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Littérature Engagée
Mar. 12th, 2017 09:56 pmIn 1976 I spent a year in France when my father was on sabbatical. The first paper I had to write in my Lycée French class was on "La Littérature Engagée". I argued at the time (I recall) for the primacy of pure art over any mandate for political engagement; I would take a somewhat more nuanced view now, beginning with the recognition (which makes the whole debate somewhat pointless) that no literature can avoid being somewhat engaged, regardless of the intent of the author, even if that intent is as purely literary and abstract as, say, Mallarmé's.
Through nothing more than coincidence, I have just been reading both Gordon's Teskey's The Poetry of John Milton[1] and Brust's / White's The Skill of our Hands.
Teskey's book is a summation of decades if teaching Milton, and covers his entire poetic career. It is thoroughly grounded in both the history of Milton's lifetime and in the sources Milton absorbed and transmuted. (Teskey knows Italian, Latin, and Greek, has familiarity with the literary works central to the traditions Milton drew on, and also enough of a grasp of Christian theology to discuss Milton's theological positions intelligently.) It is well worth reading.
One thing that comes through is the degree to which Milton's work (from about Comus on) is always "engaged", even if only with what Teskey calls transcendental engagement.
(Comus has a nice slipped-in bit: in the middle if a masque, that most aristocratic of entertainments, performed in front of one of the great officers of the realm, the Lady's statement that
If every just man that now pines with want
Had but a moderate and beseeming share
Of that which lewdly-pamper'd Luxury
Now heaps upon som few with vast excess,
Natures full blessings would be well dispenc't
In unsuperfluous eeven proportion,
And she no whit encomber'd with her store,
And then the giver would be better thank't,
His praise due paid, for swinish gluttony
Ne're looks to Heav'n amidst his gorgeous feast,
But with besotted base ingratitude
Cramms, and blasphemes his feeder.
-- an appeal for radical egalitarianism.)
Adam and Eve's society in Eden is, for Milton, the only valid polity in human history, and it is, formally, outside history. Milton's writing aims to push the reader into a mindset, and a course of action, aimed at bringing an ideal order into being here and in this dispensation. (The classic study of the reader in Paradise Lost is Fish's Surprised by Sin.)
We have become used to a discourse in which, because it is asserted that everything is political, and because many works elicit strong personal reactions because of traits which align them with one side or another in the culture wars, we tend to forget what fully engaged political works are actually like.
Regardless of whether troglodytes get worked up about them, works which are "political" mainly in the sense that they have diverse leading characters and display more polities than simply feudal ones in their fantasy/future worlds are not political, or at least engagedly political, in the same sense that, say Uncle Tom's Cabin was, or indeed Paradise Lost.
By contrast, The Skill of our Hands is very much an engaged book - oddly, even more on its publication than when it was being written.
At the time of its composition, its authors could not have known that it would be published amid a flurry of executive orders on immigration and deportation. They did know that the Obama Administration has increased markedly the number of deportations of undocumented immigrants, and that the general militarization of the police - a continuing trend not only in the US but more generally - was at its apex in the south.
It is explicitly an engaged work: it is about resistance; it layers the undocumented immigrant issue over that if slavery in Buchanan's day; it ends with a direct call to action. (It also slips in an aside about HFCS as a public-health concern.)
It also works as a novel, although it helps if the reader has first read The Incrementalists as a preparation.
[1]Disclosure: Teskey was an undergraduate student of my father's and a graduate student of a friend (and through the latter I see him from time to time when he returns to Canada for a visit).
Through nothing more than coincidence, I have just been reading both Gordon's Teskey's The Poetry of John Milton[1] and Brust's / White's The Skill of our Hands.
Teskey's book is a summation of decades if teaching Milton, and covers his entire poetic career. It is thoroughly grounded in both the history of Milton's lifetime and in the sources Milton absorbed and transmuted. (Teskey knows Italian, Latin, and Greek, has familiarity with the literary works central to the traditions Milton drew on, and also enough of a grasp of Christian theology to discuss Milton's theological positions intelligently.) It is well worth reading.
One thing that comes through is the degree to which Milton's work (from about Comus on) is always "engaged", even if only with what Teskey calls transcendental engagement.
(Comus has a nice slipped-in bit: in the middle if a masque, that most aristocratic of entertainments, performed in front of one of the great officers of the realm, the Lady's statement that
If every just man that now pines with want
Had but a moderate and beseeming share
Of that which lewdly-pamper'd Luxury
Now heaps upon som few with vast excess,
Natures full blessings would be well dispenc't
In unsuperfluous eeven proportion,
And she no whit encomber'd with her store,
And then the giver would be better thank't,
His praise due paid, for swinish gluttony
Ne're looks to Heav'n amidst his gorgeous feast,
But with besotted base ingratitude
Cramms, and blasphemes his feeder.
-- an appeal for radical egalitarianism.)
Adam and Eve's society in Eden is, for Milton, the only valid polity in human history, and it is, formally, outside history. Milton's writing aims to push the reader into a mindset, and a course of action, aimed at bringing an ideal order into being here and in this dispensation. (The classic study of the reader in Paradise Lost is Fish's Surprised by Sin.)
We have become used to a discourse in which, because it is asserted that everything is political, and because many works elicit strong personal reactions because of traits which align them with one side or another in the culture wars, we tend to forget what fully engaged political works are actually like.
Regardless of whether troglodytes get worked up about them, works which are "political" mainly in the sense that they have diverse leading characters and display more polities than simply feudal ones in their fantasy/future worlds are not political, or at least engagedly political, in the same sense that, say Uncle Tom's Cabin was, or indeed Paradise Lost.
By contrast, The Skill of our Hands is very much an engaged book - oddly, even more on its publication than when it was being written.
At the time of its composition, its authors could not have known that it would be published amid a flurry of executive orders on immigration and deportation. They did know that the Obama Administration has increased markedly the number of deportations of undocumented immigrants, and that the general militarization of the police - a continuing trend not only in the US but more generally - was at its apex in the south.
It is explicitly an engaged work: it is about resistance; it layers the undocumented immigrant issue over that if slavery in Buchanan's day; it ends with a direct call to action. (It also slips in an aside about HFCS as a public-health concern.)
It also works as a novel, although it helps if the reader has first read The Incrementalists as a preparation.
[1]Disclosure: Teskey was an undergraduate student of my father's and a graduate student of a friend (and through the latter I see him from time to time when he returns to Canada for a visit).
