Elaine Scarry

            On Monday morning it was warm enough to open all the windows and keep them open. Sometimes I get a chill in my back from the draft after I sit down from song practice and have to close them but not today. Around 9:30 I did have to close the windows after all. 

            I worked out the chords for the first verse of “Merde à l’amour" (Shit to Love) by Serge Gainsbourg and I’m pretty sure the rest of the song is much the same. 

            I weighed 89.3 kilos before breakfast. I took a siesta from 12:00 to 13:30.

            For lunch I had kettle chips with salsa and skyr. It’s amazing how the Icelandic people can make yogourt out of fish. 

            At 14:30 I noticed the last Brit Lit 2 lecture was up but I wanted to take a bike ride first, so I rode to Ossington and Bloor and back before logging on at 15:45 to take notes. 

            The lecture was on the second half of On Beauty. Vocabularies. Being wrong, attachment and detachment. Key questions from term. 

            He started out by preaching that there is implicit bias in course evaluations and that professors who are women and professors of colour do worse. People are held to different standards, so be conscious. Wow. This doesn’t even apply to our course and so he’s preaching to us about how to do evaluations for other courses if women and people of colour are running them. What an asshole! Give us a little credit and let the people that run those courses speak for themselves. I’ve never seen a professor so high and mighty before that he anticipates students being racist and sexist outside of his realm. If there is an imbalance then the university should adjust for it. If any students have implicit bias there is nothing he could say to change how they negatively assess a female professor or professor of colour or both. He’s just trying to make himself feel woke. 

            The novel On Beauty sets up the relationship between hyper-modern depictions of the world and the old fashion questions about beauty and the relationship between art and ethics. This comes through in vocabularies about art. Look at the clash of vocabulary between Carl and Zora. Carl gives an analysis of Mozart but it is misheard by Zora because he does not speak in her academic language. Our idea of who we think can make art informs how we think about them and predetermines who we value. 

            Smith presents a world that reflects the complexity of our lives. Characters are hybrid in ways that make them impossible to place in a particular identity category. The clash of vocabularies is a way of showing the real differences that cultural and historical differences make. Smith wants to emphasize the difference. For all the hybridities she wants us to think about differences. How Levi is cut off from models of what it’s like to be a young black man and how Zora is different from fellow students because of race. The novel is interested in suggesting differences. The vocabularies we use to talk about the world make differences and cause disagreements. 

            Zora and Carl. Howard and Kiki (204-208). The clash between Howard’s class room language and Kiki’s language of intimacy. Mind vs. Body. The old problem comes up. Kiki makes clear there’s a difference of speaking. I comprehend your narrative vs. I got your number. Howard tries to articulate and Kiki responds, resists or shuts down. He wants to talk. Despite the obvious fun we see a strong disconnect between languages they are picking up. She’s claiming authority and that Howard’s academic language is meaningless. She wants to talk about bodies and the effects of actions on individuals. In a later fight she says actions hurt people. Howard is intellectualizing and trying to explain. She doesn’t want explanation but rather admission of guilt. There is a clash of ways of thinking and language. If he uses her language he has nowhere to go and she can’t adopt his language. Every time Howard wants to extract things from feeling to thinking and that insults Kiki’s feelings. They can’t find common ground. They can’t agree on a set of meaningful terms to communicate. 

            This has to do with the larger question of the role of beauty in the world. This is related to Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty. On Beauty and Being Wrong. Smith is trying to think about what is happening in the philosopher’s book. She is asking what is the relationship between our sensibility to beauty and our relationship to the world? We have encountered a different version of this question before in many of our previous texts, but Smith proposes it differently: not a question of realism but of sensibility and the ability to see. 

            Thom Dancer mentions three times in half a minute that Elaine Scarry’s book is a philosophy book as if we didn’t get it the first time. He seems to want to remind us that she’s a woman and a philosopher as if that was outside of our comprehension. We can tell by what she’s saying that she is a theorist but he once again wants to show us how woke he is. The fact is that Scarry is not a philosopher but a professor of literature and language at Harvard. 

