunderstandings of her friends and neighbors: all but once. Miss Todd does fail to understand Miss Baker’s attraction to Sir Lionel, and yet we might see here the success of that misunderstanding: Sir Lionel’s iniquitous seductions, we feel, are better kept far away from Hadley. Miss Todd we are told “does more good to others than others do to her”: to do so is to make a kind of heroic effort. Unlike Arthur’s orthodoxy, Miss Todd’s ethics requires not creeds but only an effort of understanding. 

The Bertrams and “understanding”

Volume One

·         Adela had never before known him to be solicitous about money for himself, and now she felt that she did not understand him. (Chapter 4, p44)

·         Indeed Mr. Bertram did not think very much about degrees. He had taken no degree himself, except a high degree in wealth, and could not understand that he ought to congratulate a young man of twenty-two as to a successful termination of his school-lessons. (55)

·         They did not understand each other; perceiving which, Sir Lionel gave up the subject. He was determined not to make himself disagreeable to his son. (89)

·         “…But you hardly understand me, or him either.”

“I think I understand him, George…” (91)

·         “…I hardly think you know or realize what my feelings to you are. I can only meet you to tell you again and again that I love you. You are so cold yourself that you cannot understand my—my—my impetuosity, if you choose to call it so." (135-136)

·         …he might not know his own mind….she hardly knew her own mind. (137)

·         "Ah! my dear fellow, you do not know her…” (166)

·         "Ah! you say that because you do not understand her…” (166)

·         "And occasionally cheese," said Harcourt, who could not understand that any rising man could marry early, unless in doing so he acquired money. (176)

·         "Yes, I do; at times very, very much; but I fear the time may come when I may love him less. You will not understand me; but the fact is, I should love him better if he were less worthy of my love—if he were more worldly."

"No, I do not understand that," said Adela, thinking of her love, and the worldly prudence of him who should have been her lover.

"That is it—you do not understand me; and yet it is not selfishness on my part. I would marry a man in the hope of making him happy." (184)

Volume Two

·         "But it was a fault of yours. Do you think that I cannot understand? that I cannot see?...” (238) 

·         …she had acted foolishly in that, certainly; had not known him, had not understood his character… (244)

·         "Trouble—trouble! But I will not make a fool of myself. I believe at any rate that you understand me."

"Oh! perfectly, Mr. Bertram."

But she did not understand him; nor perhaps was it very likely that she should understand him. What he had meant her to understand was this: that in giving her up he was sacrificing only himself, and not her; that he did so in the conviction that she did not care for him; and that he did so on this account, strong as his own love still was, in spite of all her offences. This was what he intended her to understand;—but she did not understand the half of it. (251)

·         Bertram did not understand her, and he showed he did not by his look. (253)

·         Mr. Bertram turned towards the table, and buried his face in his hands. He did not understand it. He did not know whence came all this opposition. He could not conceive what was the motive power which caused his nephew thus to thwart and throw him over, standing forward as he did with thousands and tens of thousands in his hand. But he knew that his request was refused, and he felt himself degraded and powerless. (314)

·         "I believe much that I do not understand. I believe the distance of the earth from the sun. I believe that the seed of a man is carried in a woman, and then brought forth to light, a living being. I do not understand the principle of this wondrous growth. But yet I believe it, and know that it is from God. But I cannot believe that evil is good. I cannot believe that man placed here by God shall receive or not receive future happiness as he may chance to agree or not to agree with certain doctors who, somewhere about the fourth century, or perhaps later, had themselves so much difficulty in coming to any agreement on the disputed subject." (334)

·         "Ah! you do not understand, George." (336)

·         “I do not know what you wish me to understand, Mr. Bertram.”

“Yes, Adela, you do; I think you do. I think I am honest and open. At any rate, I strive to be so. I think you do understand me.” (344)

·         She was in a twitter of sentimental restlessness, but she did not understand the cause of her own uneasiness. (377)

Volume Three

·         “Ah! you little know me.”

“I should but little know you if I thought you could esteem me in that guise.” (449)

·         "What is it you mean?"

"I will not deserve the name again—even from you."

"Nonsense; I do not understand you. You do not know what you are saying."

"Yes, Sir Henry, I do know well what I am saying. It may be that I have done you some injury; if so, I regret it. God knows that you have done me much. We can neither of us now add to each other's comfort, and it will be well that we should part."

