What I’m Reading This Week: J. L. Carr’s Month in the Country
Posted By BillHeise on April 19, 2010
As usual, I am late.I intended to write and publish my second book review several Fridays ago. However, events (read fate) intervened, and I’ve only got around to it today. I will try to do better in the following weeks.
My Approach to Book Reviews
I found Ezra Klein’s article called “My favorite books—or not” on the Washington Post website last week.
In it, he notes that his fellow bloggers are talking about their favorite books.
Matt Yglesias, Tyler Cowen and an array of other bloggish luminaries are running through the lists of books that most influenced their thinking.
I’ve written this sort of thing before. The mainstays on my list are John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” Tom Geoghegan’s “Which Side Are You On?,” Abraham Joshua Heschel’s “Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity,” Richard Ben Cramer’s “What It Takes” and maybe a handful of others.
He then admits what everyone in the world already knows: no one reads books anymore:
But I always feel like a fraud.
His reasons are that blogs take up more of his attention than books do, and have for a long time:
These books meant a lot to me, but they were much less influential in my thinking — particularly in my current thinking — than a variety of texts that carry consider less physical heft. Years spent reading the Washington Monthly, American Prospect and New Republic transformed me from someone interested in politics into someone interested in policy. So, too, did bloggers like, well, Matthew Yglesias, Kevin Drum and Tyler Cowen. In fact, Cowen, Brad DeLong, Mark Thoma and a variety of other economics bloggers also get credit for familiarizing me with a type of basic economic analysis that’s consistently present in my approach to new issues.
You’d think that my emphasis here would be to dismiss posts like these (and their authors) from consideration in favor of much deeper books. After all, I have embarked on a project of reading books that I had missed the first time around. What am I doing if I am not going to be supportive of the goals of literature over the lesser goals of writing short posts for rapid consumption in a temporary medium?
But the fact is that I don’t agree that books are deeper than blogs. I believe that literature is falling out of favor, not because of the laziness of modern man in the face of the deep literature and culture of the wise, but because literature itself is still pursuing goals that are, for the modern man and women, older, backwards-looking, and largely irrelevant.
There is nothing necessary about this tendency. Moreover, in my literary work, I hope to face the challenges of literature and to recuperate the literary experience from its failings. This project is my attempt at coming to terms with the literature of the past and to assess what had been overemphasized and what has been left out that it would be profitable to reinclude on account of its relevance to modern men and women.
So, with that goal in mind, I start out with J. L. Carr’s A Month in the Country
The Back Cover Description
The back cover of the novel has an adequate description for the purposes of review. It reads as follows:
In J. L. Carr’s deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin [no relation to Jane Birkin], a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the bell tower, surrounded by the resplendent countryside of high summer, and laboring each day to uncover an anonymous painter’s extraordinary depiction of the apocalypse, Birkin finds that he himself has been restored to a new, and hopeful, attachment to life. But summer ends, and with the work done, Birkin must leave. Now, long after, as he reflects on the passage of time and the power of art, he finds in his memories some consolation for all that has been lost.
A Generic Discussion of Plot Structure
That’s nor enough for me, though I like to put my books in a format I have developed in grad school, where I often had to read 4 of 5 books in a day. This structure helped me define the lines of inquiry I would take in approaching the novel, helped me to pull out themes quickly, and helped organize the economy of time so I would miss as little as possible (and believe me, you miss a lot when you are reading 4-5 books a day).
I lay out my system in my book, Writing for People Who Hate Writing
But organizing facts in such a manner is a recipe for disaster. I outline a process in my book of breaking the “natural” order of facts, manipulating them, and then putting them back together in a more rational fashion than you found them. (read the book if you want to know how it works, but my system does work).
Therefore, my system for reading anything is to consciously identify four points in anything you read.
- Status Quo—This is the “natural” world as it is when we begin to read.
- Conflict—This is a problem of set of problems that breaks the symmetry of the “natural” world. From the time we encounter the conflict to the time we are in the Action Sequence.
