Dear Marion, Today, Friday, is one of the days of the week on which I permit myself a letter to you, Tuesday being the other. As yet unanswered is the question, how long such a letter should be, and what, if anything besides obligatory formalities, such as "Thank you for your letter" and "Have a nice weekend" it should contain. We ought not overlook the fundamental consideration that the process of writing and the written text which it yields are integral to my intellectual - and perhaps emotional - existence. Writing satisfies for me a persistent and pervasive impulse which I choose not to try to suppress. The product of that compulsion is a text which I read and reread with Narcissus-like persistence, perhaps in part to enable my mind fortify itself with its own ideas, in part to reassure myself of an identifiable existence. I read my own writing to confirm my subjectivity much as I read the journalist's prose, e.g. in the New York Times, to corroborate the persisting existence of yesterday's objective world. While I'm gratified - and always duly grateful to know that someone like yourself might be willing to read what I am writing, my garrulousness is not inhibited even by the awareness of idiocy, i.e. by the knowledge that my writing is meaningful only to myself and will be read by no one else. The considerations in turn provoke the question: what is appropriate to a restricted epistolary menu? What I should send to you? Only what is most immediately on my mind, or also copies of texts that have preoccupied me in the interval. Please tell me. Within a few days, I hope to set up a non-public website where such writing as might be of interest to you may be deposited. I will then include in my e-mails the URL's where, without obligation to do so, you could read further, if you wished. Meanwhile, I append what's recently been going on in my mind. You're under no obligation. If you reply, my next letter will be due on Tuesday, April 19. Please stay healthy, enjoy the weekend and the spring, which is finally on its way. Jochen ================================= Wanda L. Di Bernardo wrote: > > Dear Comparative Literature Alumni: > > Thank you to everyone who submitted a personal profile and academic news update for the 2011 edition of "Comp Lit News," the newsletter for Harvard's Department of Comparative Literature. > > > > We are currently in the middle of editing the newsletter and completing the layout process. While we have many interesting and well-written profiles featured in our 2011 newsletter, right now we are missing articles on recent developments in Comparative Literature and changes to our department over the year. > > So this month we are opening a Call for Articles for the 2011 Comparative Literature newsletter. Articles should be between 300 and 500 words each. The topics of the articles can range from reports on current research to reviews of recent publications to explorations of new directions and challenges in the field of Comparative Literature to discussions about the job market and future of Comparative Literature, or they can focus on departmental happenings and changes. > > We would be more than happy to publish articles written by faculty, students, and alumni. If you are interested in writing an article for the newsletter, please send a copy of it via e-mail to me, Rita Banerjee (at banerjee@fas.harvard.edu ) by *May 1, 2011.* > > If you would like more time to work on an article, or have any other questions, please do not hesitate to write to me as well. > > Thank you for reading, and all the best, > > Rita Banerjee, Editor > Department of Comparative Literature > Harvard University * banerjee@fas.harvard.edu You have my permission to make any use you wish of the text below, with or without attribution. - Ernst J. Meyer 04-14-2011 In the sixty-one years since my two semesters in Comparative Literature ended in disbelief and despair, the notions which governed those efforts have withered, and from their roots there has sprung a contrarian's understanding of literature. The clarity and definition that appeared to make words inherently unambiguous has dissipated. Certainty and reliability of meaning have proved to be consequences of an inapparent but indispensable process of negotiation, accommodation and compromise among speakers. Dictionaries do not stand alone. Preserving their meanings requires ongoing discipline and pedagogy. All language is in flux, and over time, comes into being, flourishes, fades and ultimately perishes corresponding to the needs of its users. The literature which we compare has no unconditional validity. It is an artifact of cultural politics, an accident of history. The quality that makes a work classical or timeless is an illusion. It has endured not because it is timeless; it appears timeless on account of its accidental endurance. Because the societal acceptance of our sentences is essential, we subject our writing to stringent critical standards. Given, however, that we read in utter privacy and isolation, the quality of our reading is inaccessible to evaluation. Nor is the understanding which reading engenders subject to scrutiny. Yet understanding is the key to meaning which remains by and large a mystery. The prototypical genus of literature is the poem onto whose words and phrases the reader projects a meaning extracted and distilled from his own existence. For the accomplished reader the projection of meaning onto the text becomes deliberate and conscious; apparently factual, independent, objective meanings of terms vanish, and all texts become subject to interpretation in the same way as poems. The potential poetic quality of fictitious prose such as novels is obvious. Scrutinized with sufficient sensitivity and rigor, texts of purported history also display the qualities of fiction, and are ultimately intelligible only as poetry. The same turns out to be true of all narrative, of all knowledge that is clothed in speech. The aggregate of narrative knowledge constitutes the conceptual