Category: feminism

E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End

In our reading group discussion of Howard’s End, I called Henry Wilcox “despicable”—a comment that generated some push back from other members of the group.  And in discussing our meeting afterwards with Jane, I realized that I had not made myself clear.  Straight out: I was not saying business people are despicable.  Henry is a fictional character; if he is despicable, that’s because Forster has portrayed him as such. Henry is Forster’s portrayal of a certain type, not the reality of how actual business people (who come in all stripes) are. That Forster did not portray a practical man we could respect and like is the central failure of the novel.  I believe Forster wanted to give “both sides” their due, but that he failed to do so.

To explain: I agree with Scott in our group that Forster wanted to write a novel that accepts (even “demonstrates”) that we need both the artsy intellectuals (who attend to the “inner life) and the practical business people who get things done.  Forster endorses Meg’s insight that their artsy life is utterly dependent on the business men.  Meg’s income—and even more concretely the clothes she wears and the food she eats—exist only through the work done by other hands.  She does nothing herself to make those necessities appear—as they regularly do.  She is a parasite, feeding off what others produce. By extension, Forster–and yours truly–are also parasites.

Given that fact—and Forster’s desire to live up to that fact—the novel strives to provide a bridge, to forge a connection, between the intellectual world and the practical one.  It wants to pay homage to the strengths of each side, to show that each has a contribution to make to creating the “good life.”  And this notion of the “good life” is grounded in the somewhat more concrete question of national identity.  What should we, as a people, make of England?  The novel is shot through with a deep love for the English landscape and of English places—and suffused with a fear that modern speed (cars are a menace even as they move too fast to allow a true appreciation of the countryside through which they move) and modern rootlessness (loss of attachment to place) threaten any ability to retain identity.

But when it comes to executing his design, Forster (in my opinion) fails spectacularly.  The deck is just too stacked against Wilcox and in favor of Margaret.  Wilcox is obtuse and selfish.  What are his sins? He fails to understand his first wife and her attachment to Howard’s End.  He ignores the first wife’s desire for the house to go to Margaret, even though he has no love for or even use for the house himself.  He is unfaithful to his first wife—and thinks the sin is the sexual act not the violation of his relationship to his wife.  He fails to “connect” his off-hand remark about Leonard Bast’s place of business to Leonard’s subsequent economic ruin (part of his more general inability to connect large-scale business decisions with their real impact on individual lives).  He is generally (and persistently) condescending to women, convinced of their inability to understand or handle anything, of their congenital hysteria.  This attitude culminates in his attempt to prevent Meg (now his wife) from going with him to see her sister Helen when she has finally reappeared after an eight month absence.  His behavior toward women convinces Helen and Meg that men have absolutely no ability to understand women.  There is only the slim chance that in two thousand years from the present some connection (that key word in the novel) between the sexes will be achieved.

Finally, of course, there is the crucial moment when Meg challenges Henry to “connect,” to see that Helen (whom he condemns) has only done what Henry himself has done and Meg has forgiven him for doing.  To see that his real crime was the deceit and infidelity to the first Mrs. Wilcox (not the sexual act); to see that he is, at least in part, responsible for Leonard’s plight.  But Henry cannot see any of that. And, at that point, Meg’s forbearance comes to an end.  She cannot forgive this moral blindness—and there will now be a break-up of their marriage. 

So the novel does not portray the virtues and vices of each side (in the duality it sets up between the artsy and the practical) evenly.  Throughout the novel, Meg has had to discount Henry’s flaws in ways that he does not have to discount hers.  All the yielding and forbearance is on her side.  Forster has failed to make Henry likeable or to paint a convincing picture of his virtues.  In fact, the narrator from the start keeps making snide comments about the “Wilcox” way of thinking and of not feeling.  True, the narrator also offers some criticisms of the Schlegel girls—and the portrait of the selfish and ineffectual brother Tibby is devastating.  But (at least for this reader) I never lose sympathy for Meg while I never get any sympathy for Henry.  His flaws accumulate until their culmination in his failure to “connect” at the key moment in his history. The mystery of the book is why Meg would ever agree to marry Henry, knowing his general attitude to (and contempt for) women and his specific ill treatment of and disregard for the first Mrs. Wilcox.

And then Henry collapses when the crisis also entails his son Charles going to prison.  Henry becomes a child at the end, helpless and totally dependent on the care of the women.  Instead of portraying a world that pays equal homage to the virtues of practical men and artsy women, it looks instead like Forster really (in his heart of hearts?) can’t feel any respect or liking for men—and would, ideally, like to see a world run by women.  All his sympathies, it seems to me, lie on the feminine side.  Forster, too, if you will, fails to connect.  He knows, intellectually, that men are necessary—but that doesn’t mean he has to like that fact or the men who embody it.  He tries to write a book that overcomes some of his most basic feelings (prejudices).  That’s a noble enterprise (I think), but one I don’t believe he pulls off.  His emotional commitments override his intellectual effort to write against their grain.

Disparate Economies (2): Sex and Love

Before I try to talk about economies of sexual selection and of power and of fame (following up on my earlier discussion of economies of status), I really should try to nail down what I mean by an “economy.”