- Action Sequence—This section will take up 99% of a novel. Here, the writer turns over all the various solution in his mind before settling on one in his resolution.
- Resolution—In the resolution we get the “new natural” world, that is a world in which the problem (the Conflict) that the writer had noticed with the Status Quo has been considered from many angles is restored to its new and more stable balance that is in accord with nature.
The Plot of A Month in the Country
- Status Quo—The non-Jane Birkin has been in war. He lives in the city.
- Conflict—Birkin leaves the city for a job in the country.
- Action Sequence—He uncovers the Last Judgment painting, which is deeper than he thought at the beginning of the novel, and he falls in love with a married woman name Alice. Carr wields themes, including, but not limited to, judgment, time, and love.
- Resolution—He returns to the city healed by his encounter with a painting of the Last Judgment and by his unconsummated love for Alice.
8 Questions
1. Why we don’t just read one book?
I once knew a guy who was proud he had only read one book in his life. He was a nice guy, but his reading habits made me suspicious of him. So I avoided the topic with him and turned the conversation to other topics when I was with him. But the question I always wanted to ask him was why he was so proud of taking a position that the world generally acknowledges to be a position taken by stupid people.
Part of the answer, which I had to work out for myself, was that he didn’t know enough to know what he didn’t know. People who read know that people who don’t read are people who are not curious about things. That was enough to satisfy me if all I wanted was satisfaction; but I was curious about what was he thinking, not about what he didn’t know.
This position is available to everyone who has been in school. It is also an invitation to rest on what you already know about the world. This places you on the top of a hierarchy of knowledge: you know; others don’t know. The world operates on this principle quite often. Everyone thinks they know something that others don’t know. Not knowing is something we ascribe to others, not to ourselves. But no one is asking themselves what they themselves don’t know.
This is important for my reading of A Month in the Country; because, although I liked Carr’s book, I didn’t love it. If I, like my friend, had only one book to take with me to an island—this is one of those dorm room games that we used to play in college before the much-heralded (and vastly over-rated) ‘death of learning’—then I would always take The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
If I ask myself, as literary critics have asked themselves, why don’t others read what I want them to read, then one answer that is available to them is that ‘others’ are ignorant fools who don’t that reading is good for them. And being fools, they don’t have to be listened to. But that is not the only solution, and I would say not the best solution.
So the question I might have asked myself after reading this book is why I didn’t read War and Peace over and over. My answer springs from the fact that, while I think reading is good and good for me, there are others in the world who disagree with my assessment. Intellectuals tend to dismiss them as unworthy of serious consideration as thinkers on the lines of the ‘we knowledgeable; they dumb’ model. But this approach has some serious problems if we look at it from a different perspective. And this is what I intend to do in this review.
2. Generic and specific elements in art. What matters when we read?
My point is that we do not read for the basic plot points that I outlined above (Status Quo to Resolution). If we did, then there would be no reason to read more than one book. All murder mysteries have a murder at the beginning and a resolution at the end. Why do we who do like to read more than once murder mystery, if every murder mystery has the same structural plot elements?
The answer is that we don’t read for these structural elements. Those are just arbitrary generic structures on which we hang things that capture our attention at the moment. As events change, we renew our faith in the social structure by turning our minds towards television, movies, the Internet, and yes, even books when a conflict arises in our lives. Last week, Television Cop Show dealt with a psychopathic killer in the streets of Ur-City. This week they are dealing with a child-molester in Ur-City.
Have you ever wondered why there are so many bizarre murderers in Ur-City in which Television Cop Show is set? No ever does. The experience of watching television dramas is wrapped up in fiction, and that means that the prospect of questioning the situation in which the writers have set their imaginary experience (the fictional world of Ur-City) is unimportant. What matters is the general sense that we all share in, and that doesn’t really matter in ‘nature.’ It is a product of imagination.
What is more, this quest for a general sense down not mean that the experience of watching television is the quest for the last thing we’ll ever watch. It is no more than a momentary solution to an aspect of our lives that, for whatever reason, people feel has gotten out of control.
