Bureau of Treatises:
World Theory
6 July 2015
There are times when, like everyone else, I wish I had my life to live over again — aided, of course, by the wisdom that I’ve acquired on the first go-round. In my case, these fantasies involve academic careers that I should have pursued in fields that even now don’t exist. The imaginary specialty that I have been thinking of most recently won’t have a name, will it, until I give it one. Here goes.
World Theory. Yes — the longer I look at it, the more I like it. It makes such an entertainingly ridiculous first impression. “World Theory” would be a theory about everything, right? Wrong — the second attraction. You must always give your theory a name that will trip up the uninitiated; otherwise, it’s not properly academic. World Theory (I’m being serious now, class) seeks to explain how certain man-made things acquire the very rare permanence that makes them meaningful to successive generations. How is it that we are still listening to Mozart and reading Jane Austen? World Theory would also seek to explain how this permanence, which is by no means to be confused with immortality, may be lost. How is it that we are no longer listening to Cherubini, nor reading Sir Walter Scott? Just what kind of cultural loss was entailed by the demolition of Pennsylvania Station? The destruction of the World Trade Center?
“The World,” according to World Theory, is made up exclusively of such permanent things. The vernacular word for these things is “classics,” but it throws no light on what World Theory wants to know, which is how and why some things get to be classics. Also, World Theory needs to explain who is doing the listening and the reading — the appreciating of classics. Appreciation is the principal Worldly activity of human beings. There is a vital secondary activity, known familiarly as “scholarship.” Scholars keep track of Worldly Things; they know the names and dates, they prepare editions and repair paintings with one objective that never changes with fashion: to preserve whatever it is that has been appreciated. World Theory itself is another secondary activity. The main Worldly activity, as I say, is appreciating things.
To begin at the beginning, let’s have a look at what academics calls “the Classics,” or “Classical Studies.” These are things — poems, statues, ruins — that were made, for the most part, by people who spoke Greek and Latin and who lived (to cast the net very wide) between 800 BCE and 400 CE. Scholars, as I say, oversee the care and clarification of these things. They authenticate the statues, and they prepare Loeb editions of the poems. To this extent, their work is a specialty of history. Classics scholars are often motivated by something besides academic curiosity, however. They are quite often impassioned appreciators of the things they study. Their relationship with these things is marked by love and reverence (even if the reverence often hides behind a taste for the carnal longing of Catullus or the rudeness of Juvenal). Insofar as they appreciate what they study, classicists are Worldly.
According to World Theory, the point of a liberal education is to instill in students the desire and the ability to appreciate the World. Where the modern research university has gone off the rails is in its attempt to transform students into scholars — into academics. Much of what passes for higher education is merely the ritual simulation of scholarly activity that bypasses the development of appreciative skills entirely. There are sorry explanations for this mistake, but we shan’t go into them now. We shall merely remind ourselves that the modern research university was concocted when entrepreneurs were harnessing what we now call “the scientific revolution” to drive what we now call “the industrial revolution.” In those days, quantities and regularities were the measures of success, and, as such, extremely important kinds of scores.
It is an axiom of World Theory that new things cannot be appreciated until they are no longer new. The vulgar term, “contemporary classic,” is meaningless. It is in the nature of new things to attract admiration. When something continues to attract admiration after losing its novelty, it may be on the way to becoming a Worldly Thing. Time will tell. Admiration becomes appreciation as novelty gives way to personal satisfaction. There is a monotony to admiration, because there is so little understanding in it: we are dazzled by the new in the same way. Over time, however, we appreciate things in very different ways; and yet there is a communicability of these different personal appreciations that produces the thick and rich texture of Worldliness.
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Now: what brought that up? Whom do we thank for the latest little treatise? It seems almost unfair to point to William Maxwell. The preceding paragraphs would probably make him shudder, possibly break out in an allergic reaction. But that’s by the way. What I’m trying to understand is this: will Maxwell’s 1961 novel, The Château, become a Worldly Thing? Is it one already? How can we tell?
