Sargent's Scandalous "Madame X"

Sargent’s “Madame X” was originally appreciated as the object of scandal, and so it was and remains, but also reveals the complex relationship between husbands and wives in the Gilded Age and also the opening of what would become glamor photography.

John Singer Sargent, Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau), 1883–84. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Commentators regard the scandal that was associated with the first appearance of John Singer Sargent’s painting “Madame X” as a sign of Gilded Age prudery. After all, the straps on her dress were rather narrow and Sargent had tried to repair the image by painting in a second strap. All that had been shown was her bare shoulders. It is a clue that Sargent is hopelessly middle brow, entertaining only conventional images to satisfy a bourgeois taste and so is like Norman Rockwell, who could also be appreciated as humor for the uneducated viewer rather than deep in meaning as was the case with Sargent’s contemporary Kliest who made dresses part of the background and so reconceived clothing as an existential experience as well as a fresh vision. 

But think again. “Madame X” is indeed and remains scandalous and not just because it portrays a respectable and recognizable figure for her slightly risque dress but because it was and remains titillating. That is because the viewer has a sense of the subject as being in her body and presenting her body to the viewer. What Sargent is presenting is pornography with people with their clothes on, forcing you to consider the union and contradiction of personhood and body, which is as existential a matter as it gets and so an object of art rather than just a distraction.

Look at the painting closely. Looking at it recently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, I was struck by its whitish skin, revealed best in the actual canvas, and so noted by a placard placed next to it. Also to be noticed is the ripple of flesh at the neck which suggests that Madame X is turning away from the plane of the viewer and has the suggestion of a come hither look that combines but contradicts her hauteur, and is a very attractive way in which a woman can pose herself. So there is more to her presence tham bare shoulders and upper chest. She is meant to be alluring. I noticed some more things when looking at leisure at a photograph of the painting, Look at her hands. They are clutched as if in tension and holding tight to objects as if it were a strain to maintain her pose. So her posture indicates that it is hard work to seem graceful. One of her hands clutches part pof her carefully draped dress where the light allows for different aspects of the very black dress. The dress and not just the contrasting shoulders is important.

The same is true of other of Sargent’s elegant ladies. These portraits make them aware of their bodies under their clothes, that they are all naked under their clothes, a continuing presence ever since Adam and Eve became modest when they ate the apple from the tree of knowledge, which is about moral enlightenment rather than scientific knowledge. The compilers of “Genesis” were only concerned with moral knowledge and Sargent is specifying this long lasting moral tension between what is animal, which means, among other things, given to lust, and what is social and human, which is the display of personality and the coexistence of the two. Isn’t that metaphysical enough?

The catalog at the Met said that later on in his long life, Sargent thought that Madame X was his best painting. I would demure. Lady Agnew and Mrs. Swinton are more elegantly dressed and have more colors and more interesting faces than Madame X. What the artist in Sargent was saying was how much he could achieve with minimum resources: just a black dress and a conventional female stance and an intricate pose. He got a big bang with little resources, and so that might have leased his artistic frugality. “Madame X” certainly made an impression.

Dr. Pozzi at Home, John Singer Sargent (American, 1856–1925), 1881.
Oil on canvas. The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Moreover, by the time of “Madame X, Sargent had already done some remarkable portraits that could have certified his reputation. One is “Dr. Pozzi at Home” which was painted in 1882, two years before “Madame X”, and it is intriguing. Dr. Pozzi was a gynecologist and art collector, and so critics think his slender hands and red as blood eobe showed his occupation, but that I think is overreaching, Sargent’s not an age of iconography. Sargent is a realist who paints people accurately. Dr. Pozzi had slender hands and all his red robe tells is that he was a bit flamboyant. Nor should it be read into him that he is satanic because of his carefully groomed short beard. All it shows is that he is well turned out and meticulous and perhaps maybe a dandy. He is particular rather than symbolic.

Rather than looking back at iconography to get Sargent right, look forward. Sargent is accused of being slick rather than depthful. He does not get into the hearts of people as in Rembrandt or Velasquez, Instead he is glossy, his women, like Madame X, overly posed and glamorous as well as haughty and so the presentation is of its own kind of stylization that goes beyond realism. And that is true because Sargent is inventing a style that would come to dominate glossy photography that adorned the covers of fashion magazines like Vogue. His women are the celebrities of the age before there were movie stars to play that role. Think of Sargent as precursor of Richard Avedon and Irving Penn, who also made striking and elaborate and carefully posed women, even sometimes highlighting the blackness of the tone to establish striking images, as is the case with “Madame X”. Think of Penn’s 1950 cover of Vogue with the model of Jean Patchett. That photo, like “Madame X”, dressed the model in black and was very striking. The goal is not to make the woman all too human, cries to humanity, however distinctive Sargent’s portraits may well be, but elevated out of the dross, elevated into admiration and a higher way of life and so an escape from realism while remaining exact. This is a fresh combination. 

Black & White Vogue Cover (Jean Patchett), New York, Irving Penn (American, 1917–2009), 1950 (printed 1968).
Platinum-palladium print. The Art Institute of Chicago.