What this means is that when we watch Television Cop Show, we are not looking for permanent answer to problems. Instead we are interested in a bit of a thrill with a satisfying answer at the end. Television Cop Show is art that does not last. We are more interested in the constant tension and release than we are in any permanent solution to our problems. This puts our emphasis on the Action Sequence in my plot structure.
This is different than our expectations for literature. When we read, we expect a more permanent resolution to our problems than we expect from Television Cop Show. This changes our emphasis from middles (Action Sequences) to ends (Resolutions).
This emphasis on ends is exactly what we get when we read A Month in the Country.
The emphasis on the endings is apparent when on page 94 Birkin discovers that the painter of the medieval of painting had also faced his death so many years ago. This is a condition of the living. But he discovers that the painter must have died on the job
He’d sweated here, tossed in his bed, groaned, howled over it. Those torn hands, those agonized fingers,
“And he shal com with woundes rede …”
And then I knew why that last yard of fire wasn’t his. This was his last job. He’d had enough, could stick it no longer. He’d left, thrown in his hand. But in those days you couldn’t leave; they’d have hauled him back and kicked him to a conclusion. So he must have died on the job. But his last brush-strokes had been steady and sure, he’d been as fit at the end as when he’d begun.
And then I understood. I turned and, shuffling to the scaffold’s edge, stared down at the stone-slabbed floor. He’d fallen.
Great God! I scrambled down the ladder and ran from the church. Moon had almost reached his tent. “He fell,” I yelled after him, “This was his last job. He fell.”
Moon turned and, as it sunk in, he grinned. “O.K.,” he called back. “Mind your own step, then” (94).
Why do I think this is important? After all, his friend Moon dismisses Birkin’s observation as a curiosity at best. Well, it is important because it affects Birkin more deeply than it does Moon. He is coming to align his own experience with the past master.
It’s as though Carr wants us to connect the two characters (he does) and Moon is there to divide those in the know (like Birkin and the reader) from those who are among the unknowing (Moon, but also everyone who does not pick up and read this particular book). The episode gives a sense of belonging to the reader by which he can align him or herself with the ‘knowing few’ and against the ‘ignorant many.’
But my question would be to ask whether this experience with ends (Resolutions) is so different than the experience of reading for a never-ending series temporary middles (Action Sequences) without any expectation of a permanent ending. I think the difference is vast. The literary ending of A Month in the Country is supposed to be a permanent solution. The Action Sequence of Television Cop Show is supposed to solve a problem; but, by the very nature of television cop shows, the same plot will come around again (perhaps on another show; perhaps on Television Cop Show itself) if the solution worked out turns out not to be permanent. Television, and pop culture generally, is not as interested in permanent solutions as it is in purveying temporary solutions like Band-Aids to permanent wounds.
Now, I don’t believe we can have a permanent solution to problems that we have been banging our heads against the collective wall since the beginning of time. Literature, which still holds on to the hope that it can offer permanent answers to unanswerable questions, still offers us hope that we can ever find enduring solutions to life’s greatest problems. It does so in vain.
That is not the end of literature, but it does explain why books are so unpopular while movies and television are going gangbusters. Books are holding on to a dying worldview which TV and film have long since dispensed with. We need to change our orientation to reading of books from ends to middles if we want to make the practice useful to us again.
3. If art is truly individual, why should Birkin’s personal experience mean anything to me?
Carr resorts to Birkin’s personal experience to ground him. Birkin has his own personal experience, and it widens by the end of the novel. But this is the same problem I had with literature as I was trying to explore the relationship between my particular individual experience, which was deep and differentiated me from even my closest friends, and the general cultural experience, which tended to be the same for all members of society. As you will remember, I was trying to broaden my individual experience to capture the culture. I found that the individual experience is much more interesting to me and more memorable to me than the sameness of the collective experience.
