Comments on: Tolstoy and the Rousseau Threshold http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/helen-rittelmeyer/2013/01/08/tolstoy-and-the-rousseau-threshold/ Sat, 01 Jun 2013 07:36:15 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: Withywindle http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/helen-rittelmeyer/2013/01/08/tolstoy-and-the-rousseau-threshold/#comment-4066 Withywindle Wed, 09 Jan 2013 02:08:51 +0000 http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/helen-rittelmeyer/2013/01/08/tolstoy-and-the-rousseau-threshold/#comment-4066 Criticizing Rousseau is MSI-bait … my own interests include tracing the history of poetics, conceived of for a good length in time in rhetorical terms, where a work of art is an argument to be made. What's interesting is how, in our formal assumptions, the argument of ethos, character, transfers from the actual author to the characters within the novel–but in our informal assumptions, the older conception retains great pull. I.e., in 1350, or even 1650, everyone would have said, "if Tolstoy is a schmuck, his novel must be awful"; but by 1850, the formal assumption would be that Tolstoy's schmuckiness is irrelevant to the arguments made/incarnated by the characters in his novels. But that's purely on the level of formal poetics: we've never stopped caring about the schmuckiness of authors. (See Eliot, Pound, and Larkin, Anti-Semitism of, Ink Spilled by the Gallon about.) Or perhaps I should say the older version survives as a subaltern poetics, largely because I want to use the phrase "subaltern poetics," since you don't get the chance every day. And the converse certainly survives as a strong cultural trope, Romanticized: the Poet as Moral Hero, making Real-World Arguments that Draw on his God-Like Genius for Authority. This self-importance should be soundly thrashed on principle, and in practice it's useful to have a blowhard like Tolstoy caught out on his schmuckiness, so we can say, "Moral Hero, my Aunt Fanny."

I confess I am to some extent a modern: I thought Anna Karenina and War and Peace were wonderful books, and I'm not going to stop thinking that even when I do find out that Tolstoy ate babies in borscht. Or shall I say, the argument of the author's character is discreditable, but does not by itself disqualify the arguments of the author's characters. Both matter.

I also have strong reactions against using "conservative" as an adjective, as it is infinitely malleable in practice, and tends to be used to mean "Plusgood Stuff I Doubleplus Like.

]]> By: Miss Self-Important http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/helen-rittelmeyer/2013/01/08/tolstoy-and-the-rousseau-threshold/#comment-4065 Miss Self-Important Tue, 08 Jan 2013 23:13:51 +0000 http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/helen-rittelmeyer/2013/01/08/tolstoy-and-the-rousseau-threshold/#comment-4065 "The fact that he abandoned all his children does not make Émile ironic. It makes it worthless."
Worthless for what? Worthless as a straightforward guide to childrearing? Perhaps, but what if Rousseau never meant it to be one in the first place? Or worthless as a psychology and critique of liberalism? On your terms, his being a scoundrel shouldn't disqualify Rousseau from being taken seriously on those questions. I think all he ever claimed that his own life exemplified is the last remaining possibility for freedom in modern society – radical individualism and isolation – and his being a scoundrel doesn't contradict that argument. The claim might be wrong, but his way of demonstrating it can't be said to be.

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