World Theory would explain it all, but, sadly, World Theory is not in working order at the moment. The scholars of World Theory have not been trained. This is what I would do if I had my life to live over: I would become the first scholar of World Theory.
Probably the first rule that I would hit on would derive from the axiom of novelty: it is not possible to estimate the Worldliness of a thing created in one’s lifetime.
When people ask me to name my favorite novelists, I draw a blank after Austen, Eliot, and James. Proust? I love Proust, but I don’t know how to re-read him. I’ve gone through the great novel sequence twice in my lifetime, and even embarked on a French crossing. But the work is so immense that it requires a pilgrimage, and one does not spend one’s life on pilgrimages. Is there a way to re-read Proust as one re-reads novels of normal scale? If there is, I’d like to know about it. (Note that the appreciation of a novel begins with the first re-reading. That’s why one essential course in a true liberal arts curriculum would revisit, in the final semester, works read during the first two years of college. With a very light-handed sort of guidance, students would compile their own reading lists from the books, not chosen by them, read earlier.)
Lately, I hit on the idea of keeping all the novels that I’ve read recently and really liked on one shelf. The shelf is only so capacious, and no book can be added to it without the subtraction of another. Who’s on the shelf now? Edward St Aubyn, Alan Hollinghurst, Ben Lerner, Greg Baxter, J K Rowling (The Casual Vacancy), Helen DeWitt (Lightning Rods), plus a few novels by writers who have their own sections in the fiction bookcase (Colm Tóibín, Kazuo Ishiguro, Peter Cameron). And let’s not forget Miklós Bánffy’s Transylvanian Trilogy! (The Penelopes, as one friend referred to this winter’s passion for Fitzgerald and Lively, have their own little bookcase.)
William Maxwell has always had his own corner, shared for a long time (I can’t think why) with Barbara Pym. Pym has moved to the fiction shelf, and now Maxwell abuts all the Europa Editions. I’m waiting anxiously for delivery of the Early volume of the Library of America edition, edited by Christopher Carduff, because the spine on the (signed) Godine edition of Time Will Darken It has broken, leaving the book in two pieces. I was afraid that this would happen, but not while I was reading it. The sooner the LoA book arrives, the safer the Godine will be, because I have been unable to stop reading it.
I have always admired William Maxwell. (Even Worldly Things are novelties at first, centuries-old though they may be.) I have even declared a love for the fables gathered, in 1966, in The Old Man at the Railroad Crossing and Other Stories. But I have only appreciated him since reading The Château, ten or twenty years ago. The Château recounts the adventures of a young American couple, Henry and Barbara Rhodes, at a big house just out of sight of the Loire, as the paying guests of a once wealthy and vaguely aristocratic family. The Rhodes fall in love with France at once (Henry, turning forty, has never been to Europe before), and their fondness is amplified by one of those lucky good times that one sometimes has, in this case at an inn at Pontorson. They love everyone at the inn, and everyone at the inn seems to love them back. This is not the case at the château. What the Rhodeses encounter at the château makes the home lives of the Bellegardes, the cursed grandees in Henry James’s Traviata of a novel, The American, seem Midwestern by comparison. Poor Henry is exasperated by the unintelligibility of Mme Viénot’s treatment, but he keeps coming back for more; and, on his last day in Paris, Henry runs around like a man about to die, lamenting self-piteously that the Luxembourg Gardens will go on without him. William Maxwell completely captures the doomed yearning of earnest and well-educated young Americans to be taken for French, or at least to accepted as civilized equals. The glory of the novel is his demonstration, accomplished without fanfare, that if the Rhodeses are never quite accepted as peers, they do in fact deserve to be. The trick of the novel is that this demonstration makes you like the French even more. For The Château speaks to those Americans who believe that their own country would be a finer place if people were more demanding — especially of themselves.
As far as I’m concerned, The Château is a Worldly Thing. But it’s too soon to tell. All I can do is cast a baleful eye on the novels that hogged all the buzz when it was published. What’s become of them? Alas, I’m not the scholar to answer.