And I think that’s the message that art itself has been suggesting since the early 1960s, when Andy Warhol was putting forth his original art. Warhol’s art was manufactured in the vein of modern capitalist production and reproduction. But individual art did not go away with Warhol’s pop art. By the end of the 1960s, Elton John could retreat back into his and Bernie’s own personal experience. Warhol himself, as you may remember, had simply picked up the critique of Duchamp without actually proposing something new. So my conclusion is that the art world had simply gone back to its roots with the reproduction of Warhol’s art by many little Warhol imitators rather than propsing something really new. So that by the time that Elton John spoke, he was very secure in his work on his own personal experience, but he had hard time explaining why it should matter to anyone else in the world. The reasons for the fact that it did matter, not only to me, but to millions, the artist himself seemed oblivious to.
So my question, then, would be whether there is any meaning beyond ourselves? If not, why should I (or anyone, for that matter) write? Wouldn’t that mean that the production of art is nothing more than a large ego spreading itself in the manner appropriate to other large egos. Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche are no more than bold egomaniacs who have taken control in an otherwise world of moral atoms. They are the bold, and through boldness they have taken control of their lives in a way that ‘the little people’ (sheep or slaves) can never do.
Is this position a reflection of the ‘real world,’ or is it an illusion of the mind? If it is a reflection of the larger world, how is this position possible, since its premise reliance on skepticism? In fact, this position only makes sense as an illusion of mind.
So what we need, in my opinion, is a process by which we can overcome our skepticism. What, if any, are the processes by which we can overcome our skepticism? Are they to forever remain hidden from us, or are they capable of being worked out in our mind and raised up from sparking stage to full control by and through reason.
Do we need to read this novel, A Month in the Country, which I would say is a nice novel but not a great novel? And what are we looking for when we read novels? Are we only looking for the perfect novel that will wrap up our lives in a neat package? And if so, shouldn’t we read other, better novels? Following this logic, we would soon have a world in which we would only read the great novels (as an ancient professor assured me had happened in the 60s). But then people would begin to ask about the wisdom of following others’ recommendations (which my ancient professors assured me they taught their students to be skeptical of reading with a mind to placing their minds in other’s hands). Then no one would read great novels at all, but instead would go searching for more immediate pleasures that spoke to them more directly. Oh wait, that’s the world that Ezra Klein says we live in now.
4. One world perspective, or various perspectives on an incompletely grasped one world?
Carr’s novel rehearses the emphasis on ends that I would call characteristic of the literary approach to life. This emphasis, which had so much of a vogue in the literary criticism of Eliot, has given way in more recent criticism to more deconstructive approach to ends.
The New Critical approach to literature and the deconstructive approach share an emphasis on ends. This approach is characteristic of the metaphysical orientation by which we are in the habit of reading literature. The metaphysical orientation of literature takes nature as its guide. And the first thing that anyone must confront in the mind’s attempt to grasp the outside world of nature with the individual mind is the impossibility of entirely grasping the whole world of nature in the mind. This is the origin of skepticism in literary criticism.
Keeping this in mind, we can assess the approaches towards ends that are characteristic of each school. Eliot’s approach was characterized by his realization that he would fail to connect to nature in a direct manner. Therefore he disassembled the human experience in ‘The Wasteland.’ It was up to the individual reader to reconstruct nature in his head, at a distance, as it were. They transferred the world of nature, which they couldn’t grasp in its ontological purity, to the mind, which they thought they could grasp. By this method, he and his fellow critics could claim to have recovered the purpose of literature from the relativism that Einstein had just introduced into the cosmic order of nature.
By the 1960s, Derrida had lost faith in ability of any human being to reconstruct the ends of the world of nature in their own mind. He took out the last remaining bit of science from literary criticism—Eliot’s focus on ends as pointing us forward—and substituted a perpetual revolution for Eliot’s permanent march forward towards the soon-to-be-captured end of all things (known in religious terminology in which my teachers used to talk about their profession as ‘The Apocalypse’). Everyone, then, is vying for the ends of literature. In the end, all literature can be classified by the extent to which it coincides with our ideal aesthetic experience.
