Eastman, Arthur M. (ed.);
The Norton Reader: An Anthology of Expository Prose (Shorter Edition, Revised)
Norton, 1969, 631 pages
ISBN 0393956474
topics: | essays | fiction | anthology
Here are three essays, all focused on various degrees of deceit, from meaningless but beautiful (White), to the lack of an objective truth in science (Thoreau) to the fine line between creativity and lying (Perry). No doubt the compilers of the anthology didn't think of these being related in this way, but what is a text, if not re-interpreted through the readers' lens?
[AM: Is there a divide between meaningfulness and beauty?
For something to be beautiful, meaning can actually be a hindrance. Thus,
contrary to Keats, must beauty always lie?
As demonstration, we can consider E.B. White, explaining Democracy:]
"We received a letter from the Writers' War Board the other day
asking for a statement on 'The Meaning of Democracy.' It is
presumably our duty to comply with such a request, and it is
certainly our pleasure."
"Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that
forms on the right. It is the don't in don't shove. It is the
hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly
trickles, the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent
suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than
half the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting
booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling
of vitality everywhere. Democracy is the letter to the editor.
Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an
idea which hasn't been disproved yet, a song the words of which
have not gone bad. It's the mustard on the hot dog and the
cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War
Board, in the middle of the morning in the middle of a war,
wanting to know what democracy is."
- New Yorker July 3, 1943
There is no such thing as pure _objective observation. Your observation,
to be interesting, i. e., to be significant, must be subjective. The sum
of what the writer of whatever class has to report is simply some human
experience, whether he be poet or philosopher or man of science. The man
of most science is the man most alive, whose life is the greatest event.
It matters not where or how far you travel, - the farther commonly
the worse, - but how much alive you are.
If it is possible to conceive of an event outside to
humanity, it is not of the slightest significance, though it were the
explosion of a planet. Every important worker will report what life
there is in him. It makes no odds into what seeming deserts the poet
is born. Though all his neighbors pronounce it a Sahara, it will be a
paradise to him; for the desert which we see is the result of the
barrenness of our experience. No mere willful activity whatever,
whether in writing verses or collecting statistics, will produce true
poetry or science.
The man of most science is the man most alive, whose life is the
greatest event. Senses that take cognizance of outward things merely
are of no avail. It matters not where or how far you travel -- the
farther commonly the worse --but how much alive you are.
All that a man has to say or do that can possibly concern mankind is
to tell the story of his love -- to sing; and, if he is fortunate and
keeps alive, he will be forever in love. This alone is to be alive to
the extremities. It is a pity that this divine creature should ever
suffer from cold feet; a still greater pity that the coldness so often
reaches to his heart.
I look over the report of the doings of a scientific
association and am surprised that there is so little life to
be reported; I am put off with a parcel of dry technical
terms. Anything living is easily and naturally expressed in
popular language. I cannot help suspecting that the life of
these learned professors has been almost as inhuman and wooden
as a rain-gauge or self-registering magnetic machine. They
communicate no fact which rises to the temperature of
blood-heat. It doesn't all amount to one rhyme.
I have no idea of the provenance of this book, which has been on my shelf for a long time now. Flipping through it one day, I came across this striking essay, which I have had occasion to re-read at many points in an academic career: William G. Perry Jr's article on the nature of "bullshit".
The incident that gave rise to this essay was one where a Harvard mathematics
student found himself by accident in an examination hall where suddenly an
answerbook was thrust in front of him. He took up the challenge and wrote
the paper, not having the foggiest notion what the course was about. On one
question, in which he had to comment on a sociology text. He scored C/D on
two questions, but on the second q. he got 18 out of 10, and was top of class
or very nearly so:
the grader commented, "excellent!! If you had just dealt with another
point or two you would have hit the jackpot.
"Read Benedict, R. 'Anthropology and the Humanities' in the American
Anthropologist, Vol. 50, No. 4, pp. 585-84, 1948, for a point of view
similar to yours."
[The question concerned two texts] - Margaret Mead's "Keep Your Powder
Dry" and Geoffrey Gorer's. "The American People." Messner chose to write
about "The American People" because "its title gave me some clue to what
the book is about."
