It’s known that Milton’s “Lycidas” is a mosaic of quotations. One piece of its puzzle fell into place for me this morning. Toward the beginning of the poem, the speaker is winding himself up to deliver a full-bore elegy that will bear comparison to the great examples of antiquity, simultaneously elevating his subject (Edward King, a Cambridge graduate drowned at sea) and himself (an obscure Cambridge undergraduate known for his delicate manners, here taking the role of a sheep-herding “uncouth swain”). He says:

He must not lie upon his watery bier
Unwept, and welter to the parching wind,
Without the meed of some melodious tear.
Begin then, sisters of the sacred well
That from beneath the feet of Jove doth spring;
Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string.
Hence with denial vain and coy excuse,
So may some gentle Muse
With lucky words favor my destined urn…

The word “unwept” flashes back to Horace, Odes 4.9:

Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona
multi; sed omnes inlacrimabiles
urgentur ignotique longa
nocte, carent quia uate sacro.

(Many strong men lived before Agamemnon; but all such go unknown into the long night, bereft of mourning, because they lack a holy bard.) The heroes of remote antiquity are “ungrievable,” as Judith Butler might say, not because there’s anything wrong with their birth or character but for the technical reason that no specialist in commemoration through language had yet arisen. The one word “unwept” carries the allusion to Horace and assigns the speaker of Lycidas a task that, if correctly carried out, will put him on a level with Homer– if we know how to hear it, and I didn’t until about an hour ago.

It’s not enough to decide things by majority vote, said my mother to me in (I’m guessing) about 1967 or 68; there also have to be guarantees that the rights of the minority will be protected.

My mother didn’t have a degree in political science, and she may have just been voicing something that was much in the air in those days of desegregation and anti-war protests; but hers is the best test of effective democracy I’ve heard of so far.

She forgot about the special character of referendums carried out under threat of armed attack, but in those days we were still under the spell of the post-1945 dispensation and thought that we’d found a way to keep fascism from recurring.

How nice it was to be innocent and optimistic in those days!

Wallace Stevens’ poem “Connoisseur of Chaos” begins with two propositions:

A. A violent order is disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)

The parenthesis promises pages of illustrations, but the poet’s manner makes clear that not only is he not going to give us those illustrations, but they never were meant to exist in the first place. Descending to the particulars would vitiate the connoisseurship of chaos. In another poem Stevens makes a French book title the target of a parallel complaint:

Livre de Toutes Sortes de Fleurs d’Après Nature.
All sorts of flowers. That’s the sentimentalist.

The negative gesture—the negation of illustrations and enumerations—tells us a lot about what is negated. Complaining about inventories, as Stevens does here, recognizes that such lists exist and have a long history of practice in or around literature, and it is that history that I will attempt to sketch here by interrogating a few examples and their differences. Not a full catalogue of “toutes sortes de fleurs d’après nature,” by any means, but an effort to express what these objects of our collective curiosity—“collections, lists, series and archives”—have to do with literary writing.

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The great editor Helen Tartar was killed two days ago by an errant driver.

What is more random than a traffic accident?

What is less random than the taste, dexterity and care that Helen brought to the reading of proposals, drafts, manuscripts, reports and editorial memos?

I trusted her more than almost anyone else (which doesn’t mean we never disagreed). We worked on many overlapping projects, almost continuously, for twenty-four years. She was my friend and I worried about her.

She was ferocious in the defense of things she thought precious and endangered– for example, first books by academic authors. She could be tough. She could be brittle. She worked herself ragged. Something was always new and exciting. She traipsed from conference to conference, drinking endless cups of bad coffee, knitting while she listened to an infinity of tedious papers, in pursuit of the beautiful book somebody had in them without knowing it.

Nobody can replace her. Who can carry on her work?

Michèle Lamont’s How Professors Think (2009) doesn’t really deliver what the label announces. It doesn’t unveil the distinctive cognitive mechanisms of the strange tribe that gets to wear “Prof.” in front of their names. It’s about only one particular kind of professorial thinking: the discussion and judgment that come out in panels appointed to award fellowship money to selected research proposals– hardly the leading kind of “thinking” among professors, or (I’d hope) the most characteristic.

Even when we limit the scope to something like How Professors Deliberate About Grant Applications, admittedly a less exciting title, there’s something missing from the ethnographic standpoint. Lamont, bless her, keeps her observer’s point of view pretty close to the participants’ and reports their self-evaluations without heavy irony. The questions she asks are: how do people on these panels see themselves as working cooperatively to achieve the fairest outcomes and reward the best proposals? How do they recognize quality? Does the Matthew principle (“unto him that hath, much shall be added”) stand in the way of an open field and no favor? The professors may disagree about such matters as whether there is any such thing as objective merit or whether people can judge work outside their own specialization, but the scenario is still one in which there are no crooked cops and no one was paid to throw the World Series.

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Quoted in an Atlantic article about Asperger’s and the new DSM:

“Just like that, Asperger’s was gone,” [Robison] wrote in an essay on New York magazine’s Web site. “You can do things like that when you publish the rules. Like corrupt referees at a rigged college football game, the APA removed Asperger’s from the field of play and banished the term to the locker room of psychiatric oblivion.”