It is not easy to describe accurately the relation of the women to the men who pay for the portraits of their wives, It would be a simplification to think women were chattel, meat on the hoof, prized like a horse or a great gem, shown off for their beauty and objects of conspicuous consumption, like trophy wives, Even looking at the relationship is economic, wives and daughters as property, then they are wealtheather than income in that they are not easily converted into cash, but husbands  a stabile part of their way of life, like an estate, and in that case, a qualitative indicator of money rather than a quantitative one wherein there is a numerical evaluation of exactly how many dollars are owned, Rather, the measure is crude; you are rich or filthy rich or stratospherically rich and listed on the Forbes list of billionaires or lesser down making significant contributions to the “PBS Newshour’’

More accurately, wives are wives, which means married, which is a social role whereby wives can do what wives can do. They can nag their husbands, and can develop and deliver cutting remarks to men in ways the women know the men to be vulnerable. They can be cold or even withheld sexual favors and risk being thought of as a cad if the husband persists. Women can spend money to adorn their homes and apartments and make their establishments and people well turned out. They can provide solace aside from whatever other people are around. The wife of the President redecorates the White House, accompanies him to Paris for formal meetings, and is present when he leaves his hair down. The same is true of the women portrayed by Sargent. The kind of person the wife is the subject of attention, not the person who paid for the painting.

That view of portraits of loved ones is therefore, for Sargent, is deeply conservative because he is thinking of wives as parts of family, that understood as a stable and long lived part of social structure even though, obviously enough, the nature of families do evolve very slowly over time and are recognizable in the “Odyssey” and “Genesis”. The family is bedrock even if women are unreliable, also known in “Genesis” and the “Odyssey” because of how they can alter their passions, as every one of those Sargent paintings attest, always available to burst out of their seams.Yes, the women have both breeding and genes. But they also have independence, seen in their faces and posture. You don’t know what they will do next.

Critics rather than viewers may be able to articulate such matters while a viewer may only have a sense of why a painting, for that matter, a play o a political argument can be emotionally gripping and troublesome. That is the way it is with the arts: people are moved for reasons not unclear. The artwork operates more directly and asks for consideration as to why it evokes what it does even if it eludes the answer or presents a partial unfolding or explanation as why Hamlet seems a fop worth thinking about, just like Willy Loman who is afterall just a salesman. A personality is in there and personalities are embedded in women just being women and somehow for reasons of instinct and convention somehow different from  men.The thing about all of the arts is that they develop a sense of what a pater of words feel like, how they alter people as well as how people lookaside from the explanations, offered in words, of what they are really about.   

“Madame X” is an example of notorious art. Some works of art create such consternation that the heated rejection of the work of art is a part of artistic history. It applies to novels such as “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”,”Ulysses”, and “Lolita”, and to Stravinsky’s “The Rites of Spring”, whose initial performance was the occasion of a riot. “Madame X” was the start of a period of censorious response to art that lasted through “Deep Throat”, which was never treated as a work of art and continues through cleaning out “Heather Has Two Mommies” from school libraries. Significant in these causes celebres is that they are all about transgressive or overt sex, which suggests the ability to unsettle works of art because sex is so elemental and counter morality even if it is part of life, as the story of Adam and Eve suggests when they went modest. Any scintillation is daring, evokes a response, while politically charged novels and plays and paintings, such as Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and Vonnegut’s  “SlaughterHouse Five”  and Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” and  Picasso’s “Guernica” or the song does not earn outrage just rejection or earns admiration as just another way of doing art. “Strange Fruit” was just a Communist protest song about lynching and no riots ensued. So notorious art is cheaply earned and also always available and provocative and awaits its next occurrence.

Notorious art is inherently amoral in that it doesn’t violate a particular custom or obligation as is the case when a person becomes a traitor or murderer or an adulterer. It violates the idea of norm by saying in particular lust is beyond norms, not to be subject to norms. The opposite of a notorious work of art is the Hallmark movie where people can comfortably fit into their social settings even if the couple have different social backgrounds. A woman’s car breaks down and the man who rescues her brings her into his family and all of them see her as a fitting spouse and before long she finds herself in love with the unproblematic hunk. No stress; no mess.

But sexuality is always transgressive because it responds to its own imperative rather than the social order however women in particul;ar are placed within the social order. Mrs. Swinton is attractive even if that is enhanced with her clothes and makeup and manner. The sexual person resides within the social world and so is unpredictable and dangerous. She is formidable rather than sweet. She has the power of womanhood. Think of that portrayal of sex as very different from what is available in Hallmark movies of romance. In those oft repeated and attractive stories an eligible man and woman meet not even cute like in in +Sleepless in Seattle” and because of, lets say, her car getting mired in the road and a handsome man comes by and the two are ever curious and they come to his family ranch where she is asked to stay and everyone in the family loves her. Including his own child and there are no strains that might make the couple party and the couple lives happily ever after. Sex is just part of the ensemble, while in Sargent sex is a distinct part of the ensemble.

C. Olin Wright's Marxism is Bankrupt

C. Olin Wright has to extend the Marxist story of the ever immiseration of the working class by invoking non-Marxist ideas from economics and sociology.

C. Olin Wright was a leading twenty-first century Marxist theorist. He fine tuned some concepts from the Marxist corpus. He correctly followed Marx by distinguishing occupations from the relations of social production, which is class, and also by distinguishing occupation and class from stratification, which is the non-Marxist approach to sociology, where all kinds of qualities, such as clothing and art forms as well as wealth and power, are ranked by prestige. Wright also modified the Marxist view on surplus value theory which says that capitalists get their gains by siphoning off the wealth created by the workers; Wright updates that theory by claiming that the percentage of surplus has lessened and that governments have been more equivocal about exploiting what the workers create. Wright’s point of view is influential in that the placards at the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture say that American wealth was created from the surpluses Blacks created, which is to neglect that Connecticut ingenuity and New Bedford whalers and Hudson Valley entrepreneurs from Holland created wealth on their own, even if some slavers in Charleston and Newport made their money that way.