But what Carr is doing in his novel is not in accord with the metaphysical portrait of ‘nature’ at all. I borrow a metaphor from the philosopher Plato here (Allegory of the Cave in The Republic): in the quote above, he is dividing the Moons from the people who ask questions and come to see the underlying sun that resides beneath our experience.
That’s fine, but the metaphysical orientation to reading hopelessly constricts the notion of literature. Only literature that conforms to the ‘natural’ configuration counts as literature. The question that we can pose about any work of literature—is this a ‘natural’ or an ‘unnatural’ experience that we are having?—will be susceptible to being thrown out if they are found to be ‘unnatural.’ This is what both Eliot and Derrida both discovered. Their approach to the same underlying phenomenon of nature was the same. Their responses to the same phenomenon were different. As soon as they recognize anything as having anything to do with the changeable world of science, they are obligated to forgo it and to turn themselves towards the permanent elements which is central to the purpose of fiction in our otherwise rapidly changing lives. And pretty soon everything that can be thought about anything will be able to be deconstructed. But what neither of them did was to throw out the notion that what we are doing when we write something is ‘natural.’
I would argue that the experience of reading is itself ‘unnatural.’ It is, after all, a product, not of ‘nature’ but of finding a break in the natural world (the Status Quo) and then leaving the natural world while we try and experiment with various solutions in our imagination before settling on our final resolution and returning to earth with a new Status Quo.
This process is not a product of ‘nature’ at all, but reason acting on imagination. And rather than fleeing science, as literary critics have done in their attempt to recapture nature in all its purity, Carr uses the division of science to divide his readers into unknowing Moons and knowing suns. Undoing such divisions as ‘unnatural’ configurations would ultimately undo the work that makes reading Carr’s novel worthwhile.
It would also, if we pursue it to its logical end, undo the divisions between high and low art and between various genres like comedy and tragedy. All of these things are ultimately the result of an imaginative recreation of the natural world in the human mind, and are not identical with nature’s actual creations. If we use ‘nature’ as our touchstone, then all of these things can be dismissed as long as we can get enough perspective on our lives. The erasure of logic from the world of literature would ultimately leave the appreciation of literature to a matter of nothing more than personal taste. This, as I have said elsewhere, is appropriate for music, perhaps, but in the sphere of literature, in which we come together in a collective manner, it is a problem.
5. Theme of Judgment
Literature may be in quest of eternal values, and Carr’s work may touch on them, but there are more substantial books than Carr’s book to read if we want permanent answers to permanent questions. Shouldn’t we read Milton’s Paradise Lost if we want to read about the causes of Judgment (if not the Judgment itself)? Shouldn’t we read Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield if we want to read about the country life? And as for facing death, shouldn’t we read War and Peace’s account of Prince Andrei as he lies in the grass, wounded and near death at the Battle of Austerlitz, looking up at the blue sky, and realizing the dreams of glory he held in his youth are pointless? The answer is, of course we should if all we want to read one book that encapsulates all (or as much as it is possible) there is to know.
But we don’t read literature just for one point of view, do we? Sometimes we want something light. Sometimes we want to think about deeper things. There is a broad array of genres to choose from, and within the multitude of genres, countless individual plots to choose from. Comedy tonight? Or a nice tragedy? It depends on our mood, of course, but also on our patience. My wife things my love of film noir is ridiculous. I think her love of horror films is over the top. We manage to get along just fine, because we recognize that tastes differ and we do not place so great an emphasis on our tastes in art as the final word on our lives. It is, after all, only art, not life.
The symbolism of judgment in the novel may, then, be impermanent from the final metaphysical position in the universe; but its impermanence may not matter to everyone who picks up the novel. Some may decide that they believe in a final judgment at the end of time in which people are sorted according their worldly sins. Others, like Birkin himself, may decide that, although they can’t believe that the universe has so permanent a place for judgment in line for us after we die, but they are still willing to convert the old experience of religion into the new experience of aesthetic judgment.