An economist friend of mine once chided me for using the term “capitalism.”  There is no such thing as capitalism, he insisted; there are only “markets.”  Obviously, the markets for higher education, healthcare, and food work in very different ways.  For one thing, they have entirely different distribution methods; for another, each relies on a very different set of subsidies.  Who pays—and for what—differs radically in the three cases.

My title “disparate economies” points in this direction.  I am talking about “an economy” of status, not about “the” economy (an aggregate of the effects of multiple disparate economies/markets).  There is no reason to believe knowing the intricacies of financial markets will yield much in the way of insights that can be carried over in the effort to understand an economy of status.

Still, how do I want to characterize “an economy” in general terms?  Here goes.  “An economy” is a set of actions (or, better, interactions) organized around the effort to secure possession of or access to a defined good. There must be multiple actors for an economy to exist. These actors must share a minimal agreement that the good(s) in question are desirable. (They can vary in the intensity of their desire for those goods, where those variations in intensity may give certain actors an advantage over others.)  The pursued good(s) must be relatively scarce.  That is, there will be a competition to secure the good(s)—a competition motivated by the sense that either a) some people will be derived of that good altogether or b) the good will be unequally distributed.  Where a good is available to all in exactly equal quantities, there is not an economy, just an administrative issue of distribution.  (This logic dictates Marx’s famous—if mostly mistaken—idea that that state will wither away, to be replaced by the “administration of things.”)

This Marxist notion points to the important fact that an economy much be structured; it must have fairly clear delineations of what counts as possession, and what are legitimate means for securing possession, and in the case of alienable goods, what counts as accepted procedures for the transfer of goods from one person to another.  This structure needs to be enforced.  Thus no economy without power.  There must be a location from which the rules are enforced and from which “recognition” of legitimate possession/achievement emanates.  Formal economies are structured legally—with the whole ensemble of contracts, torts, civil court cases etc. 

[This does not mean an economy must be zero sum, only that the good in question must be hierarchically arranged. Think of the housing market. Various markers–size, location, amenities, prestige–mark some houses as more desirable than others. But that doesn’t mean someone must go without any housing at all. It’s not musical chairs where the loser is left with nothing. Granite countertops become de rigueur in even the most modest houses as consolation for the knowledge that, by dint of various intractable exigencies, one has had to settle for something less than one’s dream house.]

Informal economies are trickier since they lack these legal underpinnings.  An economy of status is wonderfully circular.  Those who have the right to confer status on others have never been elected into some formal or official role.  Their power comes solely from their being deemed social arbiters by other players in the game.  (This is a somewhat less true where there is an official aristocracy.  In that case, the state does play some role in designating power to certain players in the game.)  Hence there will be jockeying for positions as social arbiters even as there is also jockeying for being granted status (“recognition’) by those arbiters.  Two competitions are going on at the same time—and the whole thing is much less stable than an ordering that is secured by laws.  Fashion is fickle; those on top today may be deemed “out” (old-fashioned and passé) tomorrow.  The markers of status fluctuate as does membership in the elites that get to determine who has status and who does not.

In sum, there is a common good that participants in an economy are pursuing; there are recognized and accepted protocols/markers of possession and exchange; and some power has the ability to sanction competitors who don’t obey the rules (written or unwritten).  The structure, to be clear, is not immune to change—and that means structures can be ambiguous, neither clearly discerned or free of “grey areas” where the norms of proper behavior are unclear.  The endless jockeying for advantage always includes some players who are trying to bend or change the rules of the game in their favor.  The hoary historical argument is that French society’s deep resistance to changing the social orders of the ancien régime to accommodate non-aristocratic wealth was one cause of the French Revolution, while the English avoided that kind of violent social upheaval by providing a ladder toward political power and social status to its middle classes.

OK. It appears (taking Jane Austen’s novels as our evidence) that the sexual selection market in her England, at least among the top 10 percent (in terms of wealth) was highly formal.  Women eligible for marriage were declared “out” and were paraded in front of prospective spouses in public assemblies, private balls, and other social events.  A man wishing to marry could survey the available women—and make his choice.  Sexual selection outside of this formal system was frowned upon—declassé and scandalous.  From James Boswell’s and Pepys’s diaries (from the 18th and 17th centuries respectively) to Frank Harris’ My Secret Life at the end of the 19th century, we can deduce that sex outside of marriage in England was mostly enabled by class divisions.  Upper class men could impose themselves on lower class women, with a variety of seduction techniques at their disposal (ranging from direct payment to various blandishments that played upon the woman’s desire to rise in social class.)  It is important to note that men who were hanging on to the lower rungs of the top 10% could not expect to marry until well into their thirties (when they would have—ideally—finally secured the economic security to afford a wife and all that a “respectable” home was meant to possess).  An outlet for sexual desire prior to that happy date was needed—and mostly winked at, if one were reasonably discreet and did not prey on women of “respectable” social standing.  As Pride and Prejudice shows in the case of Wickham and Lydia, marriage is expected if dalliance with a respectable woman is discovered.  George Eliot’s Adam Bede offers the opposite case: the lower class woman is abandoned by her squire seducer.

