[lit-ideas] Re: F. R. Leavis on Genius, etc
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 7 Sep 2013 11:22:35 +0100 (BST)
Mullan begins: "I once met F.R. Leavis – or almost."
Well, on several occasions I have met John Mullan socially - or almost.
'Bumptious' would be a polite word for him. I also know others who have met him
some of whom literally shudder at the mention of his name - and, many years
after that acquaintance, still have to change channels whenever he appears on
television. I also have a fabulously indiscreet friend who tells a hilarious
story of having dinner with John and his wife (an old Cambridge chum), but it's
not for the list. One of the last times I saw John he was calling at the house
of a mutual friend while I was there, and when he entered he began barking out
phrases in German for no justifiable reason whatsoever.
Why write all this? Though afaik John is not a genius, there are many ways this
bears on genius. One is that John writes concisely and generally well about
literature but you would hardly glean his pointless point-scoring and
condescending personality from his prose. This points up the sometimes massive
gap between person and work - sometimes the work, far from being a
straightforward expression of personality, is almost a testament to the
deficiencies of the person, a kind of effort to overcome defects of character.
[E.g. Beethoven and Wagner - Wagner never had true love but his work was an
artistic way to compensate for this lack.]
John aside, we should avoid a romantic conception of 'genius'. Even those who
might appear to best fit this mantle can hardly be properly understood this way
or in terms of 'personality'. If we look at Beethoven, whose personality is
reflected in his music but who seeks to overcome his personal defects in his
music rather than merely express them, it is not the genius of the personality
that makes his music great but the genuis of the musician-composer: if
Beethoven had the same genius as a musician-composer he may well have produced
equally great work even if he had a very different personality and even if that
very different personality were expressed in his work and central to its
expression - whereas someone with Beethoven's personality but lacking his
musical genius would never have produced such great work even if that same
personality were expressed in the work and central to its expression . The
romantic conception of the artist as 'genius', of
which Beethoven may be the progenitor and apotheosis, tends to obscure all
this.
In Popper's terms, it is grasp of World 3 that is central and not personality
and other things that often are taken as signs of genius. There was a magazine
article recently on Lennon-McCartney that speculated on what it was that marked
their genius as songwriters as opposed to most other contemporaries (why did
only The Beatles transcend the British Invasion Beat Boom of which they were
initially a part?)- everything was canvassed from losing their mothers at a
tender age to being born with the Scouse wit (explanations that fail to explain
why others who lost their mothers when young, or blessed with Scouse wit,
showed the same creative genius). The most important factor here - World 3 -
was left unmentioned. Lennon-McCartney had a deeper and wider grasp of the
"World 3" of music than their lesser contemporaries and it is this that lies at
the heart of explaining their creativity. The same is true of Dylan. The same
is true of Beethoven. The same is
true of Bach. The same is true of Einstein.
The serious point is that the romantic conception of 'genius' gives undue
emphasis to personality and psychology and tends to overlook what is absolutely
central to their creativity - that their talent was locked deeply and widely
into a 'World 3'.
When you want a clue to their creativity you will find it less in reflection on
personality and the like than in the fact Dylan was a young man who would
virtually lock himself away with the Harry Smith Anthology or Johnson's King of
the Delta Blues Singers with an obsessive fascination to mine their depths and
that Bach would walk for several days just to hear Buxtehude. The reason Mozart
could recite another's composition from memory after one hearing [as reported]
wasn't because he had a photographic or brilliant memory but because he had a
genius-level appreciation of the World 3 of music and so could 'locate' a whole
composition in World 3 terms [and hence 'recall' it given that knowledge] in
the way we might locate a 'word' missing from a sentence because we grasp the
World 3 content of the sentence.
Donal
________________________________
From: Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Lit-Ideas <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, 6 September 2013, 18:30
Subject: [lit-ideas] F. R. Leavis on Genius, etc
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n17/john-mullan/as-if-life-depended-on-it
The above is a review by John Mullen of three books on F. R Leavis. Leavis is
not presented as addressing “genius” per se, but it is implicit and even
mentioned once. Leavis does not admire Dickens, but he does admire Hard Times:
“Dickens does not merit a chapter in The Great Tradition, but Hard Times, on
its own, does. ‘If I am right,’ Leavis writes, ‘of all Dickens’s works it is
the one that has all the strength of his genius, together with a strength no
other of them can show – that of a completely serious work of art.’. . .”
One can therefore read this article, or the books it reviews, and take Leavis’
“great tradition” as an indication of who he believed were the geniuses of
English literature – or moving to the idea (which Leavis would probably
approve) that there are no geniuses only works that embody genius by talented
writers.
Leavis like Britain is considered by some to be irrelevant: “Ellis begins his
memoir by accepting that, for those now teaching English in schools or
universities, ‘Leavis is an irrelevance.’ He certainly seemed an irrelevance to
us as students in the late 1970s. We were about to be plunged into the giddy
world of structuralism and deconstruction. If any of us had been recommended
Leavis by an earnest English teacher, his authority would soon have been
relinquished for Barthes and Derrida and Foucault. Some of the convictions that
sustained him now seem odd relics. Hilliard details the mythologisation in
Scrutiny of a lost world where labourers were creative artisans rather than
alienated wage slaves. In particular Leavis recommended George Sturt’s 1923
study, The Wheelwright’s Shop, a paean to the fulfilment supposedly once found
by the skilled worker in an organic community. Leavis mentions it again in
‘Luddites?’ as evidence of a
relation between ‘cultural values’ and ‘economic fact’ that is ‘finally gone’.
“Yet that supposed ‘irrelevance’ is only apparent. All these books manage to
suggest that Leavis reshaped ideas about the value of reading so completely
that we do not notice it. He taught that every encounter with the greatest
literature is completely fresh and demanding. In his early book How to Teach
Reading he scorned ‘discussing literature in terms of Hamlet’s and Lamb’s
personalities, Milton’s universe, Johnson’s conversation, Wordsworth’s
philosophy, and Othello’s or Shelley’s private life’. We don’t have to reject
all these topics to understand the value of clearing them away. Leavis
bequeathed a confidence in the essential value of any intelligent reader’s
intense engagement with the best literature. There is not exactly a Leavisite
method to follow. As Collini rightly says, reading Leavis’s criticism one often
gets the disconcerting sense that ‘the work of discrimination’ has already been
done and that ‘the
reader is merely being issued with a reminder of what was “plainly” the case.’
He is little interested in William Empson’s brand of close reading with its
minute verbal explication. His critical writing often deploys extended
quotation as if the best writing proves itself. But he had a virtue that would
be rare among leading academic critics of a later generation: he found all that
was valuable within the literary work rather than taking pride in his own
critical ingenuity (in this respect at least, Byatt’s caricature seems wrong).
Leavis taught his students that great literature is a test of the reader,
endlessly renewable, and in this he seems both influential still and right.”
Thus, if we are sufficiently interested in the nature of genius as exemplified
by British novelists and poets we would read Leavis to find out who he
considers to be the great authors in the “Great Tradition.” Leavis would say
that if we read a great novel and don’t appreciate it then we are falling short
of appreciating its genius probably because we ourselves fall far short of
genius and are incapable of grasping what the author achieves. That would be
an intimidating conclusion if all those who developed lists of works in the
Great Tradition agreed with each other.
Lawrence
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