Who’s to say which of the many experiences of judgment is correct in a world composed only of individual monads? Perhaps no one. But Derrida’s ultimate perspective doesn’t invalidate Carr’s less-than-ultimate position. Nor does it make the reading of the novel any less affecting to those who read it.
The painter—who doesn’t exist in nature and never has—has fallen off the ladder to his death. Birkin connects those facts for us, and with him we can experience what we would not otherwise be able to experience, not in nature but in our own minds. If art is only personal reflection without positioning ourselves amidst the various positions of culture, society, and even nature, then Carr’s judgment should have no bearing on the story at all. This is why Eliot and the New Critics failed to come to the end of their inquiry into the origins of literature. They decided too soon that they had found the one position from which all other positions could be judged.
Instead, Birkin latches on to the terms of judgment, transferring the Hell of the past to his memory of his recent present. Hell, then, is transferred from the spoken image of the past (of Cerberus and the demons that used to inhabit the supposed ‘real world’ of the Middle Ages) to his own, unspoken, imagery from the recently remembered war. By facing his own bleak memory obscurely, through images from the past, he manages to come to terms with what he cannot face directly. That is, once again, a reason to read Carr’s novel. It’s not simply a novel of his personal memories, though people have said this about him that he fills his novel with a lot of personal experience. It’s a novel which draws his personal experience to reconnect his main character to images of society, nature, love, and even judgment.
6. Theme of lost love.
Birkin manages to relate his learning to his actual life when he ties up all the loose ends in his love for Alice, a married woman who has settled down with a husband she may love but whom she loves only tepidly. Birkin, on the other hand, loves her madly.
“Me! Well, I’m not an artist, but they gave me a diploma at L.C.A. with a cast-iron guarantee that I could be relied upon to recognize Beauty whenever my eyes fell thereon. So, professionally, I must tell you, Yes, you’re beautiful. Very.” And could she have made herself go that little bit further and given me the nod, I would have recited a catalogue of her charms—in detail—because my blood was up. Delectissima, amantissima! (116)
He dreams of taking her away with him out of the country back to ‘real world’ of life. But he never does. Why? It is surely not because “fate in the preposterous guise of Mossop stepped in” (116-117). Something else is happening.
My answer is that the aesthetic experience which the novelist Carr is after only works as long as we don’t push it to completion. We don’t want to complete the sexual act, because sex would only spoil the aesthetic experience. The sexual response is a not a ‘natural’ reaction to seeing ‘the other Birkin’ (Jane) naked. It is okay as long as we are not perverts who are looking at her body (which we are!). In the modern world, art gives us a license to look at naked women without feeling as though we are a bunch of perverts.
Is it ‘real?’ Who cares. Human beings will naturally do what human beings do. What we need is some veil through which we can peer to distance ourselves from our animal instincts, to make us less bestial and more like the dignified human beings we know we are. That is the function of fine art in the modern world.
7. Theme of displaced memory and time in the novel.
Memory is important in the novel. Our lives have certain boundaries. These boundaries are in many ways impermanent. This gives rise to the notion, put forward by certain feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, friend and lover of Sartre, that our lives are subject to our ability to create of them what we will. Gender is not an ontological category, but is instead a category added to nature by mankind. And being an addition being can be worked far more than it has been in past civilizations, where men were held up from confronting their freedom by the fact that they were holding onto habits of thought as though they were ‘natural.’
In Carr’s novel, we can be free of the former habits of thinking that there is a real Cerberus awaiting for us by a similar move as that which Ms. Beauvoir makes. Only when we realize that it is foolish to actually believe in such things can we reconstruct them freely in our free minds. In A Month in the Country we are presented with a static moment by looking more deeply than others have into the past.
I would ask whether this experience is any more real than the experience of you or I? I would answer my own question with a ‘No.’ But in Carr’s novel, the aesthetic experience of the past is more real than the present moment. We get our glimpse of the past when he’s looking at the painting of the judgment.