All this, of course, only for the top 10%.  Among the lowest classes in Victorian England (at least), most couples didn’t bother to get married (the cost of a marriage license was one disincentive) to the endless hand-wringing of moralists (who also bemoaned the fact that the urban underclasses, in particular, never went to church).  Sex among the underclasses was a chaotic mess; it would be tempting to call this an entirely unstructured economy.  But the fact of the matter is that we just don’t have deep enough ethnographic insight into the habits and expectations of the London underclass to know how they structured sexual relationships.   That drink and poverty generated lots of sexual and domestic abuse is certain, but we don’t know much more than that. 

On the flip side, there was a tendency among Victorian commentators (I just don’t know much about the discourse around these subjects prior to the Victorian period) to romanticize the rural yeoman class and even the tenancy.  (An exception: the wonderful scene in Middlemarch where Mr. Brooke is given an earful by one of his tenants.)  The temptation to view the rural non-gentry as mostly aping the civilized behavior of their “betters” goes along with the general nostalgia for a non-urban England and general horror at what the Industrial Revolution has wrought.  London is bad enough, but Liverpool and Manchester are completely and utterly unspeakable.

If we turn to the 20th century United States, it would seem that the marriage market (outside of the very rarefied world of debutantes and Philip Barry-like “high society”) has lost all the cohesion of Austen’s novels.  There is no place to view what is on offer.  Meeting a suitable mate is happenstance, a function of opportunities afforded by school, workplaces, neighborhoods, or civic associations like churches.  And there is the additional problem of finding someone unspoken for, since dating (and other forms of pairing off) occurs early in life.  Late-comers to the dating game (for lack of a better term) will have to try to separate out the available from the unavailable—a problem that Austen’s world avoids with its clear identification of which women are available.  In short, there is no clear opportunity to survey a range of choices at a particular moment in time.  Sexual selection is much more determined by what swims into view and is available in particular circumstances at any given moment.  There is not much sense of making a choice among multiple options, since there is never an opportunity to view the “field” simultaneously.  The rationality to which Austen’s women—and other characters in Victorian novels—aspire in making their marital choices seems very foreign to how romance unfolds in the 20th century.  The clear-eyed view of what it would mean to be married to this person was probably not very prevalent in Austen’s world either, but it is not even aspired to by mid-20th century.

As for non-marital sex, practices prior to “the pill” were very class determined.  Bohemians and various underclasses (including the racially stigmatized) had lots more extra-marital sex and had very different attitudes toward it than the respectable middle classes.  The same holds for homosexual sex, which was not a big deal by the 1940s in Greenwich Village, but still mostly unknown—and an object of deep abhorrence when known—among the general population.  We could also do a class typography about attitudes toward adultery and pre-marital sex in the years before 1960.

The pill brought a democratization of sex if we can call it that.  Just as women’s entrance into the workplace with college degrees as a result of “women’s liberation” was one cause for the explosion of divorces. (The disappearance of social disapproval of divorce along with the collapse of legal and financial barriers to dissolving a marriage has transformed the meaning and practices of marriage dramatically since 1960.) I guess you could say that a chaotic market became even more chaotic once the sanctions for non-marital sex, the opprobrium attached to divorce, and even the strictures of “compulsory heterosexuality” were eroded.  The very idea that sexual relations had the telos of marriage and children lost its hold on both practice and the imagination.  Lots of options (all of which, of course, had always existed) were now more openly acknowledged—and had lost most of their stigma.

Enter the internet.  And, oddly, we seem to have moved back toward Austen’s world.  Of course, the market is not only offering suitable and available marriage partners.  Some people use the dating apps in that pursuit, but you can also use them to avail yourself of the other options on the spectrum of sexual relations.  Still, you get to survey a number of available partners at the same instant of time; you get to make a choice among this large number (exactly what I think you could not do in 1950, where not only the number of choices was circumscribed, but more crucially the moment of choice did not reveal a large range of available partners.)  There is now, via the internet, quite literally a market in sexual selection.

Various etiquettes, unwritten rules, have not surprisingly evolved to structure this market.  And the dating apps have worked to find different niches in relation to the different goals of their users.  Your expectations are, to a fairly explicit extent, set by which app you are using.  And then the behaviors that follow if you actually meet in the flesh a person originally met “on line” follow from those expectations.

In other words, although this is an informal economy, it is not an unstructured one. On the behavioral level, it would seem the structure comes from cultural scripts.  Everyone hears about love and marriage in popular lore—songs, stories, movies, poetry—from their earliest days.  There is nothing more common than the adolescent experience of wondering “is this really love?” and “am I in love?”  We have the concept and the narratives that accompany it before we have the experience or the emotions—and so wonder if the experience and emotions are the right fit, are the “real thing.”  When it comes to sex itself, the scripts are less overt, shrouded in mystery, although books and movies offer some suggestions.  Still Bob Seger’s “working on mysteries without any clues” in the attempt to develop one’s “night moves” often fits the case.  Haunted by phrases like “good in bed” and myths/hints about orgasms and ecstasy-producing bedroom practices, it is as difficult to avoid being self-conscious in bed as it is to be “natural” in the social intercourse that leads to bed—and/or to romance and love in all its possible variants.  The poets and the pornographers (representing to the two extremes of a very long spectrum) are always there before us.