Now try it again without the adjectives: “Like referees at a college football game…” How is what Robison is doing any different from what he over-vehemently denounces?

Y’all been meaning to go to New Orleans, I know, and here’s a reason that doesn’t have much to do with Mardi Gras. Mel Chin has pulled together forty years’ worth of his work, occupying five or six rooms of the high-ceilinged neoclassical New Orleans Museum of Art. There are pieces I’ve lived with in my mind since they were just being talked about, and others I haven’t fully taken in yet. Each of them does something to you in the immediate and plants a slower-acting barb. If you can’t make it down to the mouth of the mighty Mississippi, get the elegant catalogue.

As you know, the two main divisions of scholarly labor are nailing jelly to a wall and herding cats. I will be doing both today. The jelly I am taking in hand is the concept of “oral literature,” and the pack of mutually antagonistic cats includes Julius Caesar, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Johann Gottfried Herder, Michael Silverstein’s teacher Roman Jakobson, and many less famous thinkers, mainly from the last two centuries.

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D’Iorio, Mauss, Jousse, Leroi-Gourhan, and all the semioticians out there, stand back! Here’s the short list of topical turn signals to practice assiduously:

A Vocabulary of Critical Gestures

There was an old man of L. A.
Whose motto was A = ~A.
When they called him contrary,
He cried: “Corollary!”
That intrinsic old man of L. A.

Jean Métellus has died. Better to put it that way than “is dead,” because he was the sort of person who did things in the active voice. Though I am sure he didn’t want to, he has gone into the great night after a sojourn among us that began in 1937. He was a year younger than my father and three years older than my mother. I felt for him the filial respect of a reader and the conditional identification of a translator (for I did translate him, but one of my reasons for doing so is that I felt a strong difference between his literary personality and my own). I am reminded of how he signed his letters:

“Indéfectiblement
Jean”

Indéfectiblement: what’s that in English? An indéfectible is someone who never gives up, never deserts. And that he was. Convinced that the wretched of the earth were never going to get a fair deal unless they stood up and risked death to demand it, writing his poetry every morning under a big bright picture of Toussaint Louverture, he was indeed indéfectible. A real lefty. Not a deserter. Unshakeable.

Le Monde has a short bio here. “Jean Métellus, 1937-2014, a figure of the Haitian intellectual scene.” I’ll have more to say about it later, but what does it mean to call a man “a figure of the Haitian intellectual scene” when he’s been living in France for more than fifty years? Headlines are rarely written by the journalist who wrote the corresponding article, but I must say that this way of putting things rather confirms than denies the accusation made by the great poet that “French racism is if anything more severe in 2014 than in 1959” (see the article). Métellus? Black man, therefore figure of Haitian intellectual scene, therefore not our problem. Meanwhile, much more importantly, Philippe Sollers has changed his mind about something…

And further Le Monde, God love them, resorts to an esoteric vocabulary when describing Métellus’s book of odes to the heroes of black resistance to racism (e.g.: Rosa Parks, M. L. King Jr., Steve Biko, Nelson Mandela) as being touched occasionally “by angelism or Manicheanism.” That is? Decoded: Métellus occasionally simplified the record, making these resisters unambiguously good and the people against whom they struggled unambiguously bad. A grievous sin against subtlety… But in order to keep it all in the register of polite disagreement, Le Monde uses terms that will be understood by only a few. Is the French paper of record afraid of the Front National, so that they can’t call racism by its name any more? Looking back over Métellus’s broadsides against white privilege, I see the simplification as understandable and not the last word in a competition that has generations yet to run. I had no problem sympathizing with his sympathy. He hated to see good people condemned to live rotten lives because it was more convenient to someone else that it should be so.

Unshakeably. That should sum it up, Monsieur le Docteur Métellus, poète et citoyen éternel de Jacmel. Cher ami, porte-parole extraordinaire des Muses haïtiennes, général de l’armée des mots, may you have readers as long as words are read, and may they recognize your zeal for justice, which spoke through your personas of neurologist and poet. Ainsi soit-il.

(Round table talk at the ACLA/MLA panel of the same name, Chicago, Jan. 11, 2014.)

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a busy ten years. I approach today’s assignment in the spirit of the chastened soothsayer. Since I’m on record as having said a few things, in my section of the ACLA’s 2004 State of the Discipline report, about what Comparative Literature is, has been, and should be, I might now look back at which of those statements held up and which ones were dead in the water.

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(A response to papers by Andrew Piper, on “Wertherity,” and Hoyt Long and Richard So, on literary networks and the English-language haiku, MLA annual meeting, Chicago, Jan. 10, 2014.)

For lack of time, I will jump into the normative right away. Computers should augment human inquiry, not replace it: “augment,” that is, in a specific sense that I will try to elaborate. The point of using computers should not be to do the same sort of thing that scholars have been doing for a long time with file cards and dictionaries, only faster and larger. Let’s not frame the work of the Humanities in such a way that it throws the humans out on the street. My motive is more than protectionism. I hate wasted effort, even computer effort. Let us honor the tools by giving them work that only they—in combination with us—can do.

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