Marx’s theory of surplus labor was stark, remorseless and cataclysmic. Workers would have to accept whatever wages were allowed by the capitalists because there was nowhere else to go to get employment because capitalists circulated lists of workers to be blacklisted and because agricultural labor was on the decline. The monopoly over the labor force meant that capitalists would make labor as low as possible so that the capitalists would get as much surplus labor as possible That meant providing wages enough that would allow slow starvation until the time that continued immiseration would lead to revolt--though I suspect only some well fed intellectuals or Moses like figures, part of the leadership, would lead the rebellion, the poor too weak to do it themselves . 

Wright, in his “Alternative Perspectives in Marxist Theory of Accumulation and Crisis” (Critical Sociology 25, 2-3) thinks there are a number of impediments from capitalism having its way even while it remains in power. But the four qualifications it suggests vitiate the entire iron law of labor surplus. First, increased productivity will lead to less excess profit because profits can be squeezed from workers but not from capital goods like computers which will cost what the capitalists need to buy and so the immiseration of the workers is slowed because they are a smaller part of the capital needed in an enterprise.. But it could be argued that, in fact, the workers would be more scarce and so drive up their wages because they are needed to manage their valuable computers, which would alleviate the inevitable slide of the wages of workers.  Second, Wright thinks that there is a danger to capitalist profit in the underconsumption of the workers who even in their immiseration absorb most of the products of a nation. You can’t have wages so low that people can’t buy fast food or any toys. So the excess profit will be reduced from what it otherwise would be. But if that is the case, then the economy is subject to the usual laws non-Marxist economists think hold for, all economiesL having to churn the economy so that everyone is selling to everyone else, everyone circulating money like crazy and that leads to prosperity for all. China, even under Communism, has to worry about its own citizens saving too much and worry about Americans buying Chinese production much less. This is not a Marxist model of being efficient in government by reducing competition so that there is enough to go around from the stock of goods created by labor. Third, Wright argues that both government and labor through their powers and organizations push labor rates up and so slow the decline to immiseration. But if that is the case, then organizations and cultural trends to more or less be sympathetic to the plight of the workers have an independent set of effects from the iron laws of economics, and so the political game is afoot, going along its own imperatives. And fourth, Wright argues that taxation, which Marxists think creates no wealth, can redistribute wealth, which means give to the poor from the rich or visa versa which also means that the political game is afoot, and is no different from Bidenism wanting to extend entitlements by raising taxes on the wealthy. All those exceptions are in fact the substance of a mixed capitalist society.

But aside from Wright undercutting Marxism, I am more concerned with parts of the Marxist vocabulary that are more controversial and of contemporary significance. The proposition that colonialism was a system by which invading nations exploited the resources and the people of the nations they conquered and so was economic in nature was set as key by Lenin's book "Imperialism" which was published in 1917. It seemed particularly pertinent with regard to the European nations, including Great Britain, France and Germany who took control of Africa in the nineteenth centuryIt is consistent with the general Marxist idea that everything is a zero sum game and so conquest is just another name of stealing property rather than a pre-capitalist and present process of the appropriation of territories form among other things imposing their newly dominant culture upon the defeated population. 

Wright’s contribution to the discussion of colonialism is the idea of contradictory classes, whereby people can have multiple relations to the class structure. Sen. Warnock of Georgia had a father who was a junk dealer most of the week, and so a member, just barely, of the very petit bourgeoisie, but on Sunday he was a preacher and so a professional because he orated, was knowledgeable about Scripture, and gave advice as part of pastoral counselling. Wright thinks that contradictory classes intensifies colonialism.. That means that people can have entrepreneurial roles in a colony while being subservient or a dependent to the overseas controller of the colony. So a bureau director with twelve servants in British India and so part of its power elite is just a minor employee of the East India Company. 

But the idea of contradictory classes is very different from  a modification of the Marxist story of the long march, however delayed, towards immiseration or even the tussle between immiseration and capitalism, which believes in ever greater prosperity for everyone, either by making the rich richer, which is the Republican belief, or by reallocating wealth, as the Democrats think. Rather, the idea of contradictory classes is only a special case of the dynamics of formal structures in society that obtain in social life since chimps began to develop some self awareness. These are characteristics of role theory, not Marxist theory, whereby actors can have are at the moment contrary roles, such as the nonbeliever who goes to church or the woman who is a bricklayer. So the American idea of sociology has tainted the Marxist idea by placing the Marxist story into its always human context, just when append when I say that I want the doors of the train to remain open until I get into the train, after which I want the doors to close as soon as possible. There is nothing here about the class struggle, just wanting to get to work on time. 

A theory about colonialism that is true to the Marxist story of the ever more desperate attempt to shore up the capitalist system is to assert that colonialism takes place not just to use native peoples and material wealth but also because wages are increasing in these late stages of capitalism for those living in the home country and so colonials are used because they will work at comparatively lower wages. That theory applies even in the fact that China today invests in underdeveloped countries like Angola because it has difficulty getting local consumers to buy goods and so has to find other places to make investments. An empirical study might show that the rate of return on investment was higher in Africa than mainland China but that is unnecessary because African investment would add to Chinese domestic investment even if not a more productive investment than one in the domestic market. Either way, the colonized countries are economically needed by the colonizers even if it is to offshore money. The colonized are victims because they are forced or convinced to take on debt they will find it difficult to repay, loaded down with real estate far beyond the means of their own economies. It is exploitative to give people loans they cannot repay however attractive are the baubles being offered, like glass beads given to the Indians in America as well as the guns they would use against the white men. 