"Do you mean me to understand that you intend to leave me?"

"That is what I intend you to understand."

"Nonsense; you will do no such thing." (455)

·         “But, Adela, do not misunderstand me…” (461)

·         “Well, I don’t suppose you know your own mind, as yet.”

“Oh, sir! indeed I do.” (464)

·         "Well, all things are possible; but I do not understand how mine are to be cured. They have come too clearly from my own folly." (471)

·         But he knew himself to be a handsome man, and he could not understand how he could be laid aside for so ugly a lout as this stranger from England. (484)

·         Much as his uncle understood, he had failed to understand his nephew’s mind. (516)

·         His lordship had given directions at the lodge that she was not to come up, and could not understand how it had come to pass that the lady had forced her way to the hall-door. (534)

·         “My lord, if you’d only give yourself the trouble to understand me—“

“I don’t understand a word you say...” (537)

·         She felt sure that if Lord Stapledean would only be made to understand the facts of the case, he would yet take her part. (538)

·         “…Now we may fairly trust that we do know our own minds…” (541)

·         His uncle, he knew, had misunderstood him. (555)

·         “Father, you do not understand this matter.” (566)

A rather abstract abstract proposal for ACLA Conference in March

(It's at Harvard! i.e. the only reason I'm applying is to gain access to Houghton library's William James papers...)

Thinker, Soldier, Justice, Die: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and the Pragmatisms of Ending

In 1911, a seventy year old Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. would write that “the best way [to cope with mortality] is not to bother about death until it comes, but just crack ahead.” He would live to 93.

In his Introduction to The Essential Holmes Richard Posner writes that “a diverse cast of moderns….have been concerned with the…implications of taking seriously the definite possibility that man is the puny product of an unplanned series of natural shocks…” Pragmatism and Existentialism, in Posner’s figuring, stem from identical impulses, pragmatism being “typically American,” and existentialism “typically European.”

As has been observed by such critics as Posner and Louis Menand, pragmatism is both a post Darwinian and a post Civil War philosophy. Holmes, serving in the Union Army for three years, was wounded three times. Thus, as Menand argues, “the war was the central experience of his life.” Consequently, Holmes’s jurisprudential career was largely spent combatting those moral abstractions we might call universal principles or natural laws; such abstractions were, after all,  what called a young Holmes to enlist. But however “horrible and dull,” Holmes also found war necessary “everywhere and at all times.”

What I hope to contribute to this conversation on the interconnectedness between writing and death is an exploration of a particularly American voice of this soldier-philosopher judge. What are, for Holmes, the ends of pragmatic philosophy at the ends of life?

Re-reading the Declaration of Independence

Reflections on the Revolution in Philadelphia

[The Declaration] was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.

-Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Henry Lee, 1825

…of all the books that no one can write, those about nations and national character are the most impossible.

-Jaques Barzun

    The Declaration of Independence: it’s a strange thing to really look at, for the first time, a thing you’ve seen your whole life. Strange too that my least favorite subject in school was early American History, and Revolutionary History in particular. Powdered wigs, documents and committees, General Washington floating rather chubbily down the Delaware: so bloodless, so boring. Hypocrites to the man, I had thought, slavery into the nineteenth century! Freedom, indeed. Once, though, I remember quite a revolutionary little pleasure of my own: an exercise in argumentation. Sometime around third or fourth grade, my classmates and I were to write Revolutionary pamphlets. As all were at liberty to represent either the British or American interest, all hands shot up for America, the eager little sycophantic would-be patriots. I—a wised-up, bespectacled nine-year-old yet to have heard of, let alone read, Edmund Burke—I puffed out my chest and raised my hand for Britannia. I alone would defend her, squash these upstart insurrectionists, and risk all for noble King George. I would rein in, and reign over, these ungrateful, incipient would-be pamphleteers!

    Though always a quiet student, I enjoyed the assignment immensely, and I think my teacher took a kind of qualified pride in my distressingly unironic enthusiasm for His Majesty’s purely paternal concern for his colonial children. Certainly such enthusiasm stemmed partly from a play of devil’s advocate, and yet I do think I began really to love the regal British red coats, and took sincere pleasure in the arch argumentation of speaking down to these my comrades: entitled, rhetorically inflated, and so woefully misinformed. They were so dreadfully dismissive of those very real institutions which had allowed that infantile entitlement to flourish in the first place. Duty, King, and Country: to dissolve those bands would be folly indeed. And who would be foolhardy enough to take on the British Navy? I got an A—or its elementary school equivalent—and no small degree of ridicule from my more patriotic classmates.