world, the intellectual, logical, verbal universe that comprehends both the individual and the society of which he is part. Language is the bridge between private and public knowledge. The function of language changes as the individual matures. Because of the paucity of other experience, language takes possession of the mind of the child, and comes to constitute its universe. The mind of the adolescent is dominated by ideals, ideas and words. With age, the compulsion of language is supplemented and modified by the individual's own experience, by the impressions of the events on a lengthy life. Understanding the process of reading is a key to understanding ones world and oneself. Comparative literature is an appropriate point of beginning, starting from which there's a long way to go. =============================== from a letter to Cynthia Behrman who inquired about the value of my work on Nantucket: .... Arithmetically, the value of my work on Nantucket is the difference between my costs, knowable to the nearest penny, and either: a) the replacement cost of the house, or b) the proceeds, after taxes, of an hypothetical sale. What a sale would bring, of course, fluctuates with the real estate market. The other benchmark is the taxable value of the building which would be $472600 (or 189/sqft) if the construction were complete. At present, the assessor assigns a 50% discount for incompleteness. The cost to Nantucket of the protracted litigation comprises not only legal costs, but also lost tax revenue. Existentially, the value of my work on Nantucket is the recapitulation of my life: of my childhood in Germany as resisting a cruel, implacable society bent on destruction; of my childhood in Canaan as surviving abandonment by my family (except for Margaret); of my childhood in Konnarock as employing wit and will to gain control of and manage my environment. The crowning existential glory of my Nantucket enterprise is the litigation, which demonstrates to anyone who has the stomach for such contemplation, not only the anarchy of Nantucket, but also the fraudulence of a protective legal system which countenances and endorses the lawlessness, and by extension, the failure of constitutional government. Watching the flag consume itself by spontaneous combustion is more edifying by far than any fireworks on the Fourth of July and on its ashes, mementos of final freedom, is spelled out the ultimate declaration of independence, - Did you really want to know all that? I'm pleased especially for you by Joanna's early professional success. Rebekah, by way of contrast, although she did well academically, found neither intellectrual nor emotional fulfillment at Harvard. She absented herself this academic year to spend twelve months at a "farm school" in central Massachusetts, where to her relief she has been communing rather than with academic types, with horses, cows, sheep, donkeys and chickens. She now seems cheerful and contented; plans to return to Harvard in the fall to complete her studies. What the future holds for her seems uncertain. She had considered medical school, then veterinary school, then primary or secondary school teaching. Her life, it seems to me, is very much in flux. I consider her a victim of women's liberation, inasmuch as, although intelligent and diligent, she was apparently not cut out for professional or business competition. Time will tell. Nathaniel is pressing on at Yale. He finds that in music as in other areas of endeavor, lack of mediocrity is a handicap which he may not be able to overcome. He has received a grant of $1500 for this summer's Belmont music festival. He has been accepted for conducting seminars in Baku, Romania and somewhere in Italy. Applications to London and Leipzig are still outstanding. The Monteux Conductor's Camp in near-by Maine has put him on a waiting list. Meanwhile his interest in literature are flourishing. I'll append a recent essay of his - of which I suspect you will disapprove, - and my response. These texts will give you perspective on this aspect of my life, - and incidentally make this letter more than long enough.... ======================================================= Nathaniel Meyer - April 13, 2011 _ Paradox and Poeticism in Kierkegaard: _ An Afterword to the Epilogue of Fear and Trembling In a room sits a student, thinking, attempting to come to terms with the cryptic parable posed by his teacher. The student is told that it is in fact impossible to write on the topic of the parable without total irony, yet the student is compelled to com- plete the assignment, to contribute analysis on that which denies intellectual understanding. For both the teacher and the student, to achieve a true human ed- ucation is the fundamental riddle of existence. Yet, somehow it seems that for each, their individual transcendence is within each of them in the passion of their seeking spirit, soaring be- yond the bounds of their intellectual struggle, into the eternal. In the final paragraph of his epilogue to Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard invokes Heraclitus' famous parable that s "one cannot pass twice through the same river(132) and his student who claims "one cannot do it even once". It is certainly fitting for Kierkegaard, who writes in riddles, to end his afterword thus, and we must be aware of the humorous self-comparison Kierkegaard seems to draw with his ancient influence, Heraclitus "the ob- scure". In its most basic historical-philosophical context, Kierkegaard presents this ironic conclusion as a satire of Hegelian concep- tions of historical teleology. In contradiction to the Young Hegelians' obsession to "go further" and beyond faith, Kierkegaard believes that faith is the highest passion in man(130). In addition, the absurdity and impossible difficulty of coming to terms with paradox, seems here to represent the enormous difficulty and absurdity of the leap of faith. Kierkegaard recognizes the human instinct to search for truth through analysis, to reduce to