There is no need for any Marxist or Wright theory of colonialism to explain what happened in the colonialist era or its present incarnation of offered overseas investment.The great powers spent more money to gain control of Africa than they ever made out of it (with the exception of Belgian control of the Congo), though a Marxist might say government investment was needed so as to construct the dominance whereby exploitation might be developed for the benefit of homegrown and western world capitalists. The government pays so private enterprise, like Elon Musk, prospers. But the British government spent on colonialism  was done to glorify the nation so that, for example, middle class Brits would vote for the Disraeli Conservative party. Either money or glory can't both be the dominant reason. Moreover, geopolitical issues can also outweigh monetary gain. The United States took over the rest of the Spanish Empire in the Spanish American War because the United States wanted to keep Japan, the rising Pacific power, from taking over the Philippines. The US soon gave up on Cuba and has been subsidizing Puerto Rico ever since, as is evident from the fact that residents in Puerto Rico pay no income taxes.

A clear and concurrently contentious area of international relations, the Israel-Gaza War, does not yield itself to a Marxist colonialist model, however many sympathizers of Palestinians try to make it that way. The usual Marxist view is to claim that Israel is a settler colony in that a foreign nation occupied and dominated an indigenous population so that it could settle there. The Jews who came to Palestine were Europeans and Russias and some Americans which the British had appropriated from the land and allowed the soon to be Israelis in to take over the land from the Arabs and also that European and American political and economic power allowed Israel to prosper. Never mind that Jews were in continuous occupation of the area for four thousand years and that Palestinians did not regard themselves as an ethnic people rather than as Arabs who happened to own property in Palestine until Arafat for Jordan to agree that the PLO would be the sole representative of its people after the 1967 Six Day War. Leave history aside as well as the repeated efforts to partition the area. Palestinians are an ethnicity that wants what it regards as its homeland to be from the river to the sea. No equivocation about that.. 

The real explanation of colonialism is what happens whenever a more advanced society, whether militarily or economically or organizationally, encounters a less developed society. It takes it over so as to take the land for settlement, as is the case with America, and find the indigenous people a nuisance, or subject to disease. So I don't want the aliens to come to Earth because they will control us even if they are benevolent as was the case with the Catholic priests who were bringing the true faith to the Indians in Hispanic America. Europeans came to dominate Muslims in the seventeenth century and Africans in the nineteenth because they could, just as Islam invaded Europe until the Battle of Tours in the tenth century. And Israel is a more advanced ethnicity, nation and civilization than the Arab peoples of this day however much the Saudis and others want to modernize and economically diversify by, among other things, acquiring Israeli software. The Israel Gaza war stands in the way of Arab development.

You might think it superficial or coincidental to look at geopolitical or cultural causes as the engine of social history, everything dominated by the greed of capitalists, but governments and cultures and technologies are autonomous, each form of structure following its own exigencies and not all beholden to their puppet masters like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, however much government and culture wrestle with those capitalist interests. Moreover, the entire world economy, with the exception of North Korea, are capitalist in that they are all organized in corporations which are slightly regulated, as in the United States, or are heavily regulated, as in China, but all subject to the value of the currency and levels of consumer spending and all the other aspects of economic life. You can blame capitalism for the smokestack economy that made Pittsburg so sooty but will you praise capitalism for shifting to electric cars and the smokeless computer industry for having lessened the burden on climate change? Technology not capitalism did that.and has been on the advance since "Gilgamesh" marvelled at the building of tall walls.

The Gospels as a Dante-like Comedy

“Genesis” is an epic because it is a clash of civilizations and it also has a few sardonic jokes in it. The Gospels, on the other hand, are always serious minded but are a comedy in the sense that “The Divine Comedy” came to be called that because it is a vivid elaboration, as in Balzac, of the way of life of a particular and all too human society.

Mark Van Doren taught me a long time ago that an epic was episodic in that there were many events that filled in the space between the initial action and the final action. These  events did not so much move the action forward as take place within the environment created by the story’s parameters. From that I conclude, upon many years reflection, that epics are different from novels in this respect (as well as many other ways) because while there may be digressions and subplots in novels, much of the plot in novels is used to move the story forward. By these lights, I also conclude, “Exodus” is not an epic. It is too tightly plotted for that. It is more of what Vico would call sacred history, which means that it shows what had to happen rather than what might have happened or what in fact did happen. The Gospels are another sacred history because there too the narrators are recounting what had to have happened and did while the narrator of a novel is just along for the ride, for the telling of the tale, rather than the authoritative voice that commands belief in the inevitability of what is unfolded by a story or set of stories.

But the Gospels are certainly also an epic in the Van Doren sense. Even though the Gospels each present a biography of Jesus, there are, in fact, a limited number of episodes of what happens while Jesus is pursuing his calling as a preacher, no one of which is essential to the basic story, which is that a person born in a miraculous way is the long expected Messiah, something not established until after His death and Resurrection, a belief based, as St. Paul said in his letter to the Galatians, on faith rather than reason.