    I give you this anecdote by way of introduction, but also to try to explain to myself how I came to study American letters, and why. Taking leave of my hasty youthful Anglophilia, I find my higher education has largely revolved around a question I keep asking because it seems important, vital even: what, in any real sense, does “America” mean. I think here of Jaques Barzun's observation that the business of writing about a nation is "the most impossible." Academia too often renders questions of nationhood and national style as naïve, uncritical, even empty. The emotion of national pride, as Richard Rorty wrote, has been largely repudiated by the academic left (Rorty 252). Rorty sees the possibility of a richer national pride: Rorty’s patriot may feel humble, even ashamed, but also sincerely proud of her country. We might here recall Michael Kammen’s People of Paradox. Kammen writes of the tricky business of writing about national “style”:

There is both grandeur and pettiness in the so-called American experience. Hence its interpreter must somehow be unambiguous about ambiguities, must see several sides of many questions without being ultimately indecisive in his conclusions. (Kammen xiii)

Like Kammen, I seem to be writing around the problem of writing about America, and thus I also write around the problem of writing about the Declaration.  How does one approach such a document?

    In his brief, punchy biography (or, better, sketch) of Jefferson, Christopher Hitchens argues that “[t]here is no other example in history, apart from the composition of the King James version of the Bible, in which great words and concepts have been fused into poetic prose by the banal processes of a committee” (Hitchens 23). But credit ultimately still goes to Jefferson as the Declaration’s author, Hitchens writing that rather than “inventing” or “imagining” America, “[i]t would be truer to say…that he designed America, or that he authored it” (Hitchens 5). Thomas Jefferson thought his government “the world’s best hope,” an institution through which the strength of its people could be channeled. “I believe,” he wrote in his first inaugural address, “[our government] the only one where every man, at the call of the law…would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern” (Jefferson 493). There is blood in these words yet, I think. To understand America, or the American Experiment, we turn to Jefferson; to understand Jefferson we could do worse than to turn to the Declaration.   

    Writing to Henry Lee, a distant relative and a brother Governor of Virginia, an octogenarian Jefferson explains “the object of the Declaration of Independence”:

Not to find out new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of, not merely to say things which had never been said before; but to place before mankind the common sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we are compelled to take….[I]t was intended to be an expression of the American mind, and to give to that expression the proper tone and spirit called for by the occasion.  (Jefferson 1501)

Radical but not original. An “expression of the American mind” was still expressed on paper by one American mind in particular. And the contradictions for which Jefferson is often vilified, are the contradictions pointed to in the Declaration as rendering its authors hypocritical and probably insincere. And yet I still shiver at the words: “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary…”; self-evident truths; “all men created are equal”; “inalienable rights”; life and liberty; lives, fortunes, and sacred honors. Liberty, above all, liberty. So where stem the troubles? Staughton Lynd, in his Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism, identifies one particular tension within the document: “…the latent tension within the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence between an outlook on society based on property and a contrasting perspective built on conscience, or on self-determining human activity, could not long be avoided” (qtd. Kammen 237). We’re talking about, as Kammen points out, the nature of property and we’re also talking about the essence of mankind. Put together, we’re talking about the American ownership, in July of 1776, of a few hundred thousand men, women, and children. People as property.

     Natural rights and universal principles; theoretical beliefs and practical realities. Justice and reality can seldom be held in a single vision. In an 1852 commemorative speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Douglas would be rather frank to his audience as to just what exactly Independence Day means to the slave in America:

…a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham…your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery….There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

    Go where you may, search where you will…for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, American reigns without a rival. (Douglass 127)

We might picture the scattered applause, and gaping jaws. Still, Douglass addresses his contemporaries more than Jefferson. The Founding Fathers, Douglass writes, were “unlike the politicians of an hour! Their statesmanship looked beyond the passing moment, and stretched away in strength into the distant future. They seized upon eternal principles” (Douglass 121). As much may be said of Jefferson, we do know. Congress cut about a quarter of Jefferson's original draft, the majority of the cut portions decrying slavery, that "execrable commerce" (Jefferson 22). The cuts crucially meant keeping the colonies together--these edits were very practical, probably necessary. He would have had to have been pragmatic, bending idealism down into the confines of  the dire situation at hand. And yet we still, with John Adams, admit pretty bitterly the probable necessity of cutting such language: "[King George] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery" (22). 

