Jane Austen’s free indirect speech, the folding of soliloquy into third-person narration (“She had no hope, nothing to deserve the name of hope, that he could have that sort of affection for herself which was now in question”), marked the first significant breakthrough. Flaubert, James, Tolstoy, and others took this technique and ran with it. In the climactic chapters of “Anna Karenina,” Anna’s mind, overwrought by the crisis of her deteriorating affair with Vronsky, seems to commandeer the narrative altogether (“How proud and happy he’ll be when he gets my note! But I’ll show him… What a terrible smell that paint has”), so that mind and narrative become hard to tell apart.

From Tolstoy to the fractured, telegraphic stream of consciousness in “Ulysses” or the smoother, more overtly stylized variety in “Mrs. Dalloway” is not far. The main difference is one of attention span. Tolstoy gives us only a few pages of full immersion in the spume of Anna’s thoughts, and they come during the book’s most dramatic episode—a time when Anna has a lot to think about. The pages of Joyce and Woolf, on the other hand, abound with brain lint, the stuff of ordinary minds on ordinary days.

But too many pages devoted to mirroring the human mind can make a novel rather tedious. Not all minds are the same, and even great ones still think about the uninteresting essentials of life most of the time. “All novels,” Harvey writes, “need to strike a balance between description of what happens to a character and what a character is thinking about as it happens. In most, for the sake of order, momentum, and intelligibility, the latter tends to be subordinate to the former.”

Kelman inverts this, subordinating plot to consciousness, and the result, Harvey argues, is unsatisfying: “Art is meaningful because it is life-like without incurring the disadvantages of actually being life—that is to say, without being boring and formless. Kelman seems unmindful, or simply uninterested, in this proposition.”

In other words, the thoughts or actions of characters become uninteresting if they are not directed, at some point, towards a purpose. This tells us an important truth about who we are, of course. We were created to live meaningful, purposeful lives.

But I wonder if it also tells us something about goal of certain modern and contemporary novelists. One might say that in the mind of God, plot is subordinated to consciousness. Time and sequence are his thoughts, and the story of humanity is derivate of the free-wheeling, “purposeless” thoughts of our divine creator. In his mind, all thoughts are interesting, engaging on their own, but our thoughts, or the thoughts of characters, like perhaps Leopold Bloom, become uninteresting when they are made to seem self-sustaining (like God’s) when, in fact, they are not. They are subordinate to God’s thought, his plot.

Prufrock, a free daily newsletter on books, art, and ideas, is curated by Micah Mattix.

The first two weeks were a zen-like blur. I’ve never felt so calm and happy in my life. Never. And then I started actually getting stuff done. I bought copies of Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Herodotus, and Aeschylus. I was writing at an amazing pace. For the first time ever I seemed to be outpacing my editors.

Without the internet, everything seemed new to me. Every untweeted observation of daily life was more sacred. Every conversation was face to face or a phone call, and filled with a hundred fresh nuances. The air smelled better. My sentences seemed less convoluted. I lost a bit of weight.

Three months later, I don’t miss the internet at all. It doesn’t factor into my daily life. I don’t say to myself, “ugh, I wish I could just use the internet to do that.” It’s more like it doesn’t exist for me. I still say “ugh, I have to do that” — it’s just not the internet’s fault.

But now that not having internet is no longer new, just normal, the zen calm is gone. I don’t wake with the sunrise while chirping birds pull back the covers. I still have a job. I feel pressure and stress and frustration. I get lonely and bored. My articles aren’t always submitted on time. Sometimes my sentences aren’t good.

I’m just stock Paul Miller. No more Not-Using-The-Internet custom skin; I’m just myself. And it’s not all sunshine and epiphanies.

Read the rest.

Question:  What do Joe Paterno and the Roman Emperor Nero have in common? Answer:  damnatio memoriae

Damnatio Memoriae (Latin for “the condemnation of memory”)  is the act of trying to erase a person from history.  In the Roman world, this meant erasing the condemned man’s name from inscriptions, removing coins with his image from circulation, or defacing images and statues of him.

As you might imagine such an endeavor is extremely difficult to accomplish. Even in an age less bombarded by media than ours, it could be difficult to track down and remove every single mention of a person.  People who generate great anger are normally people who have also left a lasting and far-reaching mark.

Whoever said inquisitions and witch hunts were things of the past? A big one is going on now. The sociologist Mark Regnerus, at the University of Texas at Austin, is being smeared in the media and subjected to an inquiry by his university over allegations of scientific misconduct.

Regnerus’s offense? His article in the July 2012 issue of Social Science Research reported that adult children of parents who had same-sex romantic relationships, including same-sex couples as parents, have more emotional and social problems than do adult children of heterosexual parents with intact marriages. That’s it. Regnerus published ideologically unpopular research results on the contentious matter of same-sex families. And now he is being made to pay.

Smith goes on to defend the integrity of Regnerus’s study. Good for Smith; and good for The Chronicle for its open-mindedness.