            We saw this articulated by George Eliot when she says it’s evil to misrepresent the peasants. We see it in Keats, Smith, Derosio. They are all thinking about the relationship between sensibility to beauty and the outer ethical relationship to the world and how beauty is repository for moral good and cultural good and it needs to be defended and continued and accessed by the poet but access can be destroyed by colonization as see in Derosio. We’ve seen different versions. 

            Smith proposes less in Eliot’s terms of the moral right or wrongness of representation to a question of sensibility. She gets this from Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just. There is clearly a relationship between ethics and beauty. Scarry tells us things relevant to Smith. The key thing they agree on is we can be wrong about Judgements about beauty. We can think something is ugly or beautiful and be wrong. When we look at art and think it’s ugly and then later recognize the beauty. Experientially we don’t experience it as changing our minds but of being wrong. This can be seen in our feelings about people. We change our minds but think we were wrong. Landscapes are ugly then beautiful. 

            This is different from other kinds of judgements where there is usually a lack of information. Beauty is not a property of things but a way of seeing. It’s not a property in the object. If we are wrong it can’t be a property in the thing but wrong perception. We see this more clearly in Smith. To assert the beauty of something is to make a non factual statement. It’s not like saying it’s blue. That is a statement of fact. A statement of beauty is not factual. We can’t prove it. That’s not how beauty works. It can’t be definitively determined in the external world because it is always subjective. We are making a statement that asserts a universality. We can assert and explain why and share our experience. 

            This adds up to assertions of beauty being vulnerable. To assert something is beautiful is to put one’s self out there in a way that we don’t when we assert facts. Assertion of beauty is our own claim. One can’t agree or disagree. You can say look at it this way but you agreeing depends on you. Judgements of value are always fraught with danger because one could be wrong. You could say its beautiful but someone says it’s a pro Nazi painting. Now we feel foolish. It’s a scary question. Beauty can cover ugliness and the threat of that ugliness underneath. We see that this results in a relationship of detachment in the novel. The proper relationship to art as detachment which is often praised as a necessary component of critical appreciation of art might have its pitfalls. To see something as beautiful is to risk being wrong, to risk being tricked. The reaction shouldn’t be don’t take the risk. 

            To say be detached might also be problematic. 

            The view of beauty as subjective runs counter to the typical view of the proper “critical” relationship to art as detached and objective. Howard exemplifies this attitude. Art is the mask that power wears. Beauty covers what matters. For Howard that is Rembrandt. Rembrandt paintings use of light and beauty but the paintings are of rich people that paid to be portrayed as beautiful. Though Howard is right the novel is saying that to say I won’t see it as beautiful because of the message, that’s Howard’s opinion. This results in detachment from beauty. He explains that in class. Howard insists that we be critical, objective, detached, so we do not fall under the influence of seductions of beauty. 

            Don’t be seduced by beauty. There are good reasons to be critical. The novel is nuancing it. Carl’s point about Mozart is the kind of critical point that Howard would make. That all these people wanted to say Mozart wrote the last part of The Requiem because it fits the idea of the kind of person that could write it. Be aware of our own ways that bias and power operates. To be aware of that is to be aware of how bias operates in our lives about who can make art. There is an additional reason to be critical. Howard is right that aestheticization can result in a false view of the world. Art sometimes distracts or covers over injustice or suffering. To aestheticize is to cast or see through the lens of art and beauty or style, which distracts from the reality of these things. This is in agreement with Eliot. She says when we understand the peasant through long held conventions that stylization is wrong because it distracts us from what is going on. 