[A side-note: another temporal variable is when in life the individual is pursuing sexual and/or romantic relations. I read of a study that said alcohol consumption while in college had no predictive value for habits of alcohol use ten years after college. I don’t know if this is actually true, but it is suggestive. Sexual experimentation and promiscuity mean something rather different in one’s twenties as opposed to one’s forties. It does seem that there is a strong through-line heading to monogamy in contemporary culture, but that there are a significant number of non-monogamous (or serially monogamous) years prior to “settling down.” And, of course, there is a significant minority who never settle into monogamy. My point is only that the percentage of non-monogamous actors is higher among 20 year olds than among 40 year olds–and, perhaps more significantly, approval of non-monogamy (or, at least, a willingness to let it pass) is higher if those involved are 25, not 45. We expect experimentation, some form of “wilding,” among the young, but are less tolerant of it later in life. Note, however, how weak social disapproval is when it comes to sexual behavior; it only rarely influences what people do. They are generally willing to bear the cost of their neighbor’s disapproval.]

The varieties of the scripts out there and the practices they underwrite is one reason the human relations encompassed by the sphere of sex and love appears so chaotic.  Everything from date rape and the use of rape drugs to the most tentative movement toward marriage has its models—and inspires some one.  In Austen’s world that chaos (i.e. the uncertainties that plague every encounter that might or does lead to a sexual relationship) is richly represented.  For women especially, since there is no exit from marriage and almost no power within it, making the wrong choice is disastrous.  And the consequences that follow from being seduced outside the frame of marriage (especially if pregnancy follows) is the stuff of thousands of novels before the 20th century—and of plenty of novels after 1900.

My wife tells me that she heard an interview with a “dating coach” this past week on NPR.  So the chaos of multiple available scripts bedevils participants in the sex/love economy.  How to work out a path for oneself that provides the proper (happy) ending?  Interestingly, in another return to an Austen like economy of such matters, the coach reported that discussions on money, of one’s financial position, are now common on the first date.  The Austen imperative to join prudence (finding a man with the financial wherewithal to support a household) with love (true affection; she frowns upon marrying solely for money) appears to be becoming more explicit if the coach is to be believed.  The previously prevailing squeamishness of talking about money could be as passé as squeamishness of talking about sex.

The individual, then, must pick one’s way through a chaos of possible scripts, of possible forms of relating to another that involve gradations of sexual involvement.  A similar anarchy, it seems to me, is revealed when we ask what power(s) enforce the structures that undergird this economy.  As is the case with many unwritten realms, social censure is one source of sanction.  But when it comes to sex, that sanction is noticeably weaker than it was sixty years ago.  Most parents in 1960 strongly objected to two people living together prior to marriage.  Similar (even more intense) outrage attached to homosexual relations, or relations across racial lines, or various forms of polyamory.  The force of such condemnations (where they still exist) has greatly diminished.  Various arrangements and practices that would have been kept secret in the past are now fully “out of the closet.” 

I think we should actually take the idea of “anarchy” seriously here. Where social sanctions/disapproval are weak and the state enforcement absent–or, at best, reluctant, intermittent, and not to be relied upon–pretty much anything goes. And that, historically, has generally been disastrous for women, whose only recourse is to depend on male benevolence (a slender reed indeed). Abuses of women by men are just about impossible to punish–except (again, historically) if the women’s family intervenes. In Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Bennett’s absurd notion that Mr. Bennett will fight Wickham points to this means of recourse, even as Elizabeth bemoans the fact that her family has neither the financial nor social wherewithal to force Wickham to marry Lydia. Only Darcy has the clout to make the marriage happen–and his coming to the rescue is deus ex machina in action.

Even post-1960, not all practices are now openly displayed. For the most part, however, the practices that are kept secret are also subject to legal, state-enforced, sanction.  The “Me-too” movement is just the latest attempt by women to shore up state support in the fight against practices of which women are disproportionately the victims. Campaigns to publicize the prevalence of rape, incest, and domestic violence—and to follow up those publicity campaigns with pressure on the state to punish these abuses—have been a mainstay of second-wave feminism.  Sexual harassment is another item on that list.  Since women are not just almost exclusively the victims of such crimes, but that the state has rarely ever acted to protect women from them, motivates this effort to change what has up to now been the rule (more accurately, the lack of rule.)  Without the state stepping in, it’s pure anarchy—and women are almost always the losers in that case.  Only state intervention might possibly establish a balance of power between the sexes after thousands of years of female powerlessness.

Of course, marriage itself is the traditional site of the state’s involvement in issues of sex and love.  But even as there are calls for greater state enforcement of some standards of appropriate sexual behavior, the state’s hand in marriage has been greatly weakened.  Barriers to divorce have fallen and criminalization of adultery has entirely disappeared.  (Such sanctions for adultery were rarely strong in either the US or England—and, predictably, tended to punish women more harshly than men in the cases where there was some enforcement.)  So it seems fair to say that the marriage economy is becoming increasingly informal, outside the purview of the state, even as reformers work for greater state regulation of sexual practices deemed harmful and non-consensual. 

There is another way–besides the open display of partners enabled by the internet–in which the current sexual economy mirrors that in Jane Austen’s world. The choice of partners is fairly strictly limited to one’s own social class/milieu. This fact goes hand-in-hand with the “big sort.” Americans increasingly only interact (or even live near) people who share their educational background, their financial resources, and, more generally, their tastes. Long ago, Herbert Gans spoke of “taste cultures.” What he did not foresee was actual geographical segregation according to membership in these different cultures. More consequently, he didn’t predict that political opinions and allegiances would increasingly be dictated by “tastes” (or sensibility) as contrasted to economic interest or commitment to various policies/goals. (Mark Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler’s Prius or Pickup? [Mariner Books, 2018] offers a convincing and succinct account of the cultural divides that now predict and shape how one votes and what position one takes on issues like global warming, vaccines etc.)