Critics do two things according to Hari. They provide “consumer advice,” and they help audiences grasp the deeper meaning of sometimes baffling works of art or literature. The first can be done by citizen critics on Twitter, Facebook, and the comment section of Amazon. The second, however, requires learning and space–something established critics are no longer getting. Magazines are cutting coverage, and where criticism is still published, it is now much shorter:

Kael’s famous review of Bonnie and Clyde was 7,000 words long. Most critics today are lucky to get 700; on Twitter, they get fewer than 700 characters. Indeed, their work is most regularly seen now through online review aggregators, where the words are stripped out and all that remains is a banal star rating.

If criticism is cut from all magazines and newspapers, Hari argues, “all that will be left to navigate us all through a roiling ocean of culture will be unpaid amateurs and advertising.”

I think Hari’s alarm is misguided. While the general trend is of diminishing space, he ignores contrary developments, such as The Wall Street Journal’s expanded book coverage, The Chicago Tribune’s new stand-alone weekly, “The Printer’s Row,” and the recently launched online-only Los Angeles Review of Books.

Why are these newspapers and media companies launching review sections or creating entire publications devoted to criticism? At RealClearBooks (another venture that bucks Hari’s trend), Mark Judge reminds us that reading is a contemplative activity and—via Thomas Merton—that contemplation is a natural (if sometimes thwarted) inclination: “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest. That activity, which is contemplation, is immanent and it transcends the level of sense and of discourse.”

Criticism is one means of satisfying this need for contemplation, which is why I think it would take more than Twitter to dispatch of it. In fact, certain technologies, such as Amazon’s Kindle, makes reading long-form criticism easier, as Alan Jacob points out in his excellent The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction.

But what do other First Things readers think? Do you still read longer (plus 1,500 words) art, theater, and book reviews? Am I right in thinking these will always be around in some form or other?

(HT: Ben Domenech)

A decade into the 21st century, no clear movement or style has emerged to mark contemporary art. No Impressionism, Modernism, Minimalism—no single description to encapsulate what has been going on. Veteran art dealer Michael Findlay, in “The Value of Art: Money, Power, Beauty,” says that a name has been there all along: Commercialism.

In a book that dissects the past 40 years of the business, Mr. Findlay decries the rise of art as an asset class, the circus that auctions have become and the fact that, as the prices have climbed, we’ve stopped looking at the paintings themselves. “The greatest consequence of the commoditization of art is the loss of integrity of the object because it is with the integrity of the object that all lasting, true value lies,” Mr. Findlay says. And: “One of the signs of a decaying culture is a reverence for form over content.”

Peers notes that Findlay, himself a dealer, contributed more than a little to the commercialization of art, pithily noting that reading Findlay’s critique of the commercialization of art is like reading “an antiwar treatise by Napoleon: You grant the expertise but question the repentance.”

While Findlay defends the intrinsic, non-monetary value of art generally, he questions the value of much contemporary work and advises individuals investing in art to be wary: ”Collectors are frantically shopping for the artists today who will stand the test of time, he says, but what if virtually none of them do? Entire generations of artists have been filler between great movements in art history. Could we be in one of those dead zones now?”

James Panero has examined this same bending of the knee to money in our museums. The permanent collections of museums like the Metropolitain Museum of Art, Panero writes, were created for the public good. Established through the gifts of private donors, permanent collections shared the work of European and American masters that examined, among other things, what it meant to be a virtuous individual and society. Parts of these permanent collections, however, are now being sold in order to transform the museum into a place of entertainment:

A new bottom-line sensibility that aimed to maximize revenues and attendance numbers cut against the founding principles of American museums. “When art museums rush to be commercial or seek to titillate their visitors we see a lamentable failure of nerve,” says de Montebello, who went against the grain of this professionalized museum culture as director of the Metropolitan. “Our institutions—even though often founded by businessmen in league with civic officials—were not created to make money and vaunt civic identity.”

This failure of nerve is especially apparent in cases of deaccession, where institutions have justified turning their permanent collections into chattel that can be sold for profit. Among the earliest uses of the term “deaccession” was in 1972. The New York Times art critic John Canaday wrote that the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then under the direction of Thomas Hoving, “recently deaccessioned (the polite term for ‘sold’) one of its only four Redons.”

The temptation here–and it’s an easy one–is to blame capitalism for this decline. Panero points out, however, that the problem is not the market, it’s us: “If we are here to put capitalism on trial, and capitalism loses, I wouldn’t question capitalism. I would question our judgment.”

How does Kaveney arrive at this interpretation? Peering cunningly into the “liminal state” of the dead poet himself, she associates the “rough” meter of the poem with Donne’s “struggle” to determine what he thought. “He clearly felt that he needed to make it clear that some things are more important than strict form or rhythm. When souls are at stake, his soul in particular, what price correctness?” Clearly. And just so we’re clear: “To put it another way, as a contemporary poet, which matters more? Saying clearly what you mean to say, what you think of as important, or strict adherence to rules?” How about we drop that “strict” and say both? After all, you can’t say anything meaningful that’s formless.