“Genesis” is also an epic. The story of the founding of a people, as that is prophesied by no less a figure than God, is told through episodes each of them interesting and yet where the scheme of the work would allow for any number of such stories, possibly there being more patriarchs with each their own set of stories. The seriousness of this story, moreover, is not mitigated but enhanced by our ability to notice the comic twist in one or another of the stories or the emerging character of the people who are created out of these stories. It may well be in the nature of literature that it can be read perversely or ironically, but “Genesis”, because it is so terse and requires the reader to infer the motives of the characters, is particularly prone to irony or some version of the comic. Perhaps the biggest irony is the one provided by the expulsion from Eden, Adam and Eve banished to a world where he will labor to provide food and she will suffer in childbirth. That is the way it is in the world. So the punishment of God is that people will live the lives they do in fact live, which can be regarded as not much punishment at all because it is no additional punishment, or else as a very serious punishment, in which case all of life is a kind of prison. Take your pick.

There is also comedy early on in God not knowing where Abel is. I know scholars nowadays say that the story shows God was regarded as walking among people and capable of being fooled. It seems to me, however, that Cain did not think he would very long get away with his denial even to a God who is a bit slow on the uptake. Cain shows his arrogance in a comic way by the bravado of saying he is not his brother’s keeper. A bit later on, Lamech says that he is greater than Cain because he slew a man who wounded him. To bestow that honor upon yourself is to show yourself as evil in a comic way because your words betray a foolish arrogance. There is no need for an outside description of Lamech’s grotesquely angry soul, only a transcription of what he says out of his own mouth.   

And Sarah, for her part, laughs and has to be reminded that she laughed when the angel told her that she would conceive. You do not laugh at God as a daughter might laugh at an earthly father. Nor does the reader laugh but is, rather, frozen cold by the fact that God has to be wheedled into being willing to spare Sodom if some good people can be found within the town. There is no joke in the fact that He made the promise, which suggests that He is not all that firm about using his powers, an “aide” able to change his policy, or that not even ten good men could be found. That irony makes the point that people are wicked, more so than because God is remorseless or because the evil of the people of Sodom had been spelled out, which it is not. Not all irony is funny.

The same comic touch is provided in that other tale that plumbs the nature of a people, the “Iliad”, where Ajax is a bit of a fool, Odysseus overly clever, and Achilles vainglorious. Did Homer not know that? We are fooling ourselves if we think that Homer was so entrapped in his own “culture” that he could not see he was overdrawing his characters. Shakespeare understood this when he wrote his dark farce, “Troilus and Cressida”

It is less easily said of Virgil that his characters, so highly motivated by their patriotic and other duties, are deliberately overdrawn for comic effect. That is perhaps why, despite its vividness, poetry and purposefulness, the “Aeneid” is just not on the same level as the “Iliad”. Nor is the comedy within the epic  rediscovered in Aristo or Dante or other medieval epics. That development awaits the Renaissance, that long delayed recovery from fifteen hundred years of Christian earnestness. There is Cervantes who, like Shakespeare, loved low jokes, and Shakespeare himself, who intrudes Falstaff onto “Henry V” so as to remind his audience that there is comic relief even in wartime.

But even if, by a stretch, one can find humor or irony in the Old Testament, there is nothing even remotely funny about the New Testament. Its whole tone defies interpreting it or any part of it in either a comic or an ironic way. There is dramatic irony in Jesus’ prediction that Peter will betray him, but that is not funny at all; it is to make one cringe. The emotions that dominate the Gospels and “Acts” are righteousness and mercy, those combined with an abiding sentimentality that would take offense if some incident in the life of Jesus and the lives of his followers were not approached with the utmost seriousness. The leper is cured. Marvelous! What about the leper further down the lane? It is an insult to raise that question; the auditor of the Gospel is more concerned to hear the cure as a proof of the divinity of Jesus than as an example of the possibility of lessening human suffering. We who are among the saved can rejoice even if the fruits of our salvation will not be visible to us until the next life, given our present life of toil and trouble, and we must, as Dante advises, remove our pity from those who are not saved, however pathetic or noble they may seem or be.

The New Testament, however, is a comedy, even if it is an unfunny one, if the term “comedy” is understood in the sense it has taken on ever since it was applied to Dante’s epic, which is also, for the most part, an unfunny comedy. What The New Testament does is to make familiar a way of life of a people, in this case made up of small farmers and market towns becoming ever more influenced by the cosmopolitan culture of Rome, just as Dante had made familiar the violent and mean-spirited life of late Medieval Italians. The New Testament portrays the vineyards and pathways and small towns and weddings that surround an itinerant preacher and his less than merry band, his solemn crew. This is a portrait not of a society in the making but of one that is already extant, the people softened as if they lived in a pastoral idyll, which is indeed how the times of Jesus may have seemed when they are recalled some thirty years later by those who composed the Gospels and “Acts”.

There are other great comedies of this type. There is, of course, Aristophanes, who is not a tragedian not only because he uses a low style and tells jokes but because his concern is the temper of his society as that is revealed by the way fools unravel pomposity and pompous people are shown to be fools. Plato’s “Dialogues” are a comedy as well as philosophy. They provide a vivid portrait of daily life among the Athenian citizenry. They do not do what modern anthropologists would like, which is to provide accounts of what people ate and how they prepared food. They provide more important things: what people said to one another at banquets; what they think about love rather than how they calculate the size of dowries. We get a sense of mental tastes and the variations on those tastes. 