It was the most extraordinary detail of medieval painting I’ve ever seen, anticipating the Brueghels by a hundred years. What, in this single detail, had pushed him this immense stride beyond his time?
So there I was, on that memorable day, knowing that I had a masterpiece on my hands but scarcely prepared to admit it, like a greedy child hoards the best chocolates in the box. Each day I used to avoid taking in the whole by giving exaggerated attention to the particular. Then, in the early evening, when the westering sun shone in the past my my baluster to briefly light the wall, the step back, still purposely not letting my eyes focus on it. Then I looked.
It was breathtaking. (Anyway, it took my breath.) A tremendous waterfall of color, the blues of the apex falling, then seeping into the turbulence of red, like all truly great works of art, hammering you with its hole before beguiling you with its parts. (75)
Once again, want to reiterate the fact that I really enjoyed these moments in the novel. But is it only the sense that he has that by looking backwards in time that he has discovered something deeper about life. The present is dull. It is only by the addition of the past that we can truly learn to appreciate our lives fully.
This, it seems to me, is a flaw in, not only Carr’s book, but a flaw in the aesthetic system itself. The aesthetic system that Carr operates under is one in which the past can give us glimpses of the past only. And, because we in the future have a broader understanding of art than they had in the medieval past, we can judge what they could not judge for themselves in the medieval world. We are better, more complete people for having been born later than they.
It was the most extraordinary detail of medieval painting I’ve ever seen, anticipating the Brueghels a hundred years. What, in this single detail, had pushed him this immense stride beyond his time?
So by the end of the novel, when he leaves, Birkin has been healed. His month in the country has restored him to a more firm balance. It has done him a world of good that he did not suspect when he arrived. The effect on the reader is the same. We, the knowing, are similarly affected with a deeper understanding of our place in the sun.
But what about Birkin’s sense of his future? Carr says nothing of that. This, I think, is one of the problems of modern aesthetics. We’re prepared to look at the past, and we can judge works of art in the past based on our known position on the timeline, but we don’t really have any aesthetic image and imagery or any other means of judging the future (for more on this see my article on P-E Ratios, etc.) All the aesthetic imagery, however carefully crafted and however carefully managed, can show us nothing about the future that we haven’t experienced in the past. The best we can do is to gather as mch information about the past as we can and from the distance to which we have been raise up through our knowledge look back on the world and judge ‘the little people’ who do not even suspect that there is such a perspective to be had.
In the aftermath of his exprience in the country Birkin says that, “there had been a blank wall and now it wasn’t blank.” Of course he’s talking about the wall he has uncovered. He’s talking, in a not too subtle subtext, about his discovery of his love for another woman. This love in the abstract aesthetic space is of labors lost. It does not consume him because he never gets close to the actual experience of life. He is always looking inward through a glass darkly, as it were. He can look, but he can’t touch.
His entire experience in the country is, then, a distant dream of imagination which vanishes as soon as we touch it. He’s uncovered the wall, and he leaves it. He uncovers his feelings for Alice but does not act on them, but instead leaves her, too, untouched.
Is this the final word on the aesthetic experience: it gives him no more than a false dream of reconnecting with nature but only through the veil of illusion brought forth by imagination, which is to say that it gives and takes away without actually satiating any desire.
8. Why I don’t mind my friend’s ignorance
This brings me back to my friend who had only read one book in his life. Do I think he would be better off if he knew what I know about literature? Yes, I do. My training has given me the ability to ask questions that non-scholars don’t know to ask and has given me the training to answer them efficiently. But I am only a specialist in literature. He has his own specialties which I know nothing of. And he can ask questions that I don’t even know to ask.
This leaves us as two different individuals with two different perspectives. Neither of us has complete knowledge. No one has complete knowledge. Even Socrates, who was supposed to be the wisest man ever could only ask questions until he had traveled up away from earth to judge from on high. That is perhaps enough to judge the past, but the future and our judgments on it are made on a different basis.
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