That the choice of sexual partners has followed the same kinds of segregation is fairly evident. True, there are some ethnic groups whose members are strongly inclined to only marry other members of the group. So that kind of bias in sexual selection is out there. But now bias as to education, profession, and politics have been added to the mix. Jane Austen would certainly be at home with these latter biases, while taking for granted the ethnic/racial bias. The causes for this narrowing of the pool of “acceptable” partners are many, but certainly the increased access by middle-class women to educational and professional attainment is one. Doctors don’t marry nurses any longer. They marry other doctors. Another is the decline of public education. As elites have abandoned public schools–from kindergarten right through to grad school–spaces for cross-class encounters have disappeared. Social segregation will, almost by default, lead to very few marriages that cross class lines (where “class” is a general term to designate the other people one associates with and not a technical term about relative wealth, power, or status). Whether the same fairly rigid segregation holds for non-marital sexual relations is less clear. As with the Victorians, there is not much social pressure attached to whom one has sex with–even as there is considerable social pressure (and expectation) that one will marry the right “kind” of person.

Despite hysterical fears to the contrary, sexual and social intercourse between the sexes is not going to end. The hysteria is usually driven by three things: a)fear of the biological advances–from the pill to various forms of artificial insemination–that disconnect sex from reproduction; b) a sense that women have increased their share of power in the dynamics of sexual exchanges, with this increased power partly due to their increased ability to be financially independent, partly due to the biological advances just noted, and partly due to the massive shifts in attitude that accompanied “women’s liberation; and c) the greatly increased fluidity of sexual/gender identification and the variety of sexual practices (as well as sexual identities) this has brought into view. The sexual economy appears more multifarious than ever. Whether this is an artifact of visibility, or actually the case is hard to know. We can say with certainty that prevailing attitudes and arrangements of the powers that structure this economy are in a state of flux.  Which is why navigating these waters seems particularly difficult at this moment in time, even as one can go on-line to survey the variety of offers the market puts in front of any individual.

On to thinking about economies of fame and power in future posts.

Spinoza, Goethe, and Liza Dalby

One of my reading groups has just finished reading Goethe’s Faust (both part)—and our discussion reproduced the arguments that book has generated since it first appeared in the world.

To put the mater bluntly: how is it that Faust is saved at the end of the play?  He is, for many readers, a “criminal and a madman” (to quote from David Luke’s introduction to the translation we read.)  A criminal in his seduction and betrayal of Gretchen, an act that leads directly to four deaths (Gretchen’s mother, her brother, the infant she conceives with Faust, and Gretchen herself.)  His repentance for those crimes is unconvincing to many readers.

And he is a madman in his utopian scheme to hold back the sea and create a “paradisal scene,” a “wide new land” where “new human habitations stand” (Part Two, Act V, lines 11087; 11007-8).  What might seem a noble enterprise, a desire to provide the necessities and even comforts of life for others, is tainted from the start by Faust’s declared desire:  “I want to rule and to possess; what need/Have I of fame?  What matters but the deed?” (Part Two, Act IV, lines 10187-88).  A desire for eminence, for the commission of “high deeds” (Part Two, Act IV, line 10181), not any investment in the benefits those deeds might produce, drives Faust forward.  The point of striving, it would seem, lies simply in the striving, not in its results. 

The madness is revealed partly through the hubristic aim of holding back the sea.  Faust tells us that he hates the sea’s “barren will,” the way that it ceaselessly comes forward, only to withdraw, with “not a thing achieved,” “this useless elemental energy!/And so my spirit dares new wings to span:/This I would fight, and conquer if I can” (Part Two, Act IV, 10217; 10219-10222.)  He appears completely unaware that his own “striving” is just as pointless, just as wrapped up in the ceaseless expression of energy, and never oriented toward an actual  accomplishment. 

The madness (which now seems characteristic of modern men) also entails this fight against natural processes, this urge to dominate them, to install a humanly imposed order that brings nature to heel.  Only shortly before (at the beginning of Act IV), Faust has recognized that Nature is a power that is separate from and indifferent to human concerns.  “When Nature’s reign began, pure and self-grounded/Then this terrestrial globe it shaped and rounded . . . .Thus Nature takes her pleasure, never troubling/With all your crazy swirl and boil and bubbling” (Part Two, Act IV, lines 10097-8; 10105-6).  Perhaps it is this very transcendence that makes humans want to subdue nature; nature’s separateness threatens the human pretension to self-sufficiency and thus becomes insufferable.  Nature must be subdued, even while its dominion (not least its imposition of a death that will, without fail, come to all) cannot finally be overcome.  Striving to deny its power is mad.

