October 20, 2004
Beowulf versus Dante
Slashdot has an interview with Neal Stephenson that is quite excellent. Here's an excerpt:
a while back, I went to a writers' conference. I was making chitchat with another writer, a critically acclaimed literary novelist who taught at a university. She had never heard of me. After we'd exchanged a bit of of small talk, she asked me "And where do you teach?" just as naturally as one Slashdotter would ask another "And which distro do you use?"I was taken aback. "I don't teach anywhere," I said.
Her turn to be taken aback. "Then what do you do?"
"I'm...a writer," I said. Which admittedly was a stupid thing to say, since she already knew that.
"Yes, but what do you do?"
I couldn't think of how to answer the question---I'd already answered it!
"You can't make a living out of being a writer, so how do you make money?" she tried.
"From...being a writer," I stammered.
At this point she finally got it, and her whole affect changed. She wasn't snobbish about it. But it was obvious that, in her mind, the sort of writer who actually made a living from it was an entirely different creature from the sort she generally associated with.
And once I got over the excruciating awkwardness of this conversation, I began to think she was right in thinking so. One way to classify artists is by to whom they are accountable.
This only serves to set up a fairly long meditation on the bifurcated nature of today's writers. He divides them into Beowulf writers and Dante writers. The former are like himself able to make money from their writing. They write popular, commercially successful works. The Dante writers are those that, like Dante, must receive patronage to pursue their writing; in our age that patronage comes from academic institutions in the form of tenure. I hope eventually to become part of the second group. Some have bemoaned the fact that many writers (and practically all poets) now work as academics as if that must necessarily lead to lesser poetry, but I see no evidence of that whatsoever. While it would be nice for poets to either be independently wealthy like James Merrill or able to support themselves from their sales like Robert Frost, that's simply not realistic in most cases. Poets are naturally bookish, academic folks anyway, so why not put them to some use as well? Like Stephenson I see little difference between tenure and patronage. Both could potentially influence an artist's work, but in practice that seems to happen very little. Instead, it provides the time, environment, and money to permit an artist to create something of little to no commercial value. While this is largely (or should be) uncontroversial, there are still a significant number who assume that poets should be Out There Living Life rather than gathering dust in libraries. I suspect most of these people are not poets.
Ideally, I feel that ALL artists should be "out there living life" - not just in the given sense of, well, living life, which all artists kind of by definition are already. What I mean (and what I guess is generally taken to be meant) by that is that they should have as much contact as possible with the world, and in today's setup that means the world beyond the hallowed halls/walls of the academy. I think teaching is a great way to make poets useful in society, but to leave it at that is to produce a class of poets (or fiction writers, or whatever) who only/mainly know that world, which, while it wouldn't necessarily lower the objective quality of any individual poet or poem, would almost certainly make the art poorer for it. As convenient and sensible as it might be, I don't think there's any necessary connection between poetry and teaching - teaching literary criticism certainly won't make you a better poet, at least not in the same sense that teaching Gramsci will make you a better Marxist critic.
I wouldn't wish it on anyone, but I think that those who have to struggle to write or create (such as the poet who won the Poetry award recently - I forget his name) are an invaluable part of the artistic ecosystem. I'm thinking more here of those who both work a "real world" job and write, but the same applies to the "Beouwulfs" of the world. They may be separate in some outward ways, but all of these classes of writers/artists are important to one another.
What I mean (and what I guess is generally taken to be meant) by that is that they should have as much contact as possible with the world, and in today's setup that means the world beyond the hallowed halls/walls of the academy. I think teaching is a great way to make poets useful in society, but to leave it at that is to produce a class of poets (or fiction writers, or whatever) who only/mainly know that world, which, while it wouldn't necessarily lower the objective quality of any individual poet or poem, would almost certainly make the art poorer for it.
I agree that literature needs a mix of artists from and in various social positions, but I don't think contemporary poetry is any poorer for the fact that the vast majority of poets are also professors. Experience is gained no matter how you live your life; literature is created in the mind regardless of where its physical incarnation may be. While the number of viewpoints would likely be reduced if all artists were academics it is unlikely to ever happen nor am I advocating it. Even so, much great and varied art was produced under the Renaissance patronage system, yet those artists could all be said to have had essentially the same social position and often similar viewpoints. I just don't think an individual's job determines that much of their artistic concerns, style, subjects, or temperament. When you can have authors as diverse and Charles Simic, Louise Gluck, and Jorie Graham I don't think we're in any danger of poetic poverty owing to their positions as professors.
Just a word...
The beowulf poem seems to have very likely originated in a courtly setting. Thus, patronage probably had a great deal to do with that Old English titan as well.
>I just don't think an individual's job determines that much of their artistic concerns, style, subjects, or temperament.
I know what you mean, but that's a severe overstatement right there. Of course a person's job impacts their writing - the language they hear spoken day in, day out will inevitably impact what they write. Now, there are certainly plenty of writers who have come from a working class background and gained a place in the academy, and who have molded their dialect-influenced writing into a more "high" literary style (I'm thinking Maya Angelou, James Kelman), but they have still had, and continue to work with, experiences that they would never have had had they been confined in a traditional higher ed setting.
Also, Downto, I think (and this is tentative here) but I think Beouwulf would have originated in some sort of bardic form - sung verses, added to over time and passed down. I don't want to guess whether it would have, as an epic, been performed at court - probably. But it's more properly located in a folk and oral tradition, like the Odyssey.
I know what you mean, but that's a severe overstatement right there. Of course a person's job impacts their writing - the language they hear spoken day in, day out will inevitably impact what they write.
I disagree. Maybe I'm just not sensitive enough to my environment, but working in the tech industry had no noticeable affect on either the subject matter or the language of my writing. Perhaps a poet might use the phrases they hear as grist, but I don't think it's bound to have as much influence as you think. While I will agree that an individual's concerns are heavily influenced by historical and cultural forces, I don't think there's any reason to assume that's true at the more specific level of one's job. William Carlos Williams was a physician. Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive. Charles Simic is a professor. None of this would be deducable from their poetry. The only author I can think of who's so heavily influenced by his career that it shows in his language in any noticeable way is Hayden Carruth who has been a farmer for a long time, but that has more to do with lifestyle than career. Can you think of specific examples to back up your point or is this more just a general idea that you feel is true?
Besides, I didn't say such things had no impact on an author's style, just that it didn't seem to have much.
I think it's difficult to make judgments on the idea of tenure and patronage being similar because the poet-professor is a relatively new phenomenon. At first glance, it seems to me that patronage and tenure can vary significantly. Patronage could either be more constraining (in the sense that the poet has to conform to the patron's wishes or stylistic preferences) or less (when you have the classic eccentric or liberal patron). I think if you look at some key poets who worked under patronage such as Rilke, a key factor (in their life story, at least) was the ability to be mobile. But that probably wasn't the case for Beowulf (I think Sleep is right that he was probably a kind of court poet) or Dante or Lessing or many poets at all up until the modern era.
With tenure, a significant amount of the poet's time is devoted to teaching and (in some cases) the poet is quite concerned about fitting in academically. A lot depends on the context of the university. I think it would be tougher for Hadyen Carruth to be Hadyen Carruth at Harvard or Yale, much less Chicago. But then that's a fairly banal observation that has as much to do with the big city/small city distinction as the elite/non-elite university distinction.