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PLATONIC OCCASIONS Dialogues on Literature, Art and Culture Art and Literature, on Dialogues PLATONIC OCCASIONS Dialogues on Literature, Art and Culture Art and Literature, on Dialogues Richard Begam & James Soderholm Platonic Occasions Dialogues on Literature, Art and Culture Richard Begam & James Soderholm Stockholm English Studies 1 Editorial Board Claudia Egerer, Associate Professor, Department of English, Stockholm University Stefan Helgesson, Professor, Department of English, Stockholm University Nils-Lennart Johannesson, Professor, Department of English, Stockholm University Maria Kuteeva, Professor, Department of English, Stockholm University Published by Stockholm University Press Stockholm University SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden www.stockholmuniversitypress.se Text © Richard Begam, James Soderholm 2015 License CC-BY-NC-ND ORCID: Richard Begam: 0000-0001-5411-8272, James Soderholm: 0000-0003-0477-3636 Supporting Agency (funding): Department of English, Stockholm University First published 2015 Cover Illustration: Wassily Kandinksy, Blue, 1922 Reproduced by permission of the Norton Simon Museum (The Blue Four Galka Scheyer Collection), Pasadena, California Cover designed by Janeen Barker Stockholm English Studies (Online) ISSN: 2002-0163 ISBN (Paperback): 978-91-7635-000-3 ISBN (PDF): 978-91-7635-003-4 ISBN (EPUB): 978-91-7635-002-7 ISBN (Kindle): 978-91-7635-001-0 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.16993/sup.baa This work is licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. This license allows the downloading and sharing of the work, providing author attribution is clearly stated. The work cannot be changed in any way and cannot be used for commercial purposes. Suggested citation: Begam, R. and Soderholm, J. 2015. Platonic Occasions: Dialogues on Literature, Art and Culture. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. DOI: http://dx.doi. org/10.16993/sup.baa. License: CC-BY-NC-ND. To read the free, open access version of this book online, visit http://dx.doi.org/10.16993/sup.baa or scan this QR code with your mobile device. Stockholm English Studies Stockholm English Studies (SES) is a peer-reviewed series of mono- graphs and edited volumes published by Stockholm University Press. SES strives to provide a broad forum for research on English language and literature from all periods. In terms of subjects and meth ods, the orientation is also wide: language structure, varia- tion, and meaning, both spoken and written language in all genres, as well as literary scholarship in a broad sense. It is the ambition of SES to place equally high demands on the academic quality of the manuscripts it accepts as those applied by refereed international journals and academic publishers of a similar orientation. Titles in the series 1. Begam, R. and Soderholm, J. 2015. Platonic Occasions: Dialogues on Literature, Art and Culture. Stockholm: Stockholm University Press. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.16993/ sup.baa This book is for Christiaan Marie Hendrickson & Janeen Barker Contents Illustrations viii Acknowledgments ix Introduction x PART ONE: ART AND AESTHETICS Flaubert’s Hat Trick, Or The Pleasures of Banality 3 The Dysfunction of Criticism at the Present Time 18 The Grapes of Zeuxis: Representation in the Arts 35 PART TWO: EVIL, DEATH, LOVE, POLITICS The Art of Darkness 59 Let’s Hang Ourselves Immediately! On Death and Suicide 81 On the Eros of Species 95 The Benighted States of America? 108 PART THREE: PHILOSOPHICAL DIGRESSIONS The Last of the Cartesians: On Enlightenment and its Discontents 125 Nietzsche’s Cow: On Memory and Forgetting 142 Socrates Among the Cicadas: The Art of the Platonic Dialogue 159 Glossary 177 Index 185 About the Authors 190 Illustrations 1 My Bed, Tracey Emin, 1998. © 2014 Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS, London / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 10 2 A Pair of Boots, Vincent Van Gogh, 1887. The Baltimore Museum of Art: The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore. 11 3 Veiled Nun, Guiseppe Croff, 1860. Photograph by Daderot, 2012. Creative Commons License. 36 4 Temple of Poseidon from the East, Wikimedia Commons, 2012. Creative Commons License. 41 5 Parthenon (Nashville), Mayur Phadtare, 2012. Creative Commons License. 42 6 Fountain (replica), Marcel Duchamp, 1950 (original 1917). © Succession Marcel Duchamp. ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York 2014. 46 7 Electric Chair, Andy Warhol, 1962. © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 48 8 Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol, 1967. © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 48 9 Lichtdom (Cathedral of Light), 1936. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183- 1989-1109-030 / photograph: o.Ang. 53 10 “Socrates and Plato,” frontispiece of Prognostica Socratis Basilei, Matthew Paris, 13th C. Oxford, Bodleian Library, ms. Ashmole 304, fol. 31v. 168 Acknowledgments We would like to thank Claudia Egerer, Chair of English at Stockholm University, who first gave us the opportunity to bring Platonic Occasions before the public when she invited us to read a dialogue in the Higher Literary Seminars at Stockholm in 2012. We are grateful to Prof. Egerer not only for her gracious hospitality but also for her willingness to take a chance in the HLS on what is admittedly not the usual sort of academic fare. Our reception at Stockholm—at once generously collegial and probingly critical— was a model of the Platonic dialogue at its best. We wish especi- ally to thank a number of the participants, which included Paul Schreiber, Thomas Lavelle, Maria Kuteeva, Stefan Helgesson, Bo Ekelund, Pieter Vermeulen, Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva and Charlotta Einarsson. We are also deeply indebted to Nils-Lennart Johannesson, a distinguished scholar of Linguistics and Medieval literature at Stockholm, who has been wonderfully supportive in shepherding our manuscript through the review-and-production process at Stockholm University Press. His many labors on our behalf—including translating computer software from Swedish into English—are much appreciated. We also want to thank Phillip Bandy, Michael Opest and Gaby Ruchames at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for their invaluable editorial assistance. Their keen eyes and quick minds lightened our lucubrations and prevented many embarrassing errors. Finally, Christiaan Marie Hendrickson in Madison and Janeen Barker in Canterbury have kept the home-fires burning asPlatonic Occasions has gone from idea to reality. They are not merely our good spirits, but our bet- ter spirits—indeed all our eudaimonia—and it is to them that we dedicate this book. Introduction The literary dialogue originated with Plato and Xenophon, who sought a form that would reproduce the dialectical give-and- take for which their teacher, Socrates, was both celebrated and condemned. Socrates himself believed that philosophy begins in doubt and proceeds through trial and error: that it is peripatetic in the mental as well as the physical sense. Philosophical wonde- ring demands, in other words, a kind of literary wandering, an itinerant form that is exploratory, desultory, improvisational— more interested in the journey than the destination. As a genre, the dialogue has proven remarkably durable, generating not only Plato’s extraordinary canon, but also some of the most memorable works of philosophy and literature in the West, from Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy, Malebranche’s Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion and Fénelon’s Dialogues of the Dead to Berkeley’s Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, Landor’s Imaginary Conversations and Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist.” The success of the dialogue has not, however, extended quite so confidently into the modern period, where with a few exceptions—one thinks of Santayana’s Dialogues in Limbo or Murdoch’s Acastos:Two Platonic Dialogues—it has mostly fallen out of fashion. In the hope of reviving this fading form, we have written ten dialogues on a range of topics relating to literature, art and culture. Our dialogues are, however, different from those named above because they are genuine exchanges: not mono- logues disguised as dialogues but a play of two distinct voices and two distinct minds engaged in cajoling, objecting, correcting and challenging but always questioning. In the process, we have attempted both to renew and reinvent the dialogue as a literary and philosophical exploration. Our book is organized into three sections. Part One: “Art and Aesthetics” includes meditations on the aesthetics of banality (“Flaubert’s Hat Trick”), the uses and abuses of recent literary Introduction xi criticism (“The Dysfunction of Criticism at the Present Time”) and mimesis from the Greeks to the present (“The Grapes of Zeuxis”). Part Two: “Evil, Death, Love, Politics” examines evil from the Book of Genesis to Conrad and the Holocaust (“The Art of Darkness”), suicide and death from Shakespeare to Beckett (“Let’s Hang Ourselves Immediately!”), the shrunken fortunes of ero¯s in modern life (“On the Eros of Species”) and the trou- bling, poignant—and often hilarious—degradation of American culture (“The Benighted States of America?”). Finally, Part Three: “Philosophical Digressions” investigates Descartes and the Enlightenment tradition (“The Last of the Cartesians”), the philo- sophy of memory and forgetting (“Nietzsche’s Cow”) and the art of
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