Cancer is natural—and few would say that human efforts to thwart its unfolding is ignoble, crazy, and not worth the effort.  So there is some chance that Goethe actually endorses Faust’s ambitions, that Goethe sees the efforts of modern man to harness nature’s energies and processes as laudable striving, even if the effort is bound to only limited successes. Here’s how we might ventriloquize a certain (Usually masculine) vision of “life” and the position of humans within it: “We humans are at war with the nature that brings cancer and death; romantic notions of living in harmony with nature are nonsensical delusions, blind to the destructive forces embedded in nature, in the war of all against all that is nature’s primary law.  Striving is the only way forward; conflict the way new things, perhaps even better ones, are brought into the world.  Heraclitus: “War is the father of all things.”  We are doomed to striving, to kicking against the pricks, and it’s sentimental nonsense to call that striving “madness” and think we can find some modus vivendi with the nature that is out to kill us. Similarly, full human potential is only unleashed in competition, in striving against others.”

On that reading, Faust is saved precisely because his restless striving is the right way to live—irrespective of the results of that striving.  A life is only fully lived when the self expresses its vital energies, is oriented to “the deed,” with the devil taking the hindmost.  Faust’s relentless search for that which might satisfy him should be applauded—while we also admit the harsh fact that his striving will bring him into conflict not only with nature but also with other human beings.  Life is a contact sport—and some people (nay, all people) are going to get hurt.

That “positive” reading of Faust and his striving is going to lead me to Spinoza.  But two additional thoughts first.  1. The case for a negative reading of Faust, for the conclusion that he is “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” (the famous description of Byron), is cemented (it seems to me) by his covetousness once he has created his dominion grabbed from the sea.  We are told that his land’s creation required “human sacrifice” (Part Two, Act V, line 11128).  But, again, that might be read as simply the acceptance that there is no making of an omelet with breaking some eggs.  (It is often claimed that sentiment was expressed by Stalin; but, in fact, I have only seen it stated explicitly by the British politician and imperialist Joseph Chamberlain, father of the appeaser Neville Chamberlain.) More damning is Faust’s inability to tolerate that others might have dominion over their own patches of land, no matter how small.  He must uproot Baucis and Philemon.  Even as he gazes over his “masterpiece of man’s creation,” Faust feels the “sharpest torment: what/A rich man feels he has not got!”  “Their stubbornness, their opposition/Ruins my finest acquisition/And in fierce agony I must/Grow weary of being just” (Part Two, Act V, lines 11248; 11251-2; 11269-72). 

The result of this “fierce agony” is a reprise of the ending of Part One.  Once again, Faust is the agent of death; in clearing Baucis and Philemon off the land, they are killed.  Faust, once again, expresses remorse at the deaths he has caused, but just as in the case of Gretchen, he has acted on despicable motives (seduction in the one case, covetousness in the other) and, thus, seems unworthy of the reader’s sympathy or approbation.  And most certainly unworthy of the salvation that is extended to him in the scenes immediately following the deaths of Baucis and Philemon.

The second point revolves around the question of forgiveness.  To put it bluntly: must forgiveness be “earned?”  The “negative” reading of Faust, it seems to me, hinges on this question.  Some price—be it true repentance or some form of punishment—must be exacted before forgiveness is extended.  To put it that way can seem niggardly.  Why not imagine someone of such magnanimity that forgiveness is offered without demanding a quid pro quo? Presumably, that’s what is imagined in some Christian versions of “grace.”  The worthiness of the sinner is neither here nor there.  And I do think that Goethe, in the final analysis, does not believe in hell.  He believes that all are saved.  We are all humans, and are all worthy of love—and to be loved.

A hard doctrine, this universal forgiveness.  (So hard, in fact, that most versions of Christianity take the exact opposite course—emphasizing how many are damned, how the reprobate fully deserve eternal torment, how there are very many that even a merciful god must consign to the fires of hell.)  Are we really going to let people—concretely, Faust—get away with murder?  No final responsibility?  No accounting?  Just forgiveness and love extended to all?

The “positive” reading of Faust might just have to land in that hard place.  Maybe not, maybe you can make some kind of case that Faust goes through some process, some set of changes, that makes him worthy of salvation by the end.  But it seems to me that case is very difficult, if not impossible, to make.  After all, both parts of the play end with him causing deaths that he regrets but also evades all the consequences of. 

More plausible is the idea that Goethe is displaying the inevitably conflictual core of life on earth.  All must navigate those conflicts; none are innocent, but (equally) none are guilty.  Humans are just dealing with the deck they have been dealt, striving to find a path through the violence.  They can’t be blamed for that.

Enter Spinoza.  Specifically, what gets called (by commentators on Spinoza’s philosophy), the “conatus doctrine.”  In Book III of the Ethics (Proposition 6), Spinoza writes: “Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its own being.”  Note the key word “strive.” 

In some ways, conatus can seem a principle of self-preservation, or even a statement about inertia, about the way that things, conservatively, attempt to maintain the present state of things.  In Goethe, however, the notion of a thing’s “own being” takes on a temporal dimension.  A thing moves toward, develops through the course of a lifetime, its character, its characteristic mode of being.  This variant of conatus is captured in the term entelechy, defined as “the realization of potential,: or, more elaborately, as “the vital principle that guides the development and functioning of an organism or other system or organization.” 

In short, Goethe places one’s “own being,” one’s identity (in the most profound sense of that term), out in front of us, something to strive for, something to be achieved.  (Miles Davis: “it takes a whole lifetime to sound like oneself.”) Goethe thus stands at the beginning of the German obsession with Bildung, a word it is hard to translate since it encompasses education, culture, and growth/formation of character.  (Recall the biological sense of the word “culture” to capture the sense of the environment in which an individual grows.) 