[He wrote that he] ... liked the book. But he did not forget to be
balanced. "Gorer's is not the greatest book I have read," the conclusion
of his paper says, "but it has distinction. It is a man's honest
questioning and searching into what makes America. Americans, and people.
"In a way, it is partly a study of the author as a person, too. What he
wrote and how he wrote it are both of significance. This picture of
modern America is seen through the ideas of a modern man. We can see both
the pictures and their interactions. We are that much richer."
Messner, who has taken only one Social Relations course (Professor
Pitirim A. Sorokin's "Contemporary Sociological Theory), said he wrote
the examination "from the point of view of the Harvard man who doesn't
stoop to mere detail."
- from The Harvard Crimson, 1949
William Perry, who was dean of Harvard at that point, says of the student,
whom he names Metzger in his essay:
"But sir, I don't think I really deserve it, it was mostly bull, really."
This disclaimer from a student whose examination we have awarded a
straight "A" is wondrously depressing. Alfred North Whitehead invented
its only possible rejoinder: "Yes sir, what you wrote is nonsense, utter
nonsense. But ah! Sir! It's the right kind of nonsense!"
Bull in pure form is rare; there is usually some contamination by
data. The community has reason to be grateful to Mr. Metzger for having
created an instance of laboratory purity, free from any adulteration by
matter.
Perry now defines two notions:
cow - data, without relevancies, vs.
bull - relevancies, without data.
[I would use the words "substance" and "oomph" where he has "data" and
"relevancy" and one could address very deep philosophical issues. ]
As instructors, we always give bull an E, when we detect it; whereas we
usually give cow a C, even though it is always obvious. . . . a liberal
education should teach a student "how to think," - that is, to understand
"how the other fellow orders knowledge," then bulling, even in its purest
form, expresses an important part than the collecting of "facts that are
facts" which schoolboys learn to do. . . . After a long evening of reading
blue books full of cow, the sudden meeting with a student who at least
understands the problems of one's field provides a lift like a draught of
refreshing wine. . .
Sometime later, I came across Harry Frankfurt's book, On Bullshit, where he discusses bullshit and humbug, (which are not quite the same as "balderdash", "claptrap", "hokum", "drivel", "buncombe", "imposture", or "quackery"). (see earlier version of essay at nettime.org) Bullshit, says Frankfurt, is on a continuum between plain language (let's call it "truth") on the end close to "lying" (which is not clearly defined). He feels that the difference between bullshit and lying is that in bullshit, the speaker actually believes what is being said: Consider a Fourth of July orator, who goes on bombastically about "our great and blessed country, whose Founding-Fathers under divine guidance created a new beginning for mankind." This is surely humbug. [But] the orator is not lying. He would be lying only if it were his intention to bring about in his audience beliefs which he himself regards as false... [He does not care about the truth or falsehood of the content, he is concerned only with the image he is projecting of himself. ] To my mind, lying differs from bullshit in the degree to which you expect to benefit personally from the misrepresentation... Later, he says that "there is a selflessness" about bullshit - which is close to this. To distinguish this, HF relates this anecdote about Wittgenstein, related by Fania Pascal, who knew him in Cambridge in the 1930s: I had my tonsils out and was in the Evelyn Nursing Home feeling sorry for myself. Wittgenstein called. I croaked: "I feel just like a dog that has been run over." He was disgusted: "You don't know what a dog that has been run over feels like." In reacting this way, is Wittgenstein saying that "to feel like a dog that has been run over" is a lie? Or is it bullshit? With this, Frankfurt brings all figurative speecch onto the same continuum as bullshit and lying. Indeed, what is creativity, but twisting reality, or lying? - Mar 09