And some of them are pretty funny. My favorite is the early dialogue, “Euthyphro”, which is a great comedy. Socrates meets a man who says he will try to get other citizens to join him in acquitting Socrates of charges of blasphemy, and then Socrates promptly goes on to demonstrate just how much of a blasphemer he is, cross examining this man on his way to prayers about why he is saying prayers in the first place and insisting that the man cannot just offer as a reason that it is the custom or that the gods demand it because Socrates wants to know the reason for the custom, Socrates also offering the telling remark that, after all, the gods disagree. So, Socrates, in defending a very abstract notion of religion, shows himself to be no friend of religion as it is usually understood (and as it continues to be usually understood, as a matter of piety, pure and simple). Euthyphro runs away at the end, saying he has no more time to talk, and you may be sure that he reconsiders his vote. You see the guy changing as the dialogue proceeds, becoming more and more uncomfortable with the sweetly stated but very nasty cuts taken against opinions he thinks so obviously true that it is outrageous to suggest otherwise. All of us can sympathize, our own balloons of pretension also every once in a while punctured, though most of us don’t get to sentence our tormentors to death.

Now, Plato might seem a ringer to throw into a list of epic-scale comedies. Plato provided, some say, the inspiration for our other main ancient example, The New Testament. That leaves us with a mighty few epic-scale comedies. The problem is that modern critics reclassify ancient comedies as novels. I was told by Moses Hadas that the “Odyssey” was the first novel. I am no longer sure about that. Yes, the “Odyssey” does give you a portrait of life on the islands, and it does have a plot that unifies it: a son searching for a father as the father tries to get home, with all that both of those searches imply. Yes, it has central dramatic scenes and long side excursions. The difference, though, between a comedy and a novel is that the novel takes the history of an ordinary family and spells that out against the backdrop of society. “Vanity Fair” is about someone who rides with Wellington to Waterloo, not about Wellington. It may take drama to show Bohr meeting Heisenberg (and opera to portray Nixon meeting Mao) and epic scale comedy is also about a great man, a hero, and that is what the “Odyssey” concerns, while the novel does not, even if its characters may act heroically, in their little and unknown ways, mimicking greatness, as they do in Shakespeare’s comedies and in Fielding. 

Joyce’s turn on the “Odyssey” is precisely, obviously, to show that his characters are like mythic figures, not that they are mythic figures, given that they sometimes fumble with words or sit on the pot. Part of everyday life is to go to funerals that are in part made embarrassing because of the people you are required to be polite to. Joyce’s novel is very funny and, I suppose, there is no need to declare that it is not a grand scale comedy rather than a novel except to keep our categories straight. Dreiser devotes “The Financier” to the fictionalized life of a real life robber baron who had also been disgraced before again ascending to power, but the whole point of turning it into fiction was to show how he came to terms with lust and shame and pride and his own financial talents. That is how fiction is different from journalism or hagiography. 

There are not that many grand scale comedies. They seem to have died out as an art form. “Don Quixote” is clearly an epic comedy, as is “The Canterbury Tales”. Perhaps Montaigne, writing about that abstracted character known as Man, is the last one to provide us with an epic-scaled comedy that provides the nuances of what it is to be such a creature through the depiction of its natural habitat, its social setting. The novel begins after Montaigne leaves off.       

There are many reasons for this interest of the novel in the ordinary person. Maybe it was that Shakespeare made kings into ordinary persons, or that there were so many ordinary people around who could now read novels and so learn about people who were on the same scale as themselves. Maybe it was the opening to literature as a form of journalism and so making journeys to different settings and to people of different class and background a kind of education, the novel a kind of National Geographic of the world of those who lived not many miles away-- perhaps in a manor and also perhaps in a rural village. And maybe, of course, it was part of the overall growth in the early modern age of the importance of the individual and therefore of the individual life. Everybody is important.

The rise of the novel, however, distracts from a consideration of how the New Testament provides some of those same pleasures even though its protagonist is so special a hero as to be the incarnation of God himself, and even though the Gospels are by no means written for the purpose of giving its readers a look see into the Palestinian community of the time. Rather, it is written to do what it says, spread the good news of the coming of the Lord by recounting his deeds, his sayings and his fate, along with numerous facts of his biography, so that subsequent generations will have a sound grounding in the historical sources of their religion because it is that history that makes a difference, that changed the world. At the beginning, at least, Christianity is not a priest bound religion but a text based one, however much the rituals that are developed by its priesthood do have biblical allusions as their basis. The ritualization of Christianity begins early on, even if one source of its power is the story it tells, which had not happened before, even if it had been prophesied that it would occur, and so is a new thing in the world, which makes of Christianity a truly historical religion, even as Judaism is historical because it relies on the image of God parting the Red Sea as a moment in history also awesome and ever to be commemorated.

There is an asymmetry, though, in this explanation of the great works of the Western imagination in that it applies the Greek theory of genre, as that was developed by Aristotle from instances of Greek literature, to works produced by one of the Semitic civilizations. Greek categories make “Exodus” an epic and make the New Testament a comedy. A theory of genres is a theory of tones, each genre hitting a distinctive emotional chord that can be regarded as a “natural” emotion of the human psyche, or as one fashioned out of cultural experiences that are both overt and the product of given or found culture in the sense of “culture” as that is known to anthropologists. Particular works of literature can combine those tones, as when Shakespeare alternates between comedy and tragedy and melodrama all within the same play, or when Beckett fashions tragicomedy as what can be regarded either as a new tone or a blending of old ones. The genre is a guide to the audience or the reader in that it sets off the universe of feeling that is allowed within a particular work, and the failure to maintain a consistent tone jars against the ability of an auditor to hold the work together as a fiction.