    Perhaps slavery was on Jefferson's mind when property became happiness. Though heavily influenced by the natural rights philosophy of John Locke, Jefferson makes a crucial change to this oft-quoted passage in Locke's Second Treatise of Government: "The state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one: and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions… (Locke 9, emphasis original). Our inalienable rights no longer extend to ownership, but to being happy. Douglass wrote that the founding fathers “loved their country better than their own private interests” and perhaps this might help explain, if only a little, why Jefferson continued to own slaves. He held the country’s future to a higher standard; much higher than that to which he could hope to hold himself and his comrades in 1776.

Works Cited

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of an American Slave. New York: Norton Critical          Edition, 1997.

Hitchens, Christopher. Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. New York: Harper Perennial,           2009.

Jefferson, Thomas. Writings ed. Merrill Peterson. New York: Library of America, 1984.

Kammen, Michael. People of Paradox. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972.

Locke, John. Second Treatise of Government. Hackett Publishing, 1980.

Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and Social Hope. London: Penguin Books, 1999.

Welles on Falstaff

"I think Shakespeare was greatly preoccupied, as I am in my humble way, with the loss of innocence. And I think there has always been an England, an older England, which was sweeter, and purer, where the hay smelt better and the weather was always springtime and the daffodils blew in the gentle warm breezes. And its the..you feel the nostalgia for it in Chaucer, and you feel it all through Shakespeare.

And I think that he was profoundly against the modern age, as I am. I'm against my modern age, he was against his. And I think his villains are modern people, just as they're likely to be continental. I always see the villains in Lear are non-Anglo Saxon, they're from over there; they're from, they represent the modern world...

Innocence is what Falstaff is. He is a kind of refugee from that world. He has to live by his wits, he has to be funny. He hasn't a place to sleep if he doesn't get a laugh out of his patron. So it's a rough, modern world that he's living in. But I think you have to see in his eyes--it's why I was so very glad to be doing it in black and white, if it's in color he must have blue eyes. You've got to see that look that comes out of the Age that never existed, but exists in the heart of all English poetry."

Okay, another. James Earl Jones reads Othello I.iii

Chiwetel Ejiofor Othello Act I Scene iii (2007)

OTHELLO:	Her father loved me; oft invited me;
	Still question'd me the story of my life,
	From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes,		130
	That I have passed.
	I ran it through, even from my boyish days,
	To the very moment that he bade me tell it;
	Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,
	Of moving accidents by flood and field
	Of hair-breadth scapes i' the imminent deadly breach,
	Of being taken by the insolent foe
	And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
	And portance in my travels' history:
	Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,		140
	Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven
	It was my hint to speak,--such was the process;
	And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
	The Anthropophagi and men whose heads
	Do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear
	Would Desdemona seriously incline:
	But still the house-affairs would draw her thence:
	Which ever as she could with haste dispatch,
	She'ld come again, and with a greedy ear
	Devour up my discourse: which I observing,		150
	Took once a pliant hour, and found good means
	To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart
	That I would all my pilgrimage dilate,
	Whereof by parcels she had something heard,
	But not intentively: I did consent,
	And often did beguile her of her tears,
	When I did speak of some distressful stroke
	That my youth suffer'd. My story being done,
	She gave me for my pains a world of sighs:
	She swore, in faith, twas strange, 'twas passing strange,		160
	'Twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful:
	She wish'd she had not heard it, yet she wish'd
	That heaven had made her such a man: she thank'd me,
	And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,
	I should but teach him how to tell my story.
	And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake:
	She loved me for the dangers I had pass'd,
	And I loved her that she did pity them.
	This only is the witchcraft I have used:

Olivier's Othello (1965)

Despite the blackface, he's incredible here. And a very young Maggie Smith as Desdemona. Compare to Welles scene of weird ritualistic creepiness. I like both versions, but Olivier's is more empathetic somehow, less a mad man than one tragically manipulated.

Welly, Welly, Welles. Welles as Othello (1952).