PERSONAL REPORT Wallace Stegner: The town dump Allan Seager: The joys of sport at Oxford Bil Gilbert: Pop Angler E. B. White: Once More to the Lake PROSE FORMS: JOURNALS: Ralph Waldo Emerson: from Journal Katherine Mansfield: from Journal Henry David Thoreau: from Journal Donald Pearce: from Journal of a war ON LANGUAGE: William March: The Unspeakable Words C. S. Lewis: Bluspels and Falansferes Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff: Clear Sentences, right rhythm Francis Crhistensen: A generative rhetoric of the sentence Walker Gibson: A note on style and limits of lg W Somerset Maugham: Lucidity, simplicity, euphony AN ALBUM OF STYLES Roger Ascham: The wind (from Toxoplhilus: A treatise on the art of shooting with the bow) Francis Bacon: Of Youth and Age (from Of Death) John Donne: Men Are Sleeping Prisoners Samuel Johnson: The Pyramids David Hume: Laurence Sterne: Of Door Hinges and Life in General Charles Lamb: The Two Races of Men Hazlitt: Going on a journey Thomas De Quincey: Literature of Knowledge and Literature of Power Thomas Babington Macaulay: writing History John Henry Newman: Knowledge and Virtue (from The ideas of a university) Matthew Arnold: Culture (from Sweetness and Light) ON EDUCATION Wayne C Booth: Is there any knowledge that a man must have? William G. Perry, Jr.: Examsmanship and the Liberal arts: A study in educational epistemology John Holt: How teachers make their children hate reading Jerome S. Bruner: The will to learn ON MIND Henry David Thoreau: Observation John Selden: The measure of things Jacob Bronowski: The Reach of Imagination Roberta Wohlstetter: Surprise [Pearl Harbor] Stanley Milgram: A behavioral study of obedience PROSE FORMS: LETTERS ON CIVILIZATION Edmund Wilson: Books of etiquette and Emily Post Eric Hoffer: The Role of the Undesirables James Baldwin: Stranger in the Village Martin Luther King Jr.: Letter from Birmingham Jail Daniel P. Moynihan: Nirvana now X. J. Kennedy: Who killed King Kong ON LITERATURE AND THE ARTS Robert Frost: Education by Poetry: A Meditative Monologue Harold Zyskind: A rhetorical analysis of the Gettysburg address William E Wilson: Madeline among the midshipmen E.M. Forster: Not listening to Music Joseph Wood Krutch: Modern painting Kenneth Clark: The blot and the diagram PROSE FORMS: CHARACTERS ON ETHICS W.H. Auden: Pride William James: Letter to Peg Erik H. Erikson: The golden rule in the light of new insight Peter B Medawar: Science and the sanctity of life Richard M. Hare: Philosophy, ethics and racial discrimination Walter Jackson Bate: A life of allegory ON GOVERNMENT James Thurber: The rabbits who caused all the trouble Jefferson et al: Declaration of Independence [original / final drafts] Jonathan Swift: A Modest Proposal E. B. White: Democracy Carl Becker: Democracy Walter Lippmann: The Indispensable Opposition D. H. Lawrence: The spirit of place Paul A. Freund: 5-to-4: Are the justices really objective? Felix Frankfurter: Haley v. Ohio PROSE FORMS: APOTHEGMS W.H. Auden: Apothegms Ambrose Bierce William Blake: Proverbs of hell Mark Twain: Pudd'nhead Wilson's calendars Benjamin Franklin La Rochefoucauld Blaise Pascal, Pensees ON HISTORY Nathaniel Hawthorne: Abraham Lincoln Barbara Tuchman: Lord Salisbury Henry David Thoreau: The Battle of the Ants Thucydides: The Corcyraean revolution W.H. Lewis: Galleys of France Hannah Arendt: Denmark and the Jews Edward Hallett Carr: The historian and his facts ON SCIENCE John D. Stewart: Vulture country Konrad Z. Lorenz: The Taming of the Shrew John Livingston Lowes: Time in the middle ages John Rader Platt: Style in Science PROSE FORMS: PARABLES Plato: Allegory of the cave Kafka: Parable of the Jew Matthew (Bible): Parables of the Kingdom ON RELIGION Robert Graves: Mythology Ronald A. Knox: The nature of enthusiasm George Santayana: Classic Liberty Gerard Manley Hopkins: The fall of God's first kingdom John Donne: Let me wither Henry Sloane Coffin: What crucified Christ?