The imposition of Greek categories on Semitic literature would be arbitrary were it not for the fact that one can claim that these are universal categories applicable to any literature at any time, however it was that one or another culture came to craft what we would regard as journalism or epic or tragicomedy. But a perhaps more satisfying reason for applying the Greek categories to other cultures is that they allow the deepening of appreciation founded on other grounds. Criticism finds multiple confirmations of what it takes a book to be what it is. That is certainly clear in the case of “Samuel 1 and 2” which has long been recognized as something the equivalent of a Thucydides history: large political events are motivated by personal greed and other individual emotions as well as the play of other forces, all of these mediated through rational self interest and so providing a world which it is difficult to admire but rings very true to life.      

Seeing “Samuel 1 and 2” as an epic elaborates that insight. There are two main protagonists, Saul and David, just as there are two main protagonists in “The Iliad”-- Achilles and Hector. Each set acts out of very different motives and although one of each pair triumphs over the other, both are heroic in that they stand for an archetypical emotion larger than themselves. Achilles stands for gaining glory from heroism, however that diminishes personal life, while Hector stands for duty to country whatever sacrifices that entails. Achilles does not look to create a family; Hector is out to protect his family. Saul is like Hector. He is the responsible king, troubled at being king, unwilling to do what even God commands, such as kill all the Amalekites, if it conflicts with his duty as king. David, on the other hand, is rash and glory bound and as he evolves as a character becomes more tainted by his iniquities but does not often seem troubled in his dreams.  

So we can return to the Gospels and “Acts” as literary triumphs. They invest us in a world of olive trees, weddings, the betrayal of friendships, and a singular unapproachable figure who has a distinctive character and yet is an enigma which continues to trouble us, our imaginations taken up not just by Him but also by his setting, by the everyday life around him, this more familiar to the Sunday School graduate than any other environment in which the student has not himself lived. Don’t sell short the literary properties of texts that are sacred.

Republicans

Focus on Congressional Republicans. Despite their allegiance to Trump, and their fear of being primaried, most of them are smart enough to realize that the tariff water is a dumb ass move with no economic justification as is witnessed by the chart Trump offered that showed we would be putting tariffs on an island of penguins, which are hardly to be imported to the United States as meat because penguins are so cute. So the question remains why Senators and Congress members continue to support him, even though he has moved so much closer to economic and social chaos than any previous President and yet they refuse to  stop him? My suggestion is that even though they don't say so in public, they think he is crude but basically correct in that they are rejecting everything that has happened in  America since the Sixties and are filled with enough rage that they want revenge against it. Oh so low and far from statesmen like these people that they seize themselves with Ante-Bellum  feelings against the Union but without the contiguous geographic area or the control of the military that would enable them to unleash their feelings. Not the Progressives and certainly not the Liberals are as angry as even the apparently courtlyConservatives like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz and John Kennedy, all of them well educated but giving up their souls to join the Populist cause, let alone Nancy Mace and Marjorie Taylor Green, the second of whom got into a cat fight with Jasmine Crockett who said Green was a bleached blond in  answer to being told by Green that Crockett had too much mascara. A comic version of Senator Seward of New York pummeled with a cane in pre Civil War times but exhibiting tremendous animus and very different from when Biden joined the Senate and learned to be courteous to arch segregationists because, after all, they had been elected to and the office should be honored.

What is to be done to bind a tourniquet  around America's wound? I would suggest that we can’t wait until the midterm elections because what if there is a cris over taiwan  orf a nation wide measles epidemic or major private sector layoffs and no one capable of managing such matters are available in  that the organizations to deal with these cruises have  been  depopulated and the now appointed leaders are incompetent.

Four Republican Senators have already broken ranks though for specialized reasons. They voted to suspend tariffs against Canada. Susan Collins did so because Maine exports lobsters to China and imports berries from Prince Edward Island, Lisa Murkowski because she has a secure and independent minded constituency in  Alaska, Rand Paul who has a principled position on Randian economics and seems reasonable under contemporary circumstances, and Mitch McConnell, who is retiring from the Senate and hates Trump. Four other recruits to a Republican Senate opposition to Trump suggest themselves. Chuck Grassley will probably not run for another term  and so is free of a fear of being primaried. Ron Johnson represents Wisconsin, a state dependent on  cross US-Canada trade. Freshman Senator John Curtis of Utah has five and a half years before he faces reelection and has already said that dismantling the government should be a kinder, gentler process, and perhaps Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, who could claim his higher responsibility to matters of the shambles in foreign policy.

I am therefore appealing to other of very Trump friendly people to shed their cloaks of invisibility and raise out as statesman to say enough ios enough by moving to  impeachment proceedings on the grounds that the Constitution is not a suicide pact and incompetence is a high misdemeanor. It is easy enough for a democrat to say that, you wi;lsay. Because you are not betraying or changing your beliefs in  order to do so, but remember that Liberal Democrats displayed the Southern Democratic leadership over civil rights and opposed the Democratic President concerning the Vietnam War. People need to rise to the occasion  lest they become or remain  ashamed of themselves. Have these people no dignity?

The Dow Jones has dropped about 3900 points in two days. Is this not sufficient to awaken Republicans from their slumber?