The murder scene. Creepy erotic with that smothering kiss of death:

And in entirely with commentary from Bogdonovich:

Scribblings on Othello: Honesty, Skepticism, Irony, Tragedy

This scribbling is for my purpose. I'll be teaching Othello soon, and want to get some ideas down. I've never taught Shakespeare, but I think this play while complicated will be very teachable i.e. easy to get students interested, even immersed in the aesthetic swirling of this play--so much is going on! I've quite a bit of time to simply scribble before formally planning anything. I'm reading Hazlitt, Goddard, G. Wilson Knight, Bloom, Bernard McElroy, Jan Kott's fabulous Shakespeare Our Contemporary, and Millicent Bell's Shakespeare's Tragic Skepticism. The students are undergraduates, so I want to approach with close reading rather than beat them about with wonky theory. Theory can open up new worlds of a text, but you really need to read it with a clear head first. Scribbling begins:

Valences of "honesty": trust, and virtue/chastity. William Empson counts 52 occurrences of the word (or its variations). The increasing irony of such a word as the play moves along. To be true, or to be false. To be black or white. Is this a black and white world? Or can something be both? Is this a grey world? Can you trust what you see, what you hear? Are things what they seem? Appearance/Reality becomes the major philosophical concern of this play:

"I am not what I am."

 "Speak of me as I am."

"Men should be what they seem." 

Moral vs. intellectual truth. Does one prevail? Do both fail? Shakespeare vs. Iago. Which author/manipulator wins? What is the significance of Iago's silence at the end of the play? Are Othello's last words to be trusted i.e. are they honest words?

The tragic exploitation of the gap between appearance and reality. Deception vs. honesty.

Motivations of Iago--that old question. Is he a devil, or man who hates himself and the world? A man who would have agreed with Hamlet that the world seemed "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable," seeing abject fecunity everywhere: "tis an unweeded garden / That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in / nature / Possess it merely."

Is this a cosmic play? Is it trapped, as G. Wilson Knight claims, within the boundaries of its own literality? I'm tending toward the former.

Cosmic rhetoric (language of heaven and hell) and also the animal/bestial rhetoric.

Moving more toward a reading of Othello's tragical skepticism. Certainly Othello is tragic in the Classical sense. Edith Hamilton tells us that "[t]ragedy's preoccupation is with suffering," and certainly in Othello we have suffering. But the stakes are always immense, if not cosmic, in the very best tragedies. We need "[t]he suffering of a soul that can suffer greatly" (The Greek Way). Othello suffers greatly. But what do I mean by tragical skepticism? If we do read Othello as cosmic rather than literal--dealing with the universal as well as the particular--then the tragic letdown has to be ultimate.

Things are not, cannot be, what they seem in this world. Stanley Cavell wrote that skepticism was "that anxiety about our human capacity as knowers that can be taken to open modern philosophy in Descartes". Cavell links this anxious awareness of the limitations of human perception to tragedy: skepticism becomes "the playing out of tragedy" and tragedy "the working out of skepticism" (see In Quest of the Ordinary). We're talking about disappointment, about getting exactly nowhere. I think of Thoreau's quiet desperation.

Anxieties of appearance and perception--how fascinating and troubling in a play steeped in race. Things aren't black and white. We want to keep the world black and white! No philosophical or biological miscegenation allowed!

Tim Morton's definition of irony as an aesthetic exploitation of a gap between levels of signification really cleared up many vague ideas about irony I had previously been pretending to understand. From Timothy Morton's Realist Magic, near the end of Chapter 2: "Magic Birth":

"Beginnings thus involve a peculiar brand of irony that I call apoleptic. We’re all fairly familiar with proleptic irony: the irony of anticipation in which we know something that a character in a narrative doesn’t know yet. Now meet its weird sister, apoleptic irony. Apoleptic irony is the retroactive irony we feel when a narrative’s ending causes us to look back differently at the narrative. The gap between what we thought we were reading and what we are now reading is exploited. (While teaching I describe irony as gapsploitation: the aesthetic exploitation of a gap between 1+n levels of signification. Which is more of a mouthful than “gapsploitation.”) What is ironic about Alanis Morisette’s song “Ironic”? [66] What’s ironic is the fact that none of the examples she gives are examples of irony. There is a gap between what the song says it is and what it actually is...