structures, systems, and sciences. Kierkegaard's paradox asks us to be fulfilled through passion alone, to sacrifice understanding before the unknowable. The 'river' paradox, this ultimate Kierkegaardian "koan", is both the last of many in his cryptic text, and the first of a line of po- tentially infinite reinterpretations. We find irony in both Kierkegaard's task and the task of the stu- dent who finds it the focus of their contemplation. Kierkegaard seems to present us with a critique of critique (as a tool of ad- vancement), finding fault with the belief in the continual human progress of generations. Instead, "every generation begins all over again"(130). How is Kierkegaard's undeniably intellectual project immune from its own critique? The irony is perhaps even greater for the student who must respond to Kierkegaard's philos- ophy. To contemplate, let alone to write about Kierkegaard's paradox is clearly to fall into the condemned realm of academic criticism. But what is the realm transcending the academic, the "genuinely human" that Kierkegaard claims we can only learn through experi- ence? For Kierkegaard it is the self-defining experiences of passion and faith on the part of the individual. An obsession with subjectivity and a repulsion of the formality of intellectu- al superstructure seems to characterize his relation to religion. Faith is the culmination of man's passionate response to the un- knowable. The haunting paradox of the Mount Moriah episode can- not be intellectually understood, as it opposes all rational con- ceptions of law and morality. Yet, it can be deeply felt in one's personal re-experience of the story, in how it is personal- ly reconsidered and retold. There is clearly a paradox in attempting to find a moral for a parable meant to show us that there can be no lesson learned from a teacher, or a previous generation. To posit that there is a key would contradict the notion that all acts of positing are merely constitutive of meaningless chatter. Yet, the ironic ab- surdity of the parable is precisely what enables it to point to that which is meaningful, to faith. For Kierkegaard, we cannot transcend faith, and faith itself is derived from the subjective experience and expression of passion. Perhaps, therefore, if there is any key to Kierkegaard's final cryptic paradox, it is found through an understanding of Kierkegaard's poeticiscm. Although Kierkegaard claims to be neither a poet nor a philoso- pher, poetry would seem to be perfectly representative as a medi- um not in conflict with his opposition of an intellectual pursuit of understanding. And in fact, the non-structured, improvisa- tional freedom of verse seems to embody a stepping backward from the pursuit of 'going further' inherent in critique. Kierkegaard presents "the river" through his poetic voice--stylized, paradox- ical, ironical--and in doing so, eliminates the river itself. Ironically, we will attempt to reach a clearer understanding of Kierkegaardian inwardness not only through poetry, but through that of his disciple, Rainer Maria Rilke. It seems that, in con- trast to the limitations of prose (despite Kierkegaard's undeni- able lyricism), Rilke's verse achieves an unprecedented freedom of expression through its passionate formlessness. In Der Pan- ther we recognize the inevitable Stäbe of our existence those bars that inhibit our pursuit of objectivity. We pace endlessly in the cage of logic, but find nothing. When we experience the passion of faith, it is a flicker of the eternal, not in our minds, but in the deepest recesses of our being. Sein Blick ist vom Voruebergehn der Staebe so mued geworden, dass er nichts mehr haelt. Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Staebe gaebe und hinter tausend Staeben keine Welt. Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte, der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht, ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte, in der betaeubt ein grosser Wille steht Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille sich lautlos auf. - Dann geht ein Bild hinein, geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille - und hoert im Herzen auf zu sein. ====================== Dear Nathaniel, Thank you for letting me read your essay about the epilogue to Fear and Trembling. I hope your teacher agrees with me that it should receive a very good grade. However neither you nor I should be unduly disappointed if your teacher is critical. An academic who presumes to arbitrate the message of an author who makes a mockery of academia is on very thin ice, if indeed the very presumption to arbitrate is not already the sign that he/she had broken through and is in deep, cold water, over his or her head. I like your essay because I read it as incontrovertible evidence that you have crossed the threshold into that world of thought and feeling which I consider my home. I have every confidence that you will find it a source of strength, and when in need, a source of comfort. What you will learn from day to day is less important than the circumstance that you are there and learning. It is obvious that the assignment to compose a critique of Kierkegaard's writing as the ultimate criticism is difficult to the stage of absurdity; and the circumstance that you have recognized this absurdity is one of the strong arguments in your essay. Rather than write about Kierkegaard, it is more edifying (opbyggelig) to discourse about the topics, the issues, the paradoxes that Kierkegaard discusses. In a separate e-mail I sent you a URL pointing to one of my own interpretations of the Moriah drama which I had forgotten: namely that it was not Isaac who was sacrificed in the ram, but rather that the sacrifice was of the objective god; that it was the vengeful cruel deity which was sacrificed or sacrificed himself; the objective god was destroyed to be resurrected in the burning bush as the subjective deity with the unspeakable name. - I find it all very interesting, and to me it seems very important.