Faust, understood this way, is striving toward achieving himself.  When he reaches that destination, he will tell the moment to “stop.”  He will have arrived.  But his challenge to the devil is to declare that that moment will never come; he will never arrive.  There will always be more about himself to be discovered/uncovered.  He contains multitudes and wants, with the devil’s assistance, to experience all those potential selves that he harbors.  He cannot exhaust himself, he believes.

That’s one way to describe Faust’s insatiable hunger.  We might call that the “inward” path; diving deeper into himself, he will find all that he can possibly be.  And there is good reason to think that part of Goethe (at least) believes that multiplicity will never cohere, will never coalesce into some distinctive or unified identity.  It’s all fragments all the way down—a point of view the disparate Part Two drives home with a vengeance.  Life is a picaresque, an odyssey of disconnected incidents, not the well unified plot described in Aristotle’s Poetics.  To taste it all is Faust’s ambition, and to say there will never be a moment that serves as a culmination, as an arrival point, is to say that all the moments have their pleasures and their pains, their sufficiencies and their lacks.  There is always reason to move on.

But—and here my discussion will take another turn—there is also the “outward” path.  Goethe’s Faust, it seems to me, also asserts that human life, the life lived on earth, is shadowed throughout by another, spiritual, realm.  Faust’s restlessness, after all, is not just his desire to plumb his unexplored depths, but also his hunger for connection to the spiritual powers he senses all about him.  His frustration with his studies and with his life more generally comes from his inability to break through this mundane, material existence to the spiritual realm beyond it.  His striving is for the more than human, for Nature with a capital N, or for God. 

We come back to Spinoza here.  The “own being” that conatus strives to preserve is not self-created.  That being has been implanted in us.  It is the divine spark within—the indwelling being that will align us with Nature/God.  Spinoza is a pantheist; that is, every component of creation partakes of the godhead.  Peace (and freedom in Spinoza’s idiosyncratic definition of freedom) comes when the alignment of part with whole is seamless.  (Dante: “In His will, our peace.)  We achieve our own being in Spinoza when, and only when, there is no difference, no gap, between the “all” and my individual being.

I don’t think that’s where Goethe is.  Faust strives to make contact with the “all,” but I don’t think the goal is to be subsumed into that all.  Goethe is too invested in the quest, in the journey, in the striving prior to any arrival.  (This, obviously, returns us, on a different level, to the disinterest in results and consequences that Faust evidences.)  The energy that conatus points toward, the “vital principle,” is Goethe’s focus—which helps explain why Goethe can be so important to Nietzsche.  Life expressing itself through deed is what Goethe seems (at least some of the time) to be celebrating—without any concern for ordinary standards of good and evil.  Life as a blind force, but one that should not be reined in by notions of morality, or good taste, or “civilization.”  To put it that way takes Goethe too far in Nietzsche’s direction no doubt, but the hint is there.  The “spiritual,” in this reading, would then be the vital energies of the universe at large, energies that dwarf human attempts to understand, corral, or moralize them.  The whirlwind from the book of Job.

Goethe believes (I am arguing) that this world is shadowed by a spiritual one—and that human “hunger” is generated by the desire to contact that other world.  The form taken by the effort to appease that hunger in Faust seems aggressively, even toxically, masculine—with the stress on conflict and the indifference to collateral damage.  By the time we get to Nietzsche, striving looks not only toxic, but pathological, all too obviously compensatory for felt (and feared) weaknesses.

All of which reminds us that Goethe’s play is shadowed by something else besides a spiritual realm: namely, the feminine.  From Gretchen through “the Mothers” and Helen of Troy to the penitent women of the last scenes, there is the mysterious, never fully developed, presence of women who offer our hyper-masculine hero the glimpse of an alternative path.  In one way, the feminine is the possibility of unqualified love.  If forgiveness need not be earned, but is simply granted by magnanimous grace, then it is woman who are expected to extend that forgiveness, expected to love without any question of desert.  (James Joyce in Ulysses on maternal love as the only sure thing in the world, and the only thing one does not have to earn or deserve in any way whatsoever.)  Salvation is through the feminine, through the forgiveness and love that the feminine gives freely, not through the rather pathetic, vain-glorious, striving of the male.  The loving Christian god is a woman.

The feminine in Faust offers at least two things. One: the possibility that development might not be through conflict, but instead through the unleashing of potential through the enabling affirmation of love. Is it really competition that yields our best selves? Why not insist that cooperation and encouragement are better catalysts of human achievement? Why is striving to work together, to delight in the talents of others, considered weak and sentimental, scorned as “feminine?”

The second possibility is finding fulfillment in having children, which also entails a reconciliation to the fact of one’s own death. The world will be handed on to one’s progeny. Women in Faust are associated with the mystery of birth. The mysterious “Mothers” of Part Two, Act One are the ineffable origin of all things, terrifying but fecund. And Helen and Faust give birth to a son, Euphorion, in Part Two, Act Three. But becoming a parent proves a path not taken for Faust. Instead of yielding the world to his son, we have a reversal of the usual (natural?) course of things. The son dies before the father, so that Faust does not experience the kind of love that gives of oneself to one’s child, a love that eschews the Oedipal conflict on which Freud focused, choosing instead not to fight with the loved one. (Freud, like Joyce, idealized maternal love, declaring that the only pure love in the world was of the mother for her eldest son.)