Bartholomew notes that place has a formative influence on the lives of individuals throughout the Scriptures. Central to the Abrahamic narratives and much of the Pentateuch is the theme of journeying and the land; Abraham journeys through the wilderness to the land God promised, and the people of Israel wander through the desert after their release from Egypt. Likewise, God uses the desert as a formational place in the lives of Moses, the Israelites, and Jesus.

One implication of this, Scott notes, is that we should “care for our immediate environment, which begins with our home”:

Bartholomew advocates gardening and the “slow work” of homemaking such as making your own meals and replacing television dens with the front porch. Homes should also be smaller and more permanent. Since Christian institutions of higher learning already occupy a great deal of land, they ought to evaluate their use of the land and implement curriculum that teaches the importance of place and placemaking.

The idea is that we should care for the place we live, and that place will, in turn, nourish our own spiritual life. While this symbiotic relationship to place can be practiced in the city, it is (perhaps) easier to do in rural areas. Rod Dreher moved back to Louisiana last year for a number of reasons, but one of them was to regain a sense of community and connection. Patrick J. Deneen, who will be leaving Georgetown and D.C. mainly for professional reasons, also says this of his decision to move:

My wife and I hail from small towns, and both view our upbringings in those places as a deeply constitutive part of our worldview. We have sorely missed a sense of community in the DC area, a place where most of our lives’ activities are fragmented, often connected only by long car rides in heavy traffic. It has been a source of great dissatisfaction that our home life is so divorced from my vocation as a teacher and scholar. While teaching at Princeton, we frequently hosted dinners and gatherings of students; it was in the midst of those kinds interactions and colloquy that I wanted to raise our children. But, the reality of the D.C. area is that it is only possible for us to maintain a home relatively far from campus. This sense of fragmentation informs much of our daily lives – we have a set of very different spheres that rarely interact and overlap – home, work, schools, church, and so on. In the waning years that remain in which our children will live under our roof, I would like to give them that experience. This experience is palpably a part of the daily rhythm at Notre Dame.

I can sympathize with both Dreher and Deneen. My wife and I (and our four kids) live in the suburbs of Houston during the academic year. Houston has grown tremendously over the past fifty years, and there are many great things about the city that we love–great food, world-class arts, and beautiful parks. Yet, it has sometimes been difficult to develop a deep connection to the place we live for some of the same reasons that Deneen mentions. My wife, who is Swiss and comes from a family of farmers, carpenters and small-town pastors, has perhaps felt this lack of connection more than the rest of us.

Place is important, but another implication of the “Abrahamic narratives” is that God uses “journeying” to wean us from an attachment to this world and, significantly, build our inner spiritual life. Jesus himself had no place to live during his active ministry, and Peter reminds us that we are “sojourners and pilgrims” in this world. Why? So that we may “abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul.”

The adage of living in but not being of the world is applicable here. We should care for the places we live, and in so doing, they will, as Bartholomew suggests, nourish our spiritual life. At the same time, we need to be willing to live the life of sojourners, remembering that if place becomes the primary source of belonging and comfort, our homes will be at war with our souls.

Apart from the truth or politics of that statement, its consequences for the novel are certain. A good plot needs conflict, an unsettled situation whose outcome we care about. For more than two centuries, the theme of “individual vs. society” provided a ready tension for it, as in Huck Finn’s personal feelings for Jim clashing with the norms of slave society, or Edna in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening rebelling against patriarchal demands in turn-of-the-century Louisiana. The conflict worked precisely because the social side isn’t powerless and on occasion voices a legitimate criticism of the specific individual with whom we sympathize. Once all legitimacy lies on the individual side, once social institutions have no claim upon the one, tension dissipates and the novel reads like a chronicle of events in the life of _____, not a meaningful examination of human affairs in this or that setting.

I think this is correct, though I wonder if there is also something to be said about the novel being inherently individualistic and, therefore, particularly open to this overvaluing of the individual will–consider Robinson Crusoe, Pamela, Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre and any number of others. The individual is constrained in these novels, and yet that constraint is certainly less than in The Odyssey or King Lear.

Bauerlein notes that in Eugenide’s The Marriage Plot, one of the characters, Madeleine, who has struggled with the meaning of marriage and the nature of love, finds personal solace in Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. So-called critical theory is often used in contemporary novels to make it seem that big ideas are being considered when they are simply being discussed. Bauerlein makes another point. Madeleine does gain some sort of insight from Barthes’ work, but it is not insight “about humanity at large.” It applies only to her and only on the basis of resonance. ”Once social institutions deteriorate,” he writes, “and people live contained by their own sole selves, relevance becomes the first measure of value.”

This is an excellent point, which makes me wonder: Where else has relevance become “the first measure of value”?