                                                                      3 P. M., MST, April 4th

Into The Third Month

The open secret of farce is that nobody gets hurt. There are sound effects accompanyingTthe Three Stooges hitting or twerking one another but none seem the worse for where. So it could be said that the clown car is in charge of the Trump Administration, one another falling over one another in firing nuclear experts and then rehiring them after having done the same with avian flu experts. But the clown car runs into being a horror show when real damage gets done, as when a footballer is sent to a notorious El Salvador prison because his tattoo was misidentified as a gang tattoo rather than, as the ACLU claims, a tattoo of the soccer theme Real Madrid. That mistake could have been clarified if even minimal due process had been filled. A nm habeas corpus hearing would have revealed that and avoiding that suggests that the administration is deliberately acting to be cruel and capricious and so terrify anyone who they come across in their searchlights. Arbitrary arrest is the goal rather than a mistake and I wonder how far it will go, Social Security recipients without their checks because their names are similar to those who have died and law firms deprived of security clearance because the law firms are Liberal. Oh, the second of those events have already taken place.

Incompetence mostly seems a joke, just a clown car activity, just like The Three Stooges. Ordinary people fumble at doing their ordinary activities and so lapses are forgiven or perhaps for other reasons thought malicious. You forget your driver’s license but that’s important ikf your car is stolen. People get onto chat chains and there is no worse for wear unless they are communicating state secrets and lying that they are doing that to cover up the embarrassment of saying “oops”. Then it is worse to sound stupid than to lie because there is something at stake and so no longer a farce.And errors of incompetence add up to an evil if they destroy any institution through inadvertence even if not by design by culling the workforce sol that Social Security is inoperable or USAID stops operations and people die, or maybe it has been very clever that it is possible to circumvent getting Social Security and USAID without legislation to eliminate these programs by simply throwing monkey wrenches  into tube organizational machinery. The public has to decide if stupidity or malice is the prime emotion, and what difference does that make, if anything at all.

We have gone a long way from Milton’s idea that evil is so powerful that it must result from a fallen angel whose power resides in his tarnished glory. In the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt discovered the banality of evil, which did not mean that the consequences were banal but that the perpetrators were trivial people only concerned with running the trains on time, that very different from Iago, who we still try to understand for the depths of his m alice. Buty now, in the twenty first century, there is another aspect of evil, where it is uncertain whether it resides in  malice managed to achieve evil ends or, the same thing, evil ends thought of as good ones, as when Commerce Secretary says only cheaters complain of having lost their Social Security, or is just the fumblings of inadequate people set in high office because the President does not screen people for competence and only cares for loyalty, and anyway what difference does it make if appointees are incompetent father than malicious if the consequences are the same? The clown car is inn charge and people have to realize it isn't funny to want to make Canada the fifty-first state.

Short Post: Two Months In

I thought that Trump would go from bad to worse and then even worse than that but I did not expect it so quickly and deeply. Two months in, thanks to tariffs and personnel reduction, the United States has alienated its closest allies and endangered the Stock Market, Speaker Johnson passed a continuing resolution to keep the government open because Chuck Schumer correctly observed that a shutdown was even worse than the continuing resolution even though the House passed its initial approval of the CR without the Democratic amendments to say Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid wouldn't be cut. A Trump shutdown would give him even more authority to close agencies as non-essential. Moreover, cutting USAID in spite of Congressional mandates to spend it, means that the Congress' power of the purse is thwarted. By the end of the week or soon thereafter, Federal judges who insist that USAID and other agencies must be unfrozen will have to deal with the executive intransigence but the Supreme Court, however much a weak reed, can't just let Trump do whatever he wants to. It will be up to the Congress to enforce Federal judges and many of these people only care about buying the office chairs they were assigned to when they went toCongressrather than standing up for the Constitution. They may change their minds when people lose Social Security and other entitlements, being primaried a lesser danger than losing in the general election. But 2026 is a long time away in that there can be a lot of damage to the nation done in the interim.

So far, Trump has been an agent of destruction. People like J. D. Vance and Karoline Leavitt reinterpret what Trump says to make him more reasonable. He will leave out part of what he said and she will offer an interpretation of tariffs Trump never opined. Others will say Trump was ironic when he said Schumer was no longer a Jew when he was in fact quite serious minded. Oh for the days when Biden said what he meant and meant what he said when he called Putin a dictator and that he hadn’t communicated with him for a long time, there being only the obvious interpretation tat there was nothing for the two to talk about. The truth of the matter is that Trump is an agent of destruction because he can only think of destruction as the only way to accomplish things. Trump is stupid, ignorant and mean spirited. He is also deeply superficial and so has impulses and a word, such as “tariff”, as his only justification, not knowing what it means. He wants Greenland so he can build a sign called “Trumpland” on its biggest town. He wants Canada to be a state in the United States so that he can feel grandiose. He wants government efficiency because he lies the word, even if Musk really does want to destroy the government. Don’t expect him to be any deeper than that.

Who is going to bell the cat? Chuck Schumer in his NY Times interview Sunday, showed the menu we all, including me, can read. The Supreme Court could uphold the unfreezing of money allocated to Congress on various agencies and Schumer is worried that the administration would still keep it frozen, which troubles Schumer, and for good reason, because that would be a constitutional crisis. Another alternative is that Republican Senators would have had enough and oppose Trump, though Schumer may be giving them more credit than they deserve. Hasn’t Trump done enough to get Republican Senators to say enough is enough? Third, there is the midterm election. I note campaigning is just a year away. But Schumer worries whether the election will be clean, and so do I.