This gendered division of labor (where women love, and men conflict/compete) is obnoxious for all kinds of reasons, not least of all for its reserving all possibility of heroic action to men.  Women just get to sit around and wait for the man to come home—and then to salve his wounds, his frustrated pride, and provide unquestioning love. Women are just stepping stones toward something else: salvation. But within that gendered division lies the sense that maybe the heroic ideal, the emphasis on deeds above all else, is nuts, can only lead to endless restlessness and striving. Heroic striving is not the path to salvation. How else to read the ending of Faust, the need for feminine intervention on Faust’s behalf? Perhaps endless restlessness and striving are not worthy of celebration, but should be jettisoned for a more sane, a more satisfying, affirmation of what is there in front of us. What if, in fact, humans don’t need to be saved, don’t need to be transported to some “elsewhere,” whether that be some other-worldly spiritual realm or just some imagined utopia where the sea has been held back?  The surrender we are looking for is not to the overwhelming energy/power of some god or to some utopian vision of what our human ingenuity can produce, but to the possibility of satisfaction with what human life can afford: a circumscribed place shared with loved others.  That, after all, is exactly what Baucis and Philemon represent: the non-heroic and its joys.

In other words, maybe what we need is to change the scale of our desires and our actions, to stop imagining global transformations, or titanic conflicts with forces of good and evil, or momentous encounters with powers beyond the human.  A more modest focus has been coded as “feminine” with Western cultures; women represent love and the domestic; men represent striving out in the “wider world.”  I don’t know enough about Eastern cultures to claim they assign men and women to different roles than we do in the West.  What I do know is that Western writers from Thoreau on have turned to the East when they have wanted to deflate the masculine discourse of heroic action and have tried to emphasize, instead, a quieter attention to the here and now, to achieve a peacefulness that contrasts to a restlessness that they deem more dysfunctional than admirable.

Which brings me to Liza Dalby.  I have just finished reading her almanac cum memoir, East Wind Melts the Ice: A Memoir Through the Seasons (University of California Press, 2007).  Dalby (originally from Indiana) has spent almost half her lifetime immersed in Japanese culture.  She is also an avid gardener.  Her book travels through a single year, following an ancient Chinese almanac that has been widely adopted (with some alterations) by the Japanese.  The point of the almanac is to be attuned to the changes in meteorological conditions as the year unfolds.  Such changes are, of course, crucial to the farmer and the gardener, indicating what plants will thrive at different times. The almanac divides the year into 72 five-day parcels, and offers a natural occurrence that signals where each parcel fits into a full year’s cycle through the seasons.

Crucially, the gardener (and farmer) is not someone who lets nature take its course.  Instead, there is a partnership.  The gardener must respect the natural processes that are inevitable.  You can complain about the weather, but there isn’t much you can do about it.  Instead, you need to be sensitive to the unfolding weather—and shape your gardening practices toward achieving what the weather makes possible.  (The same goes, of course, for other natural factors such as soil, parasites, and weeds.)  Dalby is no romantic; like any gardener, she knows that nature can be destructive as well as creative, and that the squirrels will eat her persimmons, and the hawks will eat the squirrels.  It is not so much a question of living in some idealized “harmony” with an abstract nature as it a constant attention to a multitude of natural processes with which to contend, taking what those processes afford (make possible) and taking precautions (not all of which will succeed) against what those processes will destroy.  Carving out a garden amidst the diverse energies and contentions that constitute an eco-system. No monotheism here (no God, no Nature), but a full panoply of actors, human and non-human–and the need to navigate among them.

What I like about Dalby (and here she is very distinct from Thoreau) is how resolutely secular she is.  (I have no idea if this secularity is characteristic of the Japanese or not, even as she derives much of her stance toward life from Japanese sources.)  She does not see herself as getting in touch with some distinctive (or personified) powers in her attention to natural processes.  This is just the world in which she has landed, one in which the seasons change in ways that are simultaneously predictable and not.  August will be warmer than February, but more exact predictions are chancy.  The almanac provides some clues about what to look out for, but the real work is in being attentive to what is in front of you.  Harder work, much harder work, than we usually realize.  With our heads in the clouds, dreaming of spiritual elsewheres or enchanted by visions of what tomorrow will bring, attending to, living in, the present eludes us. 

That there is nothing else except what is right there before us is, perhaps, the hardest lesson to learn.  Of course, Dalby’s urge to keep her diary, to write a book, violates complete immersion in the present.  She needs to preserve something of the passing moment, and she needs to feel there is an audience to her witnessing for the present.  Still, the injunction to “pay attention” is important to her—and is offered as the best (the only?) path toward rendering life satisfying, interesting, perhaps even worth living.  We won’t find meaning some place else if we do not find it in the present.

“A full century has passed since Hearn’s lament that Japan would end up as a dull copy of the West, yet it seems to me that the Japanese attention to seasonality has, if anything, become stronger.  Sharpening our senses, aware of the seasons, we can be more present in the world.  Once absorbed, this way of looking at things reveals interest everywhere–even in a junkyard, making wind chimes in California” (Dalby, p. 155).