            With Levi and Choo Choo, Levi is aestheticizing and stylizing what is happening while Choo Choo is pragmatic. So the passage demonstrates in a crystallized, precise way that kind of disjunction between the stylized view of the world that Levi has. By calling something by names of style it is raising it up for Levi, but Choo Choo breaks that image. We are on the street selling and it is not a grand, glorious thing that ties us together. That’s an overly aggrandized, overly aestheticized view of the world. The novel says Levi is wrong and doing a disservice to Choo Choo by glorifying and aestheticizing what they are up to. Being critical allows us to see that. We are being critical to see how power is operating underneath. Levi has this fantasy because of his economic privilege. 

            The idea that the critic is important doesn’t need defence. It helps uncover what prettiness could hide. Critical attitude is dangerous and needs to be tempered. Howard’s attitude is a denial of art and beauty. The most damning thing is the anatomy lesson. He hates the painting. We hear Howard can no longer see it. His detached critical attitude results in a lack of vision. He is so critical he is artistically blind. Levi is so over attached that he is blind. Over or under results in a failure to connect. They see what they want to see and not what’s there. Detachment can be bad. Howard is detached. He falls asleep during Mozart and can’t see Mozart as a genius. The novel wants to understand this in terms of ethics. We see Howard’s cynicism. He is detached from the world. 

            We see Jerome moves from an ethical position in saying that Howard says no to the world because of art. Refusal of art is a reflection of the refusal to engage with the world ethically. Cynicism comes from not being vulnerable to art. We see this at the end when Howard is going through notes to talk about the painting The Stalmeesters. In the passage Howard gives a critical reading. It is seen as a painting about good benign men judging fabric. Howard is tired and zooms in and suddenly he becomes absorbed into it. Howard sees the men and the men saw Howard there is attachment and it shakes Howard. The detachment makes him tired then he’s engaged and for a moment unsettled but then Levi comes in and Howard becomes detached and unconnected. If detachment is bad and cynicism is bad should we be detached from both? 

            The heart of novel is how to love the world and art when nothing guaranteed comes from it. The novel is filled with people hurt by their attachments. When we are attached and when we lose that thing it hurts. If we had not been attached it would hurt less. Kiki is overly attached “I staked my life on you”. The novel is not saying being attached is wrong but being overly attached we don’t see things clearly. My cat is the cutest in the world. What is the balance? Carl or Katy Armstrong. Learn to not fear attachments like Howard, Monty and Zora. Or not to be over attached like Kiki or Levi. Carl appreciates beauty, is attached to what he loves, hurt but not destroyed. That is the key. Find a way to manage vulnerability and attachment without letting it destroy. 

            Reflect on the term about how we should relate to art and the detachments and attachments we should have. What art tells us about ourselves and the world. End with a vision of Carl appreciating beauty, being attached to what we love and being willing to be hurt by it when it goes away. That’s the lesson. Only when Kiki goes away has Howard gotten anything out of the marriage. Love things and be hurt but not over attached. Not misapprehending things. 

            I was done editing my notes at 19:23. 

            I cut up a whole chicken, rubbed it with curry powder and put it in the oven. I had one of the legs with a potato and margarine. I wanted to make gravy but wanted all the chicken fat to drop down into the water first and that required the chicken be fully cooked. I’ll make gravy tomorrow. I ate while watching Andy Griffith. 

            In this story the Darlings come to town and get in trouble at a restaurant when Brisco insists on watching his meal being cooked. Andy invites them all over to his house for dinner. They play music and Aunt Bee serves them a big meal. She pays so much attention to Brisco having enough on his plate that he thinks she’s flirting with him. Later Opie sings Old Dan Tucker and when Bee recites a poem about a rose Brisco thinks he is declaring her love to him. Brisco tells Bee she is going to be his bride. That night he serenades her under her window and the next day he kidnaps her. Andy goes up to the mountains to get her but Brisco says he’ll never give up. Andy convinces Bee that the only way to get Brisco off her back would be to pull a reversal on him. She agrees to marry him and then makes Brisco and the boys scrub the cabin from top to bottom. Then she makes Brisco take a bath. At dinner she expects Brisco to show table manners and every time he doesn’t she hits him with a wooden spoon